Carol Bergman

 

 

I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo. The next time a woman runs, or a black, a Jew, or anyone from a group that the country is 'not ready' to elect to its highest office, I believe that he or she will be taken seriously from the start.

 

-Shirley Chisholm, 1972

 

After the euphoria about Kamala's nomination subsides, I told myself, I will upload all the American history on my Kindle to-be-read-stack and review and amplify, yet again, the history of this fascinating, fraught nation I call home. How did we get to where we are, fault lines and all? And what would I be teaching in a high school classroom come September, just weeks away from the election, if the righteous censors weren't sitting on my shoulder?

 

I minored in American history at UC Berkeley and entered a teacher training program after I graduated. During my second term of student teaching at Oakland Technical High School, I was assigned an English class and an American History class. The school had a large catchment area, but it was streamed, which meant that it was integrated in name only; within the school it was segregated. My history class was nearly all Black, young men and women from the ghetto, low achievers, truants, kids on parole, disaffected angry youth, my supervising teacher—a disaffected older white guy—explained to me, assuming I'd comply with his bigotry. Then he wished me luck. I needed it, but not because of my students, as it turned out.  True, it was a volatile, violent time—the Black Panthers were still ascendant in Oakland—and I was a young white teacher in a make-believe suit.

 

You're probably idealistic, my supervisor said, just be careful. I intend to teach, I told him. You are naïve, he said to me. Just keep control. The security guard will keep an eye on you, as will I.

 

Fair warning, but somehow, I wasn't afraid; I was determined. The Panthers were revolutionaries wielding huge weapons, there were shoot-outs with the police, but these same men and women were also opening schools and clinics. They cared about their children, students I was now facing in the classroom, shunted to the lowest "streams," in de facto segregated public schools, as many in our inner cities still are today.

 

I stood absolutely silent that first day as my students reluctantly entered the re-arranged, seminar-style room. The security guard lingered at the door waiting for his opportunity to rescue me. I have a mezzo voice, I am tall, and I was wearing a suit, my personal armor. I went up to tell him he wouldn't be needed, and invited him to sit down in the circle and join the proceedings. Back to basics, we were about to launch my own version of a Constitutional Convention, I told him. He didn't know what I was talking about, nor did my supervising teacher who was scrunched in the back taking notes.

 

Like all things political then and now, this plan of mine, hatched at 3 a.m. before my first day in this challenging classroom, was a performance. No clichés, euphemisms, platitudes or balloons allowed, however. Let's get started, I began. What's missing here? Who attended the Constitutional Convention and who didn't? Textbooks on every desk, I asked my rapt students to open to Howard Chandler Christy's painting. It depicts Independence Hall in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787. There isn't a woman or Black person in sight.

 

And so began a very interesting semester. My students re-wrote the Constitution as though their enslaved ancestors had been attendance. It was, truly, an historical document.

 

But my supervising teacher wasn't happy. I had to explain why I veered away from the curriculum or he'd fail me. Worse, he promised I'd never get a job teaching in the Oakland School District, and might not even get my California State Teaching License. It was my second experience of threat to my livelihood, but it still perplexed me. I was too inexperienced to understand the political heft behind the intimidations; I had the insouciance and confidence of youth. Nice try, I told myself, and carried on. And, to my surprise, I did get my California State Teaching Certificate, issued "for life." I didn't even have to fight for it, or threaten my supervising teacher by reporting him, though I was prepared to do so. Maybe he knew this and backed off, like any bully. We know the type.

 

So here we are, umpteen years later, and Kamala, a California girl, is running for President of the United States. Of course, her backstory is nothing like the students I taught in Oakland; she was privileged. Still, she has felt discrimination and hatred in her life, plenty of it, and resisted it. I know and admire her type: fearless, determined, smart, competent, good-hearted. irreverent, hard-working, highly educated and ambitious. I could go on, but I'm over the moon.

 

 

 

Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at the wrong done to him.  

 

-Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

 

 

Until lately I was one of them. Strolling whistling through the slaughterhouse, averting my eyes from the carnage, able to laugh and dream and hope because it had not yet happened to me. To us."

