Carol Bergman

 

 

What serveth a man if he gain the whole world and lose his immortal soul.

 

-New Testament, Mark 8:36

 

 

I woke up this morning in a fugue state. I was channeling conceptual artist Jenny Holzer in my dreams. Like her textual projections onto buildings, the words expelled from my mouth were in capital letters. I was screaming with an urgency I had not experienced since I participated in the now historic 2017 demonstration in front of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Then, as now, the news reports were distorted by commentators sanitizing the purpose and  portent of the demonstration. We already knew that Trump was a gangster, that he would try to wreck our democracy, and leave INDESCRIBABLE SUFFERING  in his wake, but the mainstream broadcasters in our midst obfuscated the historical turning point with happy talk and highlighted the counter-demonstration by Antifa, the cameras turned to the drama of the possibility of violent encounter.

 

American market-driven newscasting is, for the most part what my professors in grad school called "Happy Talk News," and its unseriousness—remember that word from the recent campaign in a different context—is a reflection of an assumption that Americans prefer to be entertained rather than informed. This is a deceptive cover for the market-driven media environment; we are all unwittingly delivered to the advertisers. Sustained in depth conversation is available if we opt for it.  But we must  opt for it.

 

Even before #47, I made a decision to begin each day listening to British podcasts: BBC, The Guardian, The Economist. I admit I am an Anglophile having lived in London for a decade where I worked occasionally for the BBC as a reporter and wrote articles for The Times Educational Supplement. During those years away from America, my outraged voice muted, my interviewing deepened and became less confrontational, my geopolitical perspective expanded, my writing matured, and so did I. America was no longer the center of my world.

 

Perhaps my glasses are tinting rose at the moment as I look back at this period of my life. I miss London and my EU friends more than ever. It hurts when they say that they never want to step on American shores again. Like many others, I'm shattered by the consequences of the election, but also determined not to despair. As the news becomes more and more INDESCRIBABLE my morning routine continues: I cut the fruit, make important choices: yogurt or cottage cheese? I add nuts, I write in my journal, I recite a secular prayer: MAY WE CONTINUE TO WORK TOGETHER FOR PEACE, FREEDOM, AND THE RULE OF LAW AT HOME AND ABROAD. AMEN.

 

 

 

 

My parents had left Haiti in the middle of a thirty-year dictatorship during which most people were being terrorized. A woman or girl being raped or even killed was not all that unusual.

 

-Edwidge Danticat, All the Home You've Got

 

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

         

―  Machiavelli, The Prince

 

 

 

When a war starts, if citizens are forced to become soldiers, they learn to shoot a gun and to kill soldiers on the "other side." If they cannot shoot their guns, they run the risk of being killed themselves. Nobody cares whether a soldier enjoys killing other people, it is just a job, or more than a job because as they are killing, they are keeping themselves—and maybe even their family—alive . Women and children are left behind unless they have volunteered to fight, which is glorious and laudable and heroic at times, for example in Ukraine right now. Or women and children are evacuated, or they decide to flee and travel long distances to find safety, either on foot, or in a vehicle of some description, or across a body of water in boats and planes, and they may never return to their homeland, or want to return. Which is my family's story once they took flight from what they always assumed would be their home, but was no longer their home. They were welcomed to the United States as refugees and sent to Wyoming for some reason I cannot find out, and my father—who was already an eye surgeon—worked in a hospital and my mother—who had finished medical school but not done her internship—became a visiting nurse.

 

That was then and this is now. What we are witnessing in the round-ups and deportations is not just a reckoning with what everyone agrees is  a broken immigration system, and far too many seeking safety in a country that is no longer safe, it is an attempt to redefine what America is, beyond its mythology, and what it will become if the vicious cruelty taking hold is not stopped.

 

Can you think of a nation that has not been touched by killing in recent years or, at the very least, internal economic strife, or worse?  A nation so peaceful that children have never seen a gun, heard the sound of bombs, or gone to sleep hungry?  Can we include American-born children in this list of formative experiences? What has the cohort in Washington done with their children I wonder?  Have they built fall-out shelters and bunkers to protect them in the event of the final apocalyptic event? Or, bought them bullet proof vests to wear in school? What do they discuss with them at the dinner table? How do they explain the promise of America?

 

Act like a madman and no one will trust you or dare vengeance, Machiavelli suggested.  

 

The Prince has taken him at his word.