Dear Dr. Steinberg:

Enclosed find a copy of Alfred Kazin’s “A Walker in the City,” the memoir we discussed about Brownsville (he says it was pronounced “Brunzvil”) in the ’30s. You’ll have to tell me whether you recognize any of the characters. Are you the “cancer specialist” in the where-they-are-now list of his peers on page 13?

Yvonne and I have just returned from four days of post-electioneering in West Palm. Two days after the election her boss told her to pack her bags; the “Democratic Recount Committee” needed Spanish-speaking lawyers. I volunteered too, even though my Spanish is terrible. It seemed like a great romantic adventure. My stomach was acting up on the flight – I thought you’d want to know – but it could have been the lunch I had at the Pakistan Tea House, or the changeover in Atlanta, which I always associate with flying to Alabama to work on my death-penalty case.

Our first assignment in West Palm was to return 8,000 calls from people who reported that their vote had not been properly recorded. About a hundred lawyers showed up for this duty, and if the person they called wasn’t home, they left a message, with two phone numbers to call back. Those extensions were on the table next to us, and they started ringing immediately – it seems everyone in Palm Beach screens their calls. It quickly became apparent that no one had been assigned to answer the call-back phones, so we took over that job.

We were supposed to get the people off the phone right away, to clear the line. That wasn’t easy. We’d ask if we could call them right back, but they didn’t want to let us go. The double-punched and Buchanan ballots may be a joke to the rest of the country, but these people were pissed, and pretty sensitive about it. “I’m not a senior,” they would say, or “I’m not stupid,” or “I’m an active person – I play tennis every day.” They bragged about their credentials or claimed that they had never voted in Florida before and were shocked that such antiquated equipment was still in use. One woman I spoke to just wanted some reassurance.

“Can you tell me who I voted for?” she asked.

“I can’t do that, ma’am,” I said, wondering how I was going to explain the concept of secret balloting without offending her.

“Okay,” she bargained. “Can you just tell me I didn’t vote for Buchanan? That’s all I really want to know.”

Not everyone had a problem recording their vote; some people said the ballot didn’t fit into the machine properly or they were refused help or a second ballot by a poll worker. Or they didn’t get to vote at all, because their name was not rostered. In a normal election, the poll worker is supposed to call the Election Board to verify the person’s registration, but this year of course the phones were going crazy at the Election Board, and no one was answering them.

Our phones also rang continuously, and we answered them for about ten hours a day. We assessed whether the caller had a legitimate complaint, and if we thought they did, we asked them to come sign an affidavit. It wasn’t a hard sell; even when we told people there was already a line, they couldn’t wait to come in.

Obviously I am ignoring your advice to get more rest and reduce the stress in my life. But I am also feeling less intimidated by your diagnosis. Since you told me my heartburn and chest pain are symptoms of gastro-esophagal reflux disease I have discovered that it’s a very trendy condition. It turns out a lot of my nervous friends have it.

I’ve also learned that it’s associated with imminent matrimony. My friend Jeremy and my Aunt Bonnie told me that, like me, they got it before their weddings. In my case it was pretty dramatic; it started the moment we told my mother. We have since decided that’s the moment we actually got engaged, since before that it didn’t seem real to either of us. We had been talking about it hypothetically for a while, and then Yvonne’s parents invited us to go to Patagonia with them. We knew we’d see all her relatives in Buenos Aires and we figured we’d have to tell them something about why she was back in town with the same guy they met six years ago. So we started talking about maybe telling them we were engaged, and that led to fantasies about what kind of wedding we could have, and the next thing we knew we were planning logistics with my mom. I got sick right away; I couldn’t get out of bed for a week and the top of my stomach, right under the point where the lowest ribs meet, was killing me. It was kind of the same as the election cliffhanger feeling, of being on the edge of something and fearing what will happen.

Even since I got home from Florida, my stomach has been feeling okay. I’m not sure what made the difference: I’m trying everything. Rich, my therapist, says I’m somaticizing my stress and I should act out more. Marie sent me to an acupuncturist, who said I have rebellious qi, but I don’t think that’s what Rich meant. Probably the biggest factor was losing the anxiety about our marriage. When Yvonne dropped me off at the Palm Beach airport ten minutes after my final phone call to a distressed voter, she said, “You know we’re going to be talking about this for the rest of our lives.” And at that moment I had no doubt we would be together forever.

We’re leaving for Patagonia the day after Thanksgiving; I’ll make another appointment to come see you when we get back. I just hope these damn elections are over by then.

Respectfully,

Josh

Dear Paul,

Last night I closed The Hub. It’s a little bar in downtown Tampa with famously, almost undrinkably strong drinks. During the day the place is filled with troubled people and the smell of urine. But at night cheery, horny college kids join the crowd of depressed daytime drunks, and at 3 a.m. the bartenders have to turn the lights on to scare everyone out. As 3 a.m. approached last night, I didn’t want to leave. I was busy having a great conversation, I think, with this beautiful woman who was about a foot taller than I was.

We were talking, of course, about the election, which was going to take place in a few hours. Instead of admitting that I really didn’t care about the election, I overcompensated by talking about it very loudly.

A guy with a typical central-Florida mullet haircut stopped by our table and said, “Y’know, Al Gore is giving a speech or something in Tampa at 4 a.m.”

“He must be trying to capture the drunkard’s vote. Where’s the rally at: an after-hours club?” I asked. The tall woman laughed.

“No,” said the mullet. “At the cancer center.” Everyone stopped laughing. The word “cancer” will do that. The guy explained that Tampa was the last stop on Gore’s thirty-hour-long final campaign swing. This was it, he said: the whole campaign was going to end a few miles away. History would be made, in Tampa.

