The Political Becomes Personal

“Why are Americans so stupid?”

The mother of Mohammed, one of my twin stepsons’ friends, had come to collect the boys to visit the Giraffe Center in Nairobi. Clad in black, head to toe, including the hijab worn by women on the kids’ home island off the coast of Kenya, she was unaware of how rude her words sounded to an American.

That’s how it is with Lamu people. A gay friend on the island - closeted, of course, at least officially, but everyone knew - once greeted me by telling me I’d gotten fat. Before I could muster an answer, this woman shrieked and bolted for her car. Our landlord’s dogs had arrived, and they were yipping and darting about her long funereal dress. Islam regards dog saliva as impure. Until they grew up a bit, the twins had been terrified of dogs, too.

My amusement at her panicked departure removed the sting of her words. But they’ve come back to me, as one might imagine. We’ve parsed the reasons for Trump’s support too many times. Many of us have come to terms with the Fox grandpas in our lives. We are polite to our neighbors who are, to put it tactfully, low-information voters. But as the tension over America’s fate has ratcheted up, the fissures have gone beyond Democrat and Republican. To turn the classic feminist phrase on its head, the political is personal now, whether it’s abortion, the war in Gaza, or good old class rage. What I wonder, now, is whether these divisions, stoked by Trump, amplified by social media and exacerbated by our fears, will have lasting consequences no matter how the election plays out.

Nothing has been more divisive that the war in Gaza. This week, more than 2700 writers, including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Diaz, MacArthur Fellows Jonathan Lethem and Ben Lerner, and Nobel Prize-winners Annie Ernaux and Abdulrazak Gurnah signed a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers, literary agents and literary festivals. Published on Literary Hub on Oct. 28, the letter states that participating authors will not work “with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.”

Complicit? In other words, if a cultural institution has not vehemently opposed the war in Gaza, it should be boycotted. The letter prompted criticism from the organization Creative Community for Peace, which released a statement signed by more than 1,000 authors and members of the entertainment industry, which read, in part:

“We believe that writers, authors, and books — along with the festivals that showcase them — bring people together, transcend boundaries, broaden awareness, open dialogue, and can affect positive change. Regardless of one’s views on the current conflict, boycotts of creatives and creative institutions simply create more divisiveness and foment further hatred.”

Authors who signed the statement include Lee Child, Howard Jacobson, Lionel Shriver, Simon Schama, Adam Gopnik, Bernard Henri-Lévy, Ilya Kaminsky, David Mamet and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, along with Nobel Prize-winners Elfriede Jelinek and Herta Müller; entertainment industry figures included Jenji Kohan (Orange is the New Black, Weeds), former Paramount CEO Sherry Lansing and (gotta love these) Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne.

While it’s one thing to sign a letter, it’s the lost friendships that hurt. Don't you get it? I want to say. The war in Gaza is complex, involving a new iteration of the Great Game with Iran and Russia jockeying to reduce U.S. influence. Israel’s internal conflict mirrors our own, between democracy and authoritarianism, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly attempts to co-opt the nation’s judiciary. Any path to peace is complicated by the fact that there is no strategic incentive for Hamas to end the conflict despite horrifying losses among civilians. Reading the Hamas Covenant of 1987, as reported in the Atlantic, one is struck by these declarations: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.” And so they have proven to be.

The war is unlikely to end even if the U.S. cuts off arms sales to Israel, as pro-Palestinian activists are insisting on. Israel has a stockpile of weapons of its own, and should the Iron Dome falter, the war would be more likely to intensify as Israelis face greater danger within their own country. Some commentators say that Joe Biden could have stopped the war in Gaza with a phone call. If it were that simple, don't they think he would have done that already, with Michigan's Arab-American protest vote threatening to torpedo a Democratic victory?

One of my oldest friends, an editor in Berkeley, recently launched into an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian diatribe, genocide, genocide, genocide, and only after I asked, told me she also "wept" for the victims on Oct. 7, a pro forma statement immediately followed by the caveat that Palestinians are being raped by IDF soldiers.

Save your tears, I wanted to say. Use your brain. This is three-dimensional chess, and your good intentions only make things worse. As far as genocide, have you listened to Hamas leaders? What about Russia's intent to wipe out Ukrainian culture, as well as its people? Don't you realize that by, in effect, doing PR for Hamas, you're strengthening Iran and Russia?

