July 24, 2020

Dear Interested Readers,

We Are Not As “Exceptional” As We Thought

 

As a child, I developed a love of American history. My family traveled more extensively east of the Mississippi than to the west, but the east was the home of colonial America, the American Revolution, and the Civil War. In 1958 my family made one big swooping trip across the Southwest to Southern California, and then back to Texas through Nevada to see Las Vegas, Arizona to see The Grand Canyon, and then to Colorado for Pike’s Peak and Mesa Verde. On my trips and in school the sites and the history were arranged to demonstrate America’s exceptionalism.  Katharine Lee Bates, who was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, but lived for most of life in Wellesley, where she taught at Wellesley College, summed up exceptionalism in her anthem “America the Beautiful.” The song evolved. There were at least two subsequent versions in 1904 and 1911, after it first appeared in 1893. The final 1911 version is the one that we all grew up singing.

 

O beautiful for spacious skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the fruited plain!

America! America!

God shed His grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea!

 

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,

Whose stern, impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat

Across the wilderness!

America! America!

God mend thine every flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law!

 

O beautiful for heroes proved

In liberating strife,

Who more than self their country loved

And mercy more than life!

America! America!

May God thy gold refine,

Till all success be nobleness,

And every gain divine!

 

O beautiful for patriot dream

That sees beyond the years

Thine alabaster cities gleam

Undimmed by human tears!

America! America!

God shed His grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea!

 

Although it was probably not her intent, Katherine Bates captured the concept of American exceptionalism in lines that described the natural beauty of the land, the bravery and passion for freedom and progress of her people, and the favored status that God granted to such wonderful people. I lived in the land of Katherine Bates, Paul Revere, and John Hancock as an adult, but as a child living in Texs, I absorbed the propaganda that of all the states, it was Texas that God loved best. One of my favorite courses was seventh grade Texas history and geography. The highlight of the year was a field trip to San Antonio to see the Alamo. 

 

Texas had all of the glory of America plus an unabashed swagger. Americans were we were taught were exceptional for their pioneer spirit that enabled them to endure hardship, for their intelligence, for their inventiveness that produced everything from cotton gins to electric lights and automobiles, for their physical strength and athleticism demonstrated at every Olympics, and most of all for their intense patriotism, but of all Americans, Texans were the best. To live in Texas was a blessing. There were “songs a plenty” like “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” and San Antonio Rose to celebrate life and love in Texas. I did not know until recently that “Yellow Rose of Texas” was written before the Civil War and was originally the celebration of the beauty of a mixed race woman. Along with a lot of country music extolling the exceptional beauty and blessings of Texas and its people, the school system was constantly reminding us of the Alamo, Sam Houston, Stephen F. Austin, Davy Crockett, and all of the brave Texas Rangers. We were so exceptional that we had thrived under six flags, and essentially had allowed the rest of America to join us in 1836. I wonder what people are thinking these days in Texas where there “exceptionalism” may be most obvious in public health statistics like the number of uninsured citizens, rates of infection, and shortages of available ICU beds.

 

From the fifties forward, there have been cracks in the presentation of American exceptionalism, and for some time now I have not been so sure about Texas. I took pride in the presentation that America had never lost a war, but then how did we explain Korea? I was told that it wasn’t really a war, it was a “police action” of the United Nations. OK, but how do we classify Vietnam and the last seventeen years in the Middle East? Perhaps, the one event that most undermined my sense of America’s exceptionalism before the disturbing scenes that I saw in the early sixties on TV of the struggles of the Civil Rights movement was the launch of the Sputnik by the Russians in October 1957. Why were we not the first in space? Were there other countries where people were smart but not as exceptional or as talented as we are? 