A week earlier Al Gore had held a rally a couple blocks from the newspaper where I work, and Jimmy Buffett performed. I fucking hate Jimmy Buffett. I used to work in a beach-style restaurant across the street from the stadium and the people who ran the restaurant were Parrotheads (that’s what official Jimmy Buffett fans call themselves). I had to listen to Buffett constantly. And when he’d play at the stadium, the bar would turn up the Buffett even louder and hire a Buffett cover band to play on the outside patio and the Parrotheads would all take the day off from their corporate jobs and gather and drink and puke on each other per Buffett’s musical suggestion. Now when I see a group of drunk Parrotheads with their hands in a prayer position on top of their heads, all pantomiming the “fins to the left…fins to the right” routine, I want to smash something. I didn’t want to go see history being made if it was going to involve Jimmy Buffett.

The bartenders turned the lights on and everyone ran outside real quick before the people they were trying to sleep with saw their drunk, red faces under the unflattering fluorescence.

“So, you wanna go to my house and drink a bit more,” I said, looking up into the woman’s face.

“No, we should go see Al Gore,” she answered.

You do what you gotta do. We got in my truck and smoked a joint as we drove across town to the cancer center. On the radio Fred Durst was shouting,

Now I know you be lovin’ this shit right here!
L. I. M. P. Bizkit is right here!

“Now that’s some lyrical genius,” I said, passing the joint to her. “Not many artists realize that words rhyme with themselves. Y’know? Any time you’re stuck for a rhyme, you can just use the same word twice: it always works. Bon Jovi does that shit too.”

“Bon Jovi played on behalf of Al Gore last night in Miami,” she told me.

At that moment I hated Al Gore.

We drove onto the campus and found the parked motorcade of limos, police motorcycles, busses, and an ambulance out front of the cancer center. We joined a crowd of about 75 supporters with Gore signs standing on the curb across the street. A bunch of drunken fraternity guys were taking group pictures with a sign reading: “Phi Delta Theta supports Al Gore.”

So far in Gore’s camp we have Jimmy Buffett, Bon Jovi, and some meathead frat boys.

Five minutes later a woman in some kind of uniform, but without any badges or patches, came over and told us we weren’t allowed to congregate. “This is State of Florida property,” she said, meanly. “You can’t stand here.”

An old woman with a Gore sign said, timidly, “But it said in the paper he was going to be here at 4 a.m.”

“He is. He’s inside. But you can’t see him ’cause it’s not for the public. There’s a public appearance later.”

The old lady asked, kindly, “Where will that be?”

“I don’t have to give you any information,” the guard-type lady shouted. “I’m here to protect Al Gore. You have to leave.”

The pack dispersed. I thought it was pretty funny that these people, who were so into politics that they’d stay up till 4 a.m. to see a presidential candidate, would do exactly what some anonymous woman told them to do, just because her clothes were dark and looked like a uniform. My tall date and I defiantly stuck around alone until a male police officer came by and asked us what we were doing.

“We just wanted to see the Vice President.”

“Are you with the press?”

I could have said yes, since I am in fact a newspaper reporter. But I’d get fired for flashing my press pass around when I’m wasted and trying to get laid, so I said, “No, we just wanted to creep around and see if we could get a look.” Halfway through the sentence I realized that “creep around” was perhaps not the best phrase to use when trying to get near a potential President.

“He’s just visiting people in the hospital,” the officer said. “It’s gonna be televised, but you’re not going to get to see him here in person. After this he’s holding a public rally at Democratic Headquarters downtown at 5:30.” He gave us the address and smiled. He was very nice.

Back in the car I tried to think of ways to get out of going. “5:30 in the morning?” I said. “That’s an hour and a half from now. By the time Gore speaks our hangovers will be taking effect. And there’s nowhere to get more alcohol. At my house, there’s beer.” But she still wanted to go, and I still wanted her, so we headed back downtown.

The scene at Tampa Democratic Headquarters, across the parking lot from Jimmy’s Sod, looked like an indie-rock concert was about to start: small P.A., small crowd of 150 people gathered in front of a small outdoor stage while another 200 lined up outside the gate to be frisked. Security weeded out the possible protesters and let campaign volunteers, the converted, in first, as “Love Train” blasted over the P.A.

Three eight-year-old girls ran weaving in and out of the line screaming about Gore, more impatient to see the man than their parents were. “When can we see Al Gore?” the girls yelled. Hearing their little voices say his name reminded me that last week, I had reluctantly entered a conversation about the election and realized halfway through that I had been referring to Al Gore as “Bob Dole.” Nobody corrected me.

The crowd was smiley and happy and young and old and white. Not one black person.

On the way in the gate, they handed my date a sign. I declined. John Cougar Mellencamp was singing “Small Town.” Then Stevie Wonder: “Higher Ground.” Then John Mellencamp again with “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.”

I lit a cigarette and noticed I was the only one smoking. I looked around for other smokers, expecting to be shot at any moment by the Secret Service guys who were creeping around with those curly wires coming from their ears. I finally spotted a stream of smoke across the crowd and traced it to the mouth of the sound guy. I knew him from hanging out in Tampa rock clubs. His name is RatBoy. He has a mullet too. I left my date to go talk to him.

“Good choice of music,” I said to RatBoy, just as another John Cougar song started.

“I didn’t pick it. They brought a CD.”

“Music inspired by the Gore campaign?”

“Yeah, they told me to turn it up louder in…” He looked at his watch. “Two minutes: at 5:00 a.m.”

I asked why and he cranked the P.A. two minutes early to demonstrate: the crowd began talking louder to be heard over the Mellencamp and the pitch and mood heightened noticeably: it suddenly seemed like a happening scene.

I left RatBoy and on the way back to my tall date I ran into one of my co-workers from the paper. He wasn’t writing about the rally either. He just wanted to be part of history, he said. “This monumental battle is seeing its end not three blocks from my house!”

“Did you know Gore likes Bon Jovi?” I asked, watching the light drain from his eyes. It made me feel good.

