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Our America: Planet Trump

November 17, 2016 - By Frederika Randall

Went to the bar down the street for cappuccino this morning. It’s been three days now since the US election. NB: this is Rome, my home, where cappuccino takes only seconds to make and is generally pretty good.

I sit at a table outside, daring it to rain. After a few minutes a very elderly woman hobbles up with a friend and a badante, a caregiver, who asks if they can sit with me at this, the sole sidewalk table. Her ward likes to smoke, she says, and therefore they have to sit out in the cold.

‘Please do,” I say. “It’s not very cold.”

They sit down. The elderly lady then asks whether I will mind if she smokes. Oh certainly not...

Our America: Don't Give up the Fight

November 16, 2016 - By Jules Chametzky

On November 9th, the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht, that fateful date in German and German Jewish history, I called my sister-in-law Renate in Cleveland to wish her a happy birthday; it was of course my late wife Anne Halley's birthday as well, since they were twins. Renate is a retired physician, head of mammography at Western Reserve, and not ever very political--even though she and Anne were born in Bremerhaven and heard the Horst Wessel song in the streets on their birthday, and were lucky enough to escape Germany for America in 1938. But the Trump victory energized in her an anguished...

Our America: A Path to Citizenship

November 15, 2016 - By Soledad Palmieri

I want to share what happened to me two days after the election, around 3:20 p.m. in the library café, a place where a lot of students, faculty, and staff hang out.

I was having a conversation with a friend and colleague; the two of us were sitting at one of the tables against the wall, under the TV screens. Eventually,...

Our America: Odi et Amo

November 14, 2016 - By Michael Thurston

At first I thought there was something weirdly conflicting, even contradictory, in my two modes of response. On the one hand, I wept with my students and held out to them the value of what we do in the classroom: coming together to read, to think, to talk, to take each other seriously, to get smarter; we enact in miniature the culture we hope for and we repudiate the anti-intellectualism, intolerance, and thuggery currently triumphant in our politics. On the other hand, I am enjoying an incandescent and coruscating rage whose brilliance derives in part from the hot-burning gases of my own hatreds...

Our America: Get Ready to Rumble

November 11, 2016 - By Jack Polidori

Editor's Note: MR inaugurates here a new blog series, "Our America." The editorial that follows is one voice among countless others, and the first of many in this series. We look forward to hearing from our friends and contributors.
 

It’s as much about the Electoral College as it is about never having graduated from college. The slimmest of margins. . . the increasingly concentrated Democratic vote (in fewer states) and. . . the revenge of the anti-nerds. That’s the short story of the 2016 Presidential election.

Yes, white working class people—overwhelmingly from non-union households—followed an orange-haired demagogue on his marauding path to the White House. Donald Trump shocked the learned class...