A Fine Fragile Thing Shattered: War and Pieces at Hillwood Estate

Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Hillwood Estate Museum is a lot of things, but one thing I never thought of it as is a shrine to postmodern conceptual art. So I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it when I encountered Bouke De Vries’ art “installation,” War and Pieces, on the grand table of Marjorie’s sumptuous upstairs dining room at the Hillwood Estate.
   My daughter, home from college for Thanksgiving, and I came across it as a curious surprise, entirely unaware of its presence in the museum: a great spread of shattered white porcelain shards, clustering toward the center of the table and rising in a shape that I did not quite recognize at first: the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion.
   As the Hillwood Estate website explains, this is not the first time the dining room table has hosted a contemporary interpretation of classical table centerpieces. “In the seventeenth century, wealthy households decorated their tables with extravagant sugar sculptures that replicated allegorical scenes, architectural follies, or classical figures,” according to the website. “By the eighteenth century, artists augmented or replaced the decorations with porcelain…”
   de Vries’ War and Pieces comprises seven sculptural vignettes, created in both sugar and porcelain. Say the curators at Hillwood: “Besides war, chaos, and aggression, the installation also features humor and beauty, undermining classical symbols in a satirical and critical way.”
   In fact, the scene on the table registered at first with my daughter and me as whimsical, and my initial instinct was a contemporary one: take a picture of the porcelain chaos on my phone and post it to my Facebook page with a note that I’d hosted a dinner party at my small, cozy apartment the night before, when some of my more rogue friends crashed the affair, drank up all the wine, and got out of hand.
   Ha. Ha.
   But the presentation stayed with me, as a compelling work of art will do. My interest and curiosity was piqued especially by the kind of statement such an insistently ironic or “provocative” work of art might be making in the mansion home of a wealthy mid-century socialite with a grand sense of style and a classical aesthetic sensibility.
   War and Pieces is, first of all, visually appealing, all that porcelain and sugar like a snowfall of perfect white across the table. There is such a thing as “elegant chaos,” and something there is in the human soul that loves to see a fine, fragile thing shattered. War and Pieces appeals to that instinct. To be reminded of it when you are in a place that also houses a “breakfast room” with a chandelier from Catherine the Great, Faberge eggs from the Romanov family, and an 18th-century French rolltop desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl—well, it creates a special kind of resonance.
   As a museum-going experience, The Hillwood Estate “works” not because it is a showcase of vast wealth, but because it is a repository of civilization, of a civilized sensibility. Mere wealth is easily (one might say, cheaply) counterfeited, as is evident, say, in the home of a rich man who fills his rooms with a lot of gilded junk. But Marjorie Post’s home is more than a rich woman’s house. The home is reflective of a distinctly mid-20th century American appreciation of civilization at a time when the country was at its most expansive and confident: the collection at Hillwood speaks to a receptiveness to the artistic, architectural and design influences—English, French, German, Russian and Asian—that have shaped the American sensibility. To fill one’s home with such treasures and then to turn it over to the public as a museum also strikes me as deriving from a uniquely American instinct for the democratic.
   It’s been said that men and women are biological facts (or, maybe, social constructs as the young might instruct us today), but ladies and gentlemen are artifacts of civilization. What Marjorie was, most certainly, and what her museum home attests to, is a lady in the classical sense. But if what we deem to be civilized behavior is a set of learned habits, suggested and enforced by society, then they are not innate or assured, and they can be unlearned; if all the norms by which ladies and gentlemen assert civility are mere artifacts, then they can shattered, and it need not happen in one cataclysmic event, but one by one, before you are quite aware it is happening, every small act of subversion begetting another. It is a little like that “broken windows” philosophy of crime control: one shattered norm makes it easier to shatter another one, then another, and before you know it the whole neighborhood has gone to seed. The once unthinkable becomes a reality.
   To experience the house and gardens at Hillwood engenders the same feeling as does a great work of art, an expertly crafted book, movie or piece of entertainment, or an exceptional athletic performance (such as, for instance, the entire October championship run of our Washington Nationals): It is good to be alive. The human cause is not hopeless.
   Not hopeless, but not assured either. At an auspicious moment in American history, Bouke de Vries has crashed the party at Hillwood like a rogue guest to remind us about that something there is in the human soul that wants to see a fine thing destroyed, and to tell us redundantly (since history, if we were paying attention, would never let us forget it) that it is all much more fragile than we may allow ourselves to acknowledge.

Returning to Normal, or Are We Already Cooked?

