American Exile

With every passing day, Trump becomes more and more obviously the mirror of the Toxic America that was partly (and only momentarily) contested during the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter Administrations, but that gained a new lease on life during the Reagan, Bush-1, Clinton, Bush-2, and Obama Administrations. The key to understanding our present predicament does not lie in the platforms of the political parties—funhouse mirror images of one another—but in the prevailing pulse of the average American. That pulse is very weak today. Toxicity has gained the upper hand in the blood and the cure is only secondarily political in nature. It is primarily cultural. But American culture, an air-conditioned nightmare, has the nutritional value of a Big Mac. It creeps through the blood like a slow-working poison and I do not see in the population at large the inner resources necessary to resist the disease and revive the body. A James Baldwin here, a Henry Miller there, a Bob Dylan or a Bruce Springsteen, but there is only so much such sparks of light can do in our present darkness.

In the Republic of Turkey, where the political has rarely risen above the ridiculous, a culture of conviviality, hospitality, beauty and humanity—with roots that run deep in the region (9,000 years worth)—continues to reign. That culture is the soil that nourishes the Turkish people (who are, for the most part, combinations of Greek and Armenian, Kurdish and Syrian, Caucasian, Iranian, and Central Asian—“Turk,” like “American,” is a recent invention). Every time I visit I am reminded of all that I am missing in the land of my exile—which, paradoxically, is the land of my birth.

Members of the Lost Generation, gasping for air, fled to Europe. But that was nearly a century ago and, today, the American contagion is metastasizing globally. I am not confident that Europa has remained in a position to resist the spreading cancer. And we must be honest with ourselves: essential elements of the American malady arrived in North America with the first European conquistadors. Perhaps that historical relation may function as a kind of inoculation for the latter day European, but only time will tell.

Holed up in my mountain hideaway, I attend to the business of raising a family and provoking others to think—Emerson said that this is the best we can hope to accomplish with our pedagogy. But I know where a culture of conviviality, hospitality, beauty and humanity can be found and it alone has proven itself to me to be an effective antidote to American Toxicity. Every day I dream of making my escape.