Homeland Security Ate My Speech

by Ariel Dorfman

  HOMELAND SECURITY

  ATE MY SPEECH

  © Ariel Dorfman

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  Visit our website at www.orbooks.com

  First printing 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  British Library Cataloging in Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Interior Design by Pauline Neuwirth

  Published for the book trade by OR Books in partnership with Counterpoint Press.

  Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.

  paperback ISBN 978-194486-963-2

  ebook ISBN 978-194486-964-9

  This book, as always, is for Angélica, who has kept me sane in the insane America that has created Donald Trump.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: Grieving For America

  PART ONE

  THE RISE OF DONALD J. TRUMP

  1. Phillip II, the Sixteenth Century Spanish Monarch, Writes to His Excellency Donald Trump

  2. America Meets Frankenstein

  3. My Mother and Trump’s Border

  4. Latin American Food and the Failure of Trump’s Wall

  5. Faulkner’s Question for America

  PART TWO

  THE JUDGMENT OF HISTORY

  6. Now, America, You Know How Chile Felt

  7. The River Kwai Passes Through the Latin America and the Potomac: What it Feels Like to be Tortured

  8. Words of Encouragement for Donald J. Trump from James Buchanan, the 15th President of the United States

  9. A Message from the End of the World

  10. Should Iago Be Tortured?

  11. Mission Akkomplished: From Comrade Bush to Tovarisch Trump

  PART THREE

  MODELS OF RESISTANCE FROM THE PAST

  12. Martin Luther King Marches On

  13. Searching for Mandela

  14. The Truth That Made Her Free

  15. Reading Cervantes in Captivity

  16. The Dancing Cosmos of Albert Einstein

  17. Revisiting Melville in Chile

  PART FOUR

  WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

  18. Homeland Security Ate My Speech

  19. Alice in Leftland: Will You, Won’t You Dance?

  20. They’re Watching Us: So What?

  21. How We Overcame Tyranny Before: Take Heart, Friends

  22. The Whispering Leaves of the Hiroshima Ginko Trees

  A NOTE ON THE ESSAYS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  GRIEVING FOR AMERICA

  On November 9th, 2016, the day after the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States, I wrote an anguished meditation that, now, as I prepare to publish the articles and essays I composed during his astounding rise to power, seems to be the perfect prologue to this book.

  Here is what I wrote:

  I can no longer deny it.

  I feel that, by electing an ignorant, belligerent misogynist, a race-baiting, Mexican-hating predator, a liar who does not believe in climate change and who will increase the affliction of the neediest inhabitants of his country and the world, America has revealed its true identity.

  Like so many citizens of this land and so many others around the world, I am stupefied, astonished, sickened.

  And yet, looking into the mirror and mirage of my life, I should not feel surprised at this apocalyptic reckoning.

  When my wife Angélica and I brought our family to the United States in 1980, we had no illusions about what sort of nation greeted us. We had been wandering in exile since 1973, when an American-sponsored coup in Chile against the democratically-elected President Salvador Allende installed a brutal dictatorship. We were aware, coming from what was then called the Third World, of the way in which the United States, its corporations, its military, indeed its public, were complicit in crimes against humanity on every continent. Nor were we blind to how minorities and the poor were treated in the “land of the free,” or its long history of slavery and Jim Crow, its conquest of Native Americans, its maltreatment of dissidents and foreigners.

  Even so, I had many reasons to thank and admire America. My Argentine family had found refuge here once before, in 1945. As a child growing up in the wondrous, blossoming city of New York, I had fallen in love with this country, a country that gave me the language in which I write this requiem for America, the music and literature that nurture me, the extraordinary experiment in search of a more perfect union, a history of resistance to prejudice and racism among its most enlightened citizens and workers. I was seduced by the generosity of a people that was able to welcome numerous immigrant communities, to boundlessly expand its multicultural explorations, and to accept so many religious groups free to practice their beliefs. A land that belonged to you and me and was constantly willing to question its own limitations. The land of Dylan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Meryl Streep and Walt Whitman, Ella Fitzgerald and Edgar Allan Poe. The land of Frederick Douglass. How could one not be entranced by this pursuit of happiness?

  I have spent most of my hybrid, double life trying to reconcile these two Americas—one that fiercely represses our humanity and the other that gloriously expresses the best in us, a reconciliation that was made possible by the ongoing wager and prophecy that the America of the better angels that my hero Lincoln invoked would eventually prevail.

  My belief in the redemption of a country where I ended up becoming a citizen, along with Angélica and our two sons, would be grievously tested over and over in the 36 years since we arrived here.

  It was a schizophrenic process.

