I was born in New England to a German immigrant mother and a father who was the son of a Scottish father and an English-Canadian mother, all of whom were Protestants, so if you need a WASP to round out your dinner party, please invite me.
I have a great deal of cultural loyalty to Europe - primarily, but not limited to, the land of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. But I have trouble understanding how people feel any attachment to skin-color categories. I am married to a Japanese, and if two men could produce biological children, my Japanese husband and I, back in the day when reproductive sex would have been an option for us, might well have provided our brown and white canine daughters with a mixed-race yellow and white human sibling or two. Whom I expect I would love with the same abandon I do my canine daughters.
All water under the bridge, now. These days I take note of racial categories mostly to marvel at how uninformed my fellow Americans are, as evidenced by their failure to understand that race is a socially-constructed category and not a biological one. And to get in closer touch with the need for us to put right some of the injustices we of the WASPy persuasion have inflicted on non-white Americans. Particularly as a critical mass of white Americans compounded their ignorance of what race, in fact, is with a fear that they were in a zero-sum game and that the advance of every non-white somehow signified a loss to a white American. And as Roman Catholic whites joined forces with their onetime oppressor-class WASP neighbors in this folly.
A great sigh of relief is still being heard around the world from those of us who have lived in shame these past four years at evidence that the time has come to an end, at long last, when so many of us willingly followed the Pied Piper of White Supremacy into acts of self-destruction and cruelty, all in the name of self-preservation. Failing to put the blame where it belonged, on policies that allowed technological advances to put people out of work without taking the loss of jobs that ensued into consideration, many of us, with considerable justification, put the blame on government itself rather than on bad government policies. And blamed the bicoastal urban elites who benefited more from those policies than they did. So many of us chafed at America's habit of celebrating its ability to generate wealth while ignoring an equitable distribution of wealth. What a race (pardon the expression) of folk we are: allowing so many people at the bottom to fall through the cracks and then blaming others for our failure to engage in responsible governing.
This blindness gave the honest conservatives a leg up, those who believed Ayn Rand when she claimed that individual selfishness was a good thing and virtually any form of collective action should be labeled socialist and rejected. America assumed a social Darwinist outlook, and chose oligarchy over democracy, giving the free market the space to act with only a minimum of government regulation, and providing a justification for buying politicians and reducing taxes on themselves and their fellow leaders of industry and commerce. Next step was conning our clueless Jesus-as-American religionists, fearful of losing their traditional right to impose their anti-abortion anti-non-reproductive sex values on the rest of us who do not share their convictions.
Fear of non-whiteness, and the conviction that one is in possession of God's absolute truth became a deadly combination. And, tragically, the clever and otherwise gifted and courageous generators of great wealth failed to consider the long-term effects of vulture capitalism, and sold their souls to a narcissist Pied Piper who had mastered the art of deception in the age of celebrity-worship.
I don't claim that that's the whole story or that I have a sufficiently nuanced perspective. But I believe that goes a long way to explaining most of what went wrong: fear of the "other," and the changes they might bring about. A kind of tribal fear.
The Democrats have done a piss-poor job of addressing that fear. I leave it for others to argue over which was the greater evil, the willingness of the self-centered money-grubbers on the right to tie their wagon to a pathological liar, or the failure of the left to find the will and the way to prevent the minority from taking control.
It will not be lost on the world that once again, in this 2020 presidential election, Americans have demonstrated their antipathy to government. Even while showing the self-serving Pied Piper the door and bringing back a sense of decency, a respect for science and truth and rule of the majority, they have limited the power of the executive to right past wrongs by keeping the legislature in the hands of the conservatives.
The Biden/Harris government cannot expect smooth sailing. Frustration and a sense that if we progress we can only do it at a snail's pace will still dominate, and that fact might well lead to another bout of anti-government sentiment, which might mean if the Republicans in the Senate can continue stymying Democratic reforms, they might succeed in taking back control in 2024, this time with a more effective government by and for the rich.
And that may not be the worst of our problems, when you consider global warming, the pandemic, and a future where data, not human beings, run the world.
For now I'm choosing to focus on the positive, such as the fact that we're in a moment that suggests the possibility of returning to the days when American democracy was about extending civil rights and social recognition to all Americans, including African-Americans and the children who entered the U.S. after the days when most immigrants came from Europe.
For starters, we have put a vice president in office who is not only a woman, but a woman of Indian and Jamaican background who has a Jewish husband.
And, forgive me for this, but I think I am no less delighted at this break in the glass ceiling than I am that there will once again be dogs in the White House.
And while we're feeling good about the increased focus on Indian-Americans and their contributions, let's not overlook the fact that another of my favorite Indian-Americans is in the news: Atul Gawande. Have been following him for some time now. Love the guy. He's been appointed to President Biden's new corona task force.
And he's not the only Indian-American to be joining the new administration. There's also Vivek Murthy, born in England to Indian parents. Look him up if you don't know him.
Best part of the story, of course, is that they are not the only super bright guys on the panel. The entire task force consists of brilliant folk: in addition to Gawande and Murthy are David Kessler, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, Dr. Luciana Borio, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Dr. Celine Gounder, Dr. Julie Morita, Dr. Michael Osterholm, Ms. Loyce Pace, Dr. Robert Rodriguez, Dr. Eric Goosby. (And just listen to the sound of these mostly non-WASPish names.)
And last, but not least, Dr. Rick Bright, who was ousted as the head of the biomedical advanced research and development authority after criticizing the federal government's response to the coronavirus under Trump. And was reassigned to a lesser job for resisting political pressure to allow widespread use of hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug that was Trump's dumb shit anti-scientific suggestion for a way to deal with the pandemic.
No wonder the church bells are ringing in Munich and Paris and people are dancing in the street across America.
OK, so it's probably not going to be smooth sailing. But the world, for now, has just dodged a bullet.
So sing loud, I say. Dance with abandon.
Bring out the champagne.
Have a second helping of cake.
1 comment:
Amen! and Amen!
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