Here’s the latest from my travel writing site. Check it out here.
Fifteen years.
It was that long ago, in June of 2010, that I nervously stepped into a taxi from my little place in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill, headed to the event at a Castro Street bookstore to herald the release of the first-ever book-length anything I’d ever written.
Platitudes about timespan notwithstanding, what strikes me most about those days, when the book and the trip it was about were happening, was the youthful notion that after, say, one’s thirties, all the big life transitions were done. After all, most of us are settled at that age: married, owning first homes (well, once upon a time), having first kids, all set in careers. Life’s future tragedies — the passing of a parent; the failure of a marriage; a massive socio-economic shock — often seem distant, or abstract.
Or as Elastigirl from The Incredibles put it, “we’re superheroes… what could happen?”
Of course, as the years roll on, many of us discover that’s a blend of hubris and horseshit.
Maybe it’s a by-product of these fractured times, but it seems for many the years that follow the freewheeling thirties are anything but placid these days. Future tragedies move into the present. World events move in unpredictable directions. All those best-laid plans go up in smoke.
Perhaps most surprising, then, is what emerged for me out of all that tumult: after decades of both figurative and literal wandering, I finally did settle down, just in time for my adopted homeland to legalize same-sex marriage. Together with my husband and associated creatures, we set about doing two things I never would have imagined for myself that evening when I got into that taxi — or that earlier evening almost two years before, where I boarded my first flight across the Atlantic in two decades: become owners of a single-family home, and welcome a child into our family.
Perhaps least surprising to those who’ve been through it: these supposedly banal journeys of domestication were no less of a whirlwind than the times that came before. The home purchase turned into a multi-year adventure, as we got caught in the winds of San Francisco’s housing, construction, and affordability crisis. We made it out OK, and the house turned out gorgeous, though in pandemic times we were forced to make some big changes once more.
The little one’s arrival was on a whole other level: on top of the usual life-changing clichés about the arrival of kids in one’s life, the whole thing came amid other professional and personal stuff that frankly could merit an entire blog and book of its own (maybe someday). Oh, yeah, and then that little thing called the pandemic happened in the middle of it all.
Yet, through it all, we made a pledge to Leon: as descendants of families of nomads, one thing would always remain a focus in our lives.
Travel!
And so, this project evolves in a fresh, new direction: the continuing voyages, in Star Trek-speak, of a whole family of travelers. Maybe a bit like The Incredibles after all. The cast: me, onetime queer backpacker and child of overseas immigrants; and Mathew, son of two military kids, accomplished global explorer, and master logistician.
Join us as we bring Leon, now five, and help show him — one more Disney reference incoming — a whole new world.
Love. Alexander Milov. Burning Man 2015. Source: Swell Health
It’s all over the pundit-o-sphere: we’re in a full-on friendship recession. There’s an epidemic of loneliness. Fewer and fewer people say they have a broad friend circle, and a surprising number say they have no close friends at all.
On the surface, at least in safe(r) Western countries, this almost doesn’t make sense: in spite of all the turmoil worldwide, we live in unprecedented times for connection and communication. If nothing else, you’d think the bounce-back from Covid—manifested in a frenzy of revenge travel—would see people socializing like never before. Heck, even our age’s extant turmoil and uncertainty should help: bringing people together to organize, protest, collectively try to right wrongs—and possibly form lifelong friends in the process. We’re supposed to be living in the age of the global village.
So what gives?
Everyone’s quick to blame social networks and smartphones, and while I think there’s truth in that, it feels like technology’s more a symptom than a cause; plus, these innovations were built to improve communication, not pull us apart.
What I’ve learned from my own journey
Young Me. Hallandale Beach, Florida, early 1970s.
Each of us is a world in microcosm—which is why a movie like Inside Out resonates so strongly. This suggests we all may have a little friendship recession living in us.
For me, it came early, anticipating these trends. Closeted gay nerds growing up in the 1980s were practically tailor-made for a loneliness epidemic. Sometimes it even seemed like even the people I counted as friends weren’t so tolerant of my own personal flavor of freak flag. This went double growing up in a small, close-knit, homogeneous community.
In my case, there seemed like no way out. Like the pale blue dot we live on, or the inner world of our minds, my community was all I knew. And for all that it wasn’t too open to outsiders like myself, I figured it could only be even worse in the big bad world outside.
Then, one summer after high school, the paradigm exploded: for one thing, I took a step outside my world, and by golly, it was amazing; for another, my parents experienced a big, traumatic falling-out with their closest friend circle. Boom. Pop goes the world.
In the wake of all that, two things became apparent: one, the little sphere of our youth is rarely, if ever, unshakeable; two, great! There was a whole world out there, offering—maybe, possibly—better options than my origin point.
I’m not sure if it’s because of what happened with my parents, or simply due of the inherent transience of seeking community outside one’s origin point; whatever the reasons, and however more I found my footing and identity in the big world, I never managed to fully shake the friendship recession. Sure, I got great people in my life, but so many more once-great connections have come and gone. And all too many of them took the form of wrenching estrangements—the so-called friendship divorce.
The reasons for these are myriad and complicated, as they often are; I think we’d all be deluding ourselves if we believed that all our estrangements were purely the other person’s fault. Still, regardless of the causes or who’s to blame, we are as much defined by our estrangements as we are by those who stick around.
I think I’m not alone in this, believing that the hill of beans that is our life in this crazy world mirrors something bigger. I mean, think about it: if it’s established that in the past people had more friends and socialized more—then…where did all those friendships go?
To help answer that, let’s go deeper into the past, to a time when it all seemed right. Back to the Good Old Days, when the Baby Boomers were kids.
We’ve heard it many times, How Things Used To Be. When parents belonged to churches, rotary clubs, and bowling leagues; when kids played together until dark, unencumbered by technology, with only their bikes, their park swings, and their imaginations to live out an idyllic childhood.
I don’t think that’s totally off-base. But I also don’t think it’s the whole picture.
Like World War II vets who seldom acknowledged that war’s horrors—it took Saving Private Ryan, a half-century on, to explode that John Wayne myth—I suspect Boomers, the generation before mine, often don’t acknowledge how tough it was for them beneath the surface of their idealized past.
Never mind the obvious parts, like how awful it was for most anyone LGBTQ+, or for people of color; even in the catbird seat of the white middle-class, people had to live with the distant but plausible shadow of nuclear apocalypse. Closer to home, the established social harmony concealed what was beneath the surface. Example: take the movie Stand by Me, possibly the quintessential Boomer nostalgia feast. Its closing line, typed by its author, the adult recounting the story decades later:
I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?
Maybe the statement was intended to be more ironic than anyone realized. I recently did a full rewatch of this 1986 classic, and…holy crap. Has anybody misty for the Good Old Days actually seen this movie? Those kids, the film’s main characters, these loyal-till-death-do-us-part buddies, are basically total jerks to each other. Their friendship consists of trash-talking and insults. They behave like worst enemies, only briefly punctuated by moments of heart-rending vulnerability. Once this may have been called just boys being boys; but I think I see why the term toxic masculinity came about.
Not that they don’t come by their horrible behavior unfairly: they’re all from messed-up backgrounds riddled with sadness, anger, and abuse; they’re repeatedly bullied by a gang of older kids; heck, the entire adventure that’s the movie’s McGuffin consists of an overnight camping trip…to go see a dead body. If you ask me, this tale — based on a Stephen King novella — is way more frightening than anything the author cooked up in his ghost stories (full disclosure: huge fan).
Why things are worse now (but shouldn’t be)
OK, then. Coming back to now, when we live in so much more enlightened, aware, attuned—dare I call them “woke” times—then…why don’t we have the opposite of a friendship recession? Are all of us just whiny, ungrateful brats, willfully isolating ourselves, too obtuse to see just how gosh-darned good we have it?
Much ink has been spilled on how the past fifty years have been decidedly different than the century that preceded it. Some have called it the post-industrial age, where computing and communication technology overshadowed industrial-era innovations (think about how similar today’s passenger jets are from those of the 1970s, compared with computing devices from then and now). But there are two sharply opposing trends that also define the age, the past half-century, the era in which the friendship recession and loneliness epidemic took root.
I actually think the forces on the political right have a point about what they now call wokeness: we do live in times of greater emotional fragility. All that stuff repressed by the GIs in World War II, and even many of the Boomers, their kids—empathy, sensitivity, emotional awareness—are front and center now. Maybe it started with the Flower Children of the 1960s. Maybe it took off after Oprah made child abuse her cause célèbre, starting in the 1980s. Whatever the sequence of events, Gen X (a.k.a. my crowd) arrived into a world that idealized connection, kindness, and—yes—companionship. Consider the 1970s kids’ album (and companion TV special) Free to Be…You and Me; I still get choked up listening to songs like “Glad to Have a Friend Like You,” about an oddball boy and girl who become best mates, bonding over baking cakes and fishing.
There’s more: consider Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, or any number of 1980s sitcoms. Again and again, there’s the unshakable bond among friends. Go further, and you’ll find amity on Star Trek’s Enterprise, with the Skywalker gang from Star Wars, or, heck, on practically any buddy cop show.
Thing is, all this apparent warmth and connection—as represented in media and on the surface perceptions of other people’s lives—crashes against the other big force of the past half-century.
Even as popular culture lionized friendship, another trend was rising. Call it the flip side of eliminating the more coercive, hypocritical old-school social organizations of yore—let’s be honest, how many of those Rotary Club regulars actually liked each other? The 1970s saw the rise of the Me Generation. Surprisingly, this trend really found purchase on the economic side of things.
And that’s where, I think, things really came undone.
There’s nothing inevitable about sixties idealism’s push toward individual expression somehow ending us up in a Gilded Age-style plutocracy. But that’s how it panned out: a legitimate rejection of the stultifying 1950s, with its merciless cutting down of any tall poppies (or, more accurately, the odd-shaped poppies) among us.
But we never fully replaced the institutions of 1950s; instead, we embraced a hardcore flavor of individualism to take care of everything. Then, the rival economic system, one where everyone called each other comrade, crumbled almost overnight. It took economist Milton Friedman, and his ideas lying around, to come to the fore. We transitioned from Free to Be…You and Me to Greed Works.
And I think we broke friendship in the process.
Don’t believe me? Hear the ever-quotable Gordon Gekko once more:
If you need a friend, get a dog.
What this meant, in our everyday social workaday spheres, was that, while, sure, we were ever more free to be who and do what we wanted, we were also now in throat-throttling competition with everybody else for a diminishing share of the economic pie. We replaced the Boomer childhood of a broad-based middle class with the classes on the Titanic: a huge majority with little or no economic security (90% of the population); a smallish minority of upper-middle-class (the top 90–99% of the economic distribution); all of whom fight constantly to belong to the top 1% (those whose income is derived from wealth).
BFF platitudes die hard in a zero-sum world. Friendships become increasingly transactional. It puts even the strongest of bonds under strain. When so much of life feels like a desperate race, a high-stakes competition for status, standing, and material security, personal connection is the first and biggest thing to suffer.
Of course, none of this is totally unprecedented: people have fallen in and out of friendships (and love, and familial bonds) for as long as there have been people. But this flavor of it has its own causes and behaviors. To add to all the ink that’s been poured into this subject, let me add my own perspective. I can identify four personality traits that serve to shatter friendships. I believe we all retain bits of these traits; however, in an era where everyone’s scrambling for the same few lifeboats, any of these traits is liable to metastasize and take us over.
We all know this one, a potent force in our fake it till you make it culture. We’ve all heard tales of other people’s fantastic lives, fabulous careers, endless circles of friends, flawless marriages. An effortless, perfectly curated life made manifest by the power of the prosperity gospel.
What’s wrong with that? Doesn’t a life well lived deserve to be flaunted? Is it not virtuous to be happy for the good, fulfilling lives of others? Sure…but that’s not what highlight-reeling’s about. It’s never about a comprehensive picture of what’s really going on in someone’s head or life. Plus, it’s not about you sharing in their bounty. As I’ve experienced it, highlight-reeling seems intended to make others feel worse. Maybe to weaken them, a little, stifle them as prospective competition.
Counter-point: isn’t resenting highlight-reeling just jealousy in disguise? Actually, yes. But that’s sort-of the point. Highlight-reeling’s patently fictional depictions of existence are such that it’s hard not to be jealous—even if we know, somewhere in the recesses of our brains, that it’s mostly a fake-out.
As with all of these behaviors, I recognize there’s more going on with highlight-reelers under the surface. Oftentimes, it conceals real inner pain that our competitive society discourages us from expressing. Whatever’s going on inside, highlight-reeling has now reached the commanding heights: our re-minted President practically embodies this trait.
But you don’t have to limit it to the top: find me any large-ish group of friends and it’s fairly likely there’s some measure of highlight-reeling going on.
For a long time I was drawn to folks in this state. In fact, for a long time I thought I was this state. It’s seductive: hard-luck cases form powerful bonds, and for good reason. Podcaster professor Scott Galloway, in an aptly-titled blog post, points out that “the cocktail that’s made us the apex of apex predators is cooperation on the rocks of conflict.”
So how can it go wrong? Simple: circumstances (and people) change.