Listening with even a half-cocked ear to the opening statements of George Kent and William Taylor, career diplomats and public servants who have done more to advance American interests than all the pundits and commentators on both sides ever will, it was possible to entertain a little schadenfreude: surely people like Hannity and Limbaugh, a couple of overpaid loudmouths, and their fellow fantasists must be feeling at least a little twinge of guilty embarrassment: here in front of a national audience were the kind of button-down, old school, dedicated public servants they were maligning as “deep state” traitors.
    Silly me. My wishful thinking was quickly overtaken by the usual gloom: Democrats were going to misplay this and the whole thing would, somehow, redound once more to Donald Trump. Part of the problem is the immense damage the President has already done to everyone’s sense of what is normal. Under normal circumstances—does anyone remember what a normal circumstance feels like?—Trump’s behavior in this episode around Ukraine would be nearly universally regarded as shocking, apart from whether it was regarded as an impeachable offence. As it is, though, its just another instance of Trump-being-Trump and redundant evidence that the man doesn’t really understand the nature of the office he holds. I don’t doubt that the President is genuinely baffled by why he is not allowed to make foreign aid contingent on help with his own domestic political future—or why, indeed, he is not allowed to do or say any damn thing he pleases. As Andrew Sullivan has observed, his model and ideal is the conduct of a mob boss, and has been ever since his days with Roy Cohn, one of the most twisted and sinister characters to stalk the American stage.
    Then, too, the heart of the charge is a couple of phone calls, a handful of conversations, some of them reported second-hand. What won’t be registered—although it was implicit throughout Kent and Taylor’s testimony and explicit in discrete instances—is an overall pattern of behavior and intention wherever Ukraine is involved (with Russia and Vladimir Putin in the background) that seemed unrelated to American interests, as they had normally been construed, and to transcend normal protocols.
    Norms, normative behaviors and protocols, matter, Their destruction is a hallmark of the collapse of any kind of established order; an established democratic, representative form of government, with its reliance on consent to normative protocols reflecting a set of underlying values, is especially vulnerable. It is a little like that "broken windows" philosophy of crime control: one shattered norm makes it easier to shatter another one, then another, and before you know it the whole neighborhood has gone to seed. The once unthinkable becomes a reality. This is why, by the way, those tanks on the monument grounds on July 4 matter. By itself, it probably wasn’t worth the hyperventilation that ensued, a pointless gesture by a man pathetically enamored of strongmen, and a profound missing of the point of Independence Day—a joke in bad taste with an undertone of menace. But as part of a larger pattern the tanks should be alarming, a signal of the sociopath’s refusal to be bound by norms: See? I will do even this.
    After the election, there was, even among those of us astonished that this appalling human being with the flashing neon sign over his head—I AM A PHONY--had been elevated to the seat once occupied by Lincoln—there was hope that he might govern normally, that “the office might mold the man.”
    Fat chance. He came to town and proceeded to shatter every window in sight. The resulting exhaustion among the people ought to be enough to cost him the election; if Democrats would stop chasing rainbows and unicorns and get real about the center-right country they wish to govern, they could walk away with the election in 2020 by emphasizing three things, day and night, incessantly, like a drumbeat:

Decency.
A return to normal.
Why haven’t you released your tax returns?
   
(Like their comrades who think Trump and Giuliani were just doing the Lord’s work trying to clean up corruption in Burisima Holdings, those who think Trump is going to such lengths to keep his tax returns hidden for any reason other than that he is hiding something, deserve an honorary BS from Trump University.)
    But it may be too late for the return to normal. The disorienting effect of three years of Trump is profound as, one by one, norms have been shattered. The president’s mafia-like behavior with regard to Ukraine, being just one more example. There may be no going back. Like that cliché frog placed in tepid water imperceptibly heated to a boil, we have been, before we know it, already cooked.

At Hillwood, get reacquainted with the iconic images of “Mid-Century Master” photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt

From the Forest Hills Connection

Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt straddled a porous boundary between art and journalism, while bridging the understated, black-and-white aesthetic of the pre- and post-World War II generations, and the super-heated, pop celebrity-photojournalism of the baby boomers. For those over the age of, say, 55, at least a few of the photographs on exhibit at the Adirondack House of The Hillwood Estate will seem warmly familiar, even if Eisenstaedt’s name is a revelation. For younger types, they will offer a glimpse at a post-war America – the America built by “the greatest generation” – rapidly receding.
“Mid-Century Master: The Photography of Alfred Eisenstaedt,” is a dense, compact exhibit – you can absorb it in an hour and-a-few – but it is richly informative, especially for those (like me) unfamiliar with Eisenstaedt’s story. Born into a Jewish family in what is now Poland, Eisenstaedt was given an Eastman Kodak folding camera as a boy; a passion was born. After fighting on the German side in World War I, he found his niche capturing on film many of the most important cultural and athletic events of Weimar Germany for the magazine, Der Spiegel.
He fled Europe and the Nazis in 1935 for New York, where his record earned him the attention of Henry Luce, who hired him to shoot for Life Magazine. Eisenstaedt’s cover photos for the magazine fill an entire wall of the exhibit. Almost all of Eisenstaedt’s photos – at least almost all of those on display – were black and white, taken with a German-made Leica camera. I was pleased to learn that he was responsible for a photograph I remember finding amusing as a child – it depicts a drum major for the University of Michigan Marching Band rehearsing his high-stepping routine while a line of kids behind him are, with obvious hilarity, trying to mimic him. We are informed that Eisenstaedt called it his “ode to joy,” and we can believe it; the photograph is vividly evocative of the pleasure children can take in the ridiculous.

