This week marks the end of my 27th and the start of my 28th year here in Birmingham. It wasn’t supposed to be. I was supposed to be here in a temporary position before heading back to California in no more than five years. That’s what I had told Steve and that’s what I had promised myself back in the dreadful summer of 1998 when forces beyond either of our control systematically dismantled the life we had built for ourselves over a decade in our beloved Craftsman bungalow in midtown Sacramento. We pulled into Birmingham on Halloween night, a Saturday in our fully laden Acura Integra accompanied by a traumatized cat who was not in the least cut out for long hours in the car and settled into a Holday Inn waiting for the closing on Tuesday, the arrival of the moving van on Wednesday, unpacking over a long weekend, and my beginning work the following Monday.
Neither of us had any idea of what was to come – Steve’s impending illness and death which manifested about a year later, my discovering of untapped talents that have taken me to practically every stage in the metro area, the ups and downs of UAB and the Birmingham VA, the arrival of Tommy and his incredible talents, the personal losses, the assumption of the mantle of story teller and now, drifting towards formal retirement and venerable elderhood. Like all the rest of us, my brain finished it’s development sometime in my later 20s and I still feel like that person inside, although the mirror shows me hard evidence that he is long gone, and I have to figure out how to make peace between the youth inside and the paw-paw outside. Something that all of my generation is working hard at. Those who do not do this inner work are bound for great unhappiness as biology cares not for our wishes and age continues to take its toll no matter what plans we may have. I’ve been asked to give a talk in late January about my experiences in medicine as a gay man through all of the changes of the last forty years. This has put me in a contemplative state, to put it mildly.
I am a bit optimistic following the results of elections last night. Mind you, it’s off year elections so they won’t make a lot of major difference in terms of policy or trajectory of society in the near term, but a quick run down of what happened suggests that the American public has caught on to what the Trump administration’s policies actually do and they aren’t having it. Counties in deep red states that were solidly Republican by double digits went Democratic. Democrats won essentially all the important races on the ballot. It’s too early to call it a repudiation of Trumpism but it shows that our means of changing how this country works, by changing our elected representatives by showing up and voting, still works. There’s a year until the midterms and a lot can happen in a year but it suggests that Republicans will not have an easy time holding their majorities without dismantling the electoral process and I don’t think that’s going to be anywhere near as easy as they think. I’m waiting to see where the cracks open up in the Republican coalition as the gap between the policies Americans want and the policies offered by the Trump administration continue to widen. Maybe more and more of us will learn that politics are not a spectator sport and all politics are local and engaging with each other to find the common ground of what we all want to see for America may lead to some better ways forward.
I’ve been wondering if I had been framing our current political moment the wrong way in my mind. I’ve been seeing the current political moment, the great unravelling, as a destruction of the society put in place after the Great Depression by FDR which has held us together for the last four or five generations. But maybe it’s not a destruction. Maybe this attempt to make government work for the average citizen and the common good is not the norm but an aberration. Tommy would have argued this. He spent most of his nursing career working with the most marginalized communities. He ran homeless clinics. He provided health services to the sex workers of Birmiingham in the late 80s and 90s. He knew where all the brothels were and was on a first name basis with a number of the madams – it wasn’t information I could make much use of but it was interesting to know how that world, hidden beneath the surface, actually worked. Seeing how badly society and systems treated people on the lower end of the socio-economic scale enraged him about how politics worked and he was quietly furious with government on all levels and wanted nothing to do with it. I had a hard time getting him to vote he was so upset at government and law enforcement. He died just over a year into Trump’s first term. I have no idea what he’d make of our current political moment but I know he’d be out there rescuing one person at a time.
Tommy always felt that when government did something positive, it was transactional and watch out for the hidden teeth which would snap at your rear end. He felt that the true America was the America of destruction of indigenous populations and cultures, wealth hoarding, geopolitical interference for the profits of American capitalism, be it produce, petroleum, or high tech, crushing of labor movements, slavery and Jim Crow and separate but equal, and subjugation of the other to puritan morality. That was the story of America from the early 1600s until the 1930s. What we are seeing now is a return to those roots which had centuries to grow and take shape and imbue everything in the culture. It’s 80% of the time we’ve been shaping this continent.
Because of these deep cultural roots, moves back to this sort of society don’t feel wrong to a lot of people. They feel right on a very deep level and that’s going to be a very difficult thing to overcome. The smart people in the Trump administration (and there are a few left) know this and have been using the iconography of Americana to repackage some truly odious ideas and philosophies and make them palatable to a population which is no longer taught critical thinking. (Thank you two generations of No Child Left Behind). Can all of this be overcome? Of course it can but it requires a willingness on each of our parts to look forward, rather than back on a nostalgic past that never really existed.
Dick Cheney died this week. He, more than anyone else, created the ‘War on Terror’ and the dreadful misadventure in Iraq that continues to ripple through world geopolitics to this day. At the time, he was considered about as right wing as you could get. He died thoroughly ostracized by the current Republican party for not being nearly right wing enough as he loved and stood by his gay daughter and preached true fiscal conservatism, not supply side voodoo economics which have caused economic disaster everytime the Republicans have held power since Ronald Reagan. I despised him when he was in power. I still do on some levels. At the same time, I can’t help but think we might be better off with a few more like him in the current administration.
Cheney was 84 and had had a terrible heart for years. Most men, even those without significant disease, start hitting the wall in regards to their bodies holding on somewhere between 78 and 86. Take a look at the ages of the senior male politicians. Change is going to come.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 