Alien Nation. Alienation. What slaves, desperate refugees, and other inadvertent Americans must have felt. Here because they had to be somewhere, they tried to be glad, but oh, it was hard.
Until recently I was a card-carrying member of my nation’s master race. White, Protestant, Ivy League – and male, to boot! – my sort had made our world. Statues extolled my people – unless condescendingly depicting a stagey “Indian”; names on signs recalled mine; our leaders looked like me until Obama. My objections to America – we were not faultless! – were self-critiques. Self-forgiveness comes easily for most.
On the generational, gender, racial, educational divides, I’d ended up mostly on the winning side through no doing of my own. A “scion,” my parents called me from an early age – inheritor and protector of a grand tradition (really the best). I was not prejudiced – who? me? – not in the least: I had Jewish and Black friends: my first wife and kids were Jews, for Heaven’s sake: no soul less stunted than mine! Behind my easy affability one might detect the assurance of a possessor, welcoming others into my world, like a practiced host.
I report this with a blush, for I only noticed it, after seventy-two years inhabiting these premises. I’d never thought of myself as masterful: masters don’t. Princes are princes because, hey, that’s how things are.
What woke me to my prior pretensions was gradual estrangement. Estrangement by age – of course: comes with the territory. Our descendants seem to dis us by their difference.
Reflection intensified the divide between me and my moment. Americans, the more I pondered, worshipped wrong gods and pursued wrong goals. And we were so cocky and strutting: didn’t might make right! Jane’s and my years in Rome reinforced my disillusion. Did empty purses make saints “losers”?
Politics compounded disgust with my tribe. Low-lives ascended into office to grotesque applause. Truth, decency, humanity were mocked: only the clueless or impotent aimed to do “the right thing”. Winners won, no matter how. Morality – face it, fella – was a joke. As was I.
Did I leave America or America me? No matter how, we find ourselves apart. I eye fellow citizens with the detachment of a zoologist scrutinizing beetles beneath a rock. Could I be one of these! My passport says so; this late in the game, I could not be anyone else. But oh!
Alien status, new to me, has been familiar to humanity through most of time. Since prehistory, tribes displaced tribes, enslaving or deporting those they did not dispatch. New brooms swept clean. In our turbulent century, countless settled in America after eviction from their homes. I often wondered what Nabokov must have felt like, aching for a beautiful homeland he could never reclaim.
I too pine. Nostalgia is inevitably delusive: we were never as joyous as we recall. My America – of the second half of the twentieth century – was amply flawed. But it felt like we stood for something – bigger than winning, vengeance, self-interest. Our vision of a perfected planet – free, equal, rich enough to purchase our products – served our interests, surely; but it was also touched with nobility. Decry JFK’s Inaugural Address as cultural imperialism if you like, it lifted hearts, made us feel bigger than our measly selves.
There’s nothing all that wrong with my current address – and nothing much right about it. While Trump epitomizes our depravity, he is not to blame. He is who we are. We who beg to differ resemble his successor (and, I fear, predecessor) as President: impotently, anachronistically decent, sighing for a good forever gone.