Again, this is nothing new or unique to our times, but in our present-day über-capitalist world—where job security, affordable housing, college, health care, and retirement have become lottery-ticket uncertain—it’s especially fraught. Even among those who start at similar places, or in the same friend circle. With the unpredictable socio-economic sorting that goes on these days, not everyone ends up in the same place. Some might make it, find their footing, establish themselves even if they began life as hard-luck cases…and some do not.
We’ve heard endless talk about why we’re polarized politically; I maintain it’s the same reason we’re polarized socially. It’s not because of disagreements in the margins about taxation rates, or the effective role of government in a society. It’s because the two political philosophies of our age—roughly characterized for the past two centuries as Right and Left—have divided the world into camps built out of different ways of looking at the world.
It’s been said the the Left borrows from Rousseau, with his ideas that people are naturally good; it’s only modern civilization that’s messed us up, divided us against each other. Put us back in nature, out of our so-called civilization, and we’d get along a lot better.
The Right, by contrast, is said to stem from Hobbes, who believed that, without a strong, hierarchical order, we’d regress to savagery. Hobbes’ catchphrase for his take on the state of nature has become legendary: nasty, brutish, and short. It’s also often termed human nature, which is supposedly something utterly immutable and irretrievably selfish.
Friends have been having political debates since time immemorial; but in today’s climate, it’s particularly charged. Each side views the other as an existential threat, and how could it not? When so few have economic security, whatever side they’re on feels like it’s fighting the last battle to save the world. This acts like a jet turbine for our belief systems. While it’s less common for friendships to end due to political shifts, the mere fact that we’re sorted into these tribes in the first place eliminates large swaths of the population from ever commingling in the first place.
Friends with money, entitlement, and other asymmetries
While highlight-reeling is an attempt to sow inequality where it doesn’t exist, and hard-luck cases are embattled allies taking on the Empire together, there’s another dimension that inequality has foisted upon our friendships: what happens when there’s substantive inequality among friends from the start?
It’s less common, since friendship economic sorting is as prevalent these days as the political. But when there is imbalance between parties, sometimes we attempt to correct it with a dollop of noblesse oblige. Example: from early on, I’d been taught to lionize the 3am friend: the person who, as with Hillary’s campaign commercial from 2008, is always there, available for whatever trouble is afoot.
Noble indeed, but it’s also problematic. In societies with strong social obligations, codes of conduct attempt to keep things balanced. But we’re all on our own now, and those checks are gone. Sometimes it gets so far out of whack that you forget who’s privileged and who isn’t—witness the Karen phenomenon from a few year back. To say nothing of nearly any media depiction of rich kids.
And so, back to tech. There’s good reason to blame it: the friendship recession really accelerated in the 2010s, right when smartphones came out. Sure, things may have started to worsen right when full-contact capitalism got going, but tech proved the lethal ingredient.
But did it have to be? Remember, the smartphone/social universe/filter bubble phenomena are outgrowths of Milton Friedman-era capitalism, where all companies care about is shareholder value, and build their algorithms accordingly. So let’s imagine a different path.
It’s easy to forget that it was not so long ago that tech platforms were widely considered forces for good. When Googling became a thing, it felt like something of a miracle: the entirety of human knowledge at your fingertips. When social media was young, people used it to organize Arab Spring protests. There’d emerged something of a consensus that computing technology, as molded by Silicon Valley, was beneficent.
So what if things had kept on going that way, and we’d kept the good parts of capitalism—risk-taking, entrepreneurialism, respect for honestly-attained social capital, open (but supervised) markets—but ditched the toxicity—the gladiator mindset, the doctrine of hyper-concentrated ownership, the alienation of workers with no stake in the future? Imagine what tech would look like then.
Actually, not just tech. Practically all innovations—petroleum, nuclear power, electricity, commercial air travel—began with hopeful origin stories about their anticipated use.
Does this mean that all good technology ultimately goes bad?
Actually, I don’t think so. But I do believe that our acceptance of today’s zero-sum inequality has allowed our inventions to become corrupted. Those inventions can then be used to turn us on one another. But in a different societal construct, with different societal attitudes that serve to uplift the good while keeping constrained the less savory aspects of—yes, I’ll say it—human nature; well… many things become imaginable.
I really believe it’s as simple (and as impossible-seeming) as a wholesale mindset shift among every one of us. For all of us to unleash our capacity to Think Different (not the first time I’ve used this, I know) about the nature of our hierarchies, and the composition of our relationships.
I’m not proposing some sort of political revolution, by the way—we all know how those turned out—only that I hold out hope that something, somewhere, fundamentally, will click into place in the mess of a social contract we’ve made with each other. And hopefully it won’t take a cataclysm to turn us all wiser (though if Star Trek is any metric, it might).
I know we’re far from there still, marooned as we are on our lonely islands. But the seas are rising fast. How long can we go on like this before the yearning for the connections we once had becomes too loud to ignore?
Amid all the self-analysis and hand-wringing going on with progressives in the wake of the 2024 U.S. election, there’s one group whose reactions will be especially interesting to watch.
The existence of this group eluded me for a long time. That is, until watching the TV series Young Royals. Groundbreaking as it was for its frank depiction of a very unconventional queer romance between a young Swedish prince and a working-class Latin American immigrant who meet at an elite boarding school, something stood out to me: the other snobby students label Simon (the immigrant kid, played beautifully by Venezuelan-Swede Omar Rudberg) a “socialist.”
Then there was the time, back in 2016, during the Hillary-Bernie Democratic primaries. A boss of mine from India said she’d never—never—support Bernie Sanders because he, too, was a socialist and (as she put it) “socialism is terrible!” She didn’t elaborate, but I know India had a flirtation with this form of governance in decades past.
Cut to today, and there’s this guy, a Norwegian CEO lauding America’s work-life-imbalanced workforce, whom he terms “ambitious.” That made me reflect on my own attitudes towards America in my youth…and then it all made sense.
The left-right divide in the United States—despite reshuffles and realignments—is pretty well understood: on one side, it’s God, guns, and greed is good; on the other, it’s warriors for social and economic justice who, somehow, never seem to live up to expectations. See: this year’s election results.
But there are others who don’t fit neatly in either category. They make more sense now that I see the pattern—and realize I used to be one of them.
I call them the Overseas Conservatives.
Who (and what) is an Overseas Conservative?
Obviously, the United States didn’t invent conservatism—I’m not suggesting that. The concept, in the form and ideology we know today, began in Revolutionary France, where the seats of the National Assembly were organized: establishmentarian types on the right, reform/revolution types on the left.
That said, the American flavor of conservatism seems unique. Maybe some of that’s historical: America never had a monarchy, and very vigorously threw off rulership by one early on. Capitalism and meritocracy were new concepts in 1776, but for America, it was money and markets from the word go. Meanwhile, as religion slowly receded all over Europe in modern times, America’s conservatives held on to it—so much so that the term religious right is as American as Big Macs and apple pie.
Disclaimer: I know concepts of left and right are (and probably always were) oversimplified, terms that bundle together many strands of thought and policy notions. Nevertheless, the labels have stuck, so please indulge this exercise with that in mind.
Also, I’m not focusing on everyone considered a right-winger outside the U.S.A. That’s way too broad a catchment group. What makes Overseas Conservatives stand out is their non-American-ness, twinned with their association with America. Either they live here now, immigrated here by choice (as I did), or perhaps were refugees of some sort. Or else they’re pundits who remain outside these shores, but for whom America is their beat. But they all cut their teeth elsewhere, their life experience formed outside this country.
Exhibit A: Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens in 2010. Source: via Wikimedia
The OG of them all, the late Christopher Hitchens actually began life (as so many neocons did) a leftist, but drifted rightward over the later two decades of his life. In some ways, he almost doesn’t make this list, since he held a great many positions that still today are defined as progressive: a hardcore atheist, he opposed the War on Drugs, and supported same-sex marriage. But after 9/11, after years of criticizing U.S. foreign policy of yore, he shifted, supporting Dubya and his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He came to see Islamism as Public Enemy Number One. This is something we’re going to see a lot of with Overseas Conservatives, and why they’ve come to stand with America so profoundly.
Another early figure, Andrew Sullivan is equally a study in contrasts. Gay and out for decades, his early career reveals a mixed trajectory: writing for the (conservative) British Daily Telegraph early in his career, then stints at The New Republic, The New York Times, and The Atlantic. He’s a terrific writer (as many in this group are); his piece on America after 9/11 is one I’ve cited many times, and still find to be one of the most emotionally moving depictions of what it was like in this country in the days following that terrible one. He was an early and ardent supporter of same-sex marriage and Barack Obama. And then…there’s his Substack, with its skepticism over trans issues, and its fixation on the wokes (something that’s also something of a trope here).
A Brit who’s a bit less focused on America than Hitchens or Sullivan, he nonetheless covers it a lot on his beat, and even became a U.S. citizen in 2018. He’s known more for his triumphalist notion that the British Empire was better than the rest of the European imperialists; he early on saw the potency of Trumpism, and has been supportive of the now-again President-elect on occasion. He’s also big on the anti-Islamism train, going so far as to buy into the Eurabia conspiracy theory. He goes even equated Islam to the threat of Bolshevism, believing the Islamists literally want to take over the world as the early Communists did.
A Canadian like myself (I remember fondly his late mother’s newscasting career in our native homeland), Frum rose to prominence in America as a speechwriter for George W. Bush. Even those unfamiliar with this crop of conservatives almost certainly recognize words he wrote. Three of those words became the iconic line of the century, when Dubya termed Saddam’s Iraq, Islamic Iran, and totalitarian North Korea the axis of evil.
This is more than mere wordplay; it’s what unites Overseas Conservatives and onshore right-wingers alike. They’re often spoiling for a fight against some existentially-threatening bad guys looking to take down the West. Not that they’re totally wrong, I maintain, but their fixation on making these admittedly lousy actors on the global stage into Disney villains strikes me as hyperbolic. This has long been a hallmark of many flavors of conservatism: Othering others, leaning hard into patriotism and even jingoism, always wanting an ever-bigger military.
That said, Frum has grown ever more critical of America’s conservative standard bearer, the Republican party, and has even greater distaste for the prior/future President.
Another Canadian, Peterson’s a weirdly mixed bag: supportive of universal healthcare, drug decriminalization, and wealth redistribution. And then…there’s his deadnaming actor Elliot Page. His savaging of political correctness. His denial of climate change. The list goes on.
Sometimes I wonder if that’s all it is with so many of these guys — and notice they’re all guys, white ones to boot: the taking of extreme, dissonant positions purely for shock value. I myself remember being this way in my youth, the thrill of being the enfant terrible of your cohort, shocking and horrifying all these progressives (or as it’s now known in America, owning the libs). But is that a deep enough bench to build an ideology? Peterson often has other, smarter things to say, but not every political Bad Boy does. Now that we have a President-elect with his own Bad Boy rhetoric, we’ll see if folks like Peterson go high or low.
Another queer Brit, but this one more off the chain than Andrew Sullivan. Here again, we encounter the usual suspects: more Eurabia fixations, more fulminations on woke culture and its existential threat to all that is good, fair, and decent.
Murray reminds me of Log Cabin Republicans I worked with in years past. Why, I wondered, would anyone want to belong to a group so hostile to this fundamental part of yourself? One notion sees the LCR as queer Uncle Toms, or as Jewish folks call such sellouts, kapos. These were, for the uninitiated, those Jews who attempted cooperation with the Nazis in a deluded attempt to somehow countervail the effects of the Holocaust. You can guess how well that turned out.
I don’t think Murray’s quite that far gone, though some of his stances strike as unhelpful to the LGBTQ+ community. Actually, he doesn’t even think much of that community, or as he put it, queerness “is an unstable component on which to base an individual identity, and a hideously unstable way to try and base any form of group identity.”
Seriously, dude?
There’s more. He was one of the first to label Kamala Harris a diversity hire. And this is where the limits of Overseas Conservatives become apparent. I maintain they possess a blinkered view of America. This charge against Kamala’s a perfect example. Many of Murray’s defenders claimed he’s simply parroting what Joe Biden said in 2020: that he was explicitly seeking a female minority to round out the ticket. Surely that’s a diversity hire, no?
Not hearing the dog whistle
Political strategists as far back as Lee Atwater understood that, in post 1960s America (some may call that decade the dawn of wokeness), it’s unacceptable to express overt racism. Race science is discredited and vilified. It’s political suicide — to say nothing of scientifically false—to claim superiority of one ethnicity over another. But Atwater must have sensed that many in 1980s America still held such biases deep down. So instead, his cohort found ways to sneak in such notions.
Diversity hire is one of those notions. Maybe Murray was aware of it, or maybe he wasn’t, but in America of today, this term doesn’t describe a benign move to uplift certain demographics—such as, say, preferring a queer actor for a queer role in a TV series. No. It’s much more insidious than that. It’s to suggest that a person of color is somehow incapable of fulfilling that role. Tragically, I fear that, in some quarters, these odious interpretations will be used to explain the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election of 2024.
I’ve discovered that Americans who grew up here and know their history intimately understand these nuances: Beyond slavery and Jim Crow, there have been decades and centuries of educational disenfranchisement, disinvestment in communities, histories of neighborhood redlining, voter suppression, and a host of other ignominious actions undertaken against minority communities. Their struggle is real—so much so that, if anything, a woman of color has to be even more qualified than an equivalent White male to land the same position.
I wonder if Overseas Conservatives like Murray see all that. I sure didn’t when I thought that way.