A dark-haired seven-year-old boy, covered in Gore stickers from his face to his feet, climbed up on stage and held up a Gore sign and began a chant of “Gore! Gore! Gore!” I wondered if that’s what the crowd chanted in the coliseum when the Christians were being fed to the lions. The Gore crowd waved their signs frantically and the music (that “B-b-b-baby, You Just Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” song) blared. I heard someone behind me ask if the boy on stage was Elian Gonzalez.

I looked for my date and spotted her stretching her arms up, holding her sign high in the air, standing on her tiptoes, looking about nine feet tall. Her long, flat stomach was exposed as she stretched and bounced on the balls of her feet in rhythm with the Elian kid’s chant and I was a little embarrassed for her so I went over to talk to her so she’d stop being so enthusiastic about politics.

By 5:15 a.m. the crowd was losing its wind a little. An hour and about a dozen John Cougar songs later, they seemed to have gained it back. Amazing. The sky was getting lighter. I couldn’t believe I had stuck it out so long. And then came the cavalcade. I was blinded by a forest of “Gore/Lieberman 2000″ signs.

Even after the signs stopped waving the crowd was still going nuts. I would have been going nuts too if, say, Prince were up there.

Florida Congressman Jim Davis introduced Lieberman, who sounded a lot like a baseball announcer; like Harry Carey, drawing out his vowels: “If we can win it heeeeere, we’re gonna win it eeeeeeverywheeeeeere.”

When Gore spoke I paid attention to the sign-language interpreter, who, judging from his enthusiasm, was himself a Gore supporter. His exaggerated hand signals and body gestures made him look like he was doing an Eminem impersonation.

The three politicians didn’t talk much about the issues. They just kissed Florida’s ass, which was striking because we really are the bastard state; we rarely get our ass kissed. But I have to say that Gore and company seemed pretty real. Maybe I’ll vote for him, if I vote. I was way too tired to care a whole lot. I was so over it that I had even lost interest in my date and as soon as Gore said his last word and John Cougar started again, I offered to take her home.

tired,

Michael Welch

Dear Congressman Synar,

I’ve never written to a dead man before. But there’s something I always meant to tell you, and I’m not going to let a little fatal cancer stop me. You probably won’t remember me. My mother used to do your mother’s hair in Muskogee in the ’60s. My parents still have one of her paintings, by the way, a brownish still life with flowers. When you were running for the House that first time, in 1978, I handed out some pamphlets for you at my town’s rodeo. I’m from Braggs. I was eight. I live in New York City now, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been to a rodeo in Oklahoma (or anywhere else).

At the Braggs rodeo, you shook my hand and gave me the “Synar for Congress” button off your own lapel – which I still have – and told me it was the last one off the printing presses. You’d think Elvis was handing me his sweaty scarf or something, I was so excited. I realize now how young you were. You were twenty-seven then, younger than I am now.

There’s this letter you sent me right after your election. I’ve kept it with me all these years. It’s written on House of Representatives letterhead marked “Mike Synar, Member-Elect, 2nd District, Oklahoma.” It reads:

Sarah –

Thank you so much for your help during our campaign. Don’t forget that when you become 18 you should get registered to vote. Get involved in government and our government will be better.

Thank you again Sarah

Best Wishes,
Mike Synar

Lord knows you probably mailed hundreds of these notes during your sixteen years in the House. It’s even possible an aide wrote it, but in my heart of hearts I believe it came from your own pen. I must have pulled it out of the envelope and re-read it a thousand times, dreaming. Some day, I thought.

How I pined to vote. In 1985, the movie “The Breakfast Club” came out. In my teen world, it was a really big deal. Every kid who saw it was supposed to identify with one of the stereotype characters – the rebel, the weird girl, the jock, the nerd, the princess. I identified with Anthony Michael Hall’s nerd, Brian. (Though I was only about nine months away from turning into black-clad, anti-social Ally Sheedy.) There was this one scene, my favorite, in which Ally Sheedy has just stolen Anthony Michael Hall’s wallet. Jock Emilio Estevez is looking at nerd Hall’s phony driver’s license, pointing out that it says the nerd, who looks like he’s twelve, is sixty-eight years old. Clearly, the kid’s no barfly, so the jock’s suspicious.

Jock: “What do you need a fake I.D. for?”

Nerd: “So I can vote.”

I cast my first vote in 1988, in the Montana Democratic primary, for Jesse Jackson. I handed out pamphlets for him too – hope you don’t mind that I started seeing other candidates. My love for Jackson was pure, was unconditional and real. I rode my bike eight miles on a highway shoulder, swerving around road kill, to hear him speak at the airport.

As you know, he lost. I’m sure you can relate. (Sorry about ’94, by the way. Some tough year for Democrats, especially those who campaigned so hard for the President. When your friend Bill Clinton delivered your eulogy in 1996 he said this about you, “When he was defeated in 1994, there was probably no person in America more responsible for it than me.”)

Now it’s that time again. On Tuesday, I’ll be going over to the housing project on 24th Street to vote. I think of you every time I draw the voting booth curtain behind me, every time I pull the lever. I love it in there. I drag it out, leisurely punching the names I want as if sipping whiskey in front of a fire. I mean, how many times in a life does an average person get to make history?

I sometimes look at the appendix in an American history reference book I have that lists the vital statistics of all the presidential elections. For example, during Andrew Jackson’s successful reelection campaign of 1832, William Wirt of the Anti-Masonic party garnered 101,051 votes. Eight percent of the voters went for Wirt and I like to think that if you put the chart under a microscope, you can see all their rotting white male faces crammed inside that number, chanting, “Not him! Him!”

