by W. E. Gutman
*
The 80s and 90s bring fleeting professional successes, prolonged setbacks, and personal ordeals. I divorce my wife of 23 years. Five years later I remarry. We travel. I write. Good jobs and good money give way to lengthy periods of unemployment and penury interrupted by brief stints at dull or profitless occupations. Joblessness soars during the Reagan years. In 1982, 30 million people are out of work. I’m one of them. Along with 16 million Americans, I lose my medical insurance. At 45, I feel the sting of “over-qualification.” The specter of chronic joblessness looms ahead, menacing, pitiless. Unemployment benefits dry up, pushing untold numbers of Americans to the brink.
As working America struggles to survive, huge sums of taxpayer money are raised to finance wars. In defiance of a law prohibiting the U.S. from supporting, directly or indirectly, military and paramilitary operations in Nicaragua, the Reagan administration flouts the edict and finds ways to secretly fund the “Contras,” looking for “third-party” support, namely from Iran. Reagan himself solicits funds from Saudi Arabia to the tune of $32 million. Guatemala and Honduras serve as conduits in the traffic of weapons to the anti-Sandinista rebels. Israel, a major debtor, also participates in this conspiracy.
Then the Soviet Empire collapses. U.S. foreign policy, no longer forged in the crucible of Cold War paranoia, is now animated by a fear of incipient foreign nationalism and rebellions fueled by ethnic and religious factionalism, poverty, government corruption and apathy, and deepening despair. Noam Chomsky writes:
“The appeal to security [is] largely fraudulent, the Cold War framework having been used as a device to justify the suppression of independent nationalism.”
Indeed, nascent foreign nationalism is a threat to no one but a few -- Anaconda Copper, United Fruit/Chiquita Banana, Dole, International Telephone and Telegraph, Coca Cola, PepsiCo, General Electric, Aramco, IBM and other giant multinational corporations and lending institutions that enrich themselves and their stockholders by systematically “hooverizing” -- sucking -- the economic marrow out of poor nations.
Meanwhile, in Central America, my old stomping grounds, the human rights picture grows dimmer even after years of peace and an era of coerced “reconciliation” in which abusers are pardoned and victims are forgotten. Hopes of change in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua yield little or nothing. No viable political opposition emerges and grass-roots organizations that mushroom during the conflicts wither or vanish. Instead, old dynastic political structures succeed one-another. Impunity reigns. Kidnappers, torturers and assassins bribe their way out of jail. High-ranking military officers who’d engaged in murder and drug trafficking are acquitted and absolved in the name of “national reconciliation.” Poverty festers as economies based on coffee, sugar and the sweatshop maquila industries fail to compete in the global economy. Heads of state are incapable, or unwilling, to deal with crime, violence and soaring delinquency. They respond instead with a loudly trumpeted but resoundingly ineffectual “zero tolerance” policy that triggers orgies of social cleansing. “Undesirables” are liquidated, among them street children and homeless adults. In Panama, Colombian refugees crossing the border are sent back with the knowledge that they will most likely be executed. In Costa Rica, undocumented Nicaraguans are rounded up, manhandled, and deported. It’s a mess and I dutifully report what I see. I liken the situation to a cease-fire rather than peace because the problems that caused the wars are still in place -- inept and corruptible plutocrats and a depraved eagerness by the U.S. to tolerate them so long as they dance to America’s music. I urge governments to reflect the aspirations of the people they rule only to concede that the people are ungovernable and, like sheep, are devoid of tangible aspirations. Apathy is the opiate of the masses. It prevents them from grasping the abject irrelevance of their lives.
Damned if I don’t, damned if I do; in Guatemala and Honduras I’m seen as a meddler, threatened with expulsion by one, forced to bolt from the other -- or forfeit my life. In the U.S., my views are dismissed as subversive by the right, culturally insensitive by the left.
