patriotism, like all forms of love, requires fighting to be better

Hello again, after a long time. Some of you know why I paused this newsletter, but for those who don’t: my family lost my younger brother about two months ago, very suddenly and in a way we may never make peace with. It was a short entry in the list of things happening in the world now that are Not Okay, but on the smaller scale of our lives, its impact is obviously very, very large.

Thanks to so many of you for your kind and caring messages, and thanks to all of you reading this for sticking with me on this newsletter while I took such a long break so soon after starting it. Each week for a long time now, I’ve thought that maybe that would be the week where I came back to my normal life and work, and in the middle of each week some emotional earthquake upended my life. This week, the two literal earthquakes in Southern California were (luckily, thankfully) not even close to the most disruptive things that happened.

But I do want to write again, which is a nice feeling. This is going to be short and sweet, though, because I’m still just beginning to feel like a human being with a functional brain instead of a character in some emotional torture porn flick or a Kenneth Lonergan film or something.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the Independence Day holiday, and this year, for obvious reasons, it seemed like the tensions I feel were shared by more people than I’ve realized before. I heard and read people reflecting about how terrible it is to celebrate a country that has and continues to commit horrors in our name. I read takes about how the only independence day we should ever celebrate is Juneteenth, the day that slavery finally ended in the United States. The Fourth of July doesn’t feel like a celebration so much as it does a reminder of too many broken promises.

Then yesterday I listened to the Fourth of July episode of the podcast Lovett or Leave It, which ended with a monologue from the host, former Clinton and Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett, that I thought was worth sharing. It’s Lovett in full inspirational speech mode, which is somehow both too cheesy and the register where I often find him most convincing.

“Sometimes I think Donald Trump became president by sneaking through the spaces in our words, that we’ve drained so much of the moral language from the way we talk about politics. We don’t talk about character or decency, we talk about authenticity. We don’t talk about spirit or love of life or care for fellow human beings, we talk about likeability. And when we drain those moral words from the way we talk about politics, it left spaces and cracks for the worst people in our society to sneak right through. And that’s true when Donald Trump hosts a fascist parade and calls it patriotism.

“And I think we’ve been forced to ask ourselves what we really mean when we say we like this country, and I think what we’ve discovered is that we love something despite the horrors we’re seeing every day, and we love coming together with people who care as much as we do to fight back. I think we’ll look back on this as the moment where we decided that we weren’t participating because we were patriotic, we were patriotic because we were participating, and [the moment where] we were forced to confront the fact that a lot of elected people – a lot of Republicans in power – call themselves patriots, but we know something deeper. We know that they’ve forgotten to actually love their country, and we had to figure out how to love our country enough for them too.

“And I think that’s exciting because there will be a last moment when Donald Trump is president and when that day comes, we’ll all still be here, paying attention, and caring a whole fucking lot. And at that moment, we’ll be able to not just stop the worst shit from fucking happening; we’ll actually be able to do something positive for people. And then we’ll be glad that we held onto this idea of patriotism, even when a whole bunch of fucking creeps tried to take it away from us.”

I also thought back to the commencement address that Danielle Allen gave at Pomona College last year, published in the Atlantic, about ideas of what it means to be a citizen of this country. “I say citizenship and civic agency because citizenship is not about a formal status,” she said. “It is about empowerment and taking responsibility for your world.”

When I re-read that line, I thought: that’s maybe also a pretty good definition of love – being empowered to care about others and taking responsibility for how you treat them. For a variety of reasons, I’ve been obsessed lately with the questions of how to love people even when they’ve hurt us grievously, whether or not we should even try to love those people, and whether showing love and compassion for someone who’s done something wrong – whether you’re intimately connected to that person or they’re a stranger who has entered your life for terrible reasons – has any power to make things better. And what about if you’re the person who’s done the harm? How do you show love then, and what can that love accomplish?