 

My history teachers were pushing a one sided story that wasn’t meant to be a lie, but it wasn’t the full truth, and the story it distorted is still taken as the “gospel truth” by many Americans today. In their presentations my teachers suggested that Robert E. Lee was a noble hero who was loyal to his home state of Virginia, and since the Civil War was fought over “states rights,” the circumstances of his greatness were unquestionable. They never mentioned “Jim Crow,” the Klu Klux Klan, lynchings, or the treatment of Black veterans after World War II, nor was it mentioned that Ben Franklin had owned slaves before he became an abolitionist, or even that the Northeast had benefited from the slave trade and the labor of enslaved people. In my classrooms in Texas and South Carolina, Reconstruction was presented as an invasion of “carpetbaggers,” and a good example of unwarranted intervention from an oppressive federal government from which we recovered and continued on our journey to our God granted greatness. 

 

As late as the mid sixties, when I was taking a course in American History at the University of South Carolina, I would have lost points on any exam if I had suggested that slavery was the core issue behind the deep national divide that was the origin of the Civil War. It is true that Lincoln was intent on “saving the union,” but it is also true that the core issue that was threatening the union was slavery. I do not remember any professor discussing the abolitionist movement or its great heroes like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, or Sojourner Truth.

 

A companion concept to “American exceptionalism” is “manifest destiny.” As Wikipedia, my favorite “encyclopedia,” describes:

 

Manifest destiny was a widely held cultural belief in the 19th-century United States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America. There are three basic themes to manifest destiny:

 

• The special virtues of the American people and their institutions

• The mission of the United States to redeem and remake the west in the image of agrarian America

• An irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty

 

 

Slavery was white washed by the concept of states rights and the pseudo science that certified that white people were a superior race. The slow motion genocide of Native Americans was totally justified by the reality that it was God’s will that America be a beacon of freedom and opportunity that stretched from “sea to shining sea.” I was born much too soon to have had the benefit of Jill Lepore’s refocused view of American history, These Truths.   

 

Why is all of this reexamination of our past necessary and important? Because the perpetuated misconceptions of who we are and how annointed and entitled we are are the origin of much continued suffering and prevent us from effectively addressing a future that still offers the possibility of being exceptional in a way that is universally beneficial. Our past continues to divide us and those divisions make us vulnerable to a loss of freedom and opportunity. Interpersonal ugliness and bullying by elected officials and civil servants from the president right down to the clerk at the DMV, or the policeman who kneels on your neck are manifestations of persistent potentially disastrous issues that make us vulnerable to events like the pandemic because we are divided in such a way that we can not coordinate a response to a shared threat. 

 

I was particularly impressed by several events this week that ultimately will impact our ability to recover from the pandemic and its impact on our healthcare system and economy. 

 

• The use of Federal agents in Portland against the objections of the mayor and governor for crowd control and the “protection” of property
• The continuing surge of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths that seem to be related to the irresponsible behavior of leadership and many citizens
• The erratic behavior of the president as characterized best in his interview with Chris Wallace
• The inflammatory encounter between two members of congress, Representative Yoho from Florida and Representative Ocasio-Cortez from New York

 

As luck would have it, I viewed the president’s invasion of Portland through the lens of a conversation with the Masha Gessen that I recently heard on a podcast from Ezra Klein. Gesson is a journalist, author, and activist with dual American and Russian citizenship who writes about authoritarian regimes and was working in both countries, but left Russia as it increased its oppression of the LGBTQ community. 

 

After Donald Trump was elected in 2016 Gessen published a well received article “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.” Below is an abbreviated discussion of the rules. Remember as you read them that they come from an article written four years ago, long before we had witnessed the president’s destruction of political norms.

 

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. 

 

Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality… Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended…history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. 

 

Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. …many of these institutions are enshrined in political culture rather than in law, and all of them—including the ones enshrined in law—depend on the good faith of all actors to fulfill their purpose and uphold the Constitution…The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism…The power of the investigative press—whose adherence to fact has already been severely challenged by the conspiracy-minded, lie-spinning Trump campaign—will grow weaker. 

 

Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one’s capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. 

