The Scrapheap of History

I spent a few hours time-traveling yesterday afternoon. It was entirely pragmatic, but I welcomed the opportunity to escape from 2017, given what’s happening in this country and the world.

(I’m typing these words on Presidents Day, which puts a fine point on the depths to which that office has devolved—from Washington to the Worst. Also, the temperatures are in the 60s in February, manifestations of climate change that the current administration has no interest in addressing.)

So. My parents are in their 80s—my dad will be 89 soon—but the closest they’ve come to downsizing from their big split-level house is giving a tiny fraction of their possessions to me to go through and dispose of as I see fit. This fraction comes in the form of scrapbooks my mom compiled from her teen years to the dawn of the 21st century. She’s been giving them to me piecemeal for years, but I think there still are more to come.

The scrapbooks spent decades in my parents’ attic. They look like it. But mostly, they smell like it. When I first started going through them—periodically, as the mood struck me—a couple of years ago, I set up a card table downstairs and strolled down memory lane (sometimes my own memory, other times my mom’s, before I was born) in the comfort of my own home. But Lynn ultimately declared the moldering keepsakes a biohazard. Which was why yesterday I felt on my skin the impact of global warming. The card table, which itself has been banished to the garage, along with all the remaining scrapbooks, was set up on our screened-in, open-air front porch, so as not to release its toxins inside the house.

As our dog, Bean, slept in the sun beside me, I went through four scrapbooks I’d randomly grabbed, not knowing until I opened them which years they chronicled. As it turned out, they were sequential, covering 1978 through 1985. Those were highly eventful years in my life, as it happens, taking me through college and my first jobs. Appropriately, my portable radio was tuned to the classic rock station throughout my time on the porch, providing a soundtrack that was historically accurate much of the time.

On the street below me, where passersby walked their dogs and kids rode their bikes, it was the year in which I’ll turn a shocking 59—the cusp of 60! On the porch, however, I was aging from 19 at the start of my scrapbook excavations to 26 by the end of them. It felt intensely familiar yet happily distant.

I write “happily” because I wouldn’t relive those years for all the tea in China. (As the phrase used to go when China wasn’t yet better known for consumer goods and computer hacking.)

At the dawn of 1978, I was an uncertain and socially inept college student with no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. By the end of 1985, I’d cycled through a trio of jobs and found myself back at the first one by default, for lack of a better plan. I’d acquired and lost my first real girlfriend in that last scrapbook year. I was kind of back at square one.

Not that the scrapbooks told that story. There, I was part of a glowing family narrative, full of achievements and entertainments and special occasions. Every holiday was a happy one. Greensboro, North Carolina, was the cultural capital of the world, judging from the array of orchestra programs, celebrity appearances and ticket stubs. My brother was well on his way to domestic and career success, and I was blowing the competition away in everything I did—in academics, in writings for my college newspaper and literary magazine, as a fledgling journalist after graduation, then as a congressional press secretary on Capitol Hill. Only in 1985 comes a hint of discord, with the scrapbook notation that I returned to my old newspaper job in High Point after an unhappy six-month stint with an employer in downtown DC.

In fact, the end of 1985 was the low point of my adult life—not that I'd exactly felt like I’d been killing it before then, my mom’s rosy commentary and displays of my awards and articles notwithstanding.

I’d graduated from college with a high GPA but no idea what to do for a living other than to apply to newspaper work, since I’d written for my college paper. So, I ended up working for peanuts (and a canned ham as a Christmas bonus) at a middling local newspaper for a few years. Then, because I’d covered politics in my job, I got asked by the local congressman to replace his fired press secretary in DC. I spent a year at that job, was terrified the entire time even though I frankly was given little real responsibility, then was out of work a year later when my boss lost his reelection bid. I spent the subsequent six months—the first half of 1985—living at my parents’ house, being un- or underemployed, and losing my girlfriend because having no money or self-confidence proved to be the ultimate anti-aphrodisiac.

That six-month disaster in DC that had merited a rare down note in my mom’s scrapbook was my job as administrative assistant at an outfit called the National Waterways Conference. Its interest was in barge commerce, or something like that. I honestly never did quite know what the organization was all about, because it was a three-person operation, and my boss was a petty tyrant who somehow had gotten it into his head that I would learn everything I needed to know on the job without any direction from him.

