Becoming Tired

I AM BECOMING Tired of it all; the bitterness, the hatred, the ceaseless acrimony. I refer to the current state of American politics. I for one am willing to set aside my long standing hatred of Trump, and to take a new look. I do not expect this new approach to be popular among my fellow anti-Trumpers. Somehow, I'll survive. A good place to start is with the policies of the Trump administration, both foreign and domestic. C Van Woodward, a preeminent historian of the American south (I forget whether the old south or the new, post Civil War south), who began one of his monographs with the sentence "five times during the American experience the celebrated art of compromise has held the union together", paraphrased. When I was in graduate school at a major university, in the doctoral program, eminent historian C. Van Woodward was invited and accepted the invitation to be the guest speaker at te annual end of the year history-fest, or whatever they called it. One of the professors had a big pot luck party in his home, and I recall one of my fellow grad students, going a bit overboard, going from pot to pot,heaping an amount of food on a plate that no three hundred pound athlete nor anyone else could possibly comsume, and handing it to the esteemed scholar.The food eas excellent, and although I had already stuffed myself full of it, I was envious, and would gladly have acepted and devoured the entire plateful. I was not only a lowly graduate student teaching basic freshman history courses to earn my stipend as a doctoral student, I was also an ardent tennis player and exercise enthusiast, in my late twenties, still in possession of a metabolism and appetite worthy of a high school or college athlete... C.Van Woodward was unequal to the task. Although a large man of ample girth who was obviously no stranger to a large plate of food, he seemed overwhelmed, and barely took a bite... Five times...the celebrated art of compromise... His reference was to compromises made at the constitutional convention of 1787, the compromise of 1877 by which the federal occupation of the defeated south was lifted, the Missouri compromise, and so forth. The word "compromise" is apparently lacking not only from our modern political vocabulary and discourse, but also from the American political process itself, at a fundamental level. We now live in an allor nothing world and political climate, or so it seems to this humble observer of contemporary American politics. While all this was happening Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, and then as now, the nation was divided, between Reaganites and his opponents, among whom I numbered. Arguably the United States has always been a divided nation, in one way or another; whether or not to separate from Great Britain, whether to join the union or the confederacy, whether to legislate probition, whether to repeal it. The list is long. My strongest memory of a divided nation was the Viet Nam war, when I was a child. When I was twelve years old, in 1967, I had doubts about it, about whether it would ever end, whether the United States could possibly extract from it anything resembling "victory". In January, 1968, when the massive Tet offensive failed miserably and the American military slaughtered the attacking North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong, although I had not yet turned thirteen, I saw, or thought I saw, the "handwriting on the wall". The failure of the Tet offensive seemd to deter the North not one iota. The Viet Nam war, essentially dating back to the French acquisition of it, who had colonized the Asian country in 1862, and were trying to keep their hard won "possession" trying to keep the colony for which it had sacrificed much to aquire and retain. World War Two spelled the end of the French owned Viet Nam, and of most of their overseas colonial empire. Overseas empires of major western powers are in decline. National self determination is the trend. And so powerful nations, their international influence waning, are forced to look inward, upon themselves. So it is with the American empire, forced to once again look inward at itself, despite its apparent reluctance to do so. Nietsche said it best: "If thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee." Maybe a bit of fatigue would benefit us all.