On Monday, September 25, I was watching the David Letterman show and something happened I’ll remember for the rest of my life. The day before, the Sunday New York Times Magazine ran a story about how television comics are influencing the coming election. The article quoted a former Letterman writer who called Letterman a “non-voting Republican.” To me, that phrase stuck out, for three reasons. The first reason is that I am extremely partisan, a capital D Democrat, and I’m always on the lookout for which of my heroes might be Republican. (Though I would say of Letterman what I always say about Frank Sinatra – his work doesn’t make you FEEL like a Republican.) Secondly, as a regular Letterman viewer, I knew that earlier this year, he was called for jury duty in Connecticut because he talked about jury duty every damn night for weeks. And how do you get called for jury duty? By registering to vote! So “non-voting Republican” sounded fishy, but scoffing at the New York Times’s mistakes is a morning ritual, like oatmeal. Just ask Wen Ho Lee. Finally, the phrase “non-voting Republican” stuck out because that is how one might describe Dick Cheney, who responded to press attacks that he didn’t vote in local elections by saying he was more focused on “global concerns.” Which I think is a polite way of saying he was out of town on the corporate payroll sticking it to foreigners and couldn’t be bothered with what his running mate might rhapsodize as “local control.”

Anyway, Letterman. I wish you could have seen him. This presidential election has been so weirdly down to earth, so issue-oriented, that Letterman’s tirade was maybe the only moment of true over-the-top grandeur of the whole campaign. Letterman brought up the Times Magazine article and stated that it characterized him as a non-voting Republican. “When I heard this,” he said, “frankly, I was insulted.” He recalled voting in 1968: “That was my first election. We had an ugly, awful war going on. It’s not an election about who’s banging interns.” He mentioned he also voted in 1972 and then spent the rest of the ’70s abstaining, because those were his “cocktail waitress days.” For this he was embarrassed, confessing, “I realize that that was an irresponsible way to live. I straightened myself up. I come here, I’m living in New Canaan, Connecticut, so I registered to vote.” To corroborate this, he called up the registrar of voters in New Canaan, a man named George, who confirmed that Letterman has voted in every election since at least 1988. “Prior to 1988, they don’t know,” Letterman continued, because previous records are kept in a vault somewhere and “they’re scared. They don’t want to go down there.” He laid out his evidence as though testifying, concluding, “So I think I’ve established, Your Honor, I do vote.”

I don’t know if I’m capturing the intensity of this, the sheer civic thrill of watching someone so clearly offended by being called a non-voter, as if “non-voter” is some kind of curse word, a slanderous insult he couldn’t not refute. His outrage was so – there’s no other word for it – righteous. I was touched. The litany closed like an old fashioned oration. Thus saith the talk show host, “I believe I have voted for both Democrats and Republicans. Am I either one? Absolutely not. Ladies and gentleman, I am an American.” At which point, I, in my living room, clapped.

One of the items on Green Party candidate Ralph Nader’s platform is election-day voter registration. Theoretically, I support anything that increases voter turnout. On the other hand, what’s easier than filling out a card with your address on it four weeks before the election? Christ, this thing’s been going on for over a year now. Who are these lazy idiots who can’t pay attention more than five minutes before they cast their votes? Isn’t voting called “suffrage,” a word that sounds like doing it should hurt a little?

Speaking of suffrage, I’ll end this on the following thought. The protagonist in a recent movie called “The Contender,” about the confirmation hearings of a vice-presidential replacement, admits that she’s an atheist but says that she has a religion. Her faith is the idea of American democracy itself. It’s what she believes, believes IN. I was struck by that, because that’s how I feel too. During the New Hampshire primary I got in a screaming fight with candidate Gary Bauer – okay, I screamed, he didn’t – who had just whipped out a little paperback copy of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution out of his pocket and said that anyone who doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t believe in those documents because of the phrase “endowed by their Creator.” I told him that, on the contrary, those documents for me have superceded God, that they are my Bible.

All of which to say, look up the word “suffrage” in the dictionary. In mine, after noting the main meanings – the privilege of voting, the “exercise of such a right,” the third interpretation of suffrage is this: “A short intercessory prayer.” Isn’t that beautiful? And true? For what is voting if not a prayer, and what are prayers if not declarations of hope and desire?

I guess I’ll end my letter to you the way you ended yours to me.

Thank you again Mike.

Best Wishes,
Sarah Vowell

Steve, et al:

My reactions to the impending election are akin to what Elizabeth Kubler-Ross used to describe as the stages of dealing with impending death. You know – all that “denial,” “anger,” “bargaining,” “acceptance”…I move hourly back and forth between them.

I really don’t think a decisive Nader vote will materialize at the polls. Instead, even worse, I think Bush is going to win with a majority.

The thing that impresses me most about Bush voters – or at least, the vital number of converts, outside the true believers, that will push him over the top – is their assumption that there will be no real, negative consequences to their vote. I found myself wondering if they – and Nader – could actually be right, and what I thought would really happen if Bush is elected.

In this vein, I saw Alan Ehrenhalt’s piece on the Times op-ed on Sunday, about how no matter what happens in the election, the old era of right-wing politics is over. I think he could not be more wrong. Sure, Reagan-era conservatism – which was basically warmed-over military Keynesianism, combined with various cultural gestures that left the core of the old New Deal/Great Society consensus intact – is over. What is coming now, with the advent of Bush the Lesser, is a whole new era of right-wing politics, the likes of which the U.S., and the world, has not seen before.

I keep thinking about Maggie Thatcher’s infamous statement that “society does not exist.” That is, I think, the vital clue to the years ahead. It is the essential nexus of both the Republican right and – to a lesser degree – the Clinton/Gore wing of the Democratic Party.

Society does not exist – that is, all human relations will be boiled down to the most fundamental, short-term, economic transactions. See Gingrich in the Times magazine a few weeks ago, advocating that children be paid $1,000 to take calculus. This is the essence of his – and Clinton’s – “opportunity society.”

Marx liked to dream that under socialism the state would “fade away,” but in fact it is late-period capitalism that will now proceed to dismantle the nation state. As usual, the U.S. is in the vanguard. The Clinton/Gore decision to yank away the safety net was the beginning; now Bush will start to “privatize” the Social Security system.