These are questions that govern the relationships we have with the people in our lives, but I think they’re also fundamental questions of politics. Whether or not we should make reparations for slavery, for instance, is a question of how we make amends for doing the worst possible thing humans can do to one another. It’s a question of how to apologize, and what is required for forgiveness.

I think one of the problems in American life right now is that we’re not explicit enough about the links between our politics and the ways we treat each other interpersonally, which I think is something Lovett alludes to. After all, the social compact is essentially just an agreement around how we’ll protect and care for each other as a group. Politics is deciding how to care for your family, but your family is everyone.

“Clarify your values,” Allen said in her speech. “But connect them to the basic question of what is good for our community together. A shared story.”

I don’t like to give up on people. It’s actually a problem; sometimes it takes me too long to get out of things that are obviously not good for me. But I think love can sometimes be about fighting not to give up, fighting to push people to be better. Sometimes the people who are being pushed don’t want to be better, and sometimes the pushing is inappropriate. But sometimes the fighting is necessary. It’s important to hold the people you love accountable for not behaving in hurtful ways. It’s important to hold our government accountable for taking care of the children in our care. That’s love, and that’s patriotism.

So even though I still believe Independence Day is mostly a marker of our failures, I think feeling patriotic on that day is maybe good. Because being patriotic is about looking at our failures, figuring out how to heal the people hurt by them, and pushing the people who need to be pushed to be better and learn from our mistakes.

“We make mistakes!” Allen told the Pomona grads. “We have to enter into the business of democratic agency with humility.”

And let’s all hope that one day, if we love hard enough and with enough humility and with enough fight, we’ll be happy we didn’t give up on loving our country.

Tell me what to read

I’ve got two people to recommend some books for this week, both very old friends, Evan Arnold and Maryann James-Daley. This one is kind of intimidating, because Evan and Maryann are two of the most well-read people I have ever met. Evan reads everything, so I fully expect him to have already read most of the books I come up with. And Maryann is a librarian, so she knows books professionally. But here goes.

I’m going to come back to Evan’s request again in a later issue with more recommendations for it, because this is my favorite of all of the prompts I’ve gotten and one I’ve been thinking about it all the time. Evan writes:

“I'm on paternity leave at the moment, and I'm debating whether I want to return to my job at the end of it or to try something else. It is, in a way, an investigation, with the specific question of, "Does it matter if what a person does has a positive impact?” Context: my current job is as the CTO of a company that does software for lenders to facilitate mortgage closings. It's 100% socially neutral: no bad impact, no positive impact (except, perhaps, a less frustrating loan closing). Am I find stay somewhere 100% neutral? Or should I like... save the orangoutangs or something?”

I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I just wanted to highlight one book I read recently that speaks to the question of what we owe the world and that feels particularly timely this week: “American Spy,” by Lauren Wilkinson.

The narrator of “American Spy” is a woman named Marie, a black American FBI agent in the 1980s whose racist, sexist bosses undervalue her. She’s recruited by the CIA to help undermine the government of Thomas Sankara, the real-life Marxist president of Burkina Faso, a man sometimes compared to Che Guevara. The book takes the form of journals Marie is leaving for her children, who are the only people, Wilkinson noted in an interview with the podcast So Many Damn Books, to whom she will ever tell the truth.

The book is deceptively straightforward and fast-paced; it’s one of the few books I finished and thought immediately that I couldn’t wait to see the movie. But Marie turns out to be a hugely complex narrator because of the way Wilkinson conveys her restraint, mistrust, and ambivalence, not just about her work but about pretty much everyone around her. And so even though the book is filled with action and spy gadgets, it’s also an almost melancholic reflection on what our duties are as citizens, what we owe our countries and each other, and all the different ways a black person can be a spy in America.

There was one line in particular that made me think the book might be interesting for Evan’s investigation. Marie describes Sankara to her children; Wilkinson is skilled at making this historical figure who apparently is considered basically a saint in Burkina Faso feel like a complicated, fully-formed human.

Marie meditates for a moment, she tells her kids, “thinking about [Sankara], the way he used his power to pursue freedom for others. That was love for him. For me, that is goodness. Either way, I hope that you will share those values.”

