Looking Back and Looking Ahead

In 1952, Ferrar, Straus, and Young published a book by novelist-reporter-historian William L. Shirer called Midcentury Journey. (For a while I had misremembered the title as Europe at Midcentury, as it focuses on England and the countries of the European continent, following World War II as well as up to and during that war.) True to my francophilic nature, rather than beginning at the beginning, I immediately turned to the third chapter, “The Waning Star of France,” curious to see what I would find. 

French government up to the Second World War was known as the Third Republic, which began in 1870 (after the collapse of Napoleon's Second Empire) and lasted until 1940. It was relatively stable, and the economy as late as the mid-1920s was also in decent shape, Shirer reports. Intellectual life, the arts, and literature, freedom—all were flourishing. “Men were wonderfully free, and they were free from fear,” as Shirer saw them in Paris:

If ever a great nation seemed destined to continue on its glorious and civilized course for centuries to come, France was it.

And yet, even then there were signs of approaching catastrophe that one can only appreciate today—with the benefit of hindsight.

- William L. Shirer, Midcentury Journey 

How to explain the weakness of France in the face of German aggression, and why did so many French people, not just a radical racist fringe but even conservative middle-class Frenchmen, actually see Hitler as a savior?

Part of Shirer’s answer is that there were, in fact, two Frances, a democratic, republican Left (heirs of the 1789 Revolution) and an authoritarian Right, "which looked backward with nostalgia to the ancient régime….” While democratic, republican France was supported by industrial and farm workers and people in the trades and small business, those on the authoritarian side, yearning for a return to monarchy, had support from the church and army, big business and finance. Evenly matched numerically in the population, the two sides had little common ground, and thus power tended to shift back and forth, back and forth, until fear of “Reds” in their own country (“the enemy within”) led the (formerly, I would say) “conservatives” in France to see Hitler as the lesser evil.

Naturally, there were other contributing factors. Loss of male population in World War I and the subsequent falling birthrate, decay of the bourgeoisie, a corrupt press (“venal,” Shirer calls it), widespread tax evasion at all levels of society, and failure to industrialize sufficiently all played a part in the country’s problems. What struck me most forcibly, however, was the deep division Shirer identifies in the French people, a chasm with no bridge across, because had the country been united, couldn’t they have devised solutions for the other problems? 

The troubles of France, it became evident, went back to the French Revolution of 1789, which had given birth to the nation we [Americans] came to know. There the deep fissure developed which has divided France to this day. It was an unfinished revolution in that the old order was never really liquidated or even converted, and therefore survived to combat the republican idea right up to Hitler’s entry into Paris, which it welcomed and which brought the Third Republic to an end.

These two Frances, Shirer argues, “never really fused.” 

Whether or not France is a united country today is not my concern today (although I do see divisions continuing), and it is probably obvious why Shirer’s idea of a divided country strikes me with such force: It is the divisions in the United States of America, my own country, that most deeply concern me. In one of my January posts, I wrote about avoiding difficult subjects. For me, such avoidance means ignoring crisis to pretend that life is normal, although these are not normal times. The great question of our time is, once again, whether our nation, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” can endure into the future. And yet, and yet—.

Yet conversation across the chasm is all but impossible, because Americans, like those divided French Shirer describes, have so little common ground on which to meet that we live in different realities. 

The fissure was already deep in 1776, when a nation "conceived in liberty for all” allowed some humans to own others. A scant 85 years later came the Civil War, the war Lincoln saw as deciding the nation’s fate. That war came to an end without stitching the country seamlessly back together. The legacy of defeat is still bitter to many who never lived through it but inherited bitterness from those who could not accept the war's outcome, in much the same way that the defeated candidate for the presidency in 2020 has never been able to recognize and accept his defeat that year—and now, despite having successfully avoided military service himself and despite being elected to another term in the White House, has taken up political arms against Americans by withholding Congressionally approved funds, has sent armed forces into American cities and states that contributed to his defeat, and is now bombing foreign countries and killing civilians in the name of America. That is, these things are being done in your name and mine.

