As you’re reading newly written words, I’m hoping it’s obvious that I managed to get back home from Europe in one piece. I don’t have a whole lot to say about the last day or so of the trip. The ship docked back at Civitavecchia on the morning of the 30th and the disembarkation process ran smoothly, at least for us. I’m not so sure about the older woman who was busy vomiting into a plastic bag in the middle of the maze of gateway corridors, especially as her family were all rolling their eyes at her condition. Leaving her to the echoes of her heaves and the loving embrace of her adult children, we quickly found our bags in the small city of luggage and shared a van taxi into Rome with three other couples. We were only going to spend 24 hours in Rome as a buffer in case there were delays with the ship so that we wouldn’t miss our flight back to the US.
My wonderful travel agent had booked us into a small hotel in the heart of Rome, right on the Piazza Rotonda, the site of the Pantheon. When we opened the window of the room, we were looking directly into the front façade of the building and down on the heads of the myriad tourists awaiting admission. It was rather amazing. Usually when I open the curtains of my hotel room, it’s an airshaft, a parking lot, or a construction site. We had no particular agenda and 24 hours to enjoy. Between the May trip and the few days before the cruise, we had seen most of the tourist sites, so we decided to just explore and go where we felt like. I let Thomas take the lead as Rome seems to be his spiritual home in the way that London seems to be mine. We had some good meals, did some shopping at out-of-the-way places, spent a lovely sunset drinking cocktails at a wonderful rooftop bar which put us on a level with all of the bell towers and baroque domes, and wandering the streets, full of revelers just beginning their weekend. The weather was idyllic: 60s and sunny. Perfect weather for nosing around.
On Saturday morning, our last day, Thomas was up early to roam deserted streets by himself. I slept in a bit longer but did join him for breakfast, a walk through Piazza Espagnol and then over to the Tiber and down past the Vatican. At this point, it was time to finish packing and head for the airport. The airport was not crowded, the lines for check in and security were not overly long and we were soon uncomfortably ensconced for the nearly twelve-hour flight back to Atlanta. Like any long-distance flight, the best thing I can say about it is that it was uneventful. The customs/border control area at ATL was a bit of a zoo, but I have seen it much worse and we had a little time to catch our breath before the short hop back to BHM. And just like that, fifteen days, and seven destinations came to an end.
It’s now forty-eight hours later and I am still a bit jet lagged. My vacation dates were set up around the old itinerary so I have not yet returned to work and will not until Wednesday. It’s been nice having a couple of days to try and reacclimate to this time zone, complicated slightly by the daylight savings change in the midst of everything. I’m unpacked, fairly caught up on various domestic chores that have lain fallow while I have been away, and the cats are only giving me the occasional murderous stare now that they know I’m back in their lives. They only peed on the laundry once which is actually an improvement in terms of the messages they tend to send when I interrupt their personal routines. I’ve also gotten back to rehearsal on Arsenic and Old Lace which opens on Thursday. There was a mini-covid epidemic backstage while I was gone so things are a little behind but it’s coming together. I did learn my lines while away but I’m still a bit shaky on some of the cues. I should be fine by Thursday.
Tomorrow is election day. I have an appointment first thing in the morning and then I am heading to vote afterwards. As I am off work, I’m happy to stand in line if either the feds or the state of Alabama decides to pull any shenanigans at the polls in my racially mixed neighborhood. I have no idea what to expect in terms of the outcomes or how the administration is likely to react should the results prove a strong rebuke of their policies of the last two years. I guess I’ll live through the aftermath the way the rest of us will. One day and one decision at a time. I am hoping the state of Alabama voters understand the differences between our two major candidates for governor. The one from the ruling party is one of the few current politicians who can make the current president seem intelligent and lucid. The one from the opposition party, out of power for decades, is about as close as one can get to a real-life Atticus Finch. Given that I’ve watched Alabama voters shoot themselves in the foot over and over again over the decades I have lived here, I am not overly optimistic.