My friend's go-to sources? Mehdi Hasan, fired by MSNBC, now running his own media site focused exclusively on the Palestinian cause. The Oxford-educated Hasan is quite brilliant but debates rather than reports, too often bending history to suit his arguments. Her other source: Medea Benjamin, the founder of the left-wing anti-war group CodePink, best known for heckling politicians who don't meet her standards of purity.

I have never had the slightest desire to move to Israel. I am not religious. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose book The Message has evoked reactions mirroring the controversy over Gaza within the U.S., I was shocked by the inequality I witnessed in Israel. I detest right-wing Jewish settlements in the West Bank. If genetic testing has shown us anything, it has proved we are all mongrels. The future, to me, should be non-sectarian and certainly non-religious.

History is not cooperating. As a teenager I read Hannah Arendt's first book, Rahel Varnhagen, about a 19th-century bluestocking socialite, an assimilated Jew who had hoped to leave the stigma of anti-Semitism behind. Ultimately, she could not. It is biography as autobiography, a graduate thesis completed after Arendt, who was Jewish, fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

As a reporter I learned to hold my idealism in one hand, and the pragmatic knowledge I had developed covering politics in the other. Now, the idealism is receding, and the pragmatism is uglier and more depressing.

My Berkeley friend is certainly not stupid. Better to ask: Why are Americans so ignorant of foreign policy? Or more specifically, blind to the harsh realities of realpolitik. Iran has backed pro-Palestinian protests, hoping to exacerbate divisions within the U.S. Not only do the protesters strengthen Hamas on the world stage, they strengthen Iran, where a student at Tehran’s Science and Research University harassed by her university’s morality police over her “improper” hijab recently turned her body into a protest, stripping to her underwear and marching through campus. She has since been arrested and reportedly killed. Like the students in this photograph, we pretend not to see.

And yet we have seen this movie before, read the novels. Go back to Graham Greene's The Quiet American. "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous quiet American.

After Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, how can true believers be so sure they are right? Shocked, just shocked that the world is not the cosseted suburb of their youth, they cannot seem to fathom that sometimes there are no good guys — except for the peace and love hippies at the Nova festival and look what happened to them.

Medea Benjamin, my Berkeley friend pointed out, is Jewish. Along with some of her best friends, no doubt. Does that include me? I don’t know anymore.

While some obsess about Gaza, others avoid talking about it. That’s a luxury that fewer Jews feel they have as anti-Semitism escalates, both on the right and the left. For those of us who are Jewish but have never been particularly engaged with Israel suddenly there is a need to say something when friends and colleagues engage in the kind of casual anti-Semitism we’ve heard all our lives.

Gaza is only one fracture. Abortion is the most personal of all issues, and the conventional political wisdom stating that it shouldn’t be a political issue at all has been ignored.

I avoid my closest neighbor, a man in his 60s, an extreme right-wing Catholic who is vehemently anti-abortion and not too crazy about Mexicans, either. I want to brandish articles about the women who have died in Texas and Georgia after miscarriages because doctors were afraid to intervene. I want to talk about murder, about men who cloak their hatred of women in the guise of protecting the innocent. But I don’t because it would go nowhere. There is no end to it.

Right, left, left, right. One of my friends was a war correspondent and later a human rights activist. Now she decries National Public Radio for being too “woke” and enshrines The Free Press, former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss’s thinly veiled neoconservative mouthpiece. We used to argue over immigration. Now we rarely speak.

“From someone’s words, you feel that existential threat,” said Lisa Mednick Powell, a Journal editor and a songwriter, who is also Jewish. “It may not be personal to them because it’s their ideology or they feel it’s the rules, and it should be the rules for everyone, so they feel virtuous. But it’s personal to you.”

It’s personal to you if you’re a woman. Muslim. Black. Jewish. Puerto Rican. LGBTQ. Yet even those of us who fall into the categories targeted by Trump and his apparatchiks cannot get along. Fractures upon fractures.