Can we learn anything from the Overseas Right?
Surprisingly, I think we can—if only to solidify the notion that ideologies are complex, fluid things. Many progressive sacred cows—abortion, same-sex marriage, drug decriminalization, atheism or agnosticism—are baked into the beliefs of many of these non-Americans. They’re almost old-school Republicans, those Chamber of Commerce types who want nothing more than for free markets to be given a chance, and for government to be lean, efficient, and minimally involved with our lives.
While some progressive pundits pull from the anti-war history going back to Vietnam, the old saw that the Dems are weak on defense seems demonstrably false. Ronald Reagan helped engineer that perception—think Jimmy Carter and the Iran hostage crisis. Yet America’s government and military has continued to practice realpolitik—party in power notwithstanding—often to the chagrin of its progressive citizenry and (some) in academia. And yes, in those circles we do see it: post-colonial discourse blaming European imperialism for all troubles in the world. The notion, among some, that the West is in fact responsible for the rise of radical Islam.
Here I’d say Overseas Conservatives may have a point: the political left’s acquiescence to Islamist groups is the biggest geopolitical miss, I’d venture, since New York Times journalist Walter Duranty reported on Stalin-era Soviet Union. Take this social media post during last spring’s Columbia University protests:
Some of the more out-there progressive rhetoric
So, OK, we get it: idiotic geopolitical thought, and hyperactive policing of jokes and pronouns, grates on many. Ideologies, no matter how noble, can go awry. But I think what Overseas Conservatives, indeed all conservatives, seem to miss is that trolling the other side with provocative extreme-talk doesn’t fix underlying problems. Oftentimes, problems are complex and nuanced, and involve looking deeper and Thinking Different—and when Overseas Conservatives apply their outsider insight to such things is when I think they shine.
That said, I understand the Overseas Conservative appeal to those on the front lines — whether in the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf, or among the beleaguered citizenry of Israel/Palestine. So let’s take the Eurabia charge at face value: even with the migrations of recent decades, it’s unlikely Europe’s Muslim minority will even reach 20 percent in future decades — about the same as the Latino community in America (interestingly, it doesn’t seem most Overseas Conservatives are as interested in migration from America’s southern border as some domestic conservatives have been of late). And some have theorized that many of the issues Europe has with immigrants from Muslim immigrants have more to do with failure of assimilation, or lack of economic and social opportunities.
To answer that charge, there’s a well-worn (if imperfect) antidote to be found right here in the Overseas Conservative’s backyard: America, with its long tradition of bringing in outsiders and making them part of the greater polity. As a son and grandson of immigrants, and an immigrant of sorts myself, I’d even extend that to the recent influx of migrants from America’s south; so many of them are fleeing economic and political tyranny, and deserve our help. Why not hold our governments to doing it properly, in economically beneficial ways, instead of indulging in more xenophobia? Sure, some immigrant groups are slow to integrate, or self-segregate to varying degrees, but in the end, Barack Obama’s rhetoric about the bonds that unite us is real.
In a way, conservatives have it easier than progressives: it’s much easier to embrace the status quo, or harken back to some mythical past that never really existed, than it is to push for change, risk getting it wrong — and disappoint vast constituencies in the process.
This leads me to my ultimate concern about Overseas Conservatives, the real reason I abandoned their philosophy earlier in life. As constituted nowadays, it seems to me their conservatism embraces two toxic beliefs: essentialism and the just-world hypothesis. With essentialism, there’s the view that, things are their essence, and cannot be changed. Written in the stars, encoded in our DNA. There will always be poverty and bad people, so stop trying to fix them. The just world hypothesis, meanwhile, holds that the universe makes sure everyone gets what’s coming to them. Billionaires and mega-corporations legitimately earned what they have, so stop trying to raise taxes, or force social responsibility on them.
It seems to me these philosophies have utterly warped our economies, leading to a harsh, zero-sum form of competitive capitalism that leaves tens of millions looking over their shoulder, worrying about their economic and job security as companies disproportionately reward large shareholders and top executives. What good is America’s high-performing GDP if it only benefits a relative few?
I’d like to see Overseas Conservatives say more about those issues, speak ever more truth to real power, instead of fixating on the other side’s occasional craziness. In times past it was easy to tar the left as equally bad. But now? There really is no “far left” in America. Think about it: Communism has been well and surely defeated. Most formerly leftish ideas like climate change, same-sex marriage, or drug decriminalization, are broadly popular across the political spectrum. No serious U.S. politician is talking about forced collectivization, a secret police to punish counter-revolutionaries (or those who misuse pronouns), or prohibiting migration. Most of them are for the sort of mixed economies we see in European countries. As Bill Maher once said of Hillary Clinton, “Che Guevera in a pantsuit she is not.”
If I had to pick a favorite, I think David Frum offers a possible path forward—points for expat Canadians named David. He’s renounced and repudiated so much of what he once believed, embodied in a marvelously nuanced piece in this month’s The Atlantic. I’d like to think more of these folks—all of whom I concede are superb thinkers, by the way—will look at this election and, rather than engage in the usual smug, self-congratulatory right-wing triumphalism, aim to Think Different.
Because we need them, indeed everyone, to begin thinking that way, as the incoming political class of America circa 2025 promises a very interesting spectacle.
He loved this country, in spite of having been born abroad, and never having actually lived here.
His family was liberated by American troops entering Shanghai in 1945. He would tell us stories of hitching rides with them to school, having them attend his Bar Mitzvah (which, if memory serves, was held on an American ship). I grew up with stories of his love of America, and went on frequent visits to the country less than 50 miles to our south. It undoubtedly played a big role in my decision to move here, nearly three decades ago, a story I covered in this post back in 2016, on the eve of another monumentally surprising election involving a certain orange-faced fellow.
Like many sentimentally America fanboys of the past half-century (he always had far more affinity for the U.S as he did for Canada), my Dad probably fit into the camp of center-right folks, those Eisenhower Chamber of Commerce Republicans that are now considered an endangered species (hello, Liz Cheney). As I came into my own and did some intensive historical reading, I drifted away from my Dad’s worldview. But never entirely, for his was one that had some ability to see both sides. When he watched with me the Jon Stewart interview in 2010 on the 9/11 first responders struggling to afford healthcare, he was appalled, and said the thing that sticks in my mind to this day:
“This isn’t the country I fell in love with.”
My father died in 2012, years before that fateful election of eight years back. He’d known about Donald Trump, having taken me to the then newly-opened Trump Tower in New York City back in 1983. We were bedazzled by the gold, marble, and the leather shop in the lobby that made the place smell like money. I don’t know if he thought about Trump that much, other than as a New York real estate developer with a bit of an ego problem (even back then, his name was on everything).
My Dad was always lukewarm on Obama (something we did spar about) but I doubt, had he lived, that he’d have been happy to see what became of America’s conservative party in the aftermath. Like most moderate conservatives of the age, my Dad was pro-free trade; he delighted in the opportunities NAFTA granted North Americans, including a class of work visa that helped make possible my own entry into this country. Having lost relatives in the Nazi Holocaust, he was a front-and-center liberal internationalist who believed in the global pax americana world order.
Even his moderately socially conservative views—a product of the Mad Men era—shifted over the years; at first, it took him a bit to open up to the LGBTQ thing. Eventually, though, he came to embrace not only who I am, but went even further than that: he presided at the wedding of two of his closest friends, a queer couple of many decades.
For so long I identified “conservative” with “my father.” This may have been exacerbated growing up in liberal Montreal, Canada, where he often prided himself on being the Churchillian contrarian, terming himself “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan.” It wasn’t until I worked in Middle America, at a financial firm founded by evangelical Christians, that I realized that, well, he wasn’t all that conservative after all.
Obviously, movements and ideas shift over the years—it’s hard to believe “conservative” once meant embracing the divine right of kings—but I doubt my Dad would find much to revere or admire about today’s latter-day brand of conservatism, variously dubbed Trumpism or ethno-nationalist populism. In fact, it would probably freak him the fuck out. Because, Nazis. I doubt even Trump’s apparent support of Israel would move him all that much. There’s just too many other specifics that would turn him off.
The morning after
Kamala supporters. Howard University, November 5, 2024. Source: NBC News
Given that, so many of us in the progressive camp are left wondering:
What. The. Eff. Just. Happened.
Trump had long since lost those Chamber of Commerce conservatives. Both Liz Cheney and Cheney pére. Scores of his previous advisors from his first term in office. David Frum. Bret Stephens. He was painted, variously, as racist, incoherent, unhinged, fascistic. Given all that conservative intransigence, it was amazing that the race was even considered close; but given that, we were all bracing for days and days of delayed counts, recounts, legal challenges…basically 2020 all over again.
In the end, it was all moot. Because the orange man won in, what by American terms can only be described as a blowout. An unambiguous win in every swing state. A significant popular vote majority—the first for a Republican President in two decades (I was around the last time it happened, in a very sullen Boston the night of John Kerry’s loss). Most likely both houses of Congress. Plus an extant conservative Supreme Court majority, care of his last term, that led to the downfall of Roe v. Wade and nationally legal abortions in this country. Heck, he’s begun winning over the very minorities he’s been known to denigrate.
Pundits way above my pay grade are already poring over the specifics: Kamala wasn’t as strong a candidate as was needed against the charismatic Trump (say what you want about him, he has a certain Eric Cartman energy about him); the economy weighed on voters more than was given credit; the Dems were feckless, shortsighted, and far too obsessed with the woke mind virus to care about issues affecting everyday people. The list goes on.
One thing’s clear: America’s not like a parliamentary democracy. The ones where snap elections can happen anytime, last for six weeks, and frequently involve voters picking the none-too-charismatic leader they dislike the least. I’ve often noted that for Americans, voting for a President is a bit like appointing a monarch. There needs to be more there there than simple political know-how. I maintain that both Hillary and Kamala would have made legendary, kick-ass Prime Ministers…but that’s not the job they were up for.
The road ahead
Maybe because it’s the second time it’s happened, but the feeling this time around seems a bit less shock-and-awe and a bit more sorrowful resignation. The world feels a lot more fractious than it did in 2016, when Brexit was still fresh and Facebook still revered. In reaction to the last Trump term, progressives reacted assertively, though some now think they overcorrected.
I take their point, but do not fully concede it. As a young (misguided) conservative, I, too, was banged around a bit by what was then called the Politically Correct, in college back in the 1990s. Even though I’ve come around to many of their views, I recognize a certain smug, snarky, shrill stridency in progressive circles that is off-putting to many. Double that up with the fact that the once affordable-ish big cities where liberals make their homes have now become Gilded Age monuments to wealth inequality.
It must be easy to lump all of it together—establishment conservatives; woke libs; hardcore urbanists denigrating the suburbs; students looking at the Israel/Gaza war like it’s some post-colonial flavor of Black Lives Matter (it’s not); people you knew as sweet little boys now pierced, tattooed, and asking to be called they/them—and say “fuckit; the orange guy’s a better choice.”
Personally, I feel exhausted. It feels like almost every election in this country since 2000—practically the whole time I’ve been here—is trumpeted with the melodramatics of the Rebel assault on the Death Star. Every one is the most consequential of our lives. Every one foments wary triumph or terrified soul-searching. Comparisons are often made between our times and Europe in the 1930s. Except the 1930s ended—albeit with the greatest global conflagration in history, one whose aspects even today read like fiction: city-sized factories for extermination; firebombing whole metropolises to rubble; atomic-powered doomsday weapons. But even romantics of World War II like my Dad knew that kind of war, even if we somehow perversely wanted it again, can never again be fought. With the nuclear genie out of the bottle, it almost feels like we’re living in an eternal time loop where it’s always 1930s Europe—or 1850s America, for that matter.
How to convince the unconvinceable
We can’t give up on what we believe in, abandon the notion of trying. That goes double for us progressives, for whom the belief in a better world is literally the animating factor behind our belief system. It’s why we’ll never adopt the conservative belief that things can never get better—except for your little tribe building walls around everything. Or that we must stand athwart history yelling “stop.” We understand the world only spins forward. While populists like Trump promise to make things Great Again, they never really do. Beneath all the drain-the-swamp bluster is a lot of elitism-as-usual politics, and temporarily-inconvenienced-millionaire rhetoric; aggrieved Americans might believe it’s working for them, but really little of substance gets done.
The biggest homework for progressives, I think, is to learn the lessons of the past three decades and properly apply them. Presidential candidates need to be incandescent, charismatic as well as wonkishly smart. New ideas about gender and love need to connect with people who only know old ideas. One early gay writer I once read said that prejudice against LGBTQs will dissipate once everyone knows someone who’s queer. It took decades—that was written in 1994—but it seems to have more or less come to pass. Economic ideas and programs need to be expertly marketed, with provable causality on how they improve people’s lives. There are homes nowadays that, between real-estate hyperinflation during the pandemic and interest-rate hyperinflation since, cost triple in monthly payments in 2024 than they did in 2020. For folks looking at that, and blaming the current administration (however unfairly), blandishments about “the economy” mean almost nothing.
It’s a monumental task, I know: convincing so many who voted MAGA this time around (and there were millions of them) that the woke side’s ideas are on the right side of history. That progressive ideas can—tangibly and truly—help everyone build better lives. That the Woke Mind Virus is nothing to be afraid of, just guidelines for not being a dick toward anybody who doesn’t look, talk, or love like you. If there’s one silver lining to all this MAGA-mania, it’s that, unlike so many truly fascistic movements of the past, it’s an incoherent mishmash of poorly thought-out ideas that have little chance of succeeding.