***

I wrote the foregoing back in March. Since then--just the other day, in fact--the world has seen an event that fills me with hope. Despite loud support from top officials in the current American government, autocrat Viktor Orbán was defeated for re-election as prime minister by opposition leader Péter Magyar, who ran on a strong anti-corruption platform. Read about the campaign what Magyar to build support, and how he brought down a 16-year regime that had ruled through, in addition to outright corruption, stacking key institutions with loyalists and taking over news outlets. Now the rest of Europe is eagerly welcoming Hungary back into the fold--and meanwhile, Canada is contemplating joining the European Union, no longer able to trust completely in a North American alliance. The Magyar story, though, is inspiring. It can be done! We do not have to slog through another world war and commit mass genocide before returning to sanity!

Looking for Healing in a Magazine

Two people whom I love very much, two people who were once very close to each other as well as to me, have been estranged now for a full decade. It hurts.

You’d think I would have had plenty of time, in ten years, to become accustomed to and accepting of the situation, but I’m not, because one of the people continues to feel great pain over the lost relationship, and I am in permanent relationship with both. What the second person feels now, I don’t know. I probably should know, but it’s hard at a distance to find out, and for fear of the one rupture triggering others, I have not addressed the issue face to face or voice to voice when a rare opportunity presented. In fact, I must admit that, painfully disappointed myself, I have scaled back communications with the second person in general. Not a solution, I realize. I haven’t found a way to a solution. Before the holidays, hope surged and crashed.

First person is he; second is she. Although they are not a divorced couple, you can think of them that way, and it might help make sense of what I'm saying. 

In her behavior relative to the situation (very limited words and near-complete lack of action), her responses to attempted communications from the first person and from me, all I can see on the surface is avoidance. But now aow all three of us are in avoidance mode, and two of us, at least, feel stuck there. 

Meanwhile, what does she feel? Satisfaction? How is that possible? Nothing? Hard to believe. I try to imagine how it is for her on the inside. Perhaps a bit of embarrassment, maybe a touch of shame, and probably (I can only guess) some resentment over the embarrassment and shame, irritation at having any feelings at all for a situation she would rather not have to acknowledge at all? When three people have been closely connected, can two feel pain and a third be immune, unconcerned with the pain of the two others and free from any pain of her own? 

But why, in the first place, did it come to be the way it is? What is behind it all? 

My loved one in pain also feels anger and confusion (as do I). What did he do or say that was so unforgivable that he has been “shunned” (his word) so completely for so long? He hoped the two of them could meet and clear the air. I hoped that could happen! So far, though, the air-clearing, one-on-one option has not even been acknowledged as being on the metaphorical table. Instead, all that has occurred (I was going to say “all that has been accomplished” but have to wonder if “accomplishment” is the right characterization) has been a single occasion of sitting around a literal table, pretending that nothing is wrong, and then four individuals retreating from even that superficial engagement with no real improvement in the underlying dynamic. 

Lots of avoidance going on, from four people, not just three. What does everyone fear? 

This situation has been daily background for me for so long it is like my life’s wallpaper. How I would love to redecorate! But I can’t do it singlehandedly. What I fear is worsening the relationships that, so far, remain intact.

There may be more here than a simple parallel to our nation’s deep social divisions — and I use the word “social,” because “political” could be taken only to indicate voting patterns, and what I’m thinking of is the more total avoidance of “others,” in town and country, that so many Americans practice these days. Tara Westover, author of the bestselling memoir, Educated, said in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg that the nation is divided into regional pockets of city and left-behind country, but she also acknowledged that parochialism cuts through cities, as well. (I would say it cuts through country and small towns, also. Anyway, an edited interview appears in the December 2019 issue of the Atlantic magazine.) When Goldberg asks her if she thinks of the place she grew up, rural Washington state, as parochial, this is her response:

It’s astonishingly difficult in this city [New York City] to be truly close to someone who is not in your same socioeconomic group. For me, it’s the single most striking fact about living here. Meaningful interactions are difficult to engineer. The divide is deep. And it is largely between those who sit in the front of the Uber and those who sit in the back of it. 

