Introduction: An Exile’s Story

Everyone, once they pass the age of seventy, becomes a historian.

But one of the dilemmas of growing older is how do you disentangle your ever accruing personal history from the "history" of your times. How do you judge what actions you took that changed the course of your life and what events outside your control shaped your destiny.

And how do you tell the kids?

How do you explain to yourself and to the kids and anyone else who loves the idea of America how it was possible that one day, the citizens of the most powerful country in history elected an authoritarian, neo-fascist, television celebrity to be their president. And then four years later, having voted him out of office, Americans were confronted by the fact that their country was in an incipient state of Civil War with the Capitol building under assault by the former President’s supporters.

How do you explain that the society fragmented along so many axes it became almost impossible to have a discussion about it. It was a fragmentation that went beyond traditional left and right in politics but existed between generations, between races, between educated and uneducated. One region of the country seemed to have nothing in common with another.

And all of these fault lines were deepened and exploited for profit by the media: serious and trivial.

Such profound fragmentation didn’t happen overnight, it didn’t happen when al-Qaeda ushered in the new millennium, or the Soviet Union collapsed.

It has been gradual, almost imperceptible, but has reached the point where America’s continuation in its present form as a republican democracy of fifty states can be questioned. It is nothing less than a calamity and, without intending to, I have spent half my life documenting it from afar.

I am an American, New York born. I am also an expatriate, exile, immigrant, and alien. I left the US half a lifetime ago for all the reasons, positive and negative, that lead a person to take the painful step of leaving the country of their birth for another, with no job to go to and just the vague hope that things will be better in the New World.

Leaving was necessary. I was thirty-five and a failure in every sense of the word. A man falling rapidly down the social class ladder in America’s supposedly classless society. A son of a doctor, grandson of a dentist, my talents had destined me for the professions: the law or the academy. Instead I was working as a temporary secretary on the executive floor of Gannett Co. Inc. America’s largest newspaper chain. My CV also included years as a New York city cab driver, a small amount of paid employment as an actor, and a very brief stint as a copy aide at The Washington Post.

Then life intervened. I met a woman and we fell in love and got married. Her parents were English and she had a British passport, even though she had never lived in the UK. In 1985, we decided to give London a try and just off the plane I discovered a truth of exile:

If you want to truly understand your country, you must leave it behind. When the small agitations of existence are removed from daily routines you can suddenly see your homeland’s essence.

A year after I arrived in London for what has turned out to be forever, The Guardian newspaper ran an editorial noting that America, a country many of its readers thought they knew well, had become a strange place. Whoever wrote the unsigned editorial was referring to the US’s turn to the extreme right politically.

In response, I wrote a brief essay and sent it to the opinion editor on spec. The piece was distilled from the fresh understanding of America leaving it behind had given me. Amazingly, the paper decided to run the article under the headline,

Torn in the USA

The changes the Guardian notes and doesn’t comprehend are real and are caused by a confluence of three things: a hideous decline in the quality of education; the dramatic shift of population from the northeastern quarter of the country to the south and southwest; and the oligarchical control of the media.

Remember, this was written in 1986, and very little has happened since to shake my view. The piece went on:

Europeans come to the US to visit the great metropolises of the East and West Coast or rough and windy Chicago. They see on the streets recognizable faces and shapes of lives and assume that US life is like their own.

Forget it. That isn’t the way most of the country lives.

Visitors don’t go out to the junctions of the interstate highways, to the communities sprung up along the ringroads surrounding the Sunbelt cities whose existence is owed to the coming of the six-lane blacktop. Sitting out there are great, sprawling developments of mock-Tudor, mock-Spanish houses with a neon strip of shopping malls and fast food franchises.

These sprawling places which have sprung up in the last 20 years are inhabited primarily by refugees from the mill towns of the rust belt and small farming communities of the upper midwest.

The people who were forced to move are primarily white, working and lower middle class. With the recent exception of Bruce Springsteen, they traditionally have had no mainstream cultural voice.

There is a block of the body politic, wrenched from their roots and home soil, not by bombs, but by distant political events and the painful reality of overpopulation in a post-industrial age … With the life they grew up expecting to live no longer possible they try to set down roots in windswept desert soil and fail.

They come home from work and put on the TV and see a relentless stream of evangelists offering simple ideas about how to feel better and about salvation ... The evangelists invite them to become part of a community (and please send $10 to my ministry). And many do.

So there it is. You have a population under 40 who can absorb data but can’t think, living isolated from their roots in sprawling ex-urbs of hideous sameness seeking a sense of community not in each other, but by what they get through the tube.