Dramatic as these changes may seem, they will soon appear as nothing, and the new, post-nation era will roll on with an inexorable, destructive momentum all its own. After Social Security, school vouchers will gradually end public education. Police forces around the nation, encouraged to rely on the booty from drug busts for their budgets, will become evermore independent forces, beholden only to the richest and most powerful elements in society. A large, powerful, volunteer military – given no foreign role to play – will become a new political player.

Many Americans will soon recognize this as the deadly tailspin it is for our society, but to quote Boss Tweed, “What are you going to do about it?” Parents, finding the public schools gutted, will naturally flee to private ones. All citizens, watching the funds drain out of Social Security, will insist on putting more and more of their money into their own, safer investments. Neighborhoods no longer protected by an effective, public police force will hire private security and moonlighting cops instead. The less the public sector works, the more reluctant people will be to put their money into it, and the less money it has, the less well it will function. Even the means of dissent and reform will largely evaporate. With the media all but completely consolidated into a few mega-monopolies (a process greatly aided by Bill Clinton’s surreptitious decision to give away the new spectrum of TV channels and the general refusal to enforce anti-trust laws), voices of protest will become fainter and fainter. Term-limit laws, and the institutionalization of what Tom Delay calls the “right” to contribute whatever one wishes to elected officials, will ensure that the political class of the very near future will consist solely of kleptocrats and glorified lobbyists.

Indeed, before too long, even the more progressive elements in America will be forced to support our fissure into separate, self-interested enclaves. Local control will be seen as the only way to preserve minority rights and the few, dwindling social and environmental programs that remain. What we will get is a version of Peru or Paraguay, or one of half-a-dozen other Latin American states, in which those who have the means huddle inside their walled mansions or neighborhoods, hoping the local dictatorship and their own guards will save them from kidnapping and murder.

Of course, this won’t really “work,” or at least not as its main advocates, the ravenous greedheads who envision a new, global order of trade and sweatshops, would like. As leaders as diverse as Disraeli, Lincoln, Bismarck, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon understood, capitalism is best fostered by a progressive, social welfare state, one that keeps order, makes rules, and increases wealth – in short, does all the messy, untidy, un-businesslike things that must be done to keep a society running.

This is the ultimate irony: the super-capitalists of today have actually swallowed their own rhetoric. It used to be that all their blather about how they, the Masters of the Universe, were the sole creators of wealth, was just useful propaganda in their unending fight to win this tax break or the end of that anti-pollution statute. Now, like some junta of Latin American generals who have spent far too long swapping tales of their machismo and the glorious deeds of their ancestors around the mess table, they actually have come to think that they can supercede the most powerful historical force of the past five hundred years – the nation-state – and run not just some banana republic but the whole world.

And of course they can’t. Their cherished new world trading order will soon collapse without strong governmental structures to negotiate and enforce rules. The end of the welfare state will vastly diminish buying power around the globe. The lack of an effective public education system will cut into the sort of talent they need to keep productivity rising. And the end of effective governments will leave us largely defenseless in the face of the innumerable environmental and health crises that globalization is already provoking. (Can’t wait to see how paying kids a thousand bucks not to get the Ebola virus works out.)

By the end of this century, at the very latest, the new global corporations will be crying out for government – but by that time it will be much too late, if it is not too late already. Many people, infuriated by the decay of their nations, their standards of living, and their physical environment, will react with rage but, befuddled by decades of junk entertainment and active, right-wing propaganda, their protests will be incoherent at best. A race riot here, an Aryan nation enclave there – perhaps an outbreak of some wholly new, bizarre preoccupation, along the lines of one of my favorites from American history, “anti-Masonry.” None of it will suffice to change a thing. I guess you would call this the “anger” stage.

Kevin

Dear Paul,

Maybe the nicest thing about seeing “The Patriot” was standing in the ticket line, hearing my fellow Americans say that word. “Two for ‘The Patriot’ please.” “One for ‘The Patriot’ at 5:30.” Because no one I know uses the P word anymore. If they do, it’s an adjective—patriotic. But I seem to move in circles where even that word has been replaced by “jingoistic.” Like the other night at the Magnolia Bakery after dinner—I was with some friends and we stopped in for dessert—everyone went for the cookies or the banana cream pudding with ‘Nilla wafers except for one guy, Andy. I pointed at his cupcake with the little American flag stuck in the top and asked him, “What made you get that?”

“I was feeling jingoistic,” he said.

I enjoyed the movie. Watching a story line like that is always a relief. Of course the British must be expelled, just as the Confederates must surrender, Hitler must be crushed and yee-haw when the Red Sea swallows those slave-mongering Egyptians. At yet another recent dinner Stephen and I were arguing with Eric about the British royal family, whom Eric likes because “they make no sense.” We spent forty-five minutes yelling, “No, Eric, there shouldn’t be a monarchy!” It was the most fun I’ve had in months, taking the moral high ground on a topic free of the pitfalls of Cuban children or Palestinian statehood.

I’ve read some editorials about “The Patriot,” the kind that always accompany any historical film, written by professors who insist things nobody cares about like Salieri wasn’t that bad a sort or Roman gladiators maybe didn’t really have Australian accents. A little anachronism is part of the fun and I don’t mind if in real life General Cornwallis never lost a battle in the South, as he does rather gloriously in the film. Isn’t art supposed to improve on life?