The Uber driver and his unemployed counterpart back in the county seat of Preston, Idaho, near where Westover grew up, share experiences that successful urban and suburban Americans do not share and do not understand. Across the divide, there is no longer a common language of experience. 

There are places in the United States where the recession never ended. For them, it has been 2009 for ten years. 

Traveling across the Midwest and Great Plains and now, here in the Southwest, I have seen this again and again. (There are a couple of examples in this post.) When I recently visited the website of the Safford Public Library, up in Safford, Arizona, county seat of Graham County, I found one of the FAQs is, “Why is the library closed on weekends?” and the answer is that the community has not yet recovered economically from the crisis of 2008-09 and cannot yet afford personnel to staff the library seven days a week. It is open Mondays through Thursdays only. In Safford, then, you might say that “it has been 2009 for ten years.”

Westover may, however, in making her case , somewhat overstate it. She cites statistics showing that the Democratic Party is most successful in successful and prosperous cities and suburbs, but it is not only impoverished communities and individuals left behind in today’s prosperity who support the current Republican president. There are plenty of millionaires, numbers of well-to-do and well-educated senators, and many ordinary people happy with the present performance of their stock portfolios in the same camp. And so, just as socioeconomic divisions run through communities, so do political divisions run right through neighborhoods. And both the socioeconomic and the political divisions have fast become social divisions, the latter probably more consciously chosen, as if it means some kind of adherence to principle. 

The question is, are we no longer willing even to talk to people whose views do not match up with our own? 

I think that’s part of what’s at the bottom of the estrangement of the two people I love, though I don’t know for sure. There are probably other factors. My estranged loved ones, despite the very different life choices they have made, are both in comfortable circumstances (largely thanks to choices made by the generation before them). Neither has much chance of ever ending up destitute or homeless. They have, however, as I say, made very different life choices, and I’m pretty sure they hold very different views on many issues. 

And so many people I know have taken this forking path! One couple actually moved from one state to another so as to live among people who think as they think! 

(One of the things I love about the part of Arizona where I’m spending the winter is that not everyone here is like me, that Willcox, Arizona, is not just a Southwest version of Northport, Michigan. But that is neither here nor there.)

Another article in the December 2019 Atlantic — so many good articles in that issue, and I have yet to read more than a couple of them, as I slowly make my way through the issue and try to take in each article, test it against my own experience, and see what I can apply in my life — is about Mr. Rogers. In “What Would Mister Rogers Do?” Tom Junod writes, 

…Fred was a man with a vision, and his vision was of the public square, a place full of strangers, transformed by love and kindness into something like a neighborhood. That vision depended on civility, on strangers feeling welcome in the public square….

How, I wonder, reading this, can we at one and the same time welcome strangers and reject someone we have known for years? How, if I am rejecting neighbors whose views are not my own, can my welcome of strangers be truly genuine and anything more than superficial? Is it that civility requires only a superficial welcoming and that deeper relationships ask more of us?

Junod reflects on the current popularity of the question, “What would Mr. Rogers say?” of this or that person or aspect in today’s national scene, but then he points out that we already know the answer to the question

…because Fred was the most stubbornly consistent of men. He would say that Donald Trump was a child once, too. He would say that the latest Twitter victim or villain was a child once, too. He would even say that the mass murderers of El Paso and Dayton were children once too…. He would pray for the shooters as well as for their victims, and he would continue to urge us, in what has become one of his most often quoted lines, to “look for the helpers.” 

The question is not what Mr. Rogers would say or do, but what we will say and do. 

I was able to make thrilling progress in a different painful situation by applying the lessons of Mr. Rogers, but I have not yet seen my way clear with this one so much closer to me. How can I be a helper? How can I bring these two people back together if one would rather not be in a relationship at all? 

-- To be continued.... Perhaps. If I don't come to regret saying even this much already.