I was writing about people my own age, people I had met and observed on my journey away from my class and down the class ladder. The menial jobs in warehouses and dishwashing I worked were partially undertaken out of a sense of romance and curiosity about a life I had not been born into: precarious and working class. But a job in public relations, staging sparsely attended events about government health care in Appalachia, and then driving a cab in New York while the city burned around me were not romantic at all. And fetching Al Neuharth, Gannett’s CEO, a couple of hot dogs with everything from the hot dog guy at the corner of 53rd and Madison, was just plain odd.

On the other side of the ocean, in London, with the daily white noise of American life silenced, these memories from my journey downward stood out clearly. Listening to Britons misunderstand what was happening in the US and politely trying to point out where they were wrong, I started to discern the causes of America’s slide away from the noble achievements of victory in the war and finally making good on the promise of civil rights.

After the Guardian article came out, British news outlets started asking me to explain America to the insatiably curious Brits.

In October 1992, the BBC World Service sent me back to report about the state of America during that year’s Presidential contest between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. I based most of the report around an evening in a cafe near Blue Hill, Maine. The summer folk were gone, it was just townies in the restaurant that night. I listened to one story after another of disaster: a retired fellow who died before his time because he had no health insurance; a single mother from a blue-blood background living near the poverty line because her ex wouldn’t cough up child support and she couldn’t afford a lawyer; the waitress being hammered by a decline in tip revenue because of the recession.

I had left an America drunk on Reaganism and these stories were tales of the hang-over.

The following year the World Service sent me back for two weeks to drive around the Midwest. I heard more stories of disappointment. I wasn’t looking for them. These were the stories people wanted to tell me.

Throughout the decade, while working as NPR’s London correspondent, I would burn a couple of weeks of annual leave and do these trips for the BBC.

In Mississippi and along the US-Mexico border I heard stories of lingering racism and economic discontent and alienation from the country people saw on their televisions. You didn’t have to look for these discontents. These were just the tales of ordinary people that any traveler, curious about the lives of others, would hear.

The 1990s were America’s unipolar moment, the US was the global hegemon, and the Washington/New York media did not report these stories of alienation from the small towns and geographically isolated parts of the country. My colleagues were swept up in the glory of working in the imperial capitals. The provinces were no longer of interest. They could not imagine what was going on in ordinary American lives.

And I too was caught up in America’s unipolar decade: reporting for NPR on the decisive American pressure that ended the Bosnian War, and the US role in bringing the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland into being.

But the trips to the US for the BBC were crucial. They were a self-exile’s attempt not to lose complete touch with his native land.

I banked the impressions from those journeys in fly-over country and in January 2016 just before the primary season began with Donald Trump as the Republican front runner, I made a BBC radio documentary explaining why—although the professional political pundits were dismissing him—Trump was very likely to win the nomination. Because Trump seemed the logical endpoint to the decay I had been observing since before I left the US.

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There is not a single American life, there is not a single American history. This is the history of my life. An African-American my age, would have a different story to tell, as would a gay man. The personal story of a woman of any color or sexual preference would be more different still.

But there is enough shared history among all the children of America’s World War 2 victory to understand what underpins the counry’s calamity.

First, there is the catastophic decline in education at the top, in the middle and at the bottom. At the top the decline has been caused by the commodification of learning. Elite education has been turned into a product and students and parents are customers purchasing a ticket to permanent residence in the class from which I ejected myself. For everyone else, the decline has been caused by starving schools of adequate funding and then politicizing the curriculum especially the teaching of history.

As a result two generations have been educated with no knowledge of the past, particularly the recent past.

Second, there are the relentless changes in the world of work. Work is the force that gives American life meaning. When it disappears, when it becomes more casual, insecure and unstable, then that is reflected in the society. American society is more unstable today than when the Children of Victory were growing up. Most of the American population lives with economic insecurity and third world levels of personal debt. The casual nature of so much work means many feel only casually connected to the society.

These insights about work were painfully learned. At the age of 55, at what I thought was the height of my career, I was laid off and have never had full-time, salaried employment again. When I read in 2015 that American life expectancy was declining because of a phenomenon identified as “deaths of despair” I knew exactly what Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who coined the phrase, meant.

The idea of Deaths of Despair seemed shocking to many because the crisis in work and the devastation that decades of its absence wrought in so many American communities had been ignored by the national news media, which brings me to the third thing in the shared history of the Children of Victory, White/Black/Straight/Gay

The news media, particularly broadcast news, has regressed to the historical mean, and I do mean, “mean.” It is a business based on outrage and fear which is completely at odds with its professed ideals of building an informed citizenry. This is true not just at outrage machines like Fox News but traditional institutions like the New York Times, whose advertising rates are based on the number of articles online visitors click on. There are no clicks in stories about unemployment, so full, regular coverage of the devastating changes in the world of work, has been relegated to monthly reports on the unemployment rate, a tendentious measure at best.

