What It Means to Become American

 

Because the only other of her books I'm familiar with is "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, I picked up The Education of an Idealist, the memoir of former UN Ambassador and recently replaced USAID director Samantha Power, because anyone who could write about the things she has witnessed and still call herself an idealist is on a wavelength I want to invest time in. 

Early on, she describes her becoming an American citizen (she was born and raised in Ireland) and what that meant to her. 

During high school, I had failed the driver's test several times (hitting various cones), and I still felt the sting of humiliation...I was determined to avoid a similar embarrassment on my citizenship test, and wildly overprepared, using a Barron's citizenship guide to create flash cards with every conceivable question I might be asked about American government and civics. Unlike many of those applying, English was my first language, and I had the benefit of learning US history in school. Still, I felt relived when, in the fall of 1993, I learned I had passed. 

...I didn't think to invite [my mom and stepfather] to the courthouse in Brooklyn to see [my naturalization ceremony, as they had made no fuss about having been sworn in the year before.] However, the other new Americans participating treated the day like the momentous event that it was, donning their finest suits and dresses and surrounding themselves with family.

During our collective Oath of Allegiance, we pledged [to support and defend the Constitution and US laws.] Looking around the courtroom, seeing emotion ripple across the faces of those whose hands were raised, I was struck by what America meant as a refuge, and as an idea. All of gathered that morning had reached the modern Promised Land. We weren't giving up who we were or where we came from; we were making it American. I hugged an elderly woman from Central America on my left and a tall man from Russia to my right. We were all Americans now. 

Listen to what she says. She's not faking the emotion in her words or overstating those of the people around her. These are genuine sentiments from people for whom getting to the US has been an arduous and, in many cases, dangerous trek. To deny them the sanctity and sanctuary of their success, as the rethuglican administration has threatened to do and in some cases has done already, is to deny the dream and hope that citizenship holds for people. It is, plainly, wrong.

Nous Sommes les Lapins

 The first heavy casualties of the French Revolution were rabbits. On March 10 and 11, 1789, the villagers of Neuville formed themselves into platoons, armed with clubs and sickles, and searched meadows and woods for their prolific little enemies. What dogs they had accompanied them, and the shout of "Hou, hou" signified to the rest of the hunting party a satisfactory kill...Disregarding the game laws that had protected birds and animals, and the brutal "captaincies" that enforced them, hobnail boots trampled through forbidden forests or climbed over fences and stone walls. Grass was mown in grain fields to reveal the nests of partridge and pheasant, snipe and woodcock; eggs were smashed or fledglings left to the dogs. Warrens were staved in, hares rooted out from behind rocks. In daring villages, pit traps were even set for the most prized game, which was also the most voracious consumer of green shoots: roe deer. The most spectacular assaults were on those chateaux in miniature: dovecotes, from which the peasantry had seen aerial raiding parties launched against their seed, returning in absolute safety to their seigneurial compound. They were, said one cahier, "flying thieves."...It could hardly be called poaching since there was nothing furtive about the onslaught. In some cases, the slaughtered game was hung from poles like trophies and paraded about the village...[There] were simply too many determined peasants who, with their winter crop destroyed by the climate, were not prepared to see their spring crop turn into rabbit fodder. In some places...villagers simply ignored the laws and hunted at will. When they ran into gamekeepers...they shot them dead on the spot.

From Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama

Think carefully on this. At first, it is almost comical, the notion that the Revolution began in earnest with the killing of previously protected game. It may even seem justified, said game having been allegedly responsible for depleting the stores of the farmers. This description occurs on pages 322 and 323 after Schama has spent considerable time explaining the economics behind what became the bloodiest revolution in modern history, and it is not hard, after all that, to mentally cheer on the proto-citizens as they explode in violence after so long being oppressed. 

But it doesn't take long to see a problem here. After all, soon (Schama dates it to less than 3 weeks) the rampant killing moves from birds and game to the gamekeepers. These people were, after all, not only keeping the law but their families fed and cared for.

