A friend who works in a university theater department recently lost his job when the school took money that was slated for his department and gave it to the athletic department so it could buy new “state-of-the-art” cleats for the football players. (It is not a big football school, despite the fact that it’s in the Midwest.) What makes this development all the sadder is that my friend grew up in Poland, a country whose citizens, during the Cold War, often looked to the United States as a place of sanity and justice. It was why my friend, and so many of his compatriots, immigrated here.
We've gone from The Plot Against America to Goodbye, Columbus.
George Will. James Mattis. Time magazine. Episcopal bishops.
The White House is starting to resemble Versailles in the 1790s.
Listening to Mariann Budde, Episcopal bishop of the District of Columbia, express her disapproval of Trump’s use of St. John’s Church for a photo op – after he had protesters tear gassed in Lafayette Park – I was reminded of Leo Frade, former bishop of Southeast Florida, who said that he became an Episcopalian in the ’60s because, instead of a collection of elitists, he found people who were socially conscious and politically engaged.
There’s been a stream of fine books by immigrants about their experiences in the U.S. (memoirs, novels, essays) but no corresponding flow of books by Americans about their experiences abroad. Yes, we’re a country of immigrants, not travelers. But the imbalance strikes me as the result of self-absorption – Enough about us. What do you think about us? – and laziness. We’re OK with the foreign when it comes to our shores, but – even as readers apparently – we’re not going to go out and discover it for ourselves.