A little under two weeks ago, Curmie sat in a classroom at the O’Donohue Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance at the National University of Ireland—Galway. He and his 17 students were doing a seminar/workshop with Dr. Catherine Morris. The session turned out to be an intriguing blend of theatre historiography lesson and writing workshop. One of the exercises was to go outside and find a locale in which to set a story (play, short story, whatever). This was followed by a 15-minute period of solid writing, and then by the choosing of a short passage of what had been written.
Curmie’s wandering took him to an old stone wall—Dr. Morris had mentioned the walls in passing as being Famine-era, so from the 1840s, in other words. What struck me was that, unlike virtually every other stone wall I’d seen in several trips to the west of Ireland, this wall had been mortared: inexpertly, at that. It occurred to me that whoever had constructed that barrier wasn’t a wall-builder (or a farmer) by trade. There were a lot of possibilities, but I settled on the notion that the laborer performed the service in some sort of barter arrangement for a scrap of food for himself or his family. This was the area hit hardest by the Great Hunger, after all… although Galway per se, with its access to the harbor and therefore to fishing, may have been slightly better off than its neighbors: Athenry, the setting of what is now the most famous song about that era in Irish history, is only two towns to the east on the train route to Dublin. Moreover, it was unlikely that the worker who constructed that stone wall would ever again have been allowed to pass through the barrier he created.
So it was that Curmie’s 15 minutes of writing took him to describing the location thus: “Our story is set in a place outside of the sight of God (or of one who cares, at any rate), of government, of charity, beyond the hope of salvation in any sense of that term. It is set in the real world, in other words.” The purplish melodrama of the foregoing explains why Curmie is more at home in this forum than in the world of fiction-writing, but it also suggests something of the tenor of our own times: I’m not sure that even a sensitivity to the plight of those mid-19th century Irish families would have taken me to that place a couple of years ago.
And that explains, in part, why Curmie hasn’t written anything in months: not a lack of things to say, but quite the opposite. If Curmie churned out 1000 to 1500 words every time the current Grifter-in-Chief did something outrageous, there would be time for little if anything else. The machinations of what passes for an opposition party would, if similarly commented upon, take up the remainder of the waking hours… and then some.
Inertia begets inertia. The longer Curmie went without writing, the harder it became to return. What story is sufficiently significant to mark a return, while being narrowly enough focused that a blog piece doesn’t morph into a book? Curmie has thought about answering netpal Jack Marshall’s challenge to defend a policy of what most readers of this blog would regard as reasonable gun control: but such a position paper requires far more work than I have time for right now. On the other hand, some idiot high school principal (apologies for the borderline redundancy) refusing to let the school valedictorian give a speech at graduation doesn’t seem like the topic around which to build a return after nearly a year of quiescence.
The other Springsteen song which routinely gets trotted out at this time of the year is “Independence Day,” which of course has nothing to do with the national holiday, just as “Born in the USA” is a far cry from a jingoistic anthem. But whereas the song is about a dissolving father-son relationship, it includes these lyrics: “Because there's just different people coming down here now / And they see things in different ways / And soon everything we've known will just be swept away.”
What’s important here, for Curmie, is that last line, and the leap from difference of opinion to erasure of the other: in this case, the past as understood. Curmie has precisely one friend whom he knows voted for Donald Trump (as opposed to against Hillary Clinton). We were never really close, but we share some history, some interests, and some beliefs outside the world of politics as narrowly defined, and so we comment on each other’s Facebook posts from time to time. He posts political memes not infrequently. Some are funny, even if/when they support a candidate or a point of view I’m not so fond of; these I sometimes even “like.” Others offer objectively false information; sometimes I try to correct the record, but I’ve taken to blocking the source as an annoyance my life doesn’t need. Others I just disagree with; these, I ignore.
My point here is that the disagreement on many matters doesn’t have a profound effect on our relationship. Had this man ever been a really close friend, we might have grown more distant as a result of our respective views of the mendacious, xenophobic buffoon who now occupies the White House, but being friendly without being intimate works for us. Plus, a distance of 1500 miles or so also makes for a nice buffer.
It’s become clear, however, that the current administration seeks nothing less than the destruction of all that came before: there is no other way to account for the appointments of the likes of Scott Pruitt, Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, Rick Perry… the list goes on and on. Curmie is old enough to remember when politicians of both parties held most of the same essential beliefs: they differed on the means to those ends, and often on priorities, but there was never a doubt that things like healthcare and education were valued by pols on both sides of the aisle. Not so much, any more. It would be silly to believe the Democrats have answers to the country’s problems, but it’s a dead cert that the Republicans don’t. There hasn’t been an important policy decision the GOP has got right in a decade or more. We have a President who thinks he’s an emperor, and a GOP Congress without the brains, the integrity, or the courage to tell him otherwise. Cue The Boss: “Rich man wanna be king / And a king ain't satisfied / Till he rules everything.”
And soon everything we know will just be swept away.
There’s a recent Gallup poll that shows that for the first time since they started asking the question in 2001, fewer than half of Americans claim to be “extremely proud” to be so. The numbers for Democrats and liberals are even lower: fewer than 1 in 3 Democrats and 1 in 4 liberals thus identify. Curmie is with the majority on this one. The country is headed by a bull-headed ignoramus who is a worldwide laughingstock, and he’s dragging the country down with him. Our policies on immigration, guns, and trade, in particular, are impossible to even describe, let alone endorse, to the satisfaction of Curmie’s friends abroad.
Secondly, the article linked above notes that the decline started at about the beginning of the 2016 election cycle. Given the presumed inevitability of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee and the clown-car of Republican candidates, who wouldn’t start feeling a little embarrassment at the state of the union?
Moreover, it seems strange to take too much pride in an accident of birth. Curmie is reminded of the incisive words of George Bernard Shaw: “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.” If one of my students or former students succeeds—gets a job or an award or a promotion—that’s a source of pride, because I might have had something, however insignificant or indirect, to do with it. But I can’t take a lot of pride in the fact that people born in the same country as me defeated Hitler before I was born. This country may have saved the world once, but it hasn’t been at the forefront in moral or ethical terms in a long while.
Still, the idea of America is worth fighting for, and the struggle to achieve the greatness that currently lies dormant or, worse, shackled, is indeed a worthy endeavor: one that can legitimately engender (yes) pride, for the honor inherent in the attempt as much as in any successes along the way. We may have forgotten the words of Thomas Jefferson or Emma Lazarus, but we can remember them again, teach them again, reinvigorate them. To that end, Curmie will try (no promises) to write a lot more in the year ahead. There’s a battle looming, a battle not merely worth winning, but imperative. New resolve, then. As Bruce might say, “No retreat, baby, no surrender.”
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