And I thought I’d been terrified working on Capitol Hill! My boss would tell me to compile information on this thing or that—all related, somehow, to transport on our nation’s inland waterways system—and report back to him on my findings. But his only instruction, when I’d ask how I might best educate myself—the Internet and Google didn’t yet exist—was, “Just make some calls.”

“’Calls’? To who? To ask what?”

“Just make some calls.”

“Um, can you please expand on that? With whom might I start?”

By then he’d be seething at my ignorance. He’d finally spit out a contact name, who I’d then call. But that person never would be of much help to me, given that I no context about what I was supposed to be learning.

Every minute was a nightmare. I spent my days fumbling helplessly for relevant information and dreading the sound of my boss buzzing me into his adjacent office. The only other employee, a young female secretary, was sympathetic to my plight but could do nothing to relieve it. The weekends offered no comfort. All I did was count the hours until the renewed hell of Monday morning.   

My single happy memory of that entire half-year was the time I went directly from work to a movie theater on a Friday afternoon to see this crazy horror movie named Reanimator. There was a scene in which a mad scientist held his disembodied head while it vigorously performed oral sex on a woman. The sequence was so outrageous and weirdly campy that it made me laugh out loud, at length. Why, it was almost as if I’d had all these pent-up emotions that need to be excised, whatever the stimuli! Go figure.

Needless to say, my ticket stub from Reanimator was not among the postcards, sugar packets, travel brochures and other archival materials in my mom’s scrapbook of the events of 1985. But later, after I’d removed everything I wanted to keep from those four deteriorating piles of construction paper and thrown the rest into the garbage, I thought long and hard about that dreadful job and the distance I’ve come in the 32 years since I left it.

When I resigned from the Waterways Conference to return to my old newspaper job in North Carolina, my boss audibly scoffed at my surrender, yet insisted on giving me a fancy pen as a parting gift because his inbred manners as a native Alabamian demanded the gesture. But, while I wasn’t thrilled to go back to High Point and my old newspaper job, at least I stopped being terrified. And I was back to doing something at which I was reasonably good. My confidence gradually grew, to the point that I moved on, in late 1989, to another newspaper job in Savannah, Georgia. It was during my three years working there that I began dating Lynn long-distance. I joined her in DC when we got married in November 1992.

Everything since then has been on an upward trajectory. My personal life has never been happier, and my professional one is generally satisfying. (Although make no mistake, I’d exchange it for retirement in a heartbeat.) I’ve done good work at three different membership organizations over the past quarter-century, and I've had great bosses at each stop.

Still, it’s helpful to look back, and it's beneficial to keep perspective.

The Tale of the Scrapbooks, for me, is “this, too, shall pass.” Returning to the present, and staring the socio-political horror that is 2017 squarely in the eye, I can only hope the same phrase applies on a national and global scale.

I mean that literally. Seriously, hoping is all I can do. It’s not like there’s empirical evidence of impending change for the better.

Deja Vu

It’s Groundhog Day. Is it ever.

I’m not talking about the ritual of scaring a poor woodchuck half to death in service to a bogus weather forecast. I’m referencing the Bill Murray movie in which the same day, the same sequence of events, keeps happening over and over again. I’m talking about the pattern of scaring progressive Americans more than half to death in service to a president driven to bogus certainties by his own ego, ignorance and incuriousness.

We’re now a few weeks into the Trump administration—two words that continue to be, and I’m pretty sure always will be, very hard for me to write—and it’s utterly clear that anyone who thought that Petty, Boorish Campaign Trump would yield to some semblance of Statesmanlike President Trump was dead wrong.

Evidence of this is so abundant that it’s hard to choose among the seemingly endless cases in point. Who and what hasn’t the man insulted, belittled, and attempted to silence or marginalize? Examples range from our free and objective press to the tenuous existence of the Senate filibuster as a safeguard against ideological extremists on the Supreme Court. But here’s a for-instance from this morning’s newspaper—word that our Diplomat in Chief hung up on Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull after harshly criticizing an Obama-brokered refugee-acceptance deal between the two nations and informing Turnbull that, of Trump’s five telephone conversations with world leaders that day, “this call was by far the worst.”