 

-George Saunders,  Lincoln in the Bardo

 

 

 

And he blusters and he bloviates upon the stage, about the imagined and/or exaggerated slights and grievances, for the sky is falling upon the heads of the righteous, in  particular The Great Leader's now second-in-command reading from a teleprompter. And next to him, dressed in the most expensive fashion of the day. is his helpmate, silent as the lambs in Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, and even more obedient despite her elite education. For this is a gathering of the mighty, the beautiful, the elected and the selected, spinning fictions known as inspirational stories. And they will form a new congregation of the elected and selected and they will be fruitful and multiply for they will attempt a total abortion ban, and the Comstock restriction on birth control, catapulting all of us back to the mid-19th century, particularly women, the helpmates in this new Gilead.

 

So be it. A gathering of the righteous, a celebration of the backwardness and moral bankruptcy of what is still known as the "Republican Party." How Abe Lincoln must be curling in his grave. For, dear reader, it certainly feels as though we have been fighting a mostly bloodless civil war, which is to say, there has been plenty of violence and threat of violence, and rage and hatred, and now yet another assassination attempt in a county in a country saturated in the poison of gun culture. 

 

It has not yet happened to me, to us, as George Saunders wrote in his prize-winning book, Lincoln in the Bardo. Not yet. But everything has changed since Trump arrived, as those of us not of the congregation—or  "the movement," as he calls it—are mouthing platitudes about "democracy," or going on extended vacations from "the news."  There are echoes in our history, many of them, but never has such a fascist impulse been so close to realization as so many of us turn away in despair.

Are we too torn up, too paralyzed with fear to think straight? Are we so glued to the news cycle, our scrolling screens, and the safety of our homes to participate in voter registration  and/or protests?

 

About 158.4 million Americans voted in the 2020 election, according to the Pew Research Center, amounting to 62.8% of people of voting age. This may sound like a big-enough number, but it is not. The United States, a democracy, ranks 31st in voter turnout in the world. In the world, dear reader. And are we not, ostensibly, the designated and/or self-designated leaders of the free world? 

 

I record here, the one small action I performed last week after I read those pitiful statistics, for none of us alone can stop the juggernaut, but together, maybe there is hope. I got into my car and  picked up voter registration forms at the post office. There are a few 20-somethings in my orbit I talk with every day—at the gym, at the local café, in the health store. I put on my educator's hat and ask them about their issues—student loans, no medical insurance—acknowledging  their daily struggles as I struggle, patiently, to pierce their apathy and inertia with my heartfelt concern, and then ask if they intend to vote.

 

 

I challenge my readers to leave a comment here with their suggestions. Let us brainstorm together. I will give a prize to anyone who can identify the literary allusion in the title, though I am not sure what the prize will be.

 

 

It's wanting to know that matters. Otherwise we are going out the way we came in…What we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is short…

 

                                                         -from Tom Stoppard's play, Arcadia

 

. . .for the designated successor to royal authority, the Sovereign People, was no more capable than Louis XVI of reconciling freedom with power.

 

-Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution

 

 

 

This morning, the morning after the umpteenth assassination and/or assassination attempt against a politician or activist in the United States in my lifetime alone, I decided to get out early to walk my compost down to the Huguenot Street community garden. I could not shut down the news, though I thought it would do me good. "Composting, at least, is something practical to sustain hope," I wrote on What's App to a friend in the UK, now celebrating its Labour Party victory. I finally shut the news down when a bystander on the Washington Post podcast I was listening to said, "We went home and listened to Fox News." Fists in the air, threats, revenge, retribution, grievance, Project 2025, none of this is good news.

 

I thought of Stoppard's play, Arcadia, kept it in mind as I continued my walk. Life has become "a Gothic novel expressed in landscape," Stoppard wrote, except that the landscape when contemplated in silence is also solace. Gardens, even indoor plants, become our Arcadias, utopian visions of unspoiled wilderness where we are able to rest and refresh our spirits, perhaps even begin again. Isn't this also what revolutions promise: beginning again?  Weren't our "founders" hopeful?  Has the American "experiment" utterly failed? Do we have time to steady the ship and move forward? Are these pointless rhetorical questions?