In little time one of the cahiers (meaning "a list of grievances" but better understood today as a broadsheet explaining actions to the general public and written by pamphleteers) "insisted that it was 'the general will of the Nation that game should be destroyed...and this is the intention of our good King who watches over the common good of his people and who loves them.'" 

Most of us think of the French Revolution as breaking the backs of the monarchy and nobility, and there's justification to it as they were the people who famously paid with their lives. The King referred to here as being the motivator of the uprising is the selfsame Louis XVI guillotined with his wife, Marie Antoinette, just a few years later. 

But while we think of the Revolution as being an anti-elite whirlwind force that swiftly swept up innocents and guilty alike, robbing all of them of their most basic rights, it began with people who thought they were doing the (unacknowledged) will of the King. When I began reading Schama's book I did not expect to identify the initiators of the Terror with the followers of trump; in fact, I assumed contemporary Neuville villagers would be the ones stamping out, not woodcocks and rabbits, but rethuglicans. 

But instead, as we often find, history doesn't quite repeat as it slant rhymes. The contemporary Neuvillier is likelier to see immigrants as the doves of today, the "aerial raiding parties launched against their seed" (metaphorical today, given the far right conspiracy of replacement both in citizenship and jobs) and more than happy to smash eggs, stave in warrens, set the dogs on fledglings because it is what their King expects them to do. In Schama's words, "It was as though...the people had produced the assumption that the King now licensed what had been unlawful...Killing game [and gamekeepers] was not only an act of desperation, it was, by the lights of 1789, Patriotic." 

Is it difficult to see that trump's blanket pardon of nearly every January 6th offender is in that same line of thinking, at least to those who follow him? Do I exaggerate? I hope so. But Schama's recitation of greater and greater chaos finally devolving into blood does not encourage me. But for the immediate future, I fear we are the rabbits.

 

 

Home

 About a week and a half ago the message at my church centered on one's return home, especially to a home town where one doesn't feel welcomed. That's had me thinking about it since. 

I've returned at different times to the area where I grew up, and sometimes it's been good and sometimes not. I think that's most people's experience. I'm a part of the estimated 25% of men who have moved far away from their hometown and I have been for a lot of years. There were periods when I stayed at my parents home or even lived in a cabin at the end of the road I grew up on. But I knew in each case I wouldn't remain there.

Which when I look back seems strange. I grew up thinking my area was a reasonably all right place and I would remain in its environs for life. I mean, it had access to nearly everything I wanted: a big city (NYC, where a lot of my friends moved to), lots of bookstores and schools (including my alma mater), deep woods and nearby mountains (the Berkshires and one end of the Appalachian Trail), good local music I could listen to for free when I wanted, even one of the best art collections in the country (the Clark Art). 

Still, I left early in my late teens, and I've stayed away as far as I can for what's probably the rest of my life. On occasion I imagine it's because of the potential me that might have been if I'd remained: a conservative rednecked mouth-breathing rethuglican. That image warms me for my decision to stay away.

But I really know that's not true. A lot of my friends who are still in the area are not that way at all (especially of course the ones who moved south to The City but even a fair number who stayed in nearby counties). I suspect the truth is it's not the environment that makes you but your reaction to it.

Besides, if stultifying right wingery is what I'd hoped to avoid, I wouldn't have spent the bulk of 30 years living in the central midwest and a few years ago having retired to the deep south. It should seem the opposite.

There's where a part of the paradox may lay, that having grown up in the bastion of red state behavior in one of the bluest states I find myself in adulthood more comfortable in the bluer segments of some of the reddest states. 

I'm well aware it's a privilege to live somewhere one is comfortable, not afforded to everyone. When I was younger and I found where I was staying didn't fulfill me, I'd leave. It was a comfort, knowing I was a step away from being gone if I wanted to be. That's how I disappeared from a lot of people's lives too and as I grow older I wonder where and how they are. The internet and Facebook have been great for catching up and I'm glad for that. But I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to watch the people I knew age and change, both for the better and worse.