The flower children and the anti-war protesters of my youth have since grown into flabby, self-absorbed sexagenarians. The voices of dissent, the cries for peace are but feeble whimpers. I lament my cynicism and neutrality at a time when young Americans voiced their revulsion toward injustice and chicanery, as they marched against ignoble wars, pouring scorn on ignoble leaders while other young Americans died far from home as lies and colossal fraud were being heaped on a nation too smug to care.
What happened to America’s conscience? As Pete Seeger once asked -- “Where have all the flowers gone? When will they ever learn?”
*
“Aren’t you a bit too old to play paladin,” my uncle asks one day. He fears for my safety. His question startles and irks me.
“I feel younger than my years. Isn’t that the secret of eternal youth,” I parry, now on the defensive. “I’m conscious of my age only when I look in the mirror.” It’s a lie. The little aches and pains, the syndromes and anomalies that sneak up on aging men, the vague but persistent cues all remind me that I’m not immortal.
He stares at me as if assessing the veracity of my words, tilting his head sideways, raising his eyebrows and fixing his gaze upon mine with avuncular cynicism.
“I wish you a long and healthy life, my beloved nephew. But don’t you think time has come to let younger men carry the torch for a change?”
“I’m not that old,” I protest, stung by the unbidden notion that others do not see me the way I see myself. Part of me itches for new tussles. My other self yearns for tranquility. But tranquility, I fear, is another word for surrender and inertia, an admission of defeat, and I bristle at the thought that the flesh will ultimately overwhelm the spirit.
“I’m not that old,” I repeat, this time with far less conviction.
My uncle dies six months later at the venerable age of 87.
*
A new century dawns, a new millennium begins, full of illusive promises and fanciful auguries. The American Dream, I discover bit by bit, is a vast exaggeration, a myth invented by and marketed for a privileged and resourceful few who know how to play the game, pull strings, milk the system and sell, sell, sell. Once a middle class country with professed core values of hard work, opportunity and fair play, the U.S. was now being swept by a tsunami of right-wing economic, political and religious influences. The victim of corporate greed, its middle class was frittering away. With the explosive growth of the radical right -- fueled by fears generated by economic dislocation and demonizing conspiracy theories -- white “Christian” hate groups proliferated and vented their bile against changing racial demographics and, notably, the election of the first African-American president. An angry backlash against what political and religious conservatives perceived as the “socialization” of America spawned the monsters of Islamophobia, anti-intellectualism, censorship, racial profiling and concomitant police brutality, and a form of jingoism that openly condones or cheers the use of torture on suspected terrorists. Conducted in 2009, a Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey revealed that the more often Americans go to church, the more prone they are to applaud the use of “renditions” and “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
In turn, rabid opposition to same-sex marriage, immigration, the social and cultural advances of non-Caucasians and the upward mobility of women exposed an image of America that belies its self-view. Despite the strident propaganda, America is not:
-- Invincible. The U.S. lost in Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, and Iraq; it “triumphed” against tiny Grenada and Panama; it is being held hostage in Afghanistan. A stalemate will prove worse than defeat. Meanwhile, covert operations -- drone strikes, electronic surveillance and stealth engagements led by black units, mercenary armies and terrorist groups -- are becoming more common as tools of U.S. foreign policy than conventional warfare or diplomacy. Michigan University Prof. Juan Cole calls the new face of Americ
a’s conflict resolution strategy “shadow power.” [Obama’s] shadow government, he warns, “masquerades as a way to keep the U.S. strong, but if it is not rolled back, it could fatally weaken American diplomacy” and lead to further erosion of civil liberties at home.
-- The guarantor of democracy; the U.S. ranks 20th after Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand and Australia.
-- A beacon of spiritual objectivity. Americans ignore or abet the incestuous tryst between the body politic and the dinosaurs of the religious right. Considered the single greatest threat to church-state separation, the nation’s largest Religious Right organizations continue to amass political power and wealth while stimulating and sharpening conservative anxiety. Together, these groups raise more than a billion dollars annually and invest large sums toward injecting religion into public schools.