There is a solution to all this division, and it’s so obvious that nobody seems to be talking about it. In fact, it’s about 300 years old. The Enlightenment. Rationality. Or in our narrower world, hewing to the principles of journalism. Do not rewrite history. Be fair-minded in your analysis. Be temperate in your language unless your quip is clever but not cruel. It’s as if the entire country is in hysterics, saying things that married couples only say in the heat of argument. Saying things that will never be forgotten.

As someone who grew up in ultra-liberal New York, a longtime Democrat with anarchist hippie tendencies, it’s odd to find myself agreeing with David Mamet, the brilliant playwright who supports Trump, when he signs a letter against the boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. I doubt if we agree on much else, but artists and writers should not be canceled. I wrote my thesis on Oscar Wilde. Do you believe he should have been jailed for being gay? Where does it end?

I always wondered what happened to Geraldo Rivera, the TV reporter who broke the investigative story on the mistreatment of developmentally disabled kids at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island and helped inspire me to become a journalist. Ten years ago, Rivera was behaving like a blowhard on Fox News. Once a contestant on "The Apprentice," he had considered Trump a friend and lauded his administration. Rivera's views changed after Jan. 6, and after Trump’s Madison Square Garden fiasco Oct. 27, he endorsed Harris. Rivera is half-Jewish and half-Puerto Rican. Comedian Tony Hinchliffe’s characterization of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” was too much for him.

Now I’m with Geraldo, as uncomfortable as it makes me to say it. I'm with Liz Cheney, Anthony Scaramucci, and, most definitely, Stuart Stevens. Republicans all. I may not agree with them on policy, but every one of them understands history. And politics. So do Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Harris has moved so far to the center, she's landed to the right of Ronald Reagan, a political consultant pointed out to me recently. She got it right on the border wall the first time in 2019, when she called it a medieval vanity project. She had to dumb that one down in a big way, emphasizing "border security" and her prosecution of transnational gangs. I don't mind the Glock so much. But when she says, "I'm a capitalist" I find myself cringing.

None of that matters. Not right now. I got the memo, and she has, too. Welcome to America 2024.

Who hasn’t gotten the memo? Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who has come out against Trump but not endorsed Harris, and the Uncommitted folks in Michigan led by her sister, whose Jill Stein votes might swing the election. Could you forgive them for that? I’m not sure I could. Will they forgive themselves for the damage a second Trump presidency does to the Palestinian cause?

Maybe the Madison Square Garden rally was a turning point. Here. I’ll just say it despite my fear of the evil eye (I got the superstition but not the religion). The smart money is on Kamala Harris to win Pennsylvania, with nearly half a million Puerto Ricans, and Pennsylvania could make the difference. Harris campaign manager David Plouffe wrote Friday afternoon on X that late-deciding voters are “breaking by double digits” for the vice president. His comments echo those shared by senior campaign officials on a call with reporters, according to Politico.

“We have believed all along that there were still undecided voters here, and that the close of this race was really, really important,” said one of the senior campaign officials, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the state of the race. “And we are seeing that be the case as we are closing out in the last week.”

The official said that a recent focus group with undecided voters in a battleground state showed that the racist, misogynistic and vulgar language at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York over the weekend isn’t just impacting Puerto Rican and Latino voters, but undecided voters as a whole.

“It really kind of crystallized for them the choice in their minds between the vice president, who they're seeing talk about being a president for everyone, someone focused on them and solving their problems, and Trump, and these really kind of dark, divisive language and events and activities,” the official told Politico. “We don't always see, when we're talking to swing voters, anything that you can really see them kind of finalize their point of view or finalize their opinion.”

The decade I spent in Africa taught me that a guy selling sodas on the street in Sierra Leone is likely to be more politically savvy than a whole lot of Americans, even college-educated ones. People in other countries, especially countries with recent experience of war, know how much is at stake in an election.

Now more Americans do, too, even if they’ve had to be dragged kicking and screaming to that realization. Hell, Geraldo Rivera got the memo. It’s up to the rest of us to get it, too.

I'm Afraid of Americans ::: David Bowie

Stupid ::: Bobby Womack

Politiki ::: Zieti

There Is A War ::: Leonard Cohen

Politik Kills ::: Manu Chao

Everybody Ought To Treat A Stranger Right ::: Ry Cooder

Enemy ::: Angel Olsen

Political World ::: Bob Dylan

My Enemy :::: Mark Bingham