 

And then there is the extreme weather this summer which came upon us without warning, we thought. Well, not exactly; we had been amply warned. But the reality was bone thumping: an early hurricane, constant 90 degree days without much respite, and even the pool water will not cool. I lap swim and then stand under the outdoor cold shower near the changing rooms, sit on a bench, and catch my breath before heading home to AC. I still walk to the pool, water bottle in hand, doused with electrolytes. And every ten laps, I drink, but the water in the bottle has warmed to tea temperature and the post-swim alcohol drops for my ears are almost dangerously hot.

 

And so it goes these days, as Kurt Vonnegut would say. So it goes.

 

This post is dedicated to all the brave young Democrats running for office this year, many under siege on social media, and serious physical threat. May their courage inspire those of us who will vote for them and work to get out the vote. May our election poll workers remain steadfast and unafraid.

Autocrats invariably target not only human rights defenders and journalists but also writers and artists. They instinctively recognize the power of words and, by extension, free and creative expression to spark imagination, kindle hope, and allow people to imagine different and better worlds built on equality, freedom, and human rights. In the absence of free expression, other freedoms are quick to die, paving the way for autocrats to write their own rules…

 

-Marilynne Robinson, "Agreeing to Our Harm,"  NYRB, 7/18/24

 

 

On a hot Saturday morning in late June, I donated another cache of books to the Elting Memorial Library in New Paltz, NY, my new small hometown, a well-read town, which also boasts many visual artists and a state university. An "elite enclave," in other words, in the distorted vision of some. Elting Library will have their 67th  library fair at the end of September.  There will be books on tables in the parking lot of the library, music, and plants for sale, a festive occasion no matter the weather. Last year it was raining  that week, I recall, but no matter. Tents protected the paper books, sales were brisk--the fair yielded about $30,000 that day according to Crystal Middleton, the new director of the library-- and the post-Covid socializing among neighbors and visitors was intense.

 

Library fairs and book sales of donated books have been a fixture in many small towns across the United States since the 19th century. Volunteers gather to do the work of sorting, lifting, pricing and selling on the day of the event. It's labor intensive work, and some libraries have shifted to smaller events to supplement state and/or local government funding. At the Stoneridge Library, due west of New Paltz, the library fair has been abandoned, but there's a new bookshop which operates year round and raises about $10,000 per year, as compared to $14,000 from the past annual book fair, according to Jody Ford, the library's director. All the books in the shop are donated and the volunteers enjoy chatting to the shop's customers, members of their community, readers one and all. "It's a great success," Ford says.

 

Up in Woodstock, the barn behind the library is still taking donations for their 83rd library fair scheduled for July 22nd. Some libraries, such as the Gardiner Library have segued to book sales rather than Library Fairs eliminating anything other than the books themselves. It's still takes a lot of organizing, volunteerism, and muscle power, but is less complicated.

 

Will library fairs and book sales continue into the fast-paced digital world, or will they slowly disappear, becoming a quaint footnote in a town's history? It's hard to say from the vantage of 2024. A community's devotion to its residents' continuing education and sense of belonging is most important, especially in an over-sized disparate nation such as ours. And for those of us who celebrate knowledge and civil discourse, books—what they contain, what they inspire—are our mental furniture and cultural legacy. It is no wonder that so-called "controversial" books have been targeted by the radical right. Organizations such as Moms of Liberty are intimidating librarians, parents and, by extension, their own offspring, homogenizing their education and reading lists with their self-righteous censoring.

 

I am haunted by the dystopian vision of the abandoned, trashed Boston Globe newsroom in the episodic adaptation of Margaret Atwood's prescient Handmaid's Tale, the hallways reverberating with June Osborne's solitary daily run as she awaits her rescue.

 

 

According to the PEN America data base, "Writers at Risk," there were 339 writers from 33 countries jailed in 2023, an increase of 62 writers compared to 2022 and 101 more than in 2019. American writers, journalists and artists are not rounded up or incarcerated, but that does not mean that pressure is not applied, or that cancellations do not happen, early signs of a despotism our "founders" would have abhorred.

 

This post is dedicated to Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter currently on trial in Russia for his reporting, Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things,  who has been charged by the Indian government under the new Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA)  for comments made in 2010 about Kashmir, and to Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi whose jail sentence in Iran may be extended.