Their anger at the unfairness of the system is real. Our job now is to convince them there’s a better way. It’s what my Dad would’ve done for the country that he loved.
As part of election musings, here’s one I wrote twelve years ago, after Obama was elected to a second term. Those were the days.
What a night!
For those of us in the progressive camp, it went at least as well as we could imagine: a solid (if close) Obama win; a pick-up of some Senate seats, partly brought on by the defeat of what I call the “pro-rape coalition” of Neanderthals Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. Legalization of both marijuana and gay marriage in a few states — the first time such measures have actually won a general vote. Dylan nailed this one: the times they indeed are-a-changin’. For many of us, it wasn’t a moment too soon.
But still, much remains to be done: will the Obama camp drop their continued (if somewhat halfhearted) pursuit of the fruitless “war on drugs”? Will they overturn the Defense of Marriage Act? Will they go forth and enact “Obamacare” as promised? Will they tackle longstanding inefficiencies and unfairnesses in the immigration system? Will they indeed push for a future that’s less dependent on dirty, climate-altering, nonrenewable, depleting fossil fuels? I could go on.
If the mood this time around is less unabashedly jubilant than last, it’s because maybe we, collectively, have a clearer picture of the enormous work that still needs to be done — and we’re also less sanguine about the prospect of “reaching across the aisle.” In my years in this country, I’ve watched the continued devolution of “conservatism” from a movement emphasizing cautious-minded retention of core values into one that’s angry, deranged, nativist, theocratic. Free-market fundamentalist to a degree that would make Morgan and Rockefeller cringe. Bits of it make sense; most of it is hateful and brutish and belongs nowhere in an advanced democracy.
It’s that sometimes hard lesson that we bring the morning after: if Republicans indeed are what they are, it’s time to stop harboring illusions about bipartisanship and begin forging a future without them. Be bold, Barry. You’ve got a four year runway with no more elections to win. Way I see it, America faces a choice: it can remain an indispensable nation, a pre-eminent technological, economic, and military power whose great wealth can be used to help build a productive, just, outward-looking society. Or it can shrink backward into 18th-century ideology, turning itself into an irrelevant, paranoid, neo-gilded-age banana republic. This election laid the choice bare — and I, for one, am heartened that we pulled the lever forward, not back.
Six months after October 7th, a long, winding journey through histories personal and political
Old City, Jerusalem. 1971
Start with a crazy thought: Born and raised Jewish, I’ve never once personally experienced antisemitism (also known as Judeophobia, a more accurate term for the phenomenon, and one I’m using from here on out).
Maybe I was just lucky. Or maybe my parents and community did their part to shelter me from such cruelties. Or maybe, in spite of all my wanderings and travels, I’ve managed to remain in a bit of a bubble. Or maybe a little of all those things.
Of course, I know about Judeophobia. My background made good and sure of that. I’ve studied it, like, a lot. I was made to watch Holocaust documentaries as a tween (whether that was altogether healthy, I’m not sure).
And yet, one thing glares out at me though it all: though we all know what Judeophobia is, on a most profound know-it-when-I-see-it level, the question that is never answered is, well, why it is.
Think about it for a second. Homophobia (hatred of another group I belong to, and yeah, I experienced it many times) has at its core a certain messed-up, twisted logic: since sex between men and women is for procreation, anything that’s not that is no bueno. Critics would be quick to jump out and claim homophobes somehow seem fine with hetero sex that’s not for making babies. True… except even that has been verboten in ages past (and present, sadly).
Ditto racism. People look different than you, so that creates the perception of a threat. All sorts of junky, fallacious science was dreamed up to justify it over the centuries.
Religious wars come closer to answering the question. After all, if Protestants can battle Catholics as in Northern Ireland—or, heck, if all Christendom can mount literal Crusades to retake Jerusalem from the Muslim saracens—well, doesn’t the hate for the Jews make sense on that level? More broadly, doesn’t it just seem that humans have this awful penchant to hate and fear the different, the unknown, within the species? Call it a most toxic flavor of Freud’s narcissism of small differences.
For me, though, that answer never fully satisfies. For one thing, as a corollary to my theory that nearly all wars are resource wars, it can be seen that most, if not all, of these religious wars operated in tandem with the grit of statecraft. This country wanted that country’s land/resources/enslavable population/perception of glory. Think vast armies clashing on medieval meadows, captured with striking artistry by painters of the Renaissance.
But the Jews are no such people. They possess no great resources; even studies of their wealth and influence—clichés notwithstanding—sees Jews in America doing roughly as well as some other groups. They’re one of recorded history’s most ancient extant faiths, but bearing a heavy mythos and elaborate traditions—plus an aversion to proselytizing—they’ve always been few in number. Even though punching above their weight in world influence in recent centuries, they’ve never taken center stage as the world’s pre-eminent peoples the way, say, Christians, Muslims, or Han Chinese have done. It almost makes all the hate seem bitterly comical: why devote so much headspace (looking at you, Kanye) to some 0.2 percent of the human population? It borders on conspiracy theory.
The answer, I think, lies with Steve Jobs (not Jewish, but bear with me).
Think Different
Apple Computer advertisements. Late 1990s
Remember those late-1990s Apple commercials? A paean for the misfits of the world—which, at the time, included steadfast Apple users like me. Interestingly, the first two figures in the original ad from that campaign, projected in glorious slow-motion black & white, are both Jewish (Albert Einstein and Bob Dylan).
Platitudes about God’s Chosen People or deranged Zionist conspiracy theories aside, I think there’s no real magic here: just a laser focus on learning (a superpower in the age of knowledge and industry) and a position (sometimes advantageous, sometimes not) astride two of the largest faiths on Earth—ones that Jewish culture helped start. Actually, that’s likely part of the reason for all the hate, too: even at their most openminded, Christendom and Islam have always felt an Other-ness about that small group of monotheists who didn’t want to be their kind of monotheists. That narcissism of small differences again.
Still, all those reasons don’t fully capture it for me. There’s more, something that I think lies beneath all these reasons. This brings me back to Steve Jobs and those commercials, and leads me to my boldest statement about my culture of origin.
I believe the Jews to be the Think Different people of humanity.
The nerds of our species, as it were. To indulge in cliché for a minute, it’s no coincidence that the dorky persona in popular culture is frequently portrayed as, dare I say it, a tad Jewish-y (big nose, glasses, messy hair, studious). Think Woody Allen, who alone has sufficient notoriety to practically personify what I’m talking about.
Different also means noticed. Willful divergence from the mainstream of humankind may hold great potency, but also courts fatal attention.
Consider the heyday of pagan polytheism, some four thousand years back. In come these ragged old patriarchs fulminating in the desert about a singular abstract, universal super-being (by the way, the term for such an entity in the sci-fi series Dune—the Kwisatz Haderach—stems from two Hebrew words). Or the notion that what we believe in deep within our hearts—orthodoxy—is more important than simply going through ritual religious motions—orthopraxy. This actually holds another clue, since it introduced the burden of a guilty conscience—and in the words of essayist Maurice Samuel, “no one likes an alarm clock.”
It doesn’t stop there: how about the notion that workers, indeed all people, should have a day of rest. Or that we should avoid certain foods (the origin of which may have been dietary, but has since gone in a totally different direction). Or that we shouldn’t proselytise others. Or that the strategic land bridge between Africa and Eurasia—literally humankind’s first rest stop on the long march out of our ancestral cradle—would be a good place to call home. Or that we should focus, to the point of obsession, on the study of a few select texts, interpreted and reinterpreted to death. Or that all these things would spawn two of the world’s biggest religions—both of which the Think Different people would subsequently reject.
People say Judeophobia has morphed and changed through the centuries. I’d argue part of the reason is that its target has done the same. The Think Different people are an ever-shifting innovation. Where once Jews practically invented patriarchy and homophobia (sorry), nowadays it’s Jewish reformers on the front lines of women’s liberation and LGBTQ+ freedom. Where in ancient time the Israelites were rural and agrarian (and before that, nomadic herders), nowadays most Jews live in polyglot big cities.
But it went even beyond ire; it surprised me to learn the Nazis felt a profound sense of victimhood, a notion that their kind was under threat of annihilation at the hands of the Hebrew menace. Untrue and deranged though that sounds, it helps when grappling with the obscene absurdity of it all, how a nation-state considered by many to be the pinnacle of human sophistication and achievement could build city-sized factories for the mass extermination of a people whose only real crime was, well, Thinking Different.
Auschwitz-Birkenau. Outside Krakow, Poland.
This is why the Think Different paradigm feels to me like the only unified-field theory of Judeophobia I can conjure up. I’m not alone in thinking this way either. It’s a potent force, the factor that ties together 1930s National Socialism, contemporary postcolonial leftists, and Islamists together. They all seem to find some way to hate the Jews, or the state the Jews built.
Story of my life
Let’s come back to where we started: as keenly as I’m aware of its existence, Judeophobia has never felt immediate to me. For that, I sometimes hear the Kathy Bates line from Primary Colors ringing in my head: “what a privileged fucking life you’ve had.” Well, maybe on that one front. But there’s more to my story (and, I suspect, many others) than that. And it’s more than just homophobia.
For one thing, my backstory was different than those around me—even set against fellow Think Differents.
My mother’s family. Somewhere between Israel and Canada. Circa 1958
On my Mom’s side, the family story started out Ellis Island, Canadian edition, with Eastern European Jewish families coming to the New World in the early years of the Twentieth century. But, sometime in the 1940s, their path took a hard left: my grandparents, members of the Greatest Generation, met while stationed domestically during wartime. Afterward, they gave up a life in burgeoning North America in 1947 to move to…a whole other war zone. They were part of a left-wing Zionist youth movement. Even though living on a kibbutz didn’t work out for them, they remained in Palestine, and lived its violent transformation into a Jewish state.
My aunt (Dad’s sister) and grandmother. Japan. Circa 1938
My Dad’s family, meanwhile, lived a life that was more Great Gatsby than Fiddler on the Roof or Exodus. Someone in the extended family found a way to make a fortune overseas, and it ended my grandparents up in luxury in colonial-era Shanghai.
Then, World War II came calling. A lucky fluke kept them out of internment camps, but not totally out of the war: my Dad would tell of Allied bombings over Shanghai, counting the length of a bomb’s whistle to guess its deadly proximity. They made it out intact, and spent two years in more luxury in postwar Italy…only to be followed by decidedly less glamorous experiences once they reached these shores. As in: they somehow found a way to lose everything they’d made across the world.
Talk about really Thinking Different.
Maybe because of all this difference, my parents turned out, like, super-Jew-y. Borderline Born Again. On their first date—a blind fix-up in London where they were both on holiday in the Swinging Sixties—they pledged to raise their kids with the traditional Jewish background that they’d missed out on in their respective youths. My sisters and I attended Jewish day schools, from infancy through the end of high school. Our entire social circle—nay, my entire world—was pretty much all Jewish until I was eighteen years old.
Bar Mitzvah. Montreal. May, 1983
Do not be fooled, however: we were not treated as some sort of Jewish aristocrats, as I think my parents sometimes fancied themselves. For me, freak better fit the way I (didn’t) fit it. Part of it was economic: we found ourselves on the ragged edge of our tight-knit community’s upward mobility. More of it was geographic: I got teased because my (White) father was born in Japan, and his background didn’t follow the Ellis Island backstory of everybody else’s bubbe and zayde in my class.
And—yes—the homophobia: my urban, liberal community in the 1980s was no better on that front than anywhere else in John Hughes America. It might as well have been John Hughes America, or any other bougie quasi-suburb, Jewish or otherwise. Blink, and it’s Skokie or Evanston, near Chicago; Squirrel Hill, near Pittsburgh; Shaker Heights, near Cleveland; or Scarsdale, near New York City. A place where, in spite of growing up among my kind, I felt wasn’t my place. I was, in short, one of writer Blake Flayton’s (a thoughtful young queer Jewish journalist with a similar background) Jewish summer camp victims. Not because of religion or dogma; more because sometimes even the Think Different people don’t always rise above humanity’s more ignoble impulses to ostracize and exclude.
Here’s where those campus leftists come back into the picture, and where my experience partly intersects with those recent charges of Judeophobia in academe. Part of that charge is my belief that—in contrast to progressive politics’ support for visible minorities and LGBTQ+ folks—liberal academics seem to have a massive blind spot for the Think Different people. Sure, Jewish immigrants may have been the huddled masses of yesteryear, but in today’s world? Just more White folks. It’s an ironic reversal, some have noted, from when over a century ago race science demonized Jews for being not White.
Meanwhile, my crowd mostly pursued more banal aspirations: score good grades in school; attend a top-ranked university; grow a business, or else build a killer career on Wall Street. Marry, reproduce, repeat. Little boxes on a hillside, all made out of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same (BTW, writer of that ditty? Jewish; more on that below).
It’s been a slow, tangled process for me to disconnect Jewish identity from all that narrow meritocracy. The Think Different crowd has embraced it so passionately that they’re hated for that, too: recall the psychotically hateful fulminators bearing Tiki torches and chanting Jews will not replace us.
