Dear America - A Letter to the United States

 

I write to you as a friend. (I am Australian, living in Australia.)

My father lived in the United States for many years and became a citizen. I visited him once in Atlanta. Watching TV in the evenings I was impressed by a series of public service ads which featured a “talking head” expressing a number of unpleasant opinions. A voiceover at the end repeated the simple message: “If you think like this – you’re a bigot.”

It was invigorating to see and hear. I thought: Americans are really tackling this thing head on. They’re getting it done.

You may have guessed already. That was in 1976. Jimmy Carter had been governor a year before and was campaigning for the Presidency.. Atlanta had its first black mayor in Maynard Jackson. Atlanta was a beacon of what people were calling the New South, where the mistakes of the past were being acknowledged and slowly rectified. Atonement was perhaps too much to hope for but it seemed almost within reach.

Now, nearly 45 years later, it seems that the state of Georgia has gone backwards and is a beacon only of voter suppression on a vast scale. (Do I need to spell out whose right to vote is being suppressed?) Bigotry walks again in the sunlight and holds its head up, proud to be American, and not only in Georgia.

 And this is where people like me, your longstanding friends, are saddened and puzzled. How is it possible for a society to regress?

 I have followed the news from the U.S. closely and read a great deal about your political history. One notion that stands out is “American exceptionalism”. It sounds great, but can we agree that it is meaningless? No other country has such a concept of itself. You are subject to the same laws of physics and biology and chemistry as anyone else. You have your cyclone and hurricane season and COVID-19 to prove it.

 You are not immune from the consequences of your mistakes in foreign policy. You engineered the downfall of a legitimate elected government in Iran in 1954, and that has come back to bite you since 1979. In Latin America you covertly and openly supported every oppressive dictator who made a grab for power, and that has come back to bite you. If you had directed the same ingenuity and resources to encourage the evolution of stable and orderly democracies in the region you would not now have a problem at your southern border. Happy people stay at home.

You are not immune from the consequences of your mistakes within your own borders. Ask the relatives of all those who have died in mass shootings. I will say no more about guns because I know you are touchy on that subject, except to ask where is that “well regulated militia” that you promised yourselves a long time ago?

 In the light of some recent events and protests and riots you might also ask yourself why you have over 17,000 police departments in your 52 states and territories. Australia has 10. It is cheaper and more operationally effective to have a unified command in each region. It also leaves fewer opportunities for corruption and incompetence.

Perhaps you are too easily swayed by your own rhetoric. You love a good speech and a sparkling phrase too much.

“Manifest destiny” also sounds great, but what does it mean? You kept pushing the boundaries of your Republic and killing anyone who got in your way until you had seized all the land from sea to shining sea. It was brutal and you broke every promise and treaty you made along the way. I admit there was a similar history in my own country. We should both grow up, admit it, weep for the past, and try to atone.

 And now I come to two more beautiful but meaningless notions that have led you astray for too long.

“The American experiment”. This suggests a wise white-coated Republic diligently and patiently testing the mechanisms that will enable men and women to find their best path to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For many the experiment has been too patient and not diligent enough. When does the experiment end? When do any results come in? Generations of Americans, whether white or black or Latino or Asian or Native American, have lived and died in misery waiting for some result, a plan to go forward.

 No other country on earth sees itself as an experiment. Life is real and earnest, here and now. People want results now. They want to get it done.

 And finally – at last – I come to the supreme and saddest excuse for intellectual and moral laziness that you have wrapped yourself in like a warm blanket.

 “A more perfect union”. Every President I can remember has at some time, with a misty gaze and/or a tremor in his voice, spoken of this faraway mirage that you are constantly striving to attain.

 Are you striving though? How long is this going to take?

Rather than comfort yourselves with the vision of a some-day-maybe-never perfect union there might be many practical things you can do right now to make life better, fairer, and more equal for all your citizens.

Please, America. Stop trying to be exceptional. End the experiment. Get out your yellow pads. Make a list. Get it done. Claim your life, liberty, and happiness now.

Yours sincerely,

John Ellison Davies

P.S. I am not a communist Satanist paedophile.

 

 

 

 

 

Idealism Aground

(I am posting here an article I wrote for Nation Review in June 1978. At that time there were 13 million refugees worldwide. The figure today is 22.5 million, although 65.6 million are officially "displaced")

   How much idealism can you stand in one week? The story surrounding Austcare’s “boat people” mural outside Sydney’s T&G building is saturated by idealism, personified in the three people most closely associated with it.

