Civic Thuggery

Last night, I slept in a 19th Century cabin on the shore of Lake Michigan in Juddville, Wisconsin. All night long I could hear the waves.

This is an old American place. The rough-hewn timber walls tell of a different time, a different country. Here, where the Door Peninsula juts 80 miles or so into the lake like a crooked finger pointing northward, you can still sense the pioneer origins of this land, settled by Scandinavian and German immigrants starting in the 1860s. Today, Door County is a Midwestern tourist destination, and the lakeshore is lined with grand second homes. But in this cabin, I can see and sense the work of older hands, older ways.

Who were they? Those Americans?

Generations have slept under these beams; countless meals shared within these walls. All that love. Hard work. Prayers. Births. Deaths. Laughter. Silences.

Outside, our country kept changing.

Civil War and industrialization, immigration, Depression, world wars, civil rights, assassinations, Reagan's morning in America, 9/11—and now this.

This…civic collapse.

On Saturday, reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico showed up for work at the White House—and were turned away. Their credentials were deactivated or confiscated.

The day before, Trump had announced that he was banning the organizations because, he said, they report “fake news.” Others could be next, he warned.

We are well used to this kind of civic thuggery from this president and his administration. It is contrary to our Constitution, our values, our historical practices. It is alien, because we have never had a president with Trump’s anti-democratic conception of the power of that office.

The White House is his house. Access to it is his to grant. Any criticism of his performance in office is a punishable offense. The powers entrusted to the president can be used to punish the offender.

Trump’s personalization of the office collides with a much older American tradition, albeit one that was always imperfectly honored. Yes, American presidents have abused power and attacked journalists before. But there was a shared ideal of what power ought to be in America, an aspiration that began with the Founders, and especially with the magnificently republican example of George Washington.

He speaks and acts like a man drunk on the authority of his office. There is something heedless, gleeful, and menacing in him now. To me, it’s un-American.

It’s hard to keep writing about this. It’s hard to keep finding poems that match either Trump’s character or our reaction to it. I’ve done the mad-king column. I’ve done the stand-up-and-fight column, several times. I’ve done the beauty-of-free-speech column.

And today, as I wonder how to capture this moment, it feels like loss.

Like the loss that intellectually I knew was occurring, like the loss I even understood emotionally as a sense that our country may never be the same. It feels like a fact now.

It’s the weather, the American weather. And it’s settling in for a while.

But not forever. This cabin holds a lesson.

Through the generations, it had prosperous and happy eras, and times when it fell into disuse and disrepair. In the 1950s, it was restored by Maggy Magerstadt Rosner, a Chicago native and professional book-binder who spent summers up here and acted in a local theater for 44 years. An obituary describes Maggy’s favorite occupation as “spending time engaged in animated conversations with friends. No topic was off limits! Maggy truly lived her life with zest!”

That woman saved this place, and with it, more than a local curiosity, or even a piece of history. She preserved the memory of how we lived, the ideals these timbers and all the years hold. That is a special way of loving our country: restoration. Our inheritances—natural, architectural, civic—survive only when people tend them. We will all have to do the hard work of restoring some semblance of what we grew up understanding to be our American values.

Outside the cabin window here, the waves roll up to the shore, and recede.

That sound put me in mind of one of the greatest poems in the English language, Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

Arnold stands by the sea with his love, and hears the waves recede, and with them the end of an era of faith.

—Terry

(By the way, I’m here in Wisconsin for the first public reading of a play I’ve written, which will take place on Wednesday at the Door Kinetic Arts Festival—2:30PM, Kress Pavillion, Egg Harbor. It’s called The Baghdad Gentlemen’s Club. Come on by if you’re in the area! More on that later this week.)

by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.