Alfred Eisenstaedt’s favored tool of the trade, a Leica IIIa Rangefinder, is also on display.

who worked with his subjects to render them they way they wanted to be rendered


There is nothing oblique or cunning or coy about Eisenstadt's work, and you have the sense of a photographer who worked with his subjects to render them they way they wanted to be rendered.
But there are a handful of images in which he captured something striking and spontaneous. These include several photos of children watching a puppet show in The Tuileries Garden in France; Eisenstaedt captures the mesmerized or stunned or triumphant faces of the children (there’s one or two of each) at the instant when a dragon is suddenly killed in the performance.
His most famous photo, certainly, is the V-Day image of the sailor in Times Square planting that bend-over-backward kiss on a nurse. It has become iconic of America’s mood at the end of the war, but after so many years it has a stagy, choreographed feel to it. On display at Hillwood though is another, more genuinely intimate image of a soldier and his woman friend in Penn Station: the soldier’s uniform is visible, but they both are wearing overcoats. The picture has a wintry feel to it and they seem to be seeking some solace, some warmth from each other – an image that tells a truer story about where a soldier has been and what he has seen.
Eisenstaedt was chummy with Marjorie Merriweather Post, and visitors to the exhibit will have a chance to sit (that’s always a plus for this museum-goer) and peruse the edition of Life that featured his color photos of Post’s life at Hillwood. Dozens of America’s post-war celebrities shot by Eisenstaedt (almost entirely in black-and-white) are on display: Ernest Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Jackie O, a mustachioed Salvador Dali and his wife. The couple of photos of Marilyn taken in 1953 at her Los Angeles bungalow (including two impromptu color ones) are striking – Eisenstaedt captured something raw about the overflowing sensuality in this doomed woman’s lips and cheekbones and eyes. We are informed that the photo shoot “left the usually even-keeled photographer so flustered and distracted that he mistakenly shot a roll of color film at the speed meant for black-and-white.”
The notation accompanying the photograph of Sophia Loren includes the kind of eyebrow-raising tidbit that pays for the price of admission to the Estate: We are told that “the photographer earned Loren’s trust in part because he resembled and reminded her of her obstetrician.” And we learn that one of Life’s most controversial covers was an Eisenstaedt shot of a scantily clad Loren, who was promoting her film, “Marriage Italian Style.”
Near the exit from the exhibit is an inscription from “Eisenstaedt’s Guide to Photography,” published in 1978: “There are no rules for composition except good judgement and taste.” Beneath the quote is a large black-and-white image of a swimsuit model whose judgement and taste may be debatable. For she is standing with her back to the camera on a beach in Miami, wearing a fur stole that wraps around her torso and ends just where her derriere fills her bathing suit. It was taken in 1940, but it seems to project forward 25 years to the “zany” go-go era of celebrity journalism in the 60s and 70s.
In just this way is it emblematic of this mid-century master, whose images speak of “another era” – one scarcely recognizable anymore – while anticipating and suggesting the new disruptive one that would follow and that would usher us into our own new century.

About the writer: Mark Moran was born and raised in the DC area and has lived in Dupont Circle/Adams Morgan, and later in Cleveland Park. He left for Chicago in 1997, and later moved to the Cleveland area in 2000. There he wrote for the Lakewood Observer, a volunteer hyperlocal news publication. In 2016, he moved back to the DC area and settled into Forest Hills in July 2018. Mark loves the proximity to Rock Creek Park, the lovely neighborhoods east and west of Connecticut Avenue, Bread Furst, Politics and Prose, Little Red Fox, and Comet Pizza. He can often be found in The Den at Politics and Prose. In addition to writing professionally for the American Psychiatric Association, he looks forward to writing for Forest Hills Connection.

Trump and American Authoritarianism: Rationalization and the Destruction of Norms