 

According to Gesson autocracies evolve over three stages. Fortunately we have not yet progressed out of stage one where there is still the hope that voting, although it will be compromised by the wannabe autocrat, caan bring an end to the current gestation of autocracy. In stage one the politicians that are aligned with the leader become more concerned about gaining his favor than serving the best interests of the citizens. Think about the Republican members of the House and Senate, minus Mitt Romney and the majority of Republican governors. Most are terrified of expressing disagreement with the president. In stage one there are attacks on norms, the truth, and the press. Does that sound familiar? Perhaps there is some hope in the fact that the president lacks the individual skill to evolve to the level of autocracy that his role model Vladimir Putin, in stage III, clearly possesses. If politics were a sport, Trump’s greatest liability, and perhaps democracy’s greatest hope, is that he makes a lot of “unforced” errors. At the end of the day, the president’s willingness to attack and usurp the prerogatives of local government as he has done in Portland, and says that he will do elsewhere, to demonstrate to his base his commitment to his version of “law and order” is a disturbing development.

 

Moving on to the second bullet of my concerns as I write, there are four million COVID cases and we are approaching 150,000 deaths. We may suffer at least another 50,000 deaths before the election, perhaps before Labor Day. Unemployment is on the rise as is the uncertainty about unemployment benefits coming from legislation that is scheduled to end in the next week. The recent tone in the president’s communications suggest that he is beginning to realize that he can’t manage the virus the way he attempts to manage the press or international trade. The virus will not be bullied. It will show him no deference no matter what derisive name he chooses to call it. It has a deaf ear for bullies. The New York Times Magazine has recently published an article that you can read or hear, entitled “Why We’re Losing the Battle With Covid-19:The escalating crisis in Texas shows how the chronic underfunding of public health has put America on track for the worst coronavirus response in the developed world.” 

 

I will confess that it was this article that got me thinking about the fallacies of American exceptionalism and the particularly dysfunctional strain of that disorder that can be found in Texas. The article was written by Jeneen Interlandi. What really impressed me is how she explained the vulnerabilities that we all face because of our very unwise lack of attention to public health over the last half century as we shifted most of our resources toward high tech medicine for those who are covered. In giving more to the “economically more fortunate” while neglecting the needs to correct the social disparities of healthcare we have created an unstable structure for care that makes us all vulnerable. If the ICU is full, your fancy employer sponsored coverage can not buy what is not available. We are all connected. My granddaughter has a friend in Florida who has suffered through a difficult COVID-19 infection. She practiced social distancing. She wore a mask. Her father was a doctor. She attended an expensive private school. She got the virus from the family’s Latina housekeeper who probably did not enjoy the same access to services. Living in a gated community does not insure your protection from the virus, especially if the larger community has systematically neglected the needs of a significant segment of the population. As background to this moment, and a reminder of the fact that we brought much of our current misery down on our own heads, Interlandi  wirtes:

 

In the United States, decades of near-total neglect had left the entire public-health apparatus too weak and uncoordinated to mount even a fraction of that response. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s leading public-health department, had stopped holding its own news conferences in early March. Instead updates came from President Trump’s daily coronavirus briefings, which offered a cascade of contradictions about how the national response was going and who was in charge of what. State and local health departments were a hodgepodge: some were well-funded and coordinated regularly with one another, others were siloed, and most were reliant on political leaders to enact their suggested measures. Without any clear guidance or coherent national strategy, states were on their own. 

 

Later in the article Interlandi refers to Tom Frieden, a former head of CDC, whom she interviewed about our systematic misallocation of healthcare resources:

 

Think of the factors that determine a society’s health as a pyramid, Frieden says, in which the things that have the biggest impact on the most people are afforded the most space. Social policies that mitigate economic inequality would be at the base of the pyramid, followed immediately by public-health interventions like improved sanitation, automobile-and-workplace-safety laws, clean-water initiatives and tobacco-control programs. Clinical medicine would be closer to the top. “Now consider the way that we value and prioritize those factors,” Frieden says. “It’s almost completely inverted.” Less than 3 percent of the country’s $3.6 trillion total annual health care bill is spent on public health; a vast majority of the rest goes to clinical medicine.