Troye Sivan. Three Months (2022 film). Source: IMDB
It’s absurd, particularly in a country and society that celebrates succcess. But it’s also incorrect. Because the Think Different people are so much more than that. The character played by queer pop singer Troye Sivan (Jewish) delivers the most fitting line in Jared Frieder’s (also Jewish) film Three Months, “there’s like six types of Jewish people, and I wanna say…two are pretty fierce?”
Here’s to the fierce ones
They’re what keeps me coming back to my roots, those fierce types. Likely the reason I still Google every accomplished person who I think is a Member of the Tribe to confirm it. Because some Think Different-ers helped spawn a cosmology, an entire universe of better angels. In particular, a loose grouping of modern-day scientists, writers and philosophers who embody what I’m going to call Saganism. It’s the worldview potently articulated by (who else) Carl Sagan, as well as two of his forebears and contemporaries, Isaac Asimov and the above-mentioned Einstein. Add to this group some non-Jews, too: Arthur C. Clarke and Gene Roddenberry.
The Pale Blue Dot. Earth from Voyager One. Photo credit: NASA
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Sadly, current times lean far from Saganist aspirations—particularly for the Think Different people and their neighbors, fighting in the homeland both claim as theirs. It seems Sagan’s own people are trapped in the very nightmare he lays out later in that quote:
“Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.”
Shortly before last fall’s cataclysmic events, a little-known film was touring the festival circuit, a documentary called Israelism. Produced by a couple of young Jewish Americans with a startlingly similar background to my own, it chronicles their questioning, and subsequent re-education, about the inaccuracies of their upbringing. Suffice it to say, it’s attracted no shortage of attention of late as the Israel-Gaza war rages on.
I’ve read and researched this subject widely—as with the Israelism filmmakers, much more widely than my one-sided early education. What strikes me about this conflict is how much both sides seem to talk past one another. Both point to atrocities and misdeeds committed by the other as a means of undermining the other side’s credibility.
What’s even more striking is how much attention the world is paying to all this when contrasted against other global flashpoints. Sometimes I wonder how Africans in the Sahel must feel, with their equally (or more) horrific conflicts largely ignored by the larger world, focused as it is on a few dozen square miles around the Mediterranean.
I know what the Think Different response to this has been, one my upbringing so often reiterated: Judeophobia, pure and simple. Unease with Jewish power. Rabid hatred of infidels by radical Islamists. Lingering prejudice still rooted in the subconscious of many Christian-derived Westerners—ironically, these days, found more often on the social-justice left than on the Hobbesian right.
Although I grew up with these notions, my later learnings added more nuance to my understanding of the conflict. Suffice it to say, while absolutely nothing justifies Hamas’ actions on October 7th, there’s a long history that offers insight into why this madness went down the way it did—and why the reaction was what it was.
A (very) quick catch-up: Israel has a long history of both fierce fighting and hefty global criticism, having racked up an almost comical number of condemnatory UN resolutions, along with past pushes for rapid cease-fires in prior wars. I always felt there were explanations bigger than mere Judeophobia: in Cold War days, there was the inevitable superpower jockeying, with either side trying to gain an advantage without blowing up the world. Moreover, for over a century the region’s been known to be oil-rich, and the fragile geopolitics of safeguarding this valuable energy asset have played a role in every adjacent conflict. Finally, Israel/Palestine is arguably one of the few bona fide civilizational clashes of the Samuel Huntington variety, pitting a largely Western-derived nation against non-Western religion, people, and ideology.
Claims and counter-truths
Watching recent events, particularly in the context of the longer history, led me to another conclusion, a partial explanation for the talking past each other. It’s not just the once-misled kids from Israelism. Lots of people from all sides have limited or incomplete knowledge of this admittedly dense history. Here are some talking points that I think need to be addressed:
Let’s start with from the river to the sea, that innocuous-seeming phrase, often suffixed with Palestine shall be free. Sounds laudable; who wouldn’t want to campaign for people’s freedom? It’s really more about what’s implied: that one people shall supplant another, or that the presence of one people is invalid and the other should occupy the entirety of the land. Leaving aside the logistical near-impossibility of relocating either party (each of which presently number around seven million), we need to ask ourselves if, in the modern age, this is really the right way to go. Maybe, for the sake of sanity, all parties agree to drop this slogan.
Let’s move on to anti-Israel, or rejecting Israel’s right to exist. Atop charges of hate or hostility, can we all agree these are absurd, and—maybe, possibly—Judeophobic notions? If a nation is viable, functional, has an engaged polity…then disputing its right to exist makes absolutely no sense. Does anyone dispute France’s right to exist? Mongolia’s? Brazil’s? Sure, nation-states are all made-up constructs, and lots of them have ignominious pasts. But they serve as the basic organizing unit of humankind in our age. Wanting that they should evolve, holding them to address their shortcomings, fix their problems…all are laudable goals for all the world’s nations, Israel/Palestine included. But a push to utterly eradicate any nation? That has no place in any sane discourse.
As a corollary to this, let’s take another notion: anti-Zionist. This is is usually taken to mean people who don’t support the notion of a Jewish state. Let’s unpack that. Zionism—like its constituent Think Different folk—has itself changed and morphed over the years. For right-wing religious Jews it may mean an exclusively Jewish homeland from the river to the sea. More moderate Israelis consider majority Jewish demographic numbers—which in a democracy is usually synonymous with access to the levers of power—an essential. I no longer count myself in either of those camps, but I don’t consider myself anti-Zionist. Quite the opposite.
Let’s take another claim: the charge of colonialism. Comparisons have been made between Israel and, say, Algeria under French rule, or India under the British Raj. Indeed, some of Israel’s later historians took a look at the evidence (some of it more recently declassified), and surmised that, yes, there was more going on than once thought: purchases of land from absentee landowners in Damascus, followed by kicking peasants off the land they’d farmed for generations to make way for new Jewish settlers; to say nothing of the formation of new (Jewish) towns and settlements apart from their Arab neighbors.
Not to be pedantic here, but this is sometimes described as settler colonialism — more like what was practiced in North America, Australia, or New Zealand. Even this charge is considered unacceptable, but I maintain that settler colonialism offers more of a platform to build a fairer society than the colonialism of the old-school kind. Countries built by people creating society afresh have, it seems, greater capacity to be held to ideals and eliminate past hypocrisies. Or at least try.
And—yes—as with other settler societies, displacement of peoples was often in the picture. Heck, Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, fretted about it years before the State of Israel came into being. Historians on both sides seem to agree that Jewish settlement in the land provoked violent responses from longstanding locals. But how did it all start? In my quest to find who threw the proverbial first punch between the 1880s and 1948, I’ve come up with no easy answers. Some maintain that Judeophobia was behind it, with Arab locals viewing the Jewish new arrivals with much the same disdain as European Judeophobes. Whatever the origin story, the Think Different crowd prevailed, and formed a state in the aftermath.
Not Gaza. Kowloon Walled City. Hong Kong, 1989. Source: Ian Lambot
Let’s move on to Gaza, a place depicted hellishly, as a densely populated, open-air prison—I’ve even heard charges of concentration camp—possibly bringing to mind the no-longer extant Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong.
Here’s what the numbers say: if taken as a standalone country, at almost 17,000 people per square mile, Gaza is indeed up there, standing between Gibraltar (12,000 per square mile) and metropolitan Hong Kong (over 17,000 per square mile). It’s about a third smaller than the city of Chicago, and has almost as many people (2.3 million vs Chicago city’s 2.7 million). So it’s something like a city-state, or a microstate. That said, living in confinement in such a space doesn’t sound like anybody’s idea of a thriving existence, prison or otherwise.
More recently we’ve been hearing charges of genocide. Although more recently this has been a claim on the Palestinian side against Israel, after October 7th there was likewise the charge that those attacks were a newfangled variant of the late Russian Empire-era Judeophobic riots known as pogroms. While there’s no doubt that the suffering on both sides has been horrific, I don’t think either charge quite fits the circumstances. Going by the UN definition, a genocide incorporates willful intent to eliminate another group. While the Israeli military campaign has been heavily criticized for its excesses, it still seems at its core a military operation. Gaza hasn’t been nuked, nor has a significant percentage of its population (currently over two million) been wiped out. Although some of Israel’s more extreme politicians have made some truly deplorable remarks, they haven’t gone nearly as far as what we’ve seen in the historical record. Likewise, however messed up October 7th was, I think we can agree it’s nothing like the potency of the Russian Empire unleashing its citizenry on largely defenseless Jewish peasants.
Another misused word: Apartheid. There are resonances, but to me it doesn’t accurately describe the Israel/Palestine situation. For one thing, the conflict here isn’t racial; plenty of Jewish Israelis look like plenty of Arab Palestinians. I’d say that some measure of ethnocentrism has seeped into some parts of the discourse on both sides. But the major consideration for Israeli-Palestinian segregation has been geopolitical—relating to trust, security, rights, and resources. Israel’s policies could be termed Apartheid influenced. But they come from a very different place than the South Africa of old.
Well…good grief. It’s hard to believe this deranged, fulminating, ludicrous fabrication—said to be minutes of a secret meeting of the great Jewish conspiracy—can be read as anything other than a cruel Python-esque parody. Then again, it’s in good company: look at some of the more extreme media in our fractured age.
Next I watched two almost identically-named stories on Netflix that could not be more different: Farha, an international co-production indy film from 2021 about the Palestinian displacement of 1948; and Fauda, a contemporary Israeli TV series that’s been running for several years and is surprisingly popular in some unlikely places.
Fauda’s terrific—a well-crafted thriller that manages to sensitively portray nuance on all sides. Even the critiques I did find of it made mention of the odd inaccuracy in accents or settings, but otherwise it does a good job of conveying the chaos of the conflict. Heck, its title literally means chaos.
Farha, on the other hand, came in for considerable controversy when it came out, and it’s hard not to see why: although the initial half of the film—depicting a young Palestinian girl hidden in a storehouse in a Palestinian village under evacuation—is harrowing enough, it’s the event the eponymous girl witnesses through cracks and peepholes of the storehouse that’s truly horrifying. Jewish soldiers enter the village, and basically treat any Palestinian they find—including an abducted informant—about as horrifically as some Nazis had done to their kin, just scant years before. Sadism, child murder, summary execution. Yikes.
Now, I know about stories of Arab villages depopulated by Jews during the 1947-1948 period, known to Palestinians as the Nakba. Some less-than-savory behavior was practiced by both sides, shitty things done in the name of war and conquest. But that’s not what Farha’s depicting. For one thing, only one side’s committing atrocities. Then again, in scouring protest videos of this film, I have yet to find someone who definitively debunked that things like this took place. Meanwhile, the Jordanian/Palestinian maker of Farha has has been a bit cagey on the details.
Jewish folks are particularly sensitive to all this because of another old lie, the infamous blood libel. Simply put, it was the nonsensical idea that Jews made Passover matzah—basically a thin overgrown water cracker—out of the blood of Christian babies. As a die-hard carb junkie, I’ve eaten plenty of matzah in my time, and can attest it’s decidedly unsanguinary.
Although the actual blood libel was clearly bullshit, I see the resonance, and how it relates to the terms discussed above. It’s fair and healthy for the Think Different people to be criticized for conduct unbecoming. But it’s unhelpful at the least, and potentially Judeophobic at the worst, to make accusations that verge on the extreme.
To that end, I read and looked further…and the results weren’t encouraging. I read Rashid Khalidi’s book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, and gleaned one interesting data point: the (non-Jewish) locals in Palestine were always opposed to a Jewish state. Pretty much from Day One. They’ve always viewed it as a colonial project—even when tens of thousands of European refugees fleeing a genocidal regime turned up on their shores in the 1930s. Ironically, Palestinian hostility toward Jewish immigration back then evokes some of the backlash we’ve seen over the past decade in Europe against refugees from another Middle Eastern tinder-pot. I can understand a people’s uncertainty and unease with rapid change, or migration of a different kind of people into your lands. But the sheer ferocity of these reactions is, frankly, a bit chilling.
Sadly, this attitude persists into the present day. I’ve been following some of the anti-Zionist coverage in recent weeks, and the accusations are again incredible. I’m reposting these, unsure of their accuracy or veracity. I get that this is a war, attitudes are strained, and people are angry. But these don’t strike me as thoughtful, or even properly fact-checked.
A different kind of response
Given that, I think something needs to happen, believe the Think Different nation might benefit from a course correction. The old-school globocop routine—and concomitant hardass day-to-day attitudes and behaviors—worked fine when fighting nation states in the 1960s, but it hasn’t been effective at winning the most important battle of all: the one for the hearts and mind of the global community.
First things first: I’m not sanctioning trying to reason with with the likes of Hamas (or Hezbollah, or their daddy state Iran’s leadership). I give Rashid Khalidi’s book credit for at least acknowledging that a large part of Palestinian suffering has been their own failed leadership (though nary a mention of the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands), combined with unfailing intransigence from their Arab brethren. Heck it goes on even now: just ask how many Gazans have been allowed into Egypt in the last six months. These days, at least, sovereign Middle East nations have abandoned their deranged notions from the 1960s. Meanwhile, the Hamas charter reads like a Unabomber manifesto. I can only hope that supporters of personal choice, progressive values, and Palestinian liberation (looking at you, campus leftists) to look with better eyes, and renounce support or sympathy for this kind of leadership. However problematic or dickish you may think the Think Different nation has acted, Hamas isn’t the answer. They no more represent decolonization than the ultra-rich Osama Bin Laden stood for global justice and equality.