-- A paragon of chastity. Americans wallow in a steaming cauldron of promiscuity, corruption and vice.
-- A model of enlightenment and evenhandedness. John Q. Public denounces abortion but cheers when a man is hanged, roasted or injected with a lethal cocktail of drugs.
-- The custodian of a free press. What we have is a faint-hearted mainstream media beholden more to advertisers than inconvenient truths; a press that won’t challenge the evisceration of civil liberties; won’t protest against the enfeeblement of the middle class; won’t acknowledge that a huge number of Americans barely survive on starvation wages; won’t denounce the consolidation of wealth into ever-narrower circles of power; will decry neither racism, the right wing’s blitz against labor, nor the soaring price of food and medicines or a dysfunctional and predatory healthcare system ranked 37th after Costa Rica, Saudi Arabia and Malta!
Runaway capitalism would also reinforce America’s incestuous relations with autocratic or marginally democratic nations around the world and stoke war fever. To maintain the juggernaut’s momentum while doubts over the purpose and direction of conflicts widened, the Pentagon would address a growing recruitment problem by spending billions of taxpayer dollars on programs designed to deceive, seduce and capture the youth of America. All in all, U.S. conduct at home and abroad would contribute to the mounting suspicion that it talks with a forked tongue and acts solely in its own political and hegemonic interests.
The result of a glut of media-driven mythmaking, the rift between reality and reporting would end. Widening, the credibility gap, according to Sonoma University sociology professor Peter Phillips, “turned into a literal truth emergency … the result of phony elections, illegal preemptive wars, torture camps, doctored intelligence and issues that intimately impact our lives at home, from healthcare to education.” Clearly, this truth emergency stemmed from the failures of the Fourth Estate to serve as the free and outspoken conscience of America.
*
A lesser dream exists for those who have nothing left but dreams to sustain them. They all know that what separates them from the greater dream is America itself. They lack America’s killer instinct. America is the love child of lofty idealism corrupted by persistent, obsessive sloganeering and the diktats of unrestrained capitalism. The flag; the Pledge of Allegiance; God’s ubiquitous intrusion into affairs of state; an air of coyness and moral superiority; a pugnacious, confrontational streak; an annoying propensity to see itself as stately and principled -- all prop up the insolent pretense. Shibboleths are carved into America’s hide. They help perpetuate an iconic national self-image that conflicts with its actions.
Of course, America has its amiable side. So long as I behave like an American -- or pretend to -- America grants me the right not to feel like one. This is a transcendent dispensation, one not conferred, if at all tolerated in many parts of the world. But there is an art to being American, a subliminal skill that can be acquired only at birth then honed in the crucible of America’s self-promoting culture. Becoming an American is much more difficult. For some, the effort required and the inevitable transformations that ensue are their own supreme reward. Others, like me, get lost in the shuffle. The moorings that once connected me to my past -- where my selfhood resides -- are frayed. Surrendered to a wasteland of unending transience and irresolution, I’m reduced to mimicking the world around me. I follow the script, mouth the lines, control my inflection and trim my body language, all with sham self-assurance but without the slightest conviction. It’s quite an act. I shall not fault America for having failed to match a set of fanciful assumptions brought to these shores by a wide-eyed adolescent and clung to because they once fit his model of El Dorado. Hard as I tried to resist America’s enticements by looking the other way, I’ve become habituated to all its creature comforts and extravagances but none of its conventions. Perhaps this is all there is to being an American -- an unstudied acquiescence to things as they are, a piecemeal accommodation with the subtle inhibitions and tempting inducements that are part of the American experience. Yet something’s missing. At the end of the day, after an exhausting trek through assorted minefields, I go backstage, wipe off the greasepaint, tuck away the libretto and sink within myself like into a soft, cozy armchair. Once ensconced in this familiar setting, reverting to the common idiom in which I address myself, now safe in the lap of retrospection, I survey my inner world, thankful it is still there, neighborly and obliging. Some of the greasepaint, like the ink in a tattoo, may never come off. Could I have become, by default, malgré moi, an American? The question and the implications its raises would leave me perplexed. I still cheer the America of the Patriots, the Whigs, the Sons of Liberty; I cannot abide the America it has turned into: a nation of self-righteous, flag-waiving, war-mongering xenophobes.
