Midlife Meditation

Vandalism on the car and home of recent emigrees to Portland. I was grooving to a blues band when Amy showed me her phone. She had clicked on a Facebook link that took her to an Oregonian  stor y about a young couple whose home and car had been vandalized, possibly by an impatient motorist who, after having to briefly wait behind their car as one dropped the other off at their home, shouted at them to "go home to fucking California." It was a beautiful day on the waterfront, and the music was all good--ten great bands, no two of them alike, all at the top of their game--matched with an enthusiastic, joyous crowd; and yet, seeing the picture, and putting it in the context of this time of great political turmoil, I couldn't help but be brought down. In fact, if this were a vlog instead of a blog, I'd sing you some blues, something like this: I just looked at the paper, and what I saw brought me down. That's right I just looked at the paper, and it really br...

Not just this guy. Really? This is what it takes? Donald Trump's campaign has been off at least one of its rails as long as it's been running. Trump was never interested in being respectable, civil, eloquent, diplomatic, statesmanlike, or even coherent. He was always a loud, bellicose, attention-demanding incarnation of masculine id, with a dog-and-pony show that was irresistible to a large enough plurality of Republican voters that it overcome all the shallow business-as-usual candidates--as well as a few other wingnuts who lacked his eye-catching vulgar appeal--to bequeath him with a nomination to become the world's most dangerous head of state. His rhetoric was scattershot when it came to positions on any of the issues the serious candidates were debating, but consistent in one regard: he hated the same people as that large plurality of voters, and cared not a farthing for how his targets felt about that hatred. The size of his following, while not large en...

Between 1755 and 1764, more than 80% of the Acadians living in the Maritime Provinces were expelled by Great Britain. As persecutions go, it's penny ante. Some of my ancestors were Acadians, French colonists in Canada's Maritime Provinces. They took Acadia, their name for the region, from Greek mythology: Arcadia (the "r" was dropped by the French), meaning "refuge," was an abundant land, a Utopia where all could live in peace, free from want. And in fact, the Acadians coexisted with the native Mi'kmaq tribal peoples, intermarrying with them and allying with them against frequent British invasions. Over the course of Acadia's 150 year history, the power of the British Empire came to dominate. For the last fifty years of its existence, Acadia and its Mi'kmaq allies engaged in a series of small-scale wars with the Empire, culminating in the expulsion of 11,500 of the 14,100 Acadians still living in the region. Most were resettled in ...

Rick Perry threw in the towel on his campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination last week. In his exit speech, he called Donald Trump a nativist--that is, one who demands favored status for established residents of a territory at the expense of more recent arrivals. Perry's correct: Trump's pronouncements have been all over the map on a variety of issues, but since announcing his candidacy in July, he's been steadfast on this one, and it's kept him at the top of the polls. There's a significant plurality in the Republican party who are eating up his tirades against immigration, and especially his talk of deporting not just Mexican citizens, but their entire families, including those who are US citizens. That plurality is not unique to America: throughout Europe, nativist parties, some of which were until recently avowedly neo-Nazi, have been growing in power. In France and Denmark, they've won control of the government, and they've done it by ...

It's not just the funny hats that are rendering Republicans irrelevant. It started with health care—at least, that’s what the movement claimed. They showed up at town meetings that were seeking to gather a consensus on reforming the American health care system, but they didn’t come to discuss, or even to engage in constructive criticism. They came to shout and scream, to shut down the grass roots part of the process, and they succeeded. They were a tiny minority, but the volume of their protest drowned out all the hopes and dreams of the rest of America. They reacted to what they considered unconstitutional nationalization of corrupt, bloated industries that were bankrupting both individuals and collectives with the mountains of expensive red tape they erected as barriers to the product they were supposed to be delivering. Some of them dressed up in colonial costumes, others suspended teabags from wide brimmed hats, and they called themselves the Tea Party. Over time...