From the beginning of Donald Trump’s ascent to the deafening, crazy-making presence he has now attained in our lives, there have been voices warning that this was the advent of an American version of fascism or, anyway, of authoritarianism. Robert Kagan was on to this early, as was Madeleine Albright, who wrote, “Fascism: A Warning.”
   As I write this, tanks are being parked on the mall adjacent to the Lincoln Monument and Trump is hijacking what has been for years in Washington an almost thoroughly nonpartisan Fourth of July event; fireworks on the Mall here in DC has actually been something like a home-town affair—traffic congested, invariably oppressively hot and or threatening rain, yet thoroughly celebratory. In light of these events, the arguments by Kagan and Albright and others are worth considering.
    Even among those who loathe Trump, there are reasons to roll one’s eyes. For one thing, Trump is just so pathetically…..pathetic. Silly. There is something clownish and childish about him. “A sad embarrassing wreck of a man,” as George Will put it, one who appears to have stumbled into a job he didn’t really want, in the same way that he lucked into his wealth, then lost it by stumbling into multiple bankruptcies, to be propped up (very probably) by unsavory characters, i.e. Russian mafia, which is said to have enfiladed the Manhattan real estate industry. (Collusion? Who needs collusion? They already own him.) Describing Trump’s thinness of character is a challenge to language—Is it possible to be profoundly shallow?
   (Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, “Nemesis,” describes a man who was early in life, also a silly and unlikely dictator. But Hitler possessed also a ferocious single-mindedness that Trump can’t approximate, and was possessed as well, it has to be said, by a certain genius; a negative kind of genius to be sure—a knack for the long game, a willingness to play nice when it suited his purposes, and an unerring eye for people’s weaknesses. (Trump, I would say, has the last two talents but no sense of the first.))
   It’s also possible to argue that “it can’t happen here” (bearing in mind that in response to Sinclair Lewis’ tract of the same title, Saul Bellow wrote a short story entitled, “The Hell It Can’t”). One of the reassuring strengths of this country—so goes this argument—is the resilience and robustness and independence of its civil society, its extra-governmental institutions. Churches, professional associations, civic organizations, and cultural institutions continue to nurture democratic culture, however much our political structures degenerate. Two hundred years of this culture combined with a governmental architecture that is institutionally resistant to radical change make authoritarianism improbable.
   Those are the contrary responses to Kagan—an aimless, silly man who knows not what he is about, and a durable civil democracy.
   But there are reasons to be scared. Everyone—right, left and center—has become entirely too comfortable with executive privilege and power; arguably, Obama was a prime offender in extending this tendency. It is a trend whose roots, I believe, were in the Cold War: the threat of nuclear confrontation made it necessary to give the executive the power to move more quickly and decisively than the 18th century writers of our Constitution could imagine when they gave Congress the power to make war. It was accelerated again after 9/11, so that there are now influential voices—including Attorney General William Barr—who envision an executive with very nearly unchecked, unlimited authority. Add to this that the Republican party is now thoroughly intellectually degenerate and entirely enthralled to the personality cult that is Trump.
   The form that politics takes anywhere, at any time, is culture bound. German fascism took the form it did—goose-stepping soldiers, torchlight parades, and poisonous anti-semitism—because of German history and German culture and the particular circumstances of Germany in the early part of the 20th century, and it thrived on peculiarly German weaknesses. 
    People who expect an American authoritarianism to look like the German National Socialist Party have their head in a bag, even if all the features of reactionary nationalism are the same everywhere, at all times: evocation of a mythical past of national greatness, exaggeration or wholesale fabrication of national defeats or humiliations, and an appeal to racial and class resentment.
    Question: What are the most glaring American weaknesses?
   Answer: Our love of celebrity and our worship of the wealthy—as if wealth itself were proof of virtue, intelligence, valor and strength. 
   In Trump we have elevated an American cultural protype: a wealthy (or putatively wealthy) celebrity. Even his silliness and thinness of character is emblematic of a popular culture that has grown increasingly frivolous, lacking in the character required for self-government. Fifty years ago, the Moral Majority made its mark saying the culture was in decline. In this they were not wrong, but their criticism was so diminutively focused on personal, private, sexual behavior; Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell Jr. see the fruit of this degradation in abortion and gay men getting married.
    I see it in thousands of Americans braying, like middle school girls at a pep rally, for a wall, to be paid for by Mexico.
    How is it possible with that level of national immaturity to tackle problems like the financing of entitlements when a tsunami of baby boomers retire, or balancing growth and regulation in the face of climate change, or rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, problems that require some measure of self-sacrifice and deferral of immediate gratification—that is to say, that require self-government. Our national helplessness is ripe for a strongman, a peculiarly American one—silly and frivolous and empty-headed, but rich and very, very famous and perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to satisfy an insatiable ego.
   Kershaw’s biography of Hitler conveys two important lessons about how authoritarianism happens and that are relevant in thinking about the Trump phenomenon in 21st century America—these are, first, political rationalization, and secondly, the destruction of norms, of normative national practices and protocols.
   To the first point, it is not so that everyone in Germany immediately loved Hitler. There were in fact a great many people—especially among the military and the cultured elite—who immediately and very early on saw in Hitler a dangerous crackpot, at once menacing and gauche. Yet too many people found a reason to rationalize him, to make excuses, to let things slide. When this was not simple spinelessness, it very often had to do with a fear—a terror, really—of socialism. It can at least be said for Germans at the time that their fear of socialism was not unfounded—there had been a very messy, very violent, short-lived socialist uprising in November 1918 as the first world war ended (this uprising was the source of the infamous, paranoid “stab in the back” accusation—the claim, widely circulated, that Bolshevik Jews had sabotaged the war effort and caused Germany’s defeat; this claim had no basis in truth—Germany’s war command had been lying for years about winning the war and had in the process beggared the country—but it reverberated all the way to Aushwitz.)
   In contrast, the American right’s fear of socialism is a laughable joke. But the rationalization of Trump by people who know better is not. It is an open secret in Washington that many Republicans regard Trump as a buffoon and/or a mental case, yet they are willing to rationalize—either out of political cowardice or because of certain ideological interests (judges, immigration, abortion, lowering taxes).
   The second lesson that stands out from Kershaw’s narrative about Germany in the years between 1933 and 1945 is the steady, accelerating destruction of norms. One by one by one, policies and protocols and practices that had been considered normal or normative were knocked over; the dizzying, destabilizing effect of this cannot be over-estimated. The once unthinkable becomes thinkable and then it becomes the reality.
    This is the effect that Trump’s behavior on the world stage is having on American culture and politics. And this is why the tanks on the lawn of the Lincoln Memorial matter.