As for the Think Different crowd, many of whom have given up on trying to appease the world, I recommend Thinking Different a little more: confront and address accusations instead of ignoring them. Take every blood-libel allegation seriously. Do everything possible to seize the moral high ground. If a military raid leads to civilian casualties, get in front of the story before Hamas’ Health Ministry does. In my view, every global protest against Israel is a failure of its own administration to effectively make its case on the global stage.
As to how much military force is best? I lack the expertise to answer that question. Others have tried. My only thought is that it seems to me the Israeli response is based on a fatal misconception Western countries have held since World War Two: that it’s possible to wage total, lethal, overwhelming war on an enemy combatant in a quest for unconditional surrender. But we can’t fight World War Two again, not in an age or atomic weapons and the internet. The war must also be fought on other fronts. Just ask Ho Chi Minh.
In the long term, in the aftermath, we all know what must happen is not what the extremes on either sides want: a permanent Jewish majority in all the land for all time; or, a re-housing of every Palestinian in the exact home they once occupied eighty years ago on another. And why should either of those even be desirable? As commentator Bill Maher put it in a recent closing bit on his show, things change. The world only spins forward. But it can spin forward into something better, something where the injustices of the past are met with real answers instead of more injustice.
The Think Different people have at least made a start, with a demoralized yet still-extant crowd of New Historians like Benny Morris, Tom Segev and Amos Elon, along with present-day commentators like Peter Beinart and historian Yuval Noah Harari. It’s the Palestinian camp that has a lot of work to do. The way Palestinian leadership has confronted the Jewish state through history has been an unyielding pageant of missed opportunities. However you feel about what’s gone down over the past century or so, it’s far better to build from what we have than to expend all our effort into trying to destroy it all. To wit: Hamas has built more tunnels for its combatants over the past years than exist on the New York City Subway.
View from the Western Wall, Jerusalem. 2018
Obviously, none of us can say what the exact form of a now-fantastical final settlement to this conflict will be. But if we really want to Think Different, we must not give up on imagining it. Maybe the State of Israel can remain a Jewish state—constitutionally-enshrined Law of Return to boot—without necessarily having a Jewish majority; maybe, if the Palestinians can give up on their generational hostility to such a state, they can slowly become a part of it, make it an ever richer variant of what it already is. A national homeland for the Jews, and a continuation of the homeland that always was for the myriad inhabitants who’ve been there for centuries. Like their more moderate—and prosperous—Sunni Gulf state neighbors of late, the Palestinian polity has a golden opportunity to be constructively associated with one of the world’s most prosperous, dynamic nation-states.
It seems nuts—but then, so, too was the notion of a united Europe when Einstein proposed it in the 1930s. For those who think this is not only utopian but logistically impossible, I offer up a place right under everyone’s nose where such a model, huddled masses and all, has actually worked quite well—and, guess what? It’s Israel itself.
Yes, really. Under the big tent of ancient Abrahamic culture, the State of Israel gathered in scores of emigrés and refugees from immensely diverse places. From Hoboken to Hamburg to the Horn of Africa, they have come. Heck, my own family even did a stint there when I was a child, and my dim early memories were of a place far more diverse than the community I grew up around in North America. I retain extended family in the region, and, though I’ve been far from this conflict for so much of my life, I want only the best, safest outcome for all of them. And that’s indeed why I don’t consider any of this anti-Zionist at all.
Road tripping around Israel in the family Volvo. Circa 1975
You may say I’m a dreamer. That we tried it with Oslo in the 1990s, and failed. That the turbulent world of now makes all this fantasizing as plausible as Vulcans and warp drive. Maybe so. But maybe, too, it takes a onetime summer camp victim of the Think Different tribe to encourage us not to give up, and that it doesn’t pay us to lean in to the less-desirable aspects of narrow meritocracy or hardcore militarism.
Basically, I dare us to do better. Because—once again paraphrasing those Apple commercials—only the ones crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do.
Further reading
A lot has been published on this subject; here are a few of my selections (not necessarily in any order):
A History of Israel. A comprehensive, lays-out-the-facts explainer. Lengthy and detailed
Orientalism. Not directly about the conflict, but written by renowned Palestinian professor Edward Said on the deep roots of the West’s fascination with the East
Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict. Another self-examination of the conflict’s past
The 1980 film The Blue Lagoon holds a peculiar place in popular culture, particularly for those of us old enough to remember when it came out (hello again, fellow Gen-Xers).
Disclaimer: I was only ten at the time, not quite old enough to see it in theaters. But I had older cousins, and they all talked about it a lot. Heck, I may have even caught part of it on the Sony Trinitron TV in their basement, sitting on that purple shag carpet surrounded by faux-wood paneling that was ubiquitous in those days.
Based on a 1908 novel, it’s a classic of the shipwreck/desert island genre. Two kids, boy and girl cousins aged seven and nine, are stranded on an island sometime in the late Victorian era after their sailing vessel goes down somewhere in the South Pacific. Clearly privileged for the time—one of their dads is traveling with them from Boston to San Francisco—they’re likewise a little sheltered and naïve. Marooned on the island with a crew-member and fellow survivor (who’s definitely not in the same social class) he soon dies of what looks to be an overdose of binge drinking. They’re left to fend for themselves—with only their childlike sensibilities, and what he taught them, to go on.
Spoiler alert for the uninitiated: they grow into adolescence, discover they have feelings for one another, and somehow, through a combination of old photographs and watching nature around them, figure out how to have sex. They have a baby, and—through a misadventure—are finally rescued…but may or may not have lived long enough to see it. The ending is ambiguous.
Paradise‘s controversies
The movie was both groundbreaking and controversial. Coming near the end of filmdom’s movie brat era—when a then-new crop of film school-trained directors took on Hollywood, and reinvented it for the modern age—it features startlingly frank depictions of teenage sexuality and exploration. But what made it particularly hot-button was the ages of the actors themselves: Christopher Atkins was a barely-legal eighteen, and Brooke Shields was—yikes—fifteen. They used body doubles for some racier scenes, and even glued her long hair to her chest so as not to reveal too much. This is years before Oprah, decades before #MeToo (and Shields’ own coming forward about a later sexual assault). With all we’ve learned about exploitation of kid actors, the mistreatment of women in Hollywood and other industries, and the rise of child porn and human trafficking, it seems almost more shocking to us nowadays. Perhaps we, as an audience, have had our own fall from innocence in the intervening decades.
Then again, what it’s depicting, at least romantically, isn’t totally out there. Plenty of fifteen-year-olds have sex for the first time, often with kids slightly older than they—and if stats are to be believed, in greater numbers during the liberated Seventies than today. Teen parentage isn’t all that unknown either—particularly for the time period the movie depicts.
If anything, the movie’s greatest unrealism is far more workaday: how did these two youngsters keep hair and teeth perfectly groomed across a decade of life in the wild? How did the cannibalistic natives—itself a politically problematic depiction—remain unaware of the kids’ existence on a tiny island over all those years? How did they miraculously discover all the mechanics of sex—then, subsequently, deliver a healthy baby just like that? Then again, lots of stories demand suspension of disbelief, so maybe we just go with it as something of a fantasy.
The production values help: it’s gorgeously shot, mostly on an island in Fiji, by renowned cinematographer Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven, Sophie’s Choice); stirring music accompanies the visuals, composed by Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October). Watching it in sharp 4K streaming on Max, you wouldn’t be off-base for thinking it was made last month. Randal Kleiser, its director, went to USC, and was housemates with George Lucas.
It’s not all perfect, though: the beautiful production is undercut by so-so acting; I’m not sure if Kleiser was deliberately going for his leads mimicking childlike behavior, but whatever the reason, they come across like performers in a junior high play. A respectable box-office success at the time, it was largely panned by critics; while it was a star-maker for its leads, Brooke Shields doesn’t exactly count it as a high point in her career.
All that by way of saying: in an era before streaming, it would have been largely forgotten, a relic of the sex-and-drugs 1970s, available on late-night television, and maybe as a worn-out VHS tape at Blockbuster.
Paradise (and mythology) re-found
For me, though, the movie’s long held an odd emotional tug. Maybe some of it was the tropical island setting—magic for a kid growing up in snowy Eastern Canada. More likely, it’s because I was only starting to understand sexuality back then, and the scandal of it all shocked me; like so many deeply-closeted kids, then and now, I was simultaneously openly uptight about, yet secretly fascinated by, sex and sexuality. It‘s been on my endlessly-long streaming watchlist for awhile—and one recent night, in the middle of folding some laundry, I screened the whole thing from beginning to end.
And…Holy. Effing. Moly.
I think everyone has a small subset of themes, images, sounds and motifs that trigger strong emotional associations. Like really strong, shake-you-to-your-core strong. As an alienated, nerdy kid, I gravitated toward movies like Star Wars and Superman. When, in my adolescence, director Steven Spielberg brought his sensibility to a sobering wartime epic set in the same place and time where my Dad had grown up, I felt those feelings again. That time it even influenced my career direction. Years later, having come out but still never having found real, abiding romance, I had that emotional reaction once more, to—of all things—James Cameron’s Titanic. I doubtless wasn’t the only young-ish gay man at the time swept up in Leomania.
In later years, with my (straight) siblings and peers starting to have kids—and with my now-husband and I aiming to do the same—movies about coming of age, of childlike wonder under threat, ring my emotional bells. Some standouts from the past decade: Arrival, Room, and Interstellar. I find the second of those so hard to watch that I haven’t seen it since it first came out. With a kid of my own now, I wonder if I could sit through any of it.
Paradise different
Here’s where The Blue Lagoon ties in on a level I think many have missed. In the tradition of those film theorists formerly-closeted me spurned, I’m going to offer up a theory I haven’t encountered on the interwebs.
The Blue Lagoon is a metaphor for fantasized queer experience. What it almost never was at the time, what many thought would never come to pass, and what it has (sort of) become today.
First off, the obvious: its director, Randal Kleiser, is openly gay. In fact, he made a quasi-autobiographical movie some fifteen years later about a gay man dying of AIDS who throws one final goodbye party. It was one of the first LGBTQ movies I saw, part of the crop of mid-nineties films that slowly, tentatively, introduced queer life to those of us still struggling with it.
Second, and also obvious: those flirtations with taboo. Underage actors, childlike sensibilities about adult experiences, the fact that the two main characters are cousins (though this was also something not entirely unknown in the 19th century).
I think Kleiser wasn’t that innocent, and was totally aware of the taboos and their significance. The novel it’s based on was said to be an old favorite of his. The scandal, the unrealism, the mystical, fantastical nature of it all…it reads to me like something of a queer fantasy.
I don’t know Kleiser’s coming-out story, but given his times and generation, I have little doubt that he didn’t dream of living an open gay life like that of his straight contemporaries: feeling first flush of love as a teen; discovering the pleasures and connections of sexual awakening; birthing a child, and starting a family. These are fundamental, primal things that for so long were utterly unthinkable to LGBTQ folks unless they wanted to live their lives as a lie (aside: that story is the subject of an outstanding recent mini-series).
Predictably, scenes of young parenthood got me the most. There I was, sitting on my bed with a snoozing cat, piles of folded laundry, watching the two main characters onscreen nursing and raising their baby, teaching it to walk and swim…and I was losing it. Like, totally bawling. The story sat with me for a long time until it hit me what it was really about. If these clearly naïve, isolated survivors could build a beautiful, loving life for themselves in an oft-harsh but beautiful world…then maybe we queers can, too. The ending—where it’s unclear if this nascent nuclear family survives discovery by the so-called civilized world—is doubly poignant as a result.
While the controversies about the film’s production are significant, and should not be ignored or overlooked, I hope the movie also gets credit for what shines through in subtext: a paean to the purity of unconventional love, of family forged under unlikely circumstances, and all the possibilities that may bring.
The cliché is accurate, that one about all-those-years-ago-slash-feels-like-just-yesterday. I think that’s always the case with momentous time periods that reshape who you are.
For this one, I was eighteen, headed up to northern Quebec, enrolled in a six-week French immersion program sponsored by the provincial government. In an era when Franco-Quebec nationalism seemed to be slowing down, it was a moderating bid: get more people all across Canada familiar with la francophonie. Brings my native country’s historical Two Solitudes together.
OK, that was the official spiel.
Unofficially, my part of Canada’s long been known as a place that loves a good party. Unlike their Anglo-Scottish Protestant neighbors, the French part of Canada had its own variety of joie de vivre. Once a conservative, Catholic place, it shrugged off religion in the sixties, and never looked back. The drinking age was (and still is) a very loosely enforced eighteen; it wasn’t uncommon to see high schoolers out at college pubs in my hometown, Montreal. Every Quebec town of any size boasts bars and strip joints alongside spots to eat poutine (pro tip: greasy indulgence is handy after a night of carousing).
Given that, it was an open secret among young Canadians that Jonquière, the town whose local college hosted this summer language immersion program, had more bars and clubs than some big cities. With the higher, and more rigidly enforced, drinking age in the rest of Canada, this subsidized summer adventure became for many a sort of extended summer camp, a last hurrah before the tribulations of college came calling.