Broadcast news is a business based on soundbites which over the last fifty years have grown shorter and shorter. In 1968, that year of nearly revolution and hope, evening news reports on the Presidential campaign between Richard M. Nixon and Hubert Humphrey used soundbites from the two men that averaged around sixty seconds in length. Twenty years later, in the campaign between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis the average length of soundbites in the evening news was down to 8.5 seconds each. As someone who has worked in broadcast journalism for decades let me assure you, nothing beyond a slogan can be said in 8 seconds. That’s a total of 24 words or less on average. The only sentences in this paragraph that are 24 words or less are the first sentence and the one just before this one. The first sentence is an assertion without proof, the second sentence I refer to is a free-floating fact without context. You can make any number of outrageous claims in two 24 word sentences, and pundits on cable news are encouraged to do just that.

The fourth area the Children of Victory share is a memory of a time when racial progress seemed real. This progress was purchased in the 1960s with the blood of many martyrs but the battle for African-American civil rights and voting rights seemed decisive. It wasn’t. Civil rights are legal guarantees, they do not compel racists to love people of another race. Nor do they force politicians to stop exploiting racial divisions for the purpose of winning elections. Which is what the Republican party did and today the Confederate mindset thrives not just in the South but in large chunks of the Midwest and Mountain West. It has made the United States as ungovernable as it was in the years before the Civil War.

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So to go back to the original question, how do I disentangle my personal history from the history of America’s Calamity. And how do I tell you about it?

If you grew up in the privileged white world of New York’s Upper East Side and Philadelphia’s Main Line as I did, how do you describe going through adolescence at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and your own first interactions with African-Americans?

How do you describe what it was like to be a teen-ager in the years of assassinations and riots, balancing the shock of the murders with the need to get a date for Friday night?

How do you explain the complexities of American foreign interventions in the country’s time of absolute hegemony to people who only know the world through soundbite discourse and shockingly brief news reports with violent images that have no context?

How do you dispassionately tell about attending the monthly camp meeting of the Natchez branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the moment you realized they were a bit more than a “heritage organization” as they pledged allegiance to the Confederate flag?

How do you tell the kids, and remind one another, about what life was like before anyone questioned whether Americans were the good guys because we defeated fascism in Europe and Asia?

There is only one way: memories and stories.

I have been cursed with the inability to forget.

"I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world." Jorge Luis Borges, Funes the Memorious.

But these memories need to be put into a wider historical context because I have a genetic need to organize my experiences into something larger.

“Every Jew has his system, his idea of the world, his economic and social theory … He is a great builder of doctrines.” Bernard Lazare, Job’s Dungheap

I need to tell my stories and I need you to learn from them.

“That moment that his face I see/I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Anceint Mariner.

I have only stories to tell and some of the stories are amusing because frankly, unlike the Ancient Mariner, I’m a pretty funny guy.

The Ancient Mariner Leaves the Wedding Guest, His Tale Told, Gustave Doré

All of the stories contain factual reporting alongside the reminiscence because I’m a journalist, and committing journalism is a hard habit to break.

I am also a historian and my exile’s story of an American life is based around a personal idea of history.

The basic unit for measuring history is not a decade or a century, or an an era or an epoch. The basic unit is a grandparent’s age—roughly 70 years. A child first becomes aware of time’s passage in conversations with the grandparent.

“When I was your age, we did this,” a grandparent might say, and for a while the dialogue between a child and grandparent becomes fixed on the subject of the past.

“What was winter like when you were little, grandpa?”

“I don’t know, Mike, it seems like winters were much colder when I was a boy.”

My grandfather and I had that conversation in 1956 on a freezing winter day. I remember it every time I read about climate change or another winter passes with little or no snow.

Those of us born in the numerical middle of the America century have all reached a grandparent’s age, although not all of us are grandparents. That’s because we changed society’s expectations about what a family is and ended the obligation to start one in your twenties.

I am one of those who has reached a grandfather’s age without grandchildren but nevertheless want to answer the five year old’s question, what were things like when you were my age?

Let’s begin this self-exile’s history of America with one possible answer.

Now read on to:

CHAPTER ONE: INNOCENCE, AMERICA 1950s

And, please, share History of a Calamity, with your friends and if your children are old enough, humbly suggest they read some of it to give them an understanding of how America got to where it is.