Personally, I think there’s more than enough historical accuracy in “The Patriot” to keep the spoilsports happy. I’m part spoilsport, on my father’s side, and I felt nagged with quandaries every few minutes during the three-hour film. American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows about it, the quaggier the mire gets. If you’re paying attention during “The Patriot” and you know your history and you have a stake in that history, not to mention a conscience, the movie is not an entirely cartoonish march to glory. For example, Mel Gibson’s character, Benjamin Martin, doesn’t want to fight the British at the beginning because he still feels bad about chopping up some Cherokee into little pieces during the French and Indian War. At that point, as a part-Cherokee person myself, I lost a little of the sympathy I’d stored up for Mel because he’d been underrated in “Conspiracy Theory.” And did I mention Mel’s character lives in South Carolina? So at the end of the movie, you just look at the youngest Mel junior bundled in his mother’s arms and think, Mel just risked his life so that that kid’s kids can rape their slaves and vote to be the first state to secede from the Union.

Now, I am not one of those America-first, flags-on-the-front-porch kind of patriots. I am more of a “despite” patriot, believing in the inherent truth and beauty of the nation’s founding documents despite the fact we’ve never, not even in the beginning—especially in the beginning—lived up to anything close to a more perfect union. But (A) show me somewhere better (and if you say your native Canada, Paul, I suggest you tell me why you moved to L.A.), and (B), I think I’m a better person because I have words like “more perfect union” to live up to. The other day, in the subway at 5:30, I was crammed into my sweaty, crabby fellow citizens and I kept whispering under my breath “we the people, we the people” over and over again, reminding myself we’re all in this together and they had as much right—exactly as much right—as I to be in the muggy underground on their way to wherever they were on their way to.

“The Patriot” did confirm that I owe George Washington an apology. I always liked George fine, though I dismissed him as a mere soldier. I prefer the pen to the sword, so I’ve always been more of a Jeffersonhead. The words of the Declaration of Independence are so right and true that it seems like its poetry alone would have knocked King George III in the head. Like, he would have read this beloved passage, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights—that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and thought the notion so just, and yet still so wonderfully whimsical, that he would have dethroned himself on the spot. But no, it took a grueling, eight-year-long war to make independence a fact.

I never think of this.

I think about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution all the time. Mainly because I watch a lot of TV. I keep my small, 95-cent copy of the two documents handy so that I can fact-check the Constitutional interpretations in the shows of David E. Kelley and Aaron Sorkin. In my little booklet, the Declaration and the Constitution are separated by only a blank half-page. I forget that there are eleven years between them, eleven years of war and the whole Articles of Confederation debacle. In my head, the two documents are like the A-side and B-side of the greatest single ever released, recorded in one great drunken night, but no, there’s a lot of bleeding life between them. Dead boys and dead Indians and Valley Forge.

I’m not much on war stories. I haven’t hit anyone since I was twelve years old (hi, Sherry). I prefer verbal sparring, so I like courtroom dramas and, especially, Sorkin’s “The West Wing.” It’s about the senior White House staff. It often leaves me clutching my Constitution in tears. It’s a little hokey, but that’s why I like it. Sometimes the framer-style rhetoric is so intense it sounds like an action movie. They really say things like, “Let’s get out there and raise the level of public discourse!”

I swear Aaron Sorkin is sitting around with his 95-cent copy of the Constitution, too, reading the obscure bits. He conjured one surprisingly emotional story line, for example, out of the rather dry Article I, Section 2, the mandate for the census. Sorkin has picked up on something so obvious and simple. Namely, that the Constitution is and was a bottomless pit of story ideas – a prophecy of the stories that were to come. Any of the first ten Amendments contains within it the potential energy of a million stories waiting to unfold. Freedom of the press? “Citizen Kane.” The death of Diana. “All the President’s men.” The right to bear arms? Columbine, Lee Harvey Oswald, the scene in “Hannah and her Sisters” when Woody Allen’s trying to kill himself with a shotgun but his forehead’s so sweaty, the barrel slides off his face and the bullet flies into the wall. The right to a speedy and public trial? O.J., anyone?

A couple of times, I’ve forgotten to put the little Constitution booklet back on the shelf, and friends have stopped by, noticing it resting under the remote controls. I think they find my patriotism an amusing affectation—that it’s cute and old-fashioned, the way I feel about the adorable way David’s always bringing up Oscar damn Levant. I guess because my patriotism is so sentimental, so unthreatening. No one’s ever put a bayonet in my hands to back it up. The closest I’ve come is shooting a Canadian while playing laser tag and going to Starbucks afterward: I sure miss you.

Happy Fourth of July,

Sarah

Dear Emily,

The bus was of course not where I left it, but I thought I could find it – I remembered that the driver had a giant yellow flag that said “Moshiach” (Messiah) by his seat. I ran up and down the aisles of buses peering in and asking in a panicked Hebrew, “Where is the bus with Moshiach?” They are used to this kind of tourist here; in fact he is usually wearing a purple robe and playing a harp. No one paid much attention to me – they were in a hurry to close for Shabbat – and I got sent home until Sunday.

There were many theories at the bus station about where my particular bus had gone after it stopped in Jerusalem, and I spent a lot of time calling various remote bus stations to see if the computer had turned up. I also paid repeated visits to the mystical “Department of Lost Objects” at the bus station, an improbably tranquil oasis in a country where the checkout counter at the supermarket is a bit like roller derby. I think I was the only person who visited the Department, and I usually found an old bearded man named Zion entertaining his friends with backgammon or stories when I arrived. Due to our language barrier he would show me all the empty computer bags he had, his dewy eyes beaming warmly at me. I eventually gave up hope and bought a new computer.

That was back in November. Then two weeks ago a man from a Christian television network in Michigan called my mom in New York City. Seemed he had been in a different lost and found and an Israeli police officer had told him to call my home phone number when he got back to the States. So yesterday I went to this other lost and found. Although it was in the center of the “shouk,” a chaotic market whose narrow cobblestone walkways are slick with mashed fruit and trash, it had the same surreal peaceful feeling as the Department of Lost Objects. Three old religious guys sat in an empty airy room. In desperately bad Hebrew I tried to engage them in my story. Unmoved by the surprise ending with the Christian TV producer, they replied repeatedly “everything here is property of medinat yisrael (the nation of Israel).” I thought this was brilliant – a lost and found which exists to tell people that they can’t have their lost things back, that the lost things have moved on! We went back and forth until I said “Texas Instruments,” the brand of my computer. Like magic, a middle-aged woman with an enormous blond coiffure and a fetchingly tight police uniform emerged and took me to a back room, where she removed my computer bag from a locker. She was incredibly proud of herself, although her entire effort to return the computer had been to tell a stranger to call me when he got to the United States nine months after she had first received it.

