Mirage

On the Shifting Sands of Peace and Democracy

My girlfriend had never been to Europe before, and her reaction on seeing rural France was similar to my own when I first visited that country, years ago: a slow-dawning outrage at realizing that a modern, industrialized nation doesn’t actually have to be hideous; that America chose hideousness, out of blindness or indifference or, per H. L. Mencken’s “The Libido for the Ugly,” out of a perverse, willful Puritan “lust for to make the world intolerable.” The sentiment that America is the greatest country on earth is pretty much limited to those with no basis for comparison. Coming from a country that was sold off, paved over and trashed long before we were born, it's easy, looking enviously across the Atlantic, to imagine Europe as a relative utopia: a place that values its history, culture, and beauty, where they linger over dinner instead of getting drive-through, and get several months’ maternity leave instead of none. The only billboards we saw on the highway commemorated historic or cultural landmarks, not franchises (we learned about Jacques Tati’s first film, The Big Day, from a sign informing us it had been shot in a town near here). We passed orchards of towering sleek white windmills on the horizon; the French have begun converting to renewable power, while in America oil is still a more valuable commodity than human life.

And yet—as Conrad’s Marlowe muses, moored on the Thames—“This, too, has been one of the dark places of the earth.” We’d brought along A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman’s history of “the calamitous 14th century,” when Europe was plagued by wars of stupefying pointlessness: in the absence of any central command, armies operated with the strategy of a fourth-grade kickball game, each knight trying to win as much personal glory as possible. Also in the absence of centralized authority, France was ravaged by “companies,” gangs of former mercenaries who periodically pillaged towns, killing, raping, and looting. In every village we drove through stood a stone obelisk engraved with the names of the town’s young men who died in the Great War a hundred years ago. Sometimes a panel on the obverse is engraved with the dead of the next, larger war. At the Prado, in Madrid, we saw some of Goya’s “Disasters of War” etchings, chronicling the atrocities committed during the guerilla war of Napoleon’s Peninsular campaign, one of the first modern wars of occupation, and his paired epic paintings “The Second of May” and “The Third of May,” depicting, respectively, a riot against Mamelukes—Arabic knights who served as mercenaries for the invading French—and the execution by firing squad of Spanish partisans in reprisal. In the Second of May a Mameluke is toppled from his horse, dragged upside-down, his back arched in agony, midriff a riot of muddied color, gold and teal silk sashes streaked with blood. The man goring him with a dagger looks horrified, as if helplessly driven by some force outside himself, like the famous late painting of Saturn devouring his child.

Like a lot of American progressives, I think of Europe as what America could be if we’d just let the slave states secede. Our “liberal” party would be called center-right over there; our “conservative” party would be called Nazis. They have a sane gun culture and humane health care system. It sometimes looks like a last bastion of civilization in a world fast falling back into atavistic fascism. But democracy is still young and vulnerable, an anomaly in the history of civilization. I was bemused by the clucking of pundits, after the Arab Spring, when Egypt had not become a stable republic inside a year, that perhaps the Arab world was “not ready for democracy.” I wondered whether any of them were familiar with the history of France, with its rapid turnover of monarchies, republics and empires, revolutions and restorations, indiscriminate bloodbaths and spasms of imperial conquest. Spain was a fascist dictatorship until shockingly recently: Franco finally succumbed to richly-deserved Parkinson’s in 1975, the year Jaws came out; the country only became a full democracy in 1982, ca. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. You’d think the Italians, at least, would’ve had enough of fascism, but Mussolini’s granddaughter is a member of the European parliament.

I’ve written before about the distorting effect of having grown up in such an anomalous idyll in history—for my entire lifetime Americans could take for granted that, whatever our internal problems or conflicts, our government would remain stable. France’s uncountable number of governments in the last half-century seemed absurd—like, get it together already, dudes; the peaceful transfer of power was something they had to worry about in banana republics. The phrase “it can’t happen here” was always used as an ironic/ominous caution, but until recently it actually felt like a fair assumption. But racist reactionaries and fascists are gaining in elections in America and Europe, and insurrectionists carried their slavers’ flag through the halls of the U.S. Capitol.

And, for the first time in decades, Europe is at war again, as Russia makes a belated grasp at its vanished empire. While we were in France, a stray missile struck Polish soil, which made everyone very jumpy; it’s the sort of little mishap easily misinterpreted, or misrepresented, in ways that can plunge a world into war. (The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which precipitated America’s military entry into Vietnam, never even happened at all.) Ava told me that she’d understood how naive and simplistic slogans like “give peace a chance” were when she was in high school, but it was reading about the struggle for civil rights in Robert Caro’s LBJ bios that had made her realize that peace is not an inert, passive state: it is hard, complicated, active and demanding, not easily established, or maintained.

The U.S. midterm elections were held while we were abroad. I was grateful of the distance—it seemed as if democracy itself were on referendum. A lot of Republican candidates were running on platforms that claimed the 2020 election had been “stolen,” and their racist dog-whistles were now well within human auditory range. To everyone’s surprise and relief, voters mostly rejected these fascist dingbats and grifters (though it was dispiriting, as always, that the races were so close). Since then, congress has passed an electoral reform law guarding against the kind of coup Trump and his flunkies were attempting. But it’s not as if the threat has receded; Trump is still scheming another run from his marshy lair, and a new brood of larval fascists are honing their credentials in bigotry and cruelty for the next election. An unshakeable thirty percent of the electorate still longs to revert to theocracy. The designers of our experimental country understood what an essentially artificial conceit democracy was, how contrary to human nature, like some element created in a lab. I think, more and more, of Franklin telling us we have a republic “if you can keep it.”

On one of our last days abroad, we were looking for someplace to pull over for a picnic lunch, and we discovered we were a brief detour away from the Largest Sand Dune in Europe. It’s a lot bigger than you’d think. Once we’d ascended the steep wooden stairs to the top, it looked like the cover of some ‘70s post-apocalyptic novel—dun sand, a nacreous sky, a pale, pearlescent sun. The horizon unnaturally close, as if we were on the moon. On one side of that massive ridge of sand was the ocean; on the other, forest. There must have been a military base not too far away, because fighter jets were flying exercises invisibly overhead; the soft warping rumble of their engines rolled under the low grey cloud ceiling as we trudged through that desolate landscape. We could see a few bone-dead trees at the landward edge of the dune where it touched the forest; each year it creeps a few meters farther, inexorably inland, the implacable waste reclaiming the land from life’s tenacious, tenuous hold.