You may say that America, perhaps, is not mine. I have a right to be here, for now. But it’s not mine. I get to pay taxes without representation, because I am a scholar, not a citizen. Will I still be welcome here a year from now? Will I still be able to get . . .
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This post is not meant to be optimistic. It feels almost dirty to be optimistic at this moment. I came of age politically when Ronald Reagan was elected. I was depressed for weeks. And I was right to be — what he launched was thirty years of neoliberal economics and social meanness . . .
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You’ve all heard the line. “You can’t go home again,” they say. In my ear, though, just behind my left shoulder, I still hear that Gatsby whisper, Of course you can! And, no, I haven’t forgotten how the novel ends, nor am I unaware that at least one of its characters would have . . .
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“Relax,” I told my friends, one evening after Donald Trump emerged as the Republican nominee for the presidency. “Make popcorn, then sit back and enjoy the collapse of the Republican party.” “How could we have been so wrong?” many of us have been asking ever since. The simplest answer is that we . . .
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I was: I had bought the rhetoric that said Hillary Clinton would win, that she would have all the electoral votes in addition to the popular vote, that we could not possibly elect someone who grabbed women’s vaginas without their permission and was appealing to racists and homophobes at every turn. Women . . .
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I flew back to Nebraska from Germany on the morning after the elections, with the final result slowly and painfully becoming evident, overwhelmed by a feeling I’d never felt before. A feeling similar to gloom, or dread, or even complete despair. I’ve felt all of these before, of course, but always about . . .
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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 . . .
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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 . . .
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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 . . .
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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 . . .
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