Scratch My Chest, You'll Feel Better

She walked around the room, a little unstable or a little nervous, looking I believe for a way out, for the way back home—back to the predictable life she knew, that’s what she had been waiting for patiently, submissively for more than a month I think—and chanced upon some chimes hanging low to the floor in the far corner. She nudged the chime just a touch and when the small bright room filled with a rich baritone hum like the meditative “Om”, Kristina looked back at us with an expression that told me she knew within the hour she was going to die.
    If I tell you that Kristina was my dog, a nearly constant companion for 11 years since my daughter and I picked her up at the Animal Protection League in Cleveland, a few of you will roll your eyes. I understand the instinct; I grew up with pets, but throughout my early adulthood I was without one for many years and I rolled my eyes a lot at what I considered the flakiness of dog and cat owners who seemed to treat their animals like prescient people.
   Truthfully, of course, I can’t know what my sweet black border collie mix was thinking or feeling when she looked back at us—curiosity about the sound of the chime? fear and confusion at being in a strange place? Or perhaps she was just feeling sick and dizzy and lightheaded because she had a bleeding mass in her stomach that required surgery that night and a catheter injection to keep her hydrated.
   She died three years ago this week, a month before I was to move back to Washington, D.C., where my job was. (I had spent 13 years working for the same outfit but working from home in Cleveland, where I was helping to raise my daughter. When the daughter went off to college, I went off to D.C.) Kristina and I were staying temporarily with a friend in Shaker Heights, after I abandoned my apartment in Cleveland in preparation for the move. She had collapsed on the pavement—just like that, like air going out of a balloon—while on a walk in the neighborhood in the early evening. She had not been well for some time, I believe. For several years, I had noticed her slowing down, becoming more anxiously attached to me. About a month and a half prior to the night when she collapsed on the pavement, a tic had lodged itself in her scalp. I think I managed to get most of it out, but the scar that was left looked to be infected. I took her to a vet, who said she was fine, but in retrospect I am not convinced. After K and I moved into the friend’s house, I came home one night to find her hiding in an upstairs room, apparently delirious with pain from what turned out to be a raging ear infection. I spent a long night at a veterinarian hospital that night before she was treated with an antibiotic and a painkiller. But I don’t believe she was ever the same.
   At the hospital that night she died two or three weeks later, it was after 9 pm. when the nurse came out to talk to me about her condition, informing me that she would need surgery, and that there was no surgeon on call at the time. I would have to drive with her to Akron, 40 minutes away. And there was no real way of knowing what her prognosis might be after surgery, assuming she survived it.
   That’s as far as I’ll go in justifying my decision to euthanize my friend, put her “down.” She was given two shots, a painkiller and one that stopped her heart. She died with her head in my lap.
   What do our dogs and cats think and feel? Does a dog have a “personality” or a soul? Did Kristina know when she rang the chime at the vet’s office that she was dying, that her life with me was over? Or do we simply project onto household pets our own longings?
   The most cursory google search yields a lot research indicating that animals of all kinds display traits of distinct personality, although the science is “bedeviled” by the problem of anthropomorphism, of human bias or projection in the attribution of personality traits, as described by one particularly cogent report from 2013 in Real Clear Science. 
  
All animal personality scientists grapple with how to reduce the human bias embedded in their experiments. “Trying to eliminate research bias is what this field is devoted to,” says biologist and coder Alison Bell from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She says that even with coding, measuring a behavior as simple as two fish biting each other includes some level of judgment. What constitutes biting? Do the fish just need to bump mouths or must the researcher see teeth sinking into flesh?
   Western culture is quick to attribute qualities like “shy” and “brave” to cats and dogs, says animal ethologist Kristina Horback from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. Horback says that when the same traits are observed in an experiment looking at dolphins or elephants, for example, researchers steer clear of using adjectives to describe the behaviors. “Shy” and “brave” are risky words in a scientific setting, she says, because they are reputed as subjective and only ever applied to humans.

Who cares? It might be more useful and interesting to wonder why anyone should doubt that to which virtually everyone who cares for an animal can testify: the almost palpable sense that their companion animals are more human than some of the people they have to deal with at their offices or in their families.