This, in a nutshell, is what we’re dealing with: A deeply disturbed—I believe mentally ill, far beyond the obvious narcissistic personality disorder—chief executive who’s incapable of an iota of civility in the face of anything he doesn’t like, and whose off-the-charts ego brooks no thought that anything isn’t ultimately All About Him. I mean, how childish is comparing phone calls? (“Why can’t you kiss my ass like Putin does?”) Did I mention the fact that the reason Trump so loathes Obama’s agreement to take in 1,250 refugees from an Australian detention center is that “I’m going to get killed politically for this”?)

Also, the Washington Post reports, BLOATUS (tip of the hat to humor columnist Gene Weingarten, who was referencing Trump’s girth but might just as easily have been invoking the apt noun “bloviator”) managed to insert into the 25-minute conversation with Turnbull (it was supposed to have been an hour) yet another boast about the “magnitude” of his Electoral College win—which actually was small by historical standards. (And never mind the popular vote, which Trump delusionally refuses to acknowledge he fairly and legitimately lost by almost three million ballots.)

Anyway, back to Groundhog Day. I was among the roughly half-million people who, on January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration, thronged Washington’s National Mall to signal our fury at the new president’s rhetoric, personal assaults on, and promised actions toward women. We were joined that day by perhaps 1.5 million more protesters across the US and around the world. Friends of mine turned out in towns as small as Sonoma, California, and cities as large as New York and Philadelphia.

It was energizing and encouraging—if hugely claustrophobic and sometimes chaotic—to be in the midst of so many like-minded Americans, who importantly—in their signage and their chants—emphasized not only that women’s rights are human rights, but that matters such as the health of the environment and our education and health care systems are universal concerns, as well.

Yes, it remains to be seen how effectively all of this outrage can be channeled in ways that truly impact decision-making and policies, given the Republican stranglehold on Washington. We marchers and other progressives must do much more than preach to the choir. We need to let lawmakers know where we stand, donate and/or volunteer our time to causes in which we believe, and, perhaps most importantly, try in whatever small ways we can to engage with those with whom we disagree—trying less overtly to convert them than to help them understand why we fear America is selling its soul to broad and outlandish promises of backward time travel to an era when coal was king and the world was far less dangerous.

I guess I didn’t actually get back to Groundhog Day, as I promised a few paragraphs ago. But that sentence above about coal and danger hints as where I’m going with this. Please stay with me.

I mentioned the signage at the Women’s March on DC. It was inventive and wonderful. It tended to get to the heart of things in a modicum of words. Much of it centered on reproductive rights, sexual assault (per Trump’s brags in the infamous Access Hollywood video) and misogyny (Hillary Clinton as a “nasty woman”). Inevitably, though, the writings also focused specifically on the polarizing man who prompted the marches. Signs and posters read “Toddler in Chief.” “Apologize.” “We Shall Overcomb.”

Perhaps my favorite sign that day was the profane but all-encompassing “Fuck This Shit.” But that’s also where Groundhog Day comes in, because inherent in that three-word epithet was a sentiment that was expressed in a number of other signs and posters that were worded slightly differently but all conveyed the sense of frustration and exhaustion that was captured in one that read “I Can’t Believe I’m Still Having to Do This.”

Take reproductive rights: Wasn’t that settled by Roe v Wade in 1973?

Take sexual assault: Didn’t we as a nation decide long ago that it’s an awful and intolerable thing?

Take misogyny: Hasn’t our national progress against this hideous mindset been slowly but steadily improving over the years, as more and more glass ceilings have been broken?

Take the environment: Wasn’t the first Earth Day held in 1970, and wasn’t it Richard Nixon, of all people, who signed legislation establishing the Environmental Protection Agency that same year?

Take health care: Isn't there agreement now that all Americans deserve an affordable option, even if there’s vast disagreement about how to achieve that goal?

Take education: Hasn’t improving public schools always been our national aim?

But then, look at today’s Trumpian realities:

Zeal to overturn the Roe decision, as reflected in the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to claim the Supreme Court seat that was outright stolen from Obama nominee Merrick Garland.