  Dreadful things kept happening: the mean-spirited Reagan era of greed; the unrelenting interventions in sovereign nations culminating with the younger Bush’s war-mongering; the malignant growth of the national security state; Democrats far too often subservient to money and privilege and military might. But through it all—and so much more that was disappointing and objectionable—I tried to keep faith in America, resolutely holding on to any sign that allowed me to celebrate its communal story. I searched out every encouraging mark of progress, every small act of decency and defiance by countless citizens that prefigured a country of tolerance and fairness and grace, proof that the courage and solidarity of ordinary people and extraordinary organizations formed the bedrock of the real nation.

  It is this delicate balancing act that has been so tested and decentered by the rise of Trump and more fatally by the vast amount of my fellow citizens who enabled—in the worse sense of the word—his victory, which was proclaimed, by one of those chilling coincidences that history seems to love, in the early hours of this November 9th, the anniversary of Kristallnacht.

  I do not wish to demonize the future President’s followers. In fact, I have on various occasions written sympathetically about their quandary, grasping at the roots of their anger and bafflement, their sense of displacement, without condoning the more extreme manifestations of bigotry and hatred that animates, alas, a considerable contingent of his zealots.

  But I realize now that this understanding of the causes of their disarray, that sympathy for their identity crisis, was only imaginable because I thought that Trump could not conceivably win. Now, however, that we must fully live what is incon
ceivable, now that this frightening man has opened a door through which everything horrible and spiteful in America has come crawling out, I cannot help but contemplate, staring back at me from the abyss of his triumph, the true face of America, the deep face, the permanent dreadful face of America, the irrevocable part of America that has always been there and that I can no longer delude myself will ever be redeemed. The suspicion that after this loathing-filled campaign and what now looms forebodingly ahead, it may be impossible to repair the rift in the community that I belong to and cannot escape.

  How to continue onwards, bearing the broken heart of my identity and this poison that contaminates that identity and the whole nation, how to accept what so many innocent people are about to suffer?

  I have tried to console myself with words that were gifted to me just yesterday, the day of the election, by Rasheed, an African-American man with whom I talked while, with my son Rodrigo and my granddaughters Isabella and Catalina, we canvassed neighborhoods in Durham, North Carolina, seeking out anybody who had not yet voted. This radiant man, who exuded an almost magical air of tranquility and goodness, one of those human beings who has not let himself be infected by the misfortunes that fate and the color of his skin have dealt him, recognized my alarm at the very thought that Trump might succeed.

  “You just have to keep the faith,” he said. “We make mistakes, but our people, in general, in the big things, in the long run, we get it right.”

  Noble and wise words that linger but cannot alleviate my immeasurable distress.

  I began this sad rumination by writing that I felt stupefied, astonished, sickened.

  All of that, yes, but something more, something much deeper and enduring.

  Grief: that is what I really feel. Grief and mourning for a country that, for me and perhaps for many others, has just died, that signed its own death warrant when its citizens, the blind citizens of my land, chose Donald Trump as the man who will lead us all to devastation.

  And yet, Rasheed is still there. With all the resistance, past and future, that his words and dignity and incessant promise of resurrection embody.

  He will not be alone as he confronts the terror of what is to come.

  The struggle has never ceased. The struggle has just begun.

  May the fields of grief be full of miracles.

  And that is how, with a phrase that recognized my sorrow and suggested some slim intimation of hope, I finished my November 9th contemplation of our ruined nation.

  It was the culmination of a series of reflections on Donald Trump that I had penned before the election and which would be followed by many more in the next months.

  Before Trump had declared his intention to seek the Presidency, he had hardly registered on the radar of my mind. I had never watched reality TV shows, didn’t know the difference between The Apprentice and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, couldn’t have cared less for the gossip columns or the scandals soiling the tabloid news. Two actions of that celebrity billionaire had vaguely suggested his reprehensible existence: his attempt, through false birther claims, to paint Obama as alien to America, and his campaign and full page ads demanding that five black and Latino teenagers be executed for a crime in Central Park that they had not committed.

  And then he descended on his escalator from Hell to announce he was seeking the Presidency and I became very quickly obsessed with him, in a manner I am forced to recognize now as masochistic, almost perverse, and which nevertheless forced me to come to grips with his startling sway over immense swaths of the public and, regrettably, the electorate.

  Like most observers, I immediately dismissed the possibility that his outlandish attempt to become the most powerful man on the planet had the slightest chance of attaining its goal. If I paid any heed at all, it was out of sick curiosity. I felt like a spectator at a circus watching an overweight clown treading on a high wire way up in the air, wondering when that performer, in this case, a racist bully, would crash spectacularly to the ground, after which he would presumably try to get up and limp away, only to slip on the banana peel of reality.