Kristina was almost universally described as “sweet.” Border collies generally are. But she had an inner wolf that came out in certain situations, most vividly when another dog sought affection or recognition from me; that other dog was likely get the what-for, particularly as Kristina grew older and crankier. This inner wolf, by the way, was a trait I found extremely endearing, not because I enjoyed watching her beat up other dogs, but because she expressed it instinctively, without pride, and did not seem to revel in it; after she routed a dog, she went back to business as usual, as if she’d been interrupted while reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette.

I believe animals suffer a lot at our hands—K. spent entirely too much time alone in my care, which is why I cannot tell people who ask me that I will get another dog. (When someone loses a mother, sister or a brother, no one ever asks, “Will you get another?”). I do relish the memories of our many hours walking and exploring in the MetroParks, enjoying the crisp air off Lake Erie in Lakewood Park, walking the path at Stinchcomb Hill, or Edgewood Park in Rocky River.

And we have a lot to learn from them. Sometimes when my daughter was young and still at home and we would argue (sometimes loudly, sometimes toe-to-toe), Kristina would stand between us, wishing us to be nice to each other. She also had a talent for using her paw to prompt you to scratch her chest. Sometimes when Tess was upset, K. would sit up close to her, paw at her hand as if to say, “Scratch my chest, you’ll feel better.”

It always worked.

Rubbernecking Brexit

Like a great many others, it seems, I have become a Brexit rubberneck. It was instantly fascinating when the Brits inflicted this thing on themselves two years ago; it has become all the more so as the deadline approaches and all of the UK’s options for how to move forward are bad or terrible. I have probably read more about Brexit in recent weeks than I have about my own country’s contortions. Everything about the subject—the history out of which the EU grew, the great benefits it has accrued to Europe and individual member countries, the problems and restrictions and cultural displacement that has accompanied those benefits, the politics behind the original referendum, the dynamics of the Leave vote, and the contortions the U.K. is going through in the aftermath—everything, all of it, seems to refract in one national calamity the most urgent questions confronting liberal democracy in the 21st century. The Wall Street Journal came the closest (of anything I have read) to capturing this big picture, stating that Brexit encapsulates the tension between the undoubted economic benefits of “neoliberal” globalism and the irreducible need (for such it now appears to be) for democratic nations to assert a national and cultural identity and sovereignty.

For a political junkie, there’s just a lot to think and talk about. The fascination is akin, of course, to rubbernecking a roadside accident, with that regrettable human affinity for watching someone else’s disaster (or what seems like someone else’s disaster, because Brexit is really every Western country’s problem, in more ways than one). I should say up front: although I think a great many Britons (including at least some Leave supporters with buyers remorse) must be wishing to God that David Cameron had never held that referendum, and although I continue to believe, in a general way, in what the EU represents, and that when all is tallied up, "Remaining" was the better choice--despite all of that, one of the things one learns after diving deeply into the subject is that there was a powerful and legitimate impulse behind the Leave vote that should not be dismissed only as reactionary nationalist obstinancy; that there are substantive grievances about political disenfranchisement and unaccountable decision-makers in Brussels, and about cultural dissolution through borderless migration that have been seized upon (and taken advantage of) by those more retrograde instincts. For believers in liberal democracy, this makes countering the reactionary nationalist tide more difficult, and a matter of close-range strategy as well as long-range planning and philosophy.   

For instance....if Brexit has demonstrated one thing for American politics, it is that liberal Democrats who want to contain and ultimately defeat the reactionary nationalist-populist movement need to get serious about immigration, even if we may think that the problem here is entirely different—and far, far, far less existentially threatening than it is in Europe—and that American fears about the southern border are stoked by an enormous amount of horseshit on the political right. The problem on the southern border is just that—a problem; Democrats should make it a priority to solve it and banish all talk of “open borders”.

It's worth noting, there’s quite a few highly interesting articles arguing for Leave from the liberal-left perspective. The most important point in the best of these, as I understand the argument, is that a nation is the vessel through which social democracy can thrive; and there is none other. “Democracy needs a demos, a people for whom government is of, by and for,” writes Alan Johnson in the New York Times . “Without one, all you have is inter-elite management, treaty law and money grubbing….It has been a colossal error…to think of nation-states as embarrassing anachronisms hostile to democracy. Far from being a threat to democracy, the nation-state is the only stable underpinning we have yet devised to sustain the commitments, sacrifices and levels of social trust that a democracy and a welfare state require.”