*
The images fly fast and furious and I catch them one by one in the net of memory. Ashen in the luster of fall, almost gloomy despite its great beauty, as if strangled by shadows, Paris, my lover, reemerges from the haze. It’s not that night gives it a somber visage. In fact, the Grands Boulevards are all aglow with Christmas fever, and glittering ornaments hanging from invisible wires hover in festive formation over crowds of shopper and revelers below. It’s just that I need to negotiate other memories and traffic, at best, is chaotic.
Stopped by a red light at an intersection, I spot a lone balladeer strumming a tinny guitar, his songs swallowed by the sound effects around him. In the City of Light no one seems to see him. So he keeps on singing. Paris, je t’aime. It was on Rue du Pont Neuf that I first made her acquaintance, barely out of the womb and already lusting after her as I lusted after her street girls when the time came. I never stopped loving her and yet I hardly know her anymore. Only memories animate the yearning so I partake of her with the circumspection owed a childhood dream. Paris may now belong to my past but she has become the immovable anchor I cling to when reality intrudes, when other dreams turn prosaic. It is on such occasions that I let go. My eyes glaze over and my ears tune out all sounds but those that drift in through the doors of memory. I take flight and Aznavour, Bécaud, Brassens, Ferré, Montand, Piaf and Trenet break into song for me. These are not just idle hankerings or aural mirages but real sensations, everyone a wistful replay brought on by mal du pays, a homesickness so intense that I seek refuge in their poetry, in the very timbres of their distinctive voices. Diminutive, a cigarette butt dangling from his lower lip, Aznavour knows how to say “I love you” a hundred different ways without ever repeating himself. His smoky, raspy, plaintive voice speaks of seduction and heartbreak, exultation and sorrow with an innocence and verve that sparkle in his feverish gaze. In his songs I can hear rain dancing softly on a canvas of slick slate roofs glistening in the shadow of the Sacré Coeur. I can replay summer breezes and feel them wafting through the chestnut trees as sweethearts stroll in the Tuileries gardens and children play admiral to vast armadas of toy galleons in the boat basins’ turbid waters. I can even see night draping the City of Light in a dazzling display of shimmering radiance, the Eiffel Tower an incandescent lace spire rising heavenward like hands joined in prayer. I can do all that as mo
rning descends, remote and aloof after a sleepless, dreamless night. Dissolving in the blinding desert light, Paris takes on the pallid hues of a silent film. The Paris I rediscover on increasingly rare visits, or when my reminiscences deliver me into her arms, is an old lover transformed by time and circumstance. She does not seem to age. I find her more desirable than ever, especially when we part. It is I who, in her absence, slowly turned from dashing suitor to decrepit Dorian Gray. Every wrinkle, every blemish, every battered emotion compressed and deferred within me ravage my features and scar my soul. The intimacy we once shared, I fear, can never be reclaimed.
Held in check or doggedly concealed, my nostalgia is all-consuming. Reality is a vast, pervasive happenstance. Paris is not so much a flight from reality as a side-trip to another very tangible universe that belongs at once to an irreducible past and an as-yet unrealized potential. I accept my “reality” because it is the one that nourishes the very last seeds of hope. Without this reality, there can be no other. Perhaps I’m fated, as I spin on this dizzying merry-go-round, never to catch the brass ring; for doing so would rob me of the illusions that sustain me. Yes, it is the journey, not the destination. “Getting there is half the fun,” an old TV airline commercial once trumpeted. Arriving infers a state of finality, a climax, the conclusion of a crossing circumscribed by time and space -- the end of the line. The longing keeps the impossible within reach.