 

The sad reality is that our lack of preparation is not repairable by the president’s abrupt resurgence of interest in social distancing and mask wearing. He cures no one in a daily press briefing. Our relief from the “Chinese Virus” may come from an enormous investment in vaccine production, or as he enjoys saying, “It may just go away!”

 

The president’s interview with Chris Wallace that was aired last Sunday had many low points that made it a feast for comedians, and a good reason to be even more worried for the rest of us. When the president offered the idea, and then tried to prove it with charts, that we had the lowest COVID mortality in the world, I realized that perhaps some of his “lies” were just a derivative of his evolving dementia and defects in his fund of knowledge. Maybe he prevaricates, and makes up answers to conceal his lack of Knowledge more than he lies. From the need to say something when he is clueless, he speaks whatever comes to mind that seems self serving, and it is often wrong. Then he must tell more lies to defend his appearance of having some knowledge. Even more bizarre than his lies was his pathetic presentation of his test results that suggested that he wasn’t demented yet as evidence of exceptional intelligence.

 

Finally, and briefly, let me address the nature of our public discourse as manifested in the encounter between Representatives Yoho and Ocasio-Cortez. The only exceptionalism demonstrated by this affair was Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s speech to the House of Representatives that characterized the deeper meaning of the exchange, and the self serving nature of Representative Yoho’s non apology apology. We have seen this sort of behavior before when a South Carolina Congressman interrupted President Obama as he delivered his State of the Union address with loud shouts calling him a liar. Yes, the tensions of the day have produced some exceptionalism, or rather exceptionally disturbing encounters in the land of declining fortunes, acute widespread misery and fear, and a fading past of exceptionalism. 

 

The thing that I liked most about Jill Lepore’s history of America, These Truths, was the sense that despite all of our crimes against one another, our pomposity, and our collective narcissism, we have always been in pursuit of an ideal that we have not yet reached. There have always been those among us who knew that we were hypocrites who could do better. Even as Frederick Douglass was riled up against the injustices of slavery, he simultaneous exalted his belief in our founding principles. Lincoln called us to follow our “better angels,” and Barack Obama spoke of the “audacity of hope.” We are exceptional in our ability to recover from our wrong turns and roadblocks and get back on the journey toward opportunity for all. Did not Churchill say that you could count on America to do the right thing, after it had tried all of the other options? We have been presented with a huge challenge. We have not done so well with it, but if we do accept that the pandemic experience is a call for change, and that it does offer us an opportunity for a national renewal of spirit and a return to the journey toward the universal realization of “these truths,” it may turn out to be an example of an exceptional process of collective social evolution.

 

Looking For Restitution

 

I am a creature of habit. Some who know me well may say that I am predictable. I like things to fall into predictable patterns, and I am most comfortable when I am operating within a defined process. I like games with boundaries and well described rules. What I find reassuring in boundaries and rules is that you know where you are, and have some idea as to what might be coming next. 

 

This letter each week is a good example of what I am trying to say about myself. Some people ask how I do it week in and week out. The answer is easy. I have a process. I have a time when I start, and a methodology that I follow. External events and the circumstances of life sometimes disrupt my process, but since I have a process, I can quickly make some decisions that get me back on track. One downside that is associated with a rigid methodology is that it can blunt evolution and improvement. Another possible outcome is that both you and I become bored with the predictable product. That has happened for me with some of the programs that I watch regularly like “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” or “This Week With John Oliver.” Every now and then there is a new twist, or a little deviation from the normal format, and it is refreshing.

 

Besides being a lover of predictable patterns and reliable processes, I am also fascinated by “serendipity” which can be defined as “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” I have the belief that serendipity, or what the Greeks might have called “fate,” defined as “the development of events beyond a person’s control, regarded as determined by a supernatural power” has been a major driver of events in my life. My question to myself is always, “Is this fortuitous intersection of events a random occurrence like Brownian motion or perhaps a chance mutation, or is it a manifestation of some supernatural presentation of an option for me to accept or reject?” I like to frame the questions about serendipity in a way that provides me some free will or agency.