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Between now and the deadline in March 2019 for the final exit, the U.K. is in a truly weird place. As of this writing (on Monday, December 17), Theresa May’s exit deal with the E.U. is expected to be rejected in the British House of Commons. Andrew Sullivan wrote a penetrating piece on the next-to-impossible task May has had. She has had to beg Europe’s leaders for concessions to make an exit as painless as possible; Europe has driven a hard bargain—and why shouldn’t it? If leaving the Union can be seen as painless, other nations will follow suit. So the deal May brought back satisfies no one at home—it returns sovereignty over the border to the U.K., but that’s about the only real chit for hardline Brexiteers. Her agreement would keep the U.K. within a single customs market, which allows for commonly agreed upon import charge duties—but that’s not the same as the single market that E.U. member countries enjoy, in which goods move unimpeded across borders. And despite this reduced status as a trade partner, the U.K. would still be subject to rules and regulations from Brussels (which Brexiteers regard as a fundamental betrayal of the Leave vote). Meanwhile, Remain-ers still see the whole thing as a defeat with almost certainly disastrous economic consequences for Britain (every economic analysis, so I have read, expects Brexit to be a net loss, possibly a very bad one, to the U.K.’s economy), and debilitating to young people who will likely face real obstacles to moving to and working in E.U. countries. The best thing that can be said of the agreement is that co-opts the reactionary nationalist movement on its most inflammatory point—immigration—while honoring the Leave vote but containing, to the extent possible, the damage from this very bad decision.

As Sullivan points out, May’s gamble is that the other alternatives to her exit bargain will be revealed, “in the cold light of day”, to be worse. Those other options include what’s called a “hard exit”—no deal at all with Europe, the U.K. simply out in the cold on March 18, 2019, facing enormous new tariffs on every imaginable product, hard barriers to travel across European borders, and the need for the U.K. to renegotiate its own bilateral trade deals with every single country in the world that the E.U. trades with now. This option has been described, entertainingly, by one British politician as turning England into a “1950s museum floating in the Atlantic.”   

The other alternative is a re-vote on the referendum, an option that is gaining some traction (Tony Blair is campaigning for it). There’s a lot of freight behind this idea but it carries enormous risks, and not just because the outcome of the vote would be uncertain. Adding to Theresa May’s problems, so I gather, is that she is generally regarded as, well, not very good at her job—which is sad because there is a great deal of courage and principle and patriotism in what she is doing. She voted Remain, but she is committed to honoring the vote of a democratic state, and to getting an exit that will keep the U.K. from being harmed as much as possible. And she has ruled out a second vote. Can a democratic nation really just call the equivalent of a mulligan—oops, sorry, we fucked up—and re-do a vote? It would be exceptionally divisive and would convince many Leave voters that they are as disregarded and disrespected as they have always felt themselves to be, pouring gasoline on the populist fire. As one Leave supporter put it, “The establishment can’t just keep re-doing the election until they get the result they want.” 

There is a retort to this and part of it has to do with the shameful conduct of some prominent Brexiteers who floated a lot of bullshit in the campaign leading up to the 2016 referendum—not just about, for example, the millions or billions of pounds that could be reinvested into the British National Health Service, but more generally that leaving the E.U. might be painless, that the U.K. could easily renegotiate its own trade deals as if it were still a global empire. In a routine campaign for political office, this kind of flim-flam might be regarded as standard operating procedure. In a vote as a fateful as Brexit, it amounts to something like political malpractice, for which the guilty parties should be ashamed, if anyone anywhere these days were ashamed of anything, ever.

On top of this, there were also reports of people who voted Leave but didn’t really understand what they were voting for, and some who voted Leave for the hell of it, thinking it had no real chance of passing. And then there are the suspicions that Russian misinformation may have played a part. All of this, in a an enormously fateful vote decided by four percentage points, does lend some weight to the idea that the first referendum was a botched and skewered exercise. 

But the stronger argument against Brexit has to do with the E.U. itself, and where it came from. The European Economic Community, which would later become the E.U., was first forged by the exhausted combatants of World War II out of a kind of cultural despair about whether European countries would ever stop slaughtering each other, which they had been doing since Medieval times, culminating in the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of the second war; it rested on the slim hope that they might, just possibly, do so if they were economically dependent on each other. 

Here is the thing: Of the great many idealistic visions that fell by the wayside in the bloody 20th century, this idea cannot be said to be one of them. Is it not, in fact, an unqualified success? Can it not be said that this idea is, in fact, one of the very, very few instances of the human race collectively acting with something approaching common sense?

Perhaps the thing the EEC eventually evolved into is a perversion of the original vision. But was it really impossible to reform and liberalize the E.U. from within, or to register some kind of British protest that was less self-defeating? Was it not possible to formulate a referendum that might have offered more choices or less stark choices, or rules that raised the bar for success so that so radical and far-reaching a decision could not be rendered by the slim majority that carried the day in June 2016? 

My strongest feeling about this matter, when all is said and done, is that the bitter, reactionary nationalist germ at the heart of Brexit—the same germ that has infected politics in my country—needs to be co-opted, smothered, contained and ultimately defeated, whatever it takes. Leftist supporters of Brexit, on either side of the Atlantic, are being enormously naïve if they underestimate the danger of this infection, this faction with which tyhey are making league. We have seen before where it leads, and however it dresses itself up, and whatever advantage it takes of legitimate grievances, it is, I believe, an enemy of civilization. Believers in liberal democracy need to be wise and crafty and resourceful in figuring out how to contain it. If a re-do of the referendum is impossible—and it may be that that a new vote would only inflame the infection---then it may be that Theresa May’s not-so-very-good deal with Europe may be the next best thing.

