Modern American Wimpdom

Yesterday,  a motorcycle decked out with a huge American flag, big enough to act as a mainsail on a frigate, roared past me.  Also smaller flags, Don't Tread On me, maybe a Stars and Bars--I don't recall.  It was loud as a freight train and its rider's hair, what there was of it, mostly gray, streamed in the wind. 

There you had the essence of American manhood, New Hampshire style.  You knew this freedom fighter would be heading to a gathering of like minded patriots, to drink beer and smoke and laugh about all the snowflakes out there who wear masks to grocery stores.

Ms. Maud has recommended John Steinbeck's "East of Eden,"  and though I did not think I liked Steinbeck much, Ms. Maud is of such discernment, I figured I give Steinbeck another try. After all, beyond bike rides, what else to I have to do now in the lock down Covid day?

But before I got to Eden,  I discovered a slim volume of his war correspondence "Once There Was a War."  Each little dispatch is a gem, but two have stayed with me and bubbled up behind my eyes, watching that red blooded American easy rider rumble by down Route 27 on his way toward Exeter.  

One was a report of a movie theater in a suburb of London, where children, soldiers, nurses watch a Veronica Lake movie and the children thrilled to her blond glamour and took what they saw on the screen as absolute truth about life in America, and the soldiers stared numbly and the nurses laughed, until a German bomb collapsed the roof and set fire to the building and the kids, or parts of them were extracted, methodically, by rescue teams and hauled off to hospital.

Another dispatch, titled simply, "Chewing Gum" described a line of children held back near the gangplank of an American ship, holding out their hands for chewing gum from the disembarking GI's. 
"When you have gum you have something permanent, something you can use day after day and even trade when you are tired of it. Candy is ephemeral. One moment you have candy, and the next moment you haven't. But gum is really property."

But the real moment occurs when a bag of orange peels is dropped on the dock from the ship, "Golden with squeezed orange skins. The children hesitate, because it is against all their training to break the rules. But the test is too great. They can't stand it. They break over the line and tumble on the garbage box. They squeeze the skins for the last drop of juice that may conceivably be there."

A bobby comes along and shoos them off, desultorily.  He has to do his job but his sympathy is with the children. They get very hungry for oranges, he says. Nobody over 5 years of age is allowed oranges in England. The bobby hasn't had an orange in 4 years.

Reading the New York Times about the deprivation of Americans locked down in their apartments or homes, unable to go out to restaurants or to bars, or swimming pools or country clubs, I marvel at the fortitude of my fellow countrymen, who have suffered so much with this COVID19 pandemic.

Those who have lost jobs, yes. They are hurting as Americans did during the Depression--although now we do have unemployment insurance, at least temporarily for many.

But when it comes to deprivation, everything is relative. 

What is this Trump Thing?

I am no historian, but at least in my lifetime, I cannot recall a President who inspired local people to fly flags with his name on them outside their homes. 

Some of this may have to do with the ease of printing and design in the 21st Century, but this really is something new. At least I've never seen anything like it. 

After Lincoln died, people displayed Lincoln likenesses, and that long train ride from Washington, D.C. back to Illinois--people lined the route and people wept openly after FDR and Kennedy died, so there was a personal connection for many with the President. But this is different. Nobody's died. 

This Trump flag thing is something different in my mind. 

Hitler inspired the Germans to public displays of affection, and, for all I know, Franco and Peron may have as well. There was a time after World War II when German magazines were not allowed to run Hitler's photo on their covers, for fear people would frame them and hang them in their homes and businesses. 

But these are flags outside homes, on porches. In America. 

I saw them on a car ride through Buck's County Pennsylvania last Christmas, along with rebel flags, but mostly alone, just flags with Trump 2020.

Is this simply brilliant marketing? But no, you can send a man a Trump flag; that doesn't mean he'll fly it.

On my bicycle rides through Hampton Falls, I see the flags.  On Hidden Pasture road, on other roads.

The man can barely parse a sentence.

At least with Hitler, you could understand: he gave long, rousing, coherent, if vile, speeches and he appealed to something.  Racial pride. Fear. Loathing of the other in a country defeated, humiliated. The Germans, one might imagine, had a sense of grievance. But where does that sense of grievance in America come from?

During Vietnam, in the 60's, we had the same thing: That hate which stoked the murders at Kent State, a class hate really. That was palpable. There was racial hatred, as colored people confronted institutionalized racism and Southern whites saw their privileged status challenged. There was the "moral majority."

Trump fans are no more loathsome than the "patriots" who hated the anti war demonstrators, who hated the hippies or hated the "Freedom riders." But at least, when George Wallace "with hate dripping from his lips" cried out, "Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever!" you knew what that was. 

I don't really know what Trump love is. 
I talk with folks every day from Haverhill and Methuen, Massachusetts and Salem, New Hampshire.  On many topics, they seem normal.  But then, you stray a little, and you discover they love Trump and they hate something, someone, but their hate and bitterness and resentment remain inchoate. 

In some ways it's like those scrawls you see on walls: "Fuck you!" But you don't see those so much any more. You see more Trump signs than "Fuck you!" signs. Or maybe they are just the same thing.

In some ways, one has to believe this is just fate playing out the hand.  If Gavin Newsom were the presumptive Democratic candidate, you could say, okay, now the pendulum is swinging back. There's going to be a real chance. But with Biden, a vessel so fragile one can hardly imagine his making it across a calm sea, much less a rough and tumble campaign--you have to be able to see what is coming.

I can make it to Canada on a single tank of gas, is all I'm saying.