It must’ve seemed baffling to many why I would’ve signed up. Languages were never my thing, and, truth be told, neither was any form of carousing. To say nothing of the fact that I was utterly petrified to get on that bus.
Let’s unpack all that, shall we?
It seems hard for me now, looking back through all the years, to put myself back in the body of the eighteen-year-old I once was. The events may feel vivid, but the headspace feels like another world. I think that’s true in the broader sense, looked at through the prism of today, when being a young, gay nerd is typically a thing to be celebrated. But it sure as heck didn’t feel that way in the summer of 1988. It was a different world, and I was a different me. Socially, I had a microscopic circle of friends, each about as nerdy as I was (though in different ways). Sometimes it felt like we barely tolerated each other, wishing we were in some other universe where we’d all be more welcomed. The letters my friends and family wrote me that summer (how they’ve made it through all these decades and relocations, I don’t know) reveal my peers to be as lost as I was. In an era before the widespread Internet, we’d grown up in a clannish, close-knit, homogeneous community. One that always seemed so different from who I was, or would ever be.
That explains the fear. It was a defense mechanism. After all, if we were misfits in our little community, imagine how little hope we had of making it in the bigger world. I think that’s the message that plays on repeat inside the brain of every bullied nerd or incipient closet case. Closed off, cautious, unwilling to boldly go. What was the point? We were all too weird to be accepted in this universe.
Still, as high school drew to a close, I had a countervailing panic: what if we were being too cautious? Maybe answers did in fact lie outside, beyond the familiar. Ned Stark’s son in Game of Thrones, asks how you can be brave when you’re afraid. I love the answer: it is only, replies Stark père, when one is afraid that one is truly brave.
And so, there I was, on a six-hour bus ride north, fretting. What was I doing here? I tried to console myself with the official stuff: knowing more languages helps in life, people said—so if nothing else, it’s a summer to build a potentially marketable skill while maybe, just maybe, I don’t know…try to be more social?
The ride up confirmed it was going to be an uphill mission: in addition to a motley crew of mostly college-bound kids from all over Canada, the Jonquière program had gotten on the radar of folks from my little community for many of the same party-time considerations. I don’t think there were many, if any, kids from my actual high school on that bus…but I inhabited such an incestuous scene that people knew people, and no doubt word had gotten out about me, and the words were stay away. Or, maybe I was just obsessing. Whatever it was, nobody spoke or paid attention to me over those six hours. Maybe I was even a bit relieved: I’d long since learned that if you don’t engage, you can’t get in trouble.
Fabulous 1970s architecture
I was even more relieved to learn that the dorms we were staying in — a pair of mid-rise buildings overlooking a forest and an aluminum smelter (how Canadian is that?) — were single-occupancy. No roommate I’d have to fight with all summer. There was even a sink in the room, though toilets and showers were communal. I unpacked, settled in, and felt my anxiety rise.
As it began to get dark, I felt nature calling. I’d heard through my door the sounds of other kids in the hall: arriving, unpacking, chatting and laughing. That, too, was part and parcel: I was accustomed to an existence where all kids seemed to know each other, and got on in a convivial way, while I, well, didn’t. Still, I figured, no harm in popping out to the loo. Right?
I walked out my door, aiming myself at the bathrooms around the corner. A group of kids stood nearby—those voices through my door—and I did my usual, giving them a wide berth. Then I heard it behind me.
“Hey, what’s your name?”
Ugh. Busted. Well, no worry. Don’t engage, remember? No need to start this trip off on a bad note. So I ignored them, and kept on walking.
“Hey, no, come back! We’re just doing introductions.”
I remember pausing, confused. Like, what now? I had no playbook for this. All those platitudes about bravery seem to go out the window when you’re actually in the thick of it. Might as well rip off the Band-Aid now. So I turned around, walked over to them (probably mumbling an “I’m sorry” to boot).
And then, the craziest thing happened.
They actually wanted to know me, and what I was all about. Like, for real. Not as a joke, a prank, some way to cut me down later.
They’d also only just met. Not a one of them were from my hometown, much less my little community within it. As anticipated, they were from all over my vast but very spread out homeland: one guy, a buff redhead, from one of the scores of midsize towns surrounding Toronto; another kid from the Toronto burbs, headed to college to study aerospace engineering; a chatty, studious blonde gal from Windsor, Ontario, who shared my love of politics and America (I had some weird ideas about both back then); three kids from around Edmonton, Alberta, two of whom were a longtime couple—they told me how, for their high school Prom, they were gifted handcuffs; and one ski gal from Cranbrook, British Columbia.
We walked out into the unseasonably warm dusk — 1988 was the first year climate change got headlines — to experience what the town had to offer. We glided our way effortlessly into one of the many bars on the main drag. We ordered drinks, chatted, compared notes on our lives, and our life directions.
The (much younger) author, and one of his new friends
No big deal, right?
Actually, it was a big deal.
Huge.
It was nothing short of a miracle, really. A revelation. I was on a high that no substance could equal. They all seemed like popular, fun (dare I say, rather good-looking) kids, the sort my friend circle could only dream of hanging out with back home. All of them smart, funny, interesting, and ready to have a good time.
And they wanted to hang out with me. Me.
I know how all this reads. It all seems so trifling in hindsight. But those fears and insecurities we chuckle over when watching John Hughes or American Pie movies are the most significant events in creation at that age. That goes double for us real-life Freaks and Geeks, and triple in a less forgiving and understanding age.
Fun times
I spent the whole rest of the summer with that gang; they even gifted me with a cute nickname that, for once, didn’t feel derogatory. The kids from my hometown community, meanwhile, save one or two, continued the silent treatment for the duration. Though, to be fair, it wasn’t all rosy with the gang I’d fallen in with: there were predictable romantic dramas; one or two of the guys proved not quite so nice as I got to know them better; my infantile political attitudes of the period no doubt grated on them (how could they not; I cringe at some of my opinions from back then).
And, yes, even with these newfound mates and adventures, I knew something was still missing. “One day,” said one of the Alberta gals to me during a heart-to-heart, “you’ll meet somebody who’ll knock you off your feet.”
How right she was—but not in the way any of us thought. Even though I clearly recall plenty of mysterious fascinations with guys both in and out of my circle — things I’d later identify as crushes — back then, in the Reagan-era 1980s, it was unthinkable that a guy like me could ever, in a million years, be like that. To my knowledge, not a single kid that summer was openly LGBTQ+, which was no different from the high school I’d attended. Love and romance were things for other people, with me in the dark as to why I was so clueless.
Still, in spite of the boring immersion classes, and the you-must-speak-French-all-the-time rules obeyed more in the breach than the observance, it was a summer for the ages—the first one I can remember. We went to rock concerts—also a bigger deal than it sounds, since I’d been too uptight to go to any before; songs from the local band we saw back then still get me misty (heck, don’t even get me started on Rick Astley). We went on day trips to old Quebec City, and on boat trips through the fjords of the Saguenay River; I still recall some of the more opinionated kids from Out West whining about how geographically uninteresting Eastern Canada was. In retrospect, having lived on the West Coast for more than half my adulthood now, I can say they kinda had a point. We went out dancing. We drank too much — me for the first time—which, yes, culminated in that all-important rite of passage one friend dubbed praying to the porcelain god.
But above all else, that summer was about feeling included, a feat my gang of misfits back home seemed to struggle to achieve. Alienation is a feeling that unites many of us nerdy and queer kids, then and even, to a degree, now.
First time Out West. Winter 1988.
I remember we all wept as we got on the bus home. I stayed in touch with some of them for a spell, even visiting the Albertans that winter for a ski trip to the Canadian Rockies. Ultimately, we drifted apart, as young people and young friend groups so often do. And no, I never came out, or found love, or really learned who I was that summer. That would only come years later.
But those people, that place, that season, lit the spark of who I would one day become.
“I had always felt that the Devon School came into existence the day I entered… was vibrantly real while I was a student there, and then blinked out like a candle the day I left.”
How many of us think that not just about school, but about the world itself? Probably every human that has ever lived imagines the year of their birth is the most important in all the years that ever were.
That said, some lay better claim than others. Call it my corollary to the quote ascribed to Lenin about weeks when decades happen. I’m betting Germans born around 1989 think so about their year, as do Americans birthed in 2001. Or, for that matter, most anyone born most anywhere in 1945.
To that end, I’d like to submit 1970 into the roster.
Qualification One: I’m talking more about the small cluster of years around it, the late-nineteen-sixties and early seventies. Qualification Two: I’m largely focusing on the United States and Canada, though there’s sizable relevance to other Western countries, and, by extension, the rest of the world.
The overall bigness of 1970
Not just that it’s a round number — always convenient for counting birthdays. Though a part of me wonders if, given our base-ten numbering system and our generations lasting about twenty years, we tend to subconsciously bring about cadences, ebbs and flows in time that match our notions of major markers. Whatever the reason, it’s been widely noted that after 1970, things just… shifted.
The decade before it offers clues. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, few deny the impact of the Sixties. The decade when the Betty Crocker post-World War II family order began breaking down. The promise of that order worked out great for straight, white, cis guys… but for practically nobody else. Agitators for change made it out there in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until the coming decade that change became reality.
1967 may have been the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but 1970 was the era of Stonewall. Not initially considered a big deal by mainstream society—and by no means the only LGBTQ+ uprising to have happened back then, it nonetheless stands out. A for-real uprising against the police — a police, of the time, enforcing purposeless, horrifically persecutory laws. Laws that criminalized certain groups right to meet one another, to find connection, experience love. One year after the riots, the earliest marches of what we now know as the Pride movement started. Both happened within months of my arrival on this world. You could say I was literally born with Gay Liberation (though it took me awhile to figure it out).
Actually, that’s another disclaimer: big change sometimes takes time, and only looking back do we trace its spark. Even though I’d grown up mostly after being LGBTQ+ had been removed from psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mental affliction, I personally can speak to that notion having persisted for way too long in society. Don’t believe me? Watch any John Hughes 1980s high school movie. The Stonewall spark built very slowly to the roaring blaze it is now.
But it got lit around 1970.
Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll
“They are not your friends… and they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it.”
Then, in 1970, the Beatles broke up. Come to think of it, the arc of their career traces the big social changes that brought us to 1970. A decade before, guys took ladies on a date to a supper club for some ballroom dancing, as they had for generations. Ten year later, it was nightclubs, LSD, and the hippie-hippie shake amid a newly-free college generation. Don’t believe me? Watch Mad Men through its entire run. Or read about the demise of in loco parentis.
From noble causes to Pentagon Papers and Watergate
“You had Kennedy. I didn’t. I’ve never heard a president say ‘destiny’ and ‘sacrifice’ without thinking, ‘bullshit.’ Okay, maybe it was bullshit with Kennedy, too. But people believed it.”
The Sixties bore the curse of interesting times. For all the idealism, things were far from idyllic; heck, the world nearly ended before the decade was even halfway out. But a certain broader idealism feels like it was lost. When Ron Kovic goes off to war in Born of the Fourth of July (not my favorite movie, but bear with me here) sometime in the Sixties, his town is all golden and gauzy; when he returns, the Seventies have dawned, and the place is dirty and run-down.
It’s a malaise that had tangible turning points: in June, 1971 the Pentagon Papers came out, detailing what America’s government was really up to in Vietnam. Looking back, it seems almost unfathomable—in our age of smartphones, nonstop news, and five decades of jadedness about military misconduct—to really picture how long stuff like this took to disseminate, and how earth-shattering it was when it did.
But when it finally all came out, it shifted the paradigm: a government and military that, a mere quarter-century before, had led the Greatest Generation to heroic victory in the Second World War was now up to no good, destabilizing the very world people thought they were saving. Even the military-industrial complex’s most sacred offshoot, the space program, saw its mighty, decade-long initiative come to fruition in the summer of sixty-nine. Think of space exploration what you will, we’re still struggling to exceed what was all over and done with by the time the New Years bell rang on 1970.
With Apollo-era heroics closing, a darker door was opening. A gate, actually. Or, rather, a building named for one: Watergate. So central has it been to the notion of government scandal, crime, and cover-up, that the suffix -gate is now applied to nearly every scandal since.
The tipping point of economic inequality
From Robert Reich to Thomas Piketty, economists and thinkers are nearly unanimous in declaring 1970 the rough threshold where economic inequality in Western countries — America most especially — began to rise.
My take on why is actually related to the above: after they failed to snag a lock on Betty Crocker conservatism in the Sixties, the crowd so inclined to such ideas went in another direction. They even had a perfect pretext, thanks to another series of events that happened around 1970. Back then, and still now, humankind’s most vital ingredient to make the modern world happen. A three-letter word: oil.
Specifically, the OPEC embargo of 1973. To an even greater degree than the whipsawing economy of the past few years, the 1970s oil shocks roiled America. It all happened care of another peak: America transitioning from a net oil exporter to oil importer (something that’s only been partly reversed in our time of fracking).
These were the real causes of 1970s stagflation, an economic reality that was the very opposite of the go-go decade before. Adding to it were America’s once-defeated, now-rebuilding economic rivals starting to mount a challenge to U.S. manufacturing. With everything feeling like it was going downhill, it’s no surprise that challengers to the liberal economic consensus came out of the woodwork.