Liberals Should Let Go of Roe v. Wade

   The painful Capitol Hill spectacle of the last two weeks must surely have made clear, to anyone on either side of the partisan divide, what has been in plain sight for a long time: the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the fate of which lay behind the brutal machinations of both parties, is the poison pill at the heart of all that has gone wrong in American politics in the last forty years.
   It has also, I believe, been a disaster for the liberal left, permanently alienating a segment of the population from legitimate liberal-left causes: livable wages, a fair tax structure, a strong public education system, and universal healthcare.
    I think the procedure should be legal, and if the court had kept its nose out of this subject many states, if not most, might have ratified abortion by now. But I have never been able to understand how the Court construed this to be a constitutional right, or how “due process,” as protected by the 14th amendment, can be extended to include a medical procedure. I wonder how many of the ruling’s defenders can explain it.
   It’s a deal that many liberals, wanting to defend the liberation and empowerment of women, have made, I believe, with a bad conscience (I say so because for years I did so). The obstinacy with which Democrats have clung to this tortured reading over the years, has convinced the approximately one-third of Americans who regard abortion as a profoundly moral issue that the left simply does not negotiate in good faith. Roe v. Wade was the primer for a politics that was all about saying what you need to say to satisfy your “base,” regardless of facts, Constitutional principles, or anything else more enduring than winning the day.
   Let us stipulate that the other side has learned to play the game. God knows. The Republican party is thoroughly captive to a President who is a fluent liar and who has gone the final logical step and entirely discarded facts or truth as a governing principle. The devolution hardly began with Trump, however; there has been a steady corrosive drip of insincerity. Does anyone even remember the shameless Republican posturing around a private domestic tragedy in the case of Terri Schiavo?
   In the long slide to our current depths, Sarah Palin’s “death panels” lie must be regarded as the really, really deep dive. You might remember that “death panels” referred to a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would have established a funding stream and a reimbursement code within the Medicare program to pay doctors to have a conversation with patients about completing an advance directive, living will and other aspects of end-of-life planning. Congress killed the provision in the wake of Palin’s lie. (Six years later, in 2015, Medicare did indeed begin paying physicians to have these discussions with their patients).
   Palin’s lie has had legs. Almost a decade later, I know of an individual on Facebook who has posted that Ezekiel Emanuel, the Harvard medical ethicist who was an author and proponent of the provision, did so for the purposes of being able to “euthanize political opponents.” Give that some thought: there is an American out there, and he is not alone, so distrustful of “coastal elites” that he believes (or pretends to believe, in the safe space of social media where fantasies flourish) that they want to kill him.
   This is an individual who should be on our side. A decade ago the housing collapse and financial services industry scandal demonstrated that Wall Street can screw over the average American before Washington politicians can get their shoes on; both of those industries are now being de-regulated. Our elected politicians rely on ungodly amounts of money to get elected, much of it coming by hook or by crook, from Wall Street. The Supreme Court has ruled that a corporation is a “person” and the lavishing of extravagant amounts of money on a candidate is a form of free speech. A multi-billion-dollar, investor-driven pharmaceutical industry bears a very large share of responsibility for an opioid epidemic that has exacted extraordinary suffering on every segment of American society. We have the only healthcare system in the developed world where the first question you get asked when you go to the hospital is, “How is this getting paid for?” Private equity firms are buying up cash starved medical practices; by what logic does anyone think they will not dictate the limits of medical care according to their profit demands? For profit colleges. For profit prisons. For profit detention centers for detained immigrants.
   But go on any right-wing website, or tune into Hannity or Limbaugh, or look up your Trump-loving Facebook friend (if you have one) and you would think the United States was menaced by……socialism. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration practices the real thing, handing out $12 billion in subsidies to farmers damaged by protectionist policies that run counter to traditional conservative free trade policy, perfectly closing a perfect loop of perfect hypocrisy.
   Such is the measure of how badly we have lost the audience we should have. When the issue of abortion is returned to the states, where it should have been all along, at least some of the passion on the pro-life side will have been leaked out, and the political dynamics will favor a measure of choice: voters (including men) will have to live with the prohibitions they impose upon themselves. Then perhaps the liberal left can return to principles and policies aimed at securing the economic ground beneath Americans’ feet so they can thrive and prosper—policies like a publicly funded, single-payer national health insurance system that would be, I believe, restorative of American health in more ways than one. 
   It should have happened years ago. The passage of Medicaid in 1965, a kind of afterthought to the Medicare program, was believed to presage what would be the next logical step—universal healthcare coverage for every American citizen.
   In the interval, the Democratic Party and the liberal-left fatefully lashed itself to the electrified cage of a legal reading that some 30 percent of Americans believe to be morally reprehensible. The shockwaves from that ruling, and the cascade of escalating lies, dissembling, and demagoguery on both sides over the years, have seared our cultural and political fabric and warped our regard for each other. It has also, I believe, done serious damage to much that is good and true and unassailable in the American liberal tradition.