  Angélica, my wife and companion for over half a century, had warned me not to be too amused or complacent. Indeed, she had announced, as soon as she saw Trump’s first rally, that the coarse real estate dealer would capture the Republican nomination and then the Presidency. “He represents America,” she said. “You just don’t know the country if you think he won’t be elected.” Though I have confirmed, on innumerable occasions, that Angélica is far wiser and discerning than I could possibly ever be, I let myself scoff at her predictions.

  And yet, as his campaign became ever more outrageous and anti-immigrant, more boorish and dreadful, I found myself drawn to Trump’s mendacious image and his ever-contradictory statements, sucked into the vortex of the persona he was projecting. And I began, as if possessed by a demon, to write about him, at first tentatively, somewhat in jest, with unhidden contempt, and then with mounting deliberation, puzzled by the populist plutocrat’s success and unnerved by at what that success portended, even if he did not win the election. And, of course, my excessive pursuit of the meaning of Trump grew proportionately as his fortunes flourished and then turned into a veritable vertigo when, after obtaining a slim electoral college majority, he seized the White House and started us all on a road to doom.

  By expressing my views in a frenetic flurry of meditations, portents, exhortations, and analyses, some humorous, some deadly serious, I was not that different from countless others who, here in the States and abroad, fueled by compassion for Trump’s future victims, mystified by his conservative fanatics, concerned about the future of the earth, churned out a plethora of opinions destined to fade into the dustbin of history and oblivion.

  Why then did I decide to save these texts of mine from the ephemeral journalism into which they were born and collect them in this volume? As America engages in a debate about both the Meaning of Trump and the urgent question of how to block him from irreparably damaging the republic and the planet, is there anything that I can contribute?

  Readers must be the ultimate judges of that, but I do believe that unless we analyze how our dire predicament came about, unless we think ourselves out of the crisis, as I have implied in one the essays in this collection, we are doomed, like Sisyphus, to keep rolling the same boulder up the hill of history, only to find ourselves one more time at the bottom, confronted with the same task.

  With one difference: this time we may not get another chance.

  These messages are not only written from the perspective of a country I carry inside me, the Chile that is geographically at the end of the world, but messages that also are from the end of the world in another sense, as I am haunted by the fear that the end of our humanity is closer than ever before, that our species could in a matter of hours disappear through nuclear annihilation or due to an extinction that plays out more slowly and just as inexorably as an overheated planet spins towards death.

  The pieces assembled for this book were published in an array of American venues (The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, CNN, Time, The Nation, The Atlantic, Tomdispatch, Salon, The Modern Language Association Journal, The New Statesman, the BBC, Guernica), as well as some foreign papers, especially in Brazil and Spanish speaking countries. Most appeared as commentaries on Trump’s campaign, his election, and his occupation of the White House. Others, a select few, come from before the Trump era but have been included due to their ongoing relevance, though they have been revised and updated.

  All of them try, in one way or another, to exorcise America, to see the specter of Donald Trump as a manifestation and excrescence of something deep in our country’s desires and dreads and hatreds, and that will remain as a challenge no matter what happens, in the short run or long run. Trump came to power because he expressed what far too many of his countrymen wished for themselves and for their land. That America, Trump’s America, will remain with us as a challenge whether Trump
is impeached or survives to wreak more havoc, a challenge that I believe can only be met if the country undergoes a process of painful self-scrutiny that is impossible unless it is stimulated and accompanied by a new American revolution.

  That is why, perhaps, these messages are also animated by another sort of ghost, the ghost of hope, incarnated and reimagined by multitudes of men and women and even children who have already shown that they will not surrender their right to battle for the future.

  The thoughts I have gathered here are my small contribution to that battle. They were written, day by day, and during long nights of insomnia, against hopelessness and despair, with the burning conviction that understanding the world is imperative if we are to change it, if we are ever to reach the sweetness of a common dawn that Wordsworth envisioned for humanity.

  May the fields of grief indeed be full of miracles.

  1.

  PHILLIP II, THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY SPANISH MONARCH, WRITES TO HIS EXCELLENCY DONALD TRUMP

  A medium that my wife and I consult frequently in Chile intercepted a message from the 16th-century Spanish monarch Philip II directed to Donald Trump, words I transcribe here with, I must admit, some trepidation:

  I, Philip II, the most powerful ruler of my time, have been watching, most excellent Senor Trump, the woes plaguing your nation, not dissimilar to those that I faced, as did my father, Carlos V, and my son, Philip III, in our own land. Economic decline, pandemics of poor people seeking free lunches, Christianity under siege from deviants and lax women, traditional values undermined by foreign-influenced intellectuals, distant enemies incessantly challenging you abroad while, at home, terrorist Muslims pretend to be peaceful citizens—troubles that we solved in our time with remedies that may prove beneficial to your own future reign.