We all know what happened next: the Reagan era, Morning in America, the complexities and contradictions of the 1980s. They accelerated and reinforced a self-fulfilling prophecy, one where it’s believed the only way toward “progress” is through a greater risk/reward mechanism, one that leads, seemingly inevitably, toward ever more unequal outcomes. Whether or not you agree that this is inevitable (I sure don’t) the fact is, the movements that pinioned around 1970 were the forces that shaped our times.
We already went through music. But there’s another cultural touchstone that got a major rethink around 1970. Old Hollywood had been on the decline for years — by which I mean the system of studio bosses, vertical integration of production and distribution, capped off with Production Code-mandated soft censorship that forced movies to be redemptive and wholesome. By 1970, the Production Code was repealed, and as film critic Michael Medved once remarked, the winning Oscar for Best Picture went from movies like The Sound of Music, in 1965, to Midnight Cowboy in—you guessed it—1970.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. As with the rise of political neoconservatism, movies saw a classical return to form around a decade later — with the very movies that shaped the generation of kids born around 1970. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Superman; these cultural classics remain relevant to us today.
But, as with political neoconservatism, the movies of the New Hollywood still pulled in elements of the 1970 pivot: characters drank, swore, weren’t always good. Even the trademark happy ending of Old Hollywood days wasn’t safe. Both E.T. and Titanic, two of the biggest New Hollywood movies of the last four decades, don’t end in happily-ever-afters.
The New New Hollywood: Silicon Valley
Tech has so permeated our lives and our media that it probably seems almost bizarre to compare it to its SoCal counterpart. And tech had been big for awhile: histories of Silicon Valley cite the more general “electronics” industry as a player in U.S. economic activity even back in the 1960s (though much of it was corporate, military or academic back then). But it didn’t have the It status it does now, and again we find a pivot around our target year: the invention of the microprocessor, in 1971, by a wobbly, but still-major player of today: Intel.
We all think of the microprocessor as enabling something called “miniaturization,” but I’ve always found that word to be paradoxical, since it’s describing how absolutely frikken huge this innovation really was.
It wasn’t just that pre-microprocessor-age computers were bigger; they often required massive amounts of manual labor to assemble, and a significant amount of on-site maintenance when active. Then, in one stroke, the microprocessor took all that away. Picture the slow, painstaking steps we’ve taken toward nuclear fusion happening in weeks instead of decades. Or if we, one day, somebody just rolled out a car that travelled a thousand miles per hour, all while using virtually no energy and totally safe. It basically made one of sci-fi’s holy grails — thinking machines — entering the realm of the everyday in just a couple of generations. Imagine if we cracked warp drive that quickly.
Maybe the computer chip is the biggest paradigm breaker from around 1970 — though, as we’ve seen, it’s not necessarily the path to salvation we may have thought. Actually, that’s a trope: all the things we’ve brought up have led some economic historians to consider the period after 1970 one of decline in American growth. In everything, that is, except computer technology, and its applications. Tech may indeed aid our salvation in the end — or may be the catalyst toward ever-greater doom. Either way, the big boost came right around 1970.
With all these transitions and upsets, it’s tempting to look at 1970 as the border-line to dystopia. All the above implies a rise in cynicism, a trait most closely associated with the generation bisected at its midpoint by that year. I’m talking about my generation, Gen X. A popular teen movie from 1989 dubbed us the “why bother” generation, in contrast to the (however maligned) idealistic optimism of the Baby Boomers. We may have grown up under Morning in America, but that deceptively positive message was really targeted at Boomers. Lots of us Xers saw it for what Primary Colors called it: bullshit. It’s impossible to watch movies like The Breakfast Club or Heathers and not think how irredeemably hopeless everything feels. Sure, the world has sucked before, but I doubt anyone’s been quite so aware of it, under circumstances so existential, as the generation that grew up in the shadow of both economic decline and the atomic age.
But still, I move that all is not lost. The generations that came after the one cleaved by 1970 hold a different outlook. Millennials were the first to voice full-throated hope again, and took many of the progressive ideals of the 1960s to the next level. Cynics may call it performative or politically correct, but I maintain the conversation moved forward on their watch. And emerging Gen Z, largely the kids of Xers, has again made agitating for social change great again. There, too, 1970 offers an echo: the very first Earth Day was held that year.
Hopefully it makes change-agitators the true inheritors of 1970, the ones best poised to take on the mantle of fixing the world. It’s become clear over the past decade that, in spite of progress in many places, things seem ever more precarious on Planet Earth than they have in a while.
A while, I maintain, of about half a century.
Think you have a birth year with similar significance? I’d be interested to hear about it in the comments below.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
I still remember that late-summer evening when I boarded British Airways flight 94. My first flight across the Atlantic in over two decades.
I had seven months planned out. Every continent on Earth save Antarctica. Though I was always big into travel, I hadn’t set foot outside North America since adolescence. I’d lived and visited all over my home continent. But even as the son of two first(ish)-generation immigrants, I had no adult exposure to what it was like Over There.
When asked, I had the usual American-style excuses ready: not enough time, not enough money. They’re powerful reasons when they’re true, and they’re true for many. Fewer than a fifth of the human race has any kind of regular access to air travel. While I’ve been grateful enough to be a part of that fifth, I used the opportunity to stay in my home continent for many years.
Why? Like so many in this country, I fell a bit for the notion that my home continent was kind-of enough, at least for the time being. I never wanted to be a struggling newbie in foreign lands, some awkward guidebook-toting tourist trying to figure out how to ask for the bathroom.
Kyoto, Japan. January, 2009
But then, things shifted. My 1990s-era optimism about America was starting to fade — after 9/11, two wars, a misbegotten Presidency, and, ultimately, a real-estate crash. I wasn’t sure if travel would answer life’s big questions, I wrote in my journal, but at least it forces us to look at them from someplace else. In 2008, many someplace elses were needed.
The global rainbow
First off, yes, it happened: I had my mind blown. But not in the ways you’d expect.
Machu Picchu. March, 2009
First big surprise: all those places cynics had written off as touristy or tired or predictable. OK, some of them were… but many, many, many more were just plain awesome. Not just places, but people. I met a kaleidoscope of them, and all those clichés about fellow travelers and citizens of the world made sense on a truly visceral level. It’s cliché for a reason, I mused, but we all really do have a lot more in common than we realize.
Also: traveling the world was so much easier than expected, or feared. Granted, I was pretty organized, planning some things out while leaving a lot of other things to chance. As for those horror stories about lost luggage and food poisoning and getting robbed? Both happened to me back home—before the trip—but not on the trip itself. Trains and planes (mostly) left and arrived on time. I never got anything worse than a throat infection—and that in a country where I happen to have a doctor relative; a buck-fifty’s worth of antibiotics and I was on my way. Heck, even the weather was great most everywhere I went… except for that minus-twenty week in Beijing. Silver lining: I had the Great Wall almost to myself.
Great Wall, Badaling, People’s Republic of China. January, 2009
Timing played a role. 2008 marked something of a sweet spot in world navigability: just enough Internet out there to make connecting easier, but not so much as when filter bubbles closed us off. Even with the financial crash hitting big back home, overseas—at least where I went—the party was still going on.
Meanwhile, I rid myself of many preconceptions. I used to think of the Old World as, well, old. Dirty. Used up. Fractured by ancient hatreds. Instead, I saw a gleaming new Europe, one continent like never before, stitched together by amazing high-speed trains. Berlin had just finished putting itself back together. London looked nothing like the fusty old place I remembered from when I visited as a teen. This world was slick, modern, and—in the right places—party central.
Brandenburg Gate, Berlin. November, 2008
That was true for me on another level: I found thriving LGBTQ life in Tokyo, Cape Town, Singapore, Lima, and (yes) Moscow—on top of well-known standbys like Amsterdam, Bangkok, and Buenos Aires. I encountered friendly locals in Jordan, Cambodia, and Peru. Bathed in 2008 Olympics afterglow, I marveled at China’s recent rise—that remarkable stadium complex in Beijing; the elegantly restored historic neighborhoods of Shanghai; those incredible airports; those young professionals sipping lattes at Starbucks whose parents, I mused, might have endured life in labor camps.
The Bund. Shanghai, China. January, 2009
I also encountered fellow Americans, and while some impressed me, others, well… let’s just say that, with the Yankee laser-focus on career ambition, few Americans with wherewithal to travel were doing it “just be” style like young (or not-so-young) Europeans, Australians, or South Africans on their Gap Years. Heck, that was practically the point of the bestseller of the time, Eat, Pray, Love.
with American college students. Macchu Pichu. March, 2009
Maybe that’s what made me celebrate the world I encountered, and contributed to my attitude that, while we in America were relapsing into partisan bickering and economic mismanagement, the rest of the globe was figuring it out. Waking up from history.
An Atlanticist’s Kool-Aid sugar crash
Coming home in mid-2009, I held on, wanting to believe the great stuff I’d experienced could translate into lessons learned back home. Our new leadership had to get it, understand the lessons of the world and move America into the leadership role it always professed to hold. Especially then, since that leadership was headed by a man who embodied the connected world: a Middle American Mom, an East African Dad, and a birthplace smack in the middle of Earth’s biggest ocean. I watched his election late into the night from a sports bar in Prague, audaciously hoping that this would put us back on track, back to the hopeful 1990s and those dreams of a New World Order.
You can guess how I’ve been feeling over the past weeks, or for that matter, the last half-decade.
I used to repeat the mantra “war in Europe is no longer possible” so many times that it must by now be etched into my skull. I bought Thomas Friedman’s Golden Arches theorem in a big way, enjoying that company’s offerings in once-unthinkable places, though more for the symbolism than for the Big Macs.
McDonald’s. Moscow, November, 2008.
I think there’s a kind of perverse naïveté among Gen Xers like me— a generation who otherwise rank as history’s greatest group of cynics. We learned in school about the scary first two-thirds of the Twentieth century: two World Wars, the Bomb, the Iron Curtain, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire speech.
But it’s what came after school that marked us: watching that same Wall come down, peacefully no less; the Evil Empire disintegrating not long after; South Africa freeing, then electing, Nelson Mandela; Northern Ireland forming a lasting peace; the Middle East coming within sight of doing the same. And all that before Y2K ended up a giant party. Apocalypse? Pshaw. I mean, what other generation became adults just as a book literally named The End of History came out?
Zen and the art of being wrong
Predicting the future is dicey business, but you get a pass for failing as a fortune-teller. What’s more embarrassing is to realize you got it wrong about the present. What was right before my eyes. Being out there, in the moment, in the world, and not really taking in what’s before you. Granted, I was hardly the first person to get out there and see what I wanted to see; I doubt I’ll be the last.
What did I miss? My intellectuals and party friends (sometimes the same people) in London were grand… but didn’t help me understand, or even uncover, the side of Britain that voted the way they did six years later. Leave that marvel of post-World War II unity? Insanity. Looking over the lights of Cairo, I dreamed of a city ready for a glorious revolution… sure, it came, a scant three years later, but didn’t change much of anything in the end. Nowadays it’s hard to say Egypt’s any better off than it was fourteen years ago. I met up with gays in Moscow, oblivious not only to Putin’s recent war in Georgia, but also his incipient homophobia at home. I didn’t make it to Ukraine, but in years since worked with offshore tech teams from there. I always thought of their country as a part of the connected world I experienced, those talking heads on Zoom calls an echo of places I did visit, like Czechia or Germany. I wonder how those former colleagues are holding up these days.
We may feel far from it, here in North America, but it’s no less heartbreaking, reading headlines that seem torn out of history books. Clearly, some of us held on to the heady optimism of the 1990s too long, felt we’d transcended the ancient cruelties we as a species have visited upon each other for eons. We reached the brink of Armageddon, went the notion, sometime around the Cuban Missile Crisis, and have since been on a decades-long process of climbing out of it.
Except, history isn’t always a smooth climb upward. For many of us, coming to terms with that is a feature—a limitation, perhaps—of a whole life philosophy. I’ve long been critical of pessimists who believe in an intractable “human nature,” the inalienable human feature conservatives so often cite as the reason things will never really get better. Maybe I thought otherwise, that human nature’s push for self-preservation finally saw the light after the nuclear age, realized there was no way out of the stalemate but to become better to each other.
Hope and (more) travel
Utopian? Maybe. Or maybe just too soon. H.G. Wells—and Star Trek, Wells’ biggest modern-day standard bearer—posited that we can grow up as a species, sure, but only after enduring great cataclysm and existential shift from the outside (I’m looking at you, Vulcans). Simply proclaiming the Cold War over and nuclear war unthinkable wasn’t enough. And no matter how much of the world one sees when traveling, the picture you bring back is always going to be incomplete.
Over California. June, 2021
Don’t get me wrong: I still very much believe in going Over There, believe it’s a key lynchpin for breaking barriers, widening horizons, and trying to build a more complete picture for us and for generations to come. It’s something I aim to pass on to our young son, now taking his first steps in new places.
Maybe it’s partly for his sake I haven’t fully let go of big-picture hope. With everything going on these days, it seems improbable to imagine that we collectively will figure things out one day without great cataclysm and destruction. But then, everything’s improbable—which is maybe both the lessons of one’s younger travels, and a reminder to all idealistic liberal internationalists. The future is always murky, and even given the darkness and pessimism of the past years and weeks, nothing in history is ever over. Or guaranteed.