 

This week serendipity struck twice, and to relay the story to you I have changed my “process” and the formula of these letters. Normally in this part of the letter I am encouraging you to take care of yourself. A review of several hundred letters over more than a decade would reveal that I usually end the letter by promoting exercise or talking about nature. 

 

The first episode of serendipity was that I received some beautiful pictures of the night sky taken by one of my sons while he and his wife were camping with my two young grandsons in the Sierras. I present one of the pictures as the header for this post. This picture could have been taken in my own backyard because I see the same sky whenever there are no clouds. One of the things that I love about where I live is that there is no light pollution. I am looking at the same sky, trimmed by similar trees. I like to ponder the fact that the same sky with its billions of brilliant stares was visible to my ancestors long before Edison gave us the ability to read well into the wee hours of the early morning. 

 

One of the realities of the pandemic is that my wife and I are way off our cycle of routine visits to our far flung family. Some of the family has come to us. Currently, our Florida family with my granddaughter is quarantined in our garage apartment, and our Brooklyn family with their two cats have taken over the second floor of “the big house.” But, I really miss my New Mexico and California sons and their families. I am in the market for a camper because I want to see my family in Albuquerque and Santa Cruz. Driving across the country with no exposure to people in the outside world but the occasional masked encounters at gas pumps and convenience stores seems like an option I want to take. I have rationalized that nothing would be different but the changing view through the windshield since everything but my daily walk is now on Zoom. 

 

The second serendipitous event occurred while swimming. Every day I walk four or more miles. That is part of my usual daily process and predictable pattern of behavior. Between late May and October I like to follow the walk with an open water swim for a half hour or so. I pull an orange float so that it will be easy to find me if my swim carries me into the hereafter. On my walk and on my swims I like to listen to books, podcasts, or music. I have a device from H2O Audio that allows me to listen to music while I swim. Yesterday, as I swam, one of my son’s songs from November 2016 came up on the “shuffle.”  I suddenly realized that this bit of serendipity should be shared with you. I hope that you will listen to the song and read the lyrics, because the music complements the lyrics, and the words complement the tone of the music. 

 

The song is entitled “Restitution” My first reaction was that it was not the best title, but if we make it through until January and emerge with renewed hope, then we will have a chance for some restitution. I have bolded my favorite lines, or if you prefer the lines that I want you to notice. Many of the lines are bolded. The other words just join important concepts. Click on the title to hear the song.

 

Restitution

 

I’ve got the strangest feeling

Coming over me

Like we’ve all been down

This stretch of road before

So we bend our knees

And pray for restitution

And carry on carry on carry on

 

Oh what the Bible’s telling you

I swear it never said to me

And could a notion big as God

Fit in a book that you could read?

 

I’ve got a fear

That’s digging deep inside of me

That light begets the darkness

It must counter

We lack the points of light

To cast without a shadow

So carry on carry on carry on

 

Oh what the future’s telling you

I swear it never said to me

And can a concept big as truth

Fit on a page of history?

 

Forgive us lord

We know not what we do

Cast our lot with deceivers

When it feels like the truth

 

Forgive us lord

We know not who we are

Lay us down and conceal us

With a blanket of stars

 

Lay us down all together

With a blanket of stars

 

A blanket of stars is some restitution for our sojourn that was forced by a controlling minority who were swept up in the wake of a deceiver who undermined the truth. There are still more than a hundred nights before we will know for sure that restitution is a possibility, and we can look forward to enjoying a starry night without the worry that somewhere in America a wannabe authoritarian is not using storm troopers to disperse a crowd that has assembled to register their disagreements with the status quo.

 

Be well! Still stay home if you can. Wear your mask and practice social distancing as best you can if you must go out, even if the numbers are getting better for the moment where you live. Think about the America you want for yourself and others. Demand leadership that is empathetic, thoughtful, truthful, capable, and inclusive.  Look for opportunities to be a good neighbor. Let me hear from you. I would love to know how you are experiencing these very unusual times!

Gene