Election of a president who’s on record bragging about sexually assaulting women.

A national misogyny so pervasive that not only could Trump get elected despite his treatment of women, but that Hillary Clinton was constantly attacked on the campaign trail by Trump supporters in the most hateful of terms, as he encouraged cheers of “Lock Her Up.”

Utter disregard for the environment, reflected in Trump’s dismissal of climate change as a “hoax” and his appointment of an avowed EPA enemy to lead the department.

The gleeful dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, to ultimately be replaced by a system that seems certain to start with devastatingly high deductibles.

The nomination as Education Secretary of a woman who has thrown her considerable wealth behind decimating public education and funneling public dollars to for-profit vendors and religiously affiliated schools.

It’s instructive to note that Gorsuch supporters laud him as an constitutional “originalist” in the mode of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Webster’s Dictionary defines “originalism” as “the belief that the United States Constitution should be interpreted in the way the authors originally intended it.” The Constitution was signed in 1787. Now, I’m not saying the Founding Fathers weren’t in many ways wise and even revolutionary men. We owe them a great debt of gratitude. We do not, however, owe them fealty to a literal, stuck-in-time interpretation of a document that now is 230 years old and was written at a time of horse travel, outhouses and the 13 original colonies.

This, to me, is the ultimate in Groundhog Day. Hey! Let’s live by the values and precepts of 1787 to determine the laws of 2017!

Let’s work under the assumption that nothing has changed, and that the complexities of modern life never happened! It’s the same principle, after all, that’s governed the one-sided gun control “debate” that the National Rifle Association won long ago. The Second Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1789, reads, “A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

Never mind the explicit reference to “militia” in those dangerous times, when much of America was drunk and rowdy, and Native Americans were inexplicably hostile toward the White Man’s confiscation of their lands. Disregard the fact that the US has by far the highest murder and violence rates in the Western world, thanks to the flood of firearms and our toothless checks on easy access to them.

It’s all Groundhog Day. Nothing seems to really change. Or, if something does, in an evolutionary way, it’s subject to reversal.

So it is that reproductive choice now is seriously threatened. Sexual assault is dismissed as “locker room talk.” What would have been the first female president became yet another white male—and a particularly nasty one, at that. Big business and Wall Street get every break from this administration, while the planet gets none. The high ideals of “Obamacare” are thrown on history’s scrap heap. Public education seeks an advocate in vain.

There was another profane but spot-on sign at the DC march that I particularly liked. It read, “Dear Congress: Stop Being Assholes. Signed, the United States of America.” Sadly, though there’s no hint that the Republican-led Congress has any interest in discontinuing or even leavening its assholic-ness. What’s even worse to me, though, is the reason for their intemperance: They have the backing of their constituents.

What the presidential election of 2016 told me was that a majority of Americans (with caveats—voting Americans, Electoral College-vote Americans) don’t, on balance, care about anything nearly as much as they do promises that jobs lost to globalization and mechanization will magically reappear, and pledges that domestic terrorism will cease if this country will reject its history of welcoming immigrants. Just look at the poll numbers: While people like me are decrying Trump’s assaults on our civil liberties, the majority of Americans, the numbers say, are being persuaded—by his tweeted threats to individual companies and his sweeping executive orders on immigration—that he’s Creating Jobs and Keeping America Safe.    

Other signs I spotted at the Women’s March on DC insisted that “This”—meaning the Trump administration’s priorities—“Is Not Who We Are.” But I seriously wonder. It’s certainly not who many of us are. But are we really in the majority?

It may be that social media—that liberating and bullying societal force that simultaneously puts at our fingertips both facts and those who willfully reject them—has freed the America that’s been hiding in plain sight all the time. I’m talking about the embittered America that will support anything and anyone that it believes will return the nation to an illusionary, halcyon past. Perhaps the xenophobic, isolationist, racist and sexist America that has startlingly revealed itself at various times in our history not only never went away, but simply needed embolding chat rooms and Twitter feeds in order to reach full flower.

I very much hope I’m wrong about that. But then again, I’d hoped that my worst fears about Trump would prove to be overstated. Instead, as I look to tomorrow, the day after Groundhog Day, I see only a repetition of today.