I’ve been trying to figure out what this last trip has taught me. Not in the superficial way of such things as ‘smoked octopus tastes good but has an odd texture’ or ‘three pina coladas on a pool afternoon is one too many’ but in a deeper, more transformative way. If you don’t learn something by travel, there’s no point in doing it. Might as well just watch documentaries on the Travel Channel – they edit out all the boring and uncomfortable parts. This journey was centered around a part of the world where Western Civilizations have been around for a very long time. Rome and Istanbul are both pushing three millennia old. The Greek Islands have been inhabited even longer. The people have seen Empires come and go. Greek, Persian, Roman, Gothic, Muslim, Ottoman; and yet they remain, living in the same places as their ancestors, often in the same buildings, just rebuilt and repurposed as necessary. The destruction brought by civilizational shifts has been visited upon them time and again. The survivors pick up and carry on.
We don’t have that in this part of the world. There’s no city in North America much over five hundred years old. We have, for the most part, been spared the destruction and carnage of constant wars upon our soil. And we have two important gifts our ancestors left to us. The first is that this country was built upon a contract. A contract that decreed that the population, We the People, are the ones in charge and that we consent to be governed but by structures, laws and representatives to whom we have given authority as part of that contract. My generation, certainly, was raised on the ideal that the rules we create apply equally to everyone, plebian to president. In the wake of the destruction of the Great Depression and World War II (which was not so much physical here as spiritual), the people decided to move the society towards a more equitable one, tweaking the rules so that the economy would more evenly benefit the population and creating the great middle class of the postwar years. There has been a stealth operation over many decades, funded by the subset of the wealthy who feel that we should be an economic aristocracy where only those in ‘the club’ have true political power, that have been working hard to overturn this idea. And the second Trump administration is the culmination of their long propaganda campaign to convince Americans that government, higher education, an informed and neutral press, and the other institutions that created postwar society are the enemy and should be destroyed, or at least reinterpreted. The Powell memorandum, the Moral Majority, the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, the Objectivist philosophies of Ayn Rand filtering into the highest economic circles through Alan Greenspan, the Heritage Foundation, the Project for a New American Century, Project 2025: all working for the same goal – weakening the pillars of society in such a way that only the society becomes one of the new aristocracy, by the new aristocracy, and for the new aristocracy. Look at the three campaign slogans used to mobilize MAGA in 2024. ‘Release the Epstein Files’. ‘No new wars’. ‘Bring our troops home’. Say any of these at a current Trump rally and you will shortly be escorted out. The new aristocracy has found that embracing any of these might pose a threat to themselves or their cash flow. We may find in the aftermath of tomorrow if the current administration has the power to finally break the 18th century contract, product of the Age of Enlightenment that we have all assumed would be eternal.
The second great gift given to us by our forebearers was the idea that a national identity need not be synonymous with a cultural, ethnic, or religious identity. In Europe, memories are long and boundaries are sharply defined by language, by custom, by geography. There’s no particular history of assimilation or acceptance of higher level of identity. We’ve at least been giving lip service to the ideal that anyone can be and consider themselves an American who comes here and embraces our way of life and is willing to become part of the contract mentioned above. We’ve hardly been perfect at this, but we have, for the most part kept trying. And what would America be without German cars, Italian pizza, British TV dramas, and Japanese electronics? The current administration, with its Gestapo tactics being used against newer immigrant populations, promotion of the idea of ‘heritage Americans’, is trying to undo this work of centuries. Fortunately, I don’t believe they’ll succeed. We’ve shown time and again that once we meet the new neighbors, try their food and find it delicious, realize that they pretty much want the same things we do, and are generally decent folk, it’s hard to demonize them. The kind of centuries-old distrust between identities that existed in Europe and that the Third Reich was able to exploit, don’t exist here in the same way. As more and more outrages by ICE are reported, ordinary folk are starting to understand the cruelty behind the policies. Trying to decide which of my blue shirts I’m wearing to the polls tomorrow. Sleep well. Tomorrow may be a long