I was struck by the distinction she makes there, between love and goodness. It seems to me that one of those qualities is universal and one isn’t; almost everyone loves but not everyone is good. If pursuing freedom for others is love, is it mandatory? What if it’s just goodness?

I don’t think the book comes down firmly on one side or the other, but it dramatizes the question and many possible answers in a really wonderful way.

The second person I want to recommend some books to this week is someone I’ve known even longer, my friend Maryann James-Daley (side note: one of the best things about this project has been hearing from so many people I haven’t spoken to in ages, and from people who I don’t even know.) Maryann also has a parenting-related ask, for books she can read when her concentration is shot because she is taking care of an 11-month-old and a 5-year-old.

She says: “I'd love a recommendation for something easy for my child-addled brain, something that I can easily pick up and put down again OR is so riveting that I will be consume in one sitting, probably late night, when my children and husband are asleep. Murder mysteries with strong female protagonists are my jam, but not a requirement.”

So, first of all, to Maryann’s jam: you should also read “American Spy”! It’s not a murder mystery, but there are murders, the lady spy protagonist is one of the most interesting characters I’ve read in a long time, and it moves so fast – I read it in a couple of hours – so hopefully it won’t keep you up too late.

Maryann also mentioned that short story collections are her friend, which is awesome (I mostly read short stories for all of college, which is the closest experience I’ve had to only being able to read in short, interrupted blocks of time). But I’m going to take a slightly different path and recommend some poetry.

One thing I love about reading poetry is that it gives so much pleasure in so little time and you can slip it in basically anywhere. But I’m also thinking about what might help a “child-addled” brain. My brain is rarely addled by children, but it is addled a lot, and I sometimes turn to poetry for the moments of quiet and clarity and short, lyrical insight poems can have.

Here are three books of poetry that I think serve three different purposes, but all of which I think might be good for moments in between chasing a toddler.

“American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assasin” by Terrance Hayes, which is, fair warning, the saddest and most political of the three. Hayes wrote this poem sequence after the election of Donald Trump, and it’s urgent and angry and beautiful. Of course, as you might suspect, it’s timely, but not necessarily for the reasons you’d suspect – one of its most timely and interesting commentaries lies in the way it plays with form, which is part of why it’s such a pleasure to read. As Parul Sehgal noted in her review, for Hayes “the excitement of the sonnet stems from its insistence on change: It must include a volta — a sudden turn, a new argument. It’s what makes the sonnet implicitly American, Hayes has said, with admiration and naked hope — the ability to change your mind, the willingness to change your course.”

“Autobiography of Red” by Anne Carson, a “novel in verse,” and one of my favorite books of all time. It’s poems, easy to pick up and put down and read in short passages, but it tells a coherent story with some narrative drive too, in case you want to read it all at once in the middle of the night. The story is about a boy named Geryon, who is quasi-literally a Greek monster with red skin and wings and also just a modern, struggling, shy gay kid. Geryon flees an abusive home and falls in love both with photography and an impossibly cool young man named Herakles. If you know the Greek myth, you may sort of know where this story is going, but it ends up being quite a bit more ambiguous as an exploration of how we learn to grow into ourselves and love.

Also, it contains what may be my favorite line of poetry, one I think about nearly every day as a reminder of a good way to live: “Reality is a sound, you have to tune into it not just keep yelling.”

And I’m sure Maryann and many of the rest of you are familiar with Tracy K. Smith, the poet laureate of the United States, but if you haven’t read “Life on Mars,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, you should. It’s a sci-fi, Bowie-inflected tribute to her father, who as an engineer worked on the Hubble telescope. I turn to this book when I want to be reminded about how small we are in the scale of the universe but how huge our intimate moments can be. I find it a huge comfort.

Thanks again for reading, and please as always bear with me while I figure out what this (and my life!) is going to be. If you like this kind of dispatch from my brain and know someone else who might, too, please do share it. You can subscribe here.