December 27, 2013

Fine time in Alpharetta. My nephews seem almost charmed, handsome, affectionate, surrounded by friends, like my students, invigorating to be around. My sister has her achievement as a mother behind her, largely, and the next act all before her. Left Atlanta under an enamel dawn sky with a flock of geese flying over.

I can see the action at my “new” house, people moving around, trucks being loaded up as Stuart moves gradually out. I have always been able to spy on whoever lived there, but only recently did. Not much of a busybody. . . .

Americans baffle Europeans in part because of our willingness to adhere to convictions that have no basis in truth or fact– at which point we make the cleaving unto the wildly false conviction into a kind of religion, the blind adherence a kind of virtue. We hold the dignity of the individual in high esteem– and that is well, though it becomes unwell when part of that respect becomes allowing the individual to say any damn thing he pleases without fear of being called an idiot or a liar. Few Europeans would say, “I’m entitled to my own opinion” and assume that idiocy, depravity, falsehood were part of that entitlement. On the car radio I listened ten minutes of Conservative Republican analysis of a world which does not exist, and the reporter never once said, “Yes, but I was referencing Planet Earth–“ The point they were talking to was how to attract votes from people who hate and fear your principles without changing those principles. I confess that they did have success convincing the American proletariat (and sub-proletariat) that their interests were served by enriching the rich. It’s hard to doubt one’s powers after a coup like that.

Kid wanted to borrow my truck to move. OK. But it took four phone calls and that many missed passes finally to find the address. I was blue with rage. It’s a house, with an address, on a street; find it. I told him to turn south and he turned north. Maybe he was a true American and fighting the elitist notion that one  “south” is better than another.