“Here,” she said proudly. “This is your disk, no? And this is your pens, no?” We went back and forth until she opened the computer bag. I screamed. Beneath the screen there were little holes with wires poking out from them. The computer didn’t sit straight, the keys were hanging off the plastic things that are apparently underneath keys. “Ohhh,” the officer said, “It must have been exploded.” Not to worry, she told me, the government of Israel reimburses people whose items get detonated. She filled out a form for me to take to a bureau in the Prime Minister’s office, where I was assigned to an English-speaking insurance agent.

His tiny office was lined with binders full of damage reports and a bottle of kosher wine. In the space between the bookshelves and the wall, he had crammed a series of prints of famous art works featuring serene women: Gauguin, Rembrandt, etc. My chair was back-to-back with his secretary’s. He apologized for keeping me waiting; he was busy because during the Israeli pullout from Lebanon, Hezbollah had lobbed a bunch of Ketuysha rockets over the border into Kiryat Shemona, a sort of battered desert Detroit that gets bombed every time the Middle East’s political Jenga shifts a bit. “See what happened to your computer?” the agent asked gently. “In Kiryat Shemona that happened to people’s houses and stores.”

He told me to estimate the damage, I told him I couldn’t, he asked me to bring him an estimate for the damage from anyone – even a friend who knew about computers – and said he would do the appropriate paperwork. He showed almost no interest in seeing the computer, although he repeatedly expressed great sympathy for my hardship. I asked him about Kiryat Shemona. He said after the recent bombs, the government sent thirty insurance agents down for a blitz weekend. They divided the town up and each surveyed a few blocks for damages.

“Was it hard?” I asked.

“To be honest,” he said, “it is not quite right. Often the people say more damage was done and we look and see it wasn’t done, but they say it’s bad and then on our reports we say it’s worse than it is. We go to the house and they already have three TV sets from the last set of ketuyshas.”

“You mean you say the damage is worse than it is so people can get new stuff?” He nodded. This seemed like a fairly inappropriate statement for an insurance agent to make to a client.

“Is that the right thing to do?” I asked.

He said, “The one night I stayed there I didn’t sleep at all. I couldn’t wait to leave. Rockets were going off over my head. They live with that.” He shrugged.

I took my computer to a repairman to get an estimate. When I told him it had been a hafetz hashuv, he cradled it sympathetically in his enormous hands. He sat with it, gently prodding the small plastic pieces into place with a tiny pocketknife. He put it back together again and when he was done there were just two keys that didn’t fit. Everything worked. He didn’t charge me but said for $400 he could send it somewhere to get the last two keys fixed. I said that wouldn’t be necessary, but he still wrote me an estimate for $400 and told me to give it to the insurance agent if I wanted to.

Israel isn’t really at war and hasn’t been since 1973. The Ketuyshas Lebanon sends over, the bombs that go off on busses don’t cause death counts that are anything like that of war. So why is there a bureau of the government to reimburse people for damages incurred at war? And what is it doing trying to pay me $400 for two broken keys?

The violence here – a thousand Israeli lives and tens of thousands of Arab lives during the eighteen-year occupation in Lebanon – is not exactly war, but unlike the violence in the United States, there is no distance from it, literal or imagined. In a tiny country where the enemies’ settlements are scattered throughout the land and on all sides, it is hard to feel safe. The enemies look a lot like the citizens and are close enough for their scars – missing eyes from rubber bullets, furious tempers – to remain in full view. Israel cannot, for all its military strength, provide the illusion of distance. There is no ocean, there is no West, no vast emptiness to choke memory and history with. The air is flush with memory and history; sometimes like the ecstatic honeysuckle fragrance of a spring balls-out blooming, sometimes like the inescapable stink of a paper mill that announces its presence in a town long before you see its hulking frame.

In America, the beginning of the story has a moment on the ground, like a dead leaf, a nostalgic moment touched with color, but then it is gone. In Israel, it just lies there in plain view. Nothing seeps into the ground, nothing disappears. Looking around it is obvious that the process of life, of creating new things, cannot happen without loss. To understand this too fully is crippling. We need the fiction that life and death are separate, that loss is accidental, in order to keep going on with it. When the fiction fails, when the threat of death comes too close to reminding everyone how they came to be in this particular place at this particular time; that the beginning of the story is, still, a part of the story – when the threat of death jostles everyone badly and in ways that cannot be fixed, what can be done? Someone can come around and suggest an imperfect remedy, announce in a report that all that was shaken was a window pane or a television set. That it may have been shaken in ways that are not visible, not apprehensible to insurance agents is a given.

In the Bible, the Hebrew word for redemption is the same as “to buy back,” to regain possession of something you once owned; it is often used in the Bible to describe the act of repurchasing land that had previously been in one’s family. These days, Webster’s says, to redeem is also to compensate, to pay the penalty for something; to make amends for it, to atone. It may be that whatever is lost or damaged in transit, whatever disappears into that violent airless vacuum at the moment of birthing, will be given back to us. Our precious wallets, sweaters, wristwatches will be rediscovered, nearly intact, like ghosts, changed only a bit by their silent adventures. And the pulse of stories thought to have dissolved into the earth will flicker and lurch again through the veins.

Love,

Samantha

Dear Emily,

We all lose things in transit, almost involuntarily, as if Kleenex, keys and library cards were feathers to be molted. I’ve shed diaries and disks, contact lenses, entire bicycles; my mind holds the image of each and every lunch box left behind.