   Austcare’s original press release in April said it was looking for an artist to paint a mural which would draw attention to the plight of the world’s 13 million refugees – and Austcare’s 28 May doorknock appeal.

   It also said “Austcare is happy to do anything it can to popularise in Sydney the big public mural – a la Mexico city – and in this way bring art to the people and the people to art”.

   Very strange. An additional two pages proclaimed: “Austcare seeks brilliant muralist”. This quest was “inspired by Diego de Rivera, Orozco and the other famous socially committed muralists of Mexico city”. The artist would be free to choose his own subject within the given theme, but the final painting could be “one of terror, outrage or despair…an explosion of hopeful joy or as blissfully tranquil and irrelevantly relevant as a Miro…on the other hand something with the gut response of Picasso’s Guernica will also be welcome”.

   Not your average advance PR for a doorknock appeal.

   The man behind the rhetoric was Leo Kelly. I caught him on his way to batik class which he attends every Tuesday evening. Kelly writes poetry, is modest about it but amused and pleased that “hippy friends” of his in Melbourne have recently published some of his poems.

   It was his idea to use a mural as a publicity event (this is the second he has organised for Austcare) because he does believe in bringing art to the people and the people to art. And he is inspired by de Rivera and the socially committed muralists of Mexico city. Any suggestion that the boatloads of refugees coming to our shores may be carrying bourgeois capitalist exploiters on the run saddens him. He believes simply that most refugees are desperate and deserving and that our policy must cater for them regardless of a few possible undesirables.

   Enter the sought-for “brilliant muralist” – Gary Shead, chosen by Kelly from among two dozen interested artists.

   Shead’s dealer, Clive Evatt, describes him as the last of the bohemians, which is a bit exaggerated.

   Shead, who doesn’t really need to make a living from his painting, has risked his popularity several times in his career by changing styles. He began with dark toned surrealism (he still believes that Dali is the greatest artist and “the only man who can lead us out of the mess that Picasso got us into”). His style now is realistic and romantic. He is one of a group known as the New Romantics, reactionaries against all that is sterile, nihilistic and impersonal in modern art.

   “Are you interested in the artistic process?” he asked, talking of the mural. “I thought of ships because they are a traditional image of freedom. Then I linked that with the boat people.”

   Eureka! As an idealist Shead is perhaps more quirky than most, but he still qualifies. He painted the mural for very little money. He makes no secret of loving publicity, but the 1220cmx366cm (40ftx12ft) mural will become his property when it is removed from its present site and if he can sell it he will give part of the money to Austcare.

   Enter the dancer.

   Last week, before the official 26 May unveiling of the mural, a dancer named Richard Boulez arrived in Sydney from Melbourne. He immediately began making telephone calls around town to tell people that he had read about the mural, felt that he had to dance in front of it and “hopped on the first plane”.

   Another alert self advertiser on the hustle? No.

   Boulez is a qualified teacher and social worker. He studied hard for these degrees (“I put up with five years of nonsense”) so that people would take him seriously. His real interests were mime and dance, and for the past two years he has been using these as methods of therapy in teaching deaf and psychotic children.

   His spontaneous attraction to the mural was emotional, but he soon had rationalisations ready when asked to give a talk and a performance for art students at Alexander Mackie college.

   “Men and women will always cross the ocean in search of a better life,” he said. “Look at the population of Australia.”

   Gary Shead welcomed Boulez to share his windy footpath.

   When Leo Kelly heard about this he rushed down to see the performance and decided that Boulez was just what he needed to liven up the official ceremony. “I have to think of these things, to give the TV crews something to shoot,” said Kelly, with some regret for the practical necessity involved but mostly with obvious pleasure at having Boulez join in on the event.

   So the thin, whitefaced dancer danced the anguish of refugees everywhere in front of Shead’s mural, a water level view of ships approaching shore preceded by gulls and splashes of foam, while Leo Kelly bantered tolerantly with two drunks in the crowd.

   Kelly will certainly organise another mural for humanity next year.

   Shead will go back to being a New Romantic in rebellion against the sterile and nihilistic.

   Boulez is already in the Northern Territory teaching deaf black children.

   As I said in the beginning – how much idealism can you stand in one week?

The Guarantees and Fallacies of Hope

'I think that we can perhaps meditate a little on those Americans ten thousand years from now...Let us hope that at least they will give us the benefit of the doubt, that they will believe we have honestly striven every day and generation to preserve for our descendants a decent land to live in and a decent form of government to operate under.'

Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Mt. Rushmore August 30, 1936

The title above is a line from a poem I never finished, itself inspired by the painter J.M.W. Turner's unfinished poem Fallacies of Hope. (I liked the idea that there might also be guarantees.) Whatever it meant to me at the time, long ago, it seems even more resonant and relevant now.

Why do we get out of bed in the morning? Out of habit certainly, but at some level we have to believe that in the day ahead we may make some small incremental progress toward our goals, whatever they may be. A small improvement in the garden. The flourish of a job well done. We must have hope that we will find some joy in the day, some satisfaction that brings a sense of well-being. We must have something to look forward to.

That is enough for most people and in a decent land, in a decently ordered civil society, most people wake up confident in the unwritten guarantee that it is not too much to ask from life. It is achievable.

Unfortunately the guarantee is crumbling away, almost everywhere, revealing the fallacies.

Economically, the world's wealth continues to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands. There are millions of refugees who will waste years of their lives in one tent city or another. They have mostly fled Middle Eastern conflicts which are in turn the direct consequence of more than 150 years of European interference and incompetence. (But that's another story.) Terrorist acts are now a global threat and reality as never before in history.

If we forget all that for a moment, and this is easy enough to do on a sunny day in Australia, we have problems of our own. There is a crisis in housing affordability and the price of electricity has risen to insane levels. Wages growth is slow, and going backwards in some cases. There is now a whole generation of people in casual work who will never have a full-time job or enough money to realise their dreams. (It's over for them. Why do they get out of bed in the morning?) The pressure is mounting and countless tragedies are unfolding behind closed doors.

Is this a decent land?

In the United States Donald Trump was elected to the Presidency on many promises to restore jobs and make his country great again. He has appointed a Cabinet of billionaires and between them they have not put forward a single idea that will benefit anyone, beyond giving extra pocket money to the rich in tax cuts. Their plan to take affordable health care away from millions of their fellow citizens is an exquisite exercise in what our late great Bob Ellis called 'sadomonetarism'.

Is America a decent land?

In the UK masochism seems to be the order of the day as they throw away 50 years of patient, intelligent effort integrating with a strong and stable Europe.

We can almost forgive political leaders for failures of imagination, even failures of courage, but there seems to be an active principle at work - the deliberate and calculated denial of hope.

In our mediocre government, in the most mediocre Parliament formed in my lifetime, the greatest denier of hope is our Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, a zealot who has condemned thousands of asylum-seekers to indefinite detention in appalling conditions, and who clearly simmers with regret that he has not punished them enough. Perhaps it is simple sadism after all.

There are those who deny, and those who wish to give.

Franklin Roosevelt at Mt. Rushmore in 1936, meditating a little on those who would come after us in ten thousand years, also said 'Will they remember that we cared for each other?'

Will they?

(This article was published in Eureka Street on 1 August 2017 under the title "In defence of hope".)

Stand Up For The 2nd Amendment

It's happened again. In the United States a four year old boy has shot his mother. His mother is very pro-gun. On this occasion she had left a loaded gun on the back seat of her car. The boy picked it up and pulled the trigger.

Mommy is so keen on guns that she blogs about them. She wrote that her son is always "jacked up" when she takes him with her to the firing range. I assume she meant that he is excited. Well, he is four. Everything is exciting to a four year old. Especially things that go bang.

When mommy gets out of hospital I wonder if she will change her mind about guns. Will it occur to her that her son might have blown his own head off?

To be born American is to be born into a frightening maze of nonsense. The 2nd amendment to their Constitution says that there should be a well regulated militia, and to that end guarantees citizens the right to bear arms. Unfortunately there is no militia. The 2nd amendment is essentially meaningless. In any case, Congress could easily amend it again or delete it altogether.

Of course that won't happen. Many Americans regard it as a sacred text, beyond all logic.

It's all very sad. Children are shooting each other and their parents. Parents are shooting their own children in the dark thinking they are burglars. (Here's a tip: if someone is moving around the house at night it is most likely to be one of your own family.)

The men who wrote the 2nd amendment had good intentions in imagining a regulated militia and armed citizens. As time went by there was clearly no need for a militia, none was ever established, and there seemed no harm in letting people keep their single-shot muskets that took a minute to reload.

Two hundred years later the situation is something that even the brilliant Thomas Jefferson could not have imagined or foreseen.

If Congress does not have the courage to make the right to bear arms disappear from the Constitution I suggest it enforce a literal interpretation. All citizens shall have the right to bear single-shot muskets, and the implied obligation to surrender all other weapons. Congress shall establish a well regulated militia and require all citizens to march up and down their street every Friday night between 7 and 9pm bearing their arms.

I think Thomas Jefferson would approve.