Last week, I attended a summer school on ethics at the end of life, one of whose faculty members was an American bioethicist who teaches at a school of medicine in the US. On the first day, he began his talk lamenting the political situation in the US, its impact on science, and more generally its radical departure from long-standing American ideals. This prelude struck me because I don’t encounter it much; I haven’t been at venues this year hearing Americans speak. It was heart-felt and alarmed without being alarmist, but perhaps denialist: hopefully we can get back to where we used to be as a country, because we’ve gone off the rails.
My first reaction was annoyance. I dislike how Americans have a tendency to make everything about them, to center their tragedies and power, to pretend that other systems and agendas don't exist, which operates at multiple levels, from website design to headlines in major newspapers. The rest of the world is living a highly localized (in the web sense) life; if you live in the US, everything was built to serve your specifications, so you think that's how it is. Anyway, this prelude seemed like more of the same.
That night, I had my first political dream. (All dreams are indirectly political, one might say, but this was the first directly political one of the recent era that I remembered on waking.) In the dream, something ICE related had affected my youngest child’s school community, and there were a few parents collapsed, crying. Someone was comforting them. In the room was a circle of people sitting in silence, a combination protest and Quaker meeting. The mood was heavy, dark, vulnerable. Distant forces had breached the European bubble, and those forces had come from America.
In this dream, I felt moved to acknowledge that my country had done this and to apologize. Not that an apology would do anything, but I felt I had to speak up about the stain. I was connected to this, there was no longer a way to avoid that fact. I composed such a speech but then never delivered it–it didn't fit the mood, which was about mourning and gathering resistance.
This put that American academic's speech in some perspective. Maybe it was self-centered, empire-centered, but it was also something else.
This week, back at the day job, I was presenting informally to colleagues, all European, and I started with a prelude acknowledging the Trumpist, MAGA stain, that it stands for nothing I stand for, that I'm horrified at what's happening, and I apologized, for whatever that’s worth. That if I were in the US, I would be resisting and protesting. People seemed to appreciate what I said. Or, they didn't seem to find it annoying. I felt as if I’d said something important. A coming out, in a way. A graduation. It's a topic in all of our professional lives, as all funding for foreign collaborations has been stopped, and the question arises somewhat frequently about the vulnerabilities that are posed by any association with America, from collaborating on projects to traveling to the US for conferences.
I live my life here measuring my non-Dutchness, my non-Europeanness, which is demonstrated to me on a daily basis, woven into the most mundane activities. And I often occupy my Americanness in the key of relief and regret (thank goodness my family’s not living there) and worry. But rarely do I occupy it in a way that makes the association clear and explicit. I never acknowledge the disjunct between, on one hand, enjoying the benefits of being a citizen of the empire and, on the other, rejecting its policies. And I don't, outside of private conversations with friends and family, occupy it in the posture of a resister. So giving voice to the anger and the disappointment and worry was a new step. Unfortunately I don't believe that things are retrievable. The MAGA racket has taken over, and fuck them.
There’s some position between “complicitness” and a perfectly neutral association that I still need to find the words to describe, but that American speaker’s prelude and then the dream pointed to the terrain where it lies.