I knew I would rack up significant losses when I went to Israel, and I did — especially considering how little I had with me. I lost my laptop computer, the only thing I owned worth more than fifty dollars. And I lost my story, which I didn’t know you could lose.

My story had never been told to me in a systematic fashion, but from an early age I gathered it went something like this: I was a white American, solidly middle-class; the important remnants of my grandparents’ foreignness — language, gait, custom — had been purged, and the rest could be gotten out of. I was Jewish, but not in the way that Jewish people had been. I wasn’t hated, chased, taunted, had never been and would never be. I wasn’t fastidious about food, cleanness, kitchens, books. I moved easily through the world with tremendous freedom, without fear, without a passport announcing I was Jewish, and returned to an apartment building that wasn’t in a ghetto, that didn’t smell from cooking but from brand new carpets.

This is the same story that the grandchildren of the taxi driver with the turban or the Mexican housekeeper will have. It is the one correct story in America, and although the beginnings are wildly diverse, the story is not , about the beginning. It is about how we became free of the beginning: how the squalor, song, bloodshed, and blood ties of the other land dissolve. They don’t dissolve into the enormous ocean dividing America from everywhere else, they don’t dissolve from pure contact with the untouched continent, they don’t dissolve just from a failure of memory; as I understood the story they dissolve because they aren’t real, or at least because they aren’t as real as America’s own particular violence, beauty and rhythm. They were lost to prove they hadn’t meant that much in the first place. They were lost to make way for a better, more universal beginning.

I’m not sure which went first, the computer or the story, but I can tell you exactly where I lost the computer. I left it on a bus, an unimpressive move anywhere, but especially bad in Israel, where any package that appears to be unattended is a “hefetz hashuv,” a suspicious object, and assumed to be a bomb. If it can’t be claimed — and quick — police take it away and detonate it.

The noise is terrifyingly loud for a procedure that is a standard part of civic life, and for months every time I heard it I would become inconsolable, find myself sobbing behind a tree on a busy street, blowing snot into my T-shirt. The first time it happened I had just arrived and was in a big hurry to get back to my hostel before it locked for the night at midnight. The hostel was a religious place for the great unwashed American Jewish population and you could stay for free as long as you attended their religious classes once in a while and made it back by midnight (no sexy disco dancing).

When I got to the entrance of the old city at five minutes before midnight, it was surrounded by police cars and army officers. Whatever — I was late! I barreled through them single-mindedly and was stopped by several furious police officers. One shoved me back behind the army vans where assorted police officers, army officers, people standing on the street and taxi drivers waiting to get into the old city began screaming at me in highly agitated Hebrew. When one of the officers realized I spoke no Hebrew, he softened and explained that someone had just found a kerosene container left by one of the Arab guys who sells corn. This army officer, who was probably younger than me, said gently and earnestly, “It could be a bomb and it could go off and you can’t just run into it. This is serious.”

Everyone shifted around by the gate, pacing, waiting for an explosion. The old city, the walled container of Jerusalem’s boundaries circa 1100, is a deep hot blister in the valley between the Mount of Olives, Mount Zion and Mount Scopus. The rock where Mohammed ascended to heaven, the patch of ground where Jesus was resurrected, and the remaining stone wall of the first Jewish temple where God dwelt stand within meters of each other, indifferent to each other and to the thundering throngs whose sweaty hands, chaste, needy kisses, and tears coat them in a briny grime. Everyone wants a little piece of the old city — within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, ten different Christian groups battle for turf, none willing to relinquish any space for an emergency exit. At night the old city is dead, dark, dangerous, and the energy that during the day often transforms tourists into believers or patients in the local mental hospital lays still over everything like a hot blanket.

When the explosion came from behind the darkened walls, it jarred me completely. It was so much louder than anything I had ever heard; it rocked through the concrete, through the soles of my feet, and I could feel it reverberating in my jaw and chest. Everyone dispersed immediately — it had been just a canister of kerosene after all — cars were restarted, radios blasting, and people moved through the reopened entrance. I just stood there at the gate, as though at attention after some ceremonial shot had been fired.

My great-grandparents moved through Russia, Lithuania and Poland before they came to America. They were running from pogroms. They got out before the holocaust and the town they were from became the second largest ghetto in Poland after they left. In my family no one mentions or mourns this. It is over. It ended in Europe before it ever happened to us. It is buried there safely with all the other Jewish graves and memorials.

But the story in which being Jewish is deadly serious and of daily importance isn’t over in Israel. Here people’s passports still say they are Jewish, and with their Jewish passports there are lots of places they can’t go. Everyone serves in the army. People in their early twenties, like me, lose their whole social group. They lose fingers. I went on a date with a man who had spent the last year as an assassin. Who knows what he lost. In Israel being Jewish (or for that matter being Christian, Muslim, Palestinian, or Arab) still matters in a way that we are told in America it shouldn’t matter; it still binds in a way America refuses — often admirably — to let it bind. The elderly Jewish people here, who move their stocky barrel frames and speak in ways that are so much like my grandparents; who stop me in the street and tell me to tie my shoelaces, have hand-written numbers sloppily tattooed on their forearms. How to tell them or their children that nationalism is not trendy, that identity is fluid, that ethnicity is mutable and irrelevant in a postmodern era? Or looking at them, still hoarding food in their hotel rooms on vacation, how to tell oneself? How to explain the deep visceral sense of home I found navigating through cities and texts I had never seen before? How to explain the nearly electric connection to waterfalls, to ancient chants, plots of land, strangers? What if the prayerbook’s claim that something was “sealed in my flesh” — the claim that America undermines relentlessly, nobly — rings true?

Anyway, as soon as I realized I was missing my computer I knew it was a prime target for exploding, and I ran back to the bus station.

More tomorrow.

L’Hetraot,

Samantha