march 2000

Two years ago, I walked downstairs and saw one of my teenage sons watching a strange YouTube video on the television.

“What is that?” I asked.

He turned to me earnestly and explained, “It’s a psychology professor at the University of Toronto talking about Canadian law.”

“Huh?” I said, but he had already turned back to the screen. I figured he had finally gotten to the end of the internet, and this was the very last thing on it.

That night, my son tried to explain the thing to me, but it was a buzzing in my ear, and I wanted to talk about something more interesting. It didn’t matter; it turned out a number of his friends—all of them like him: progressive Democrats, with the full range of social positions you would expect of adolescents growing up in liberal households in blue-bubble Los Angeles—had watched the video as well, and they talked about it to one another.  

On a Sunday morning in 2017 I took down his picture, and by afternoon it was in the alley with other rubbish awaiting transport to the local landfill for final burial. Hardly a hero’s end.

The painting had no monetary value; it was really just a print of an original overlaid with brushstrokes to appear authentic. But 40 years earlier it had been a gift from a young Army wife to her lieutenant husband when the $25 price (framed) required juggling other needs in our budget.

The dignified likeness of General Robert E. Lee in his Confederate Army uniform had been a prized possession of mine. I’d grown up not far from the Custis-Lee Mansion, and at West Point, Lee, the near-perfect cadet, Mexican War hero, academy superintendent, and, finally, the commander of the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia, cast a long, ever-present shadow. Later, in Army quarters from Fort Benning, Georgia, to Fort Lewis, Washington, the painting reflected my fascination with leadership, and it spoke of duty and selfless service.

How many times during my childhood did my father tell me that when his grandmother and her sister sailed to America, they had traveled “a class above steerage”? I was a Hula-Hooping child of the atomic age, growing strong on USDA beef and Cocoa Puffs. What did I know about steerage? But I knew my father in the complete and inchoate way that a child knows her parent, and I knew he wanted me to understand something important to him and—somehow—to me. I understood the lesson to be: The Flanagans have been down, but they have not been out.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once wrote. And we tell them inside our families so that something can live within them, some idea or value, some complicated honoring of an elder. Elizabeth Warren’s family—the Herrings—had a story, of course. A central and important one: Her parents’ love had been so strong that they had defied their elders and eloped. Her mother had been rejected by the Herrings because she was “Cherokee and Delaware,” Warren has said many times, which heightened the family romance and gave it mythic dimensions. It’s one of the central American stories; it’s The Searchers.

There was a moment, some 45 minutes into President Trump’s rally in Houston on Monday night, when it seemed like he wasn’t really going anywhere. The president was running through some of his standard talking points, but as with many of his more recent speeches, there wasn’t a spark.

And then suddenly there was. Trump launched into the darkest, angriest section of his speech, a furious tirade at Democrats, laced with falsehoods. He ran through several areas—health care, entitlements, supposed voter fraud—but the climax was immigration.

“The crisis on our border right now as we speak is the sole result of Democrat laws and activist Democrat judges that prevent us from returning illegal aliens from Central America and all over the world—it’s called catch and release,” Trump said. “They’re killing and hurting innocent Americans. Democrat immigration policies allow poisonous drugs and MS-13 to pour into our country, and Democrat sanctuary cities release dangerous criminals from jail and into your neighborhoods.”

Conservatives aren’t terribly fond of America’s elite universities. Recent research from the political scientists Carlos X. Lastra-Anadon and Thomas Gift found that while liberals consider elite-educated politicians more competent than those with less illustrious pedigrees, conservatives find them considerably less appealing. Though liberals were just as inclined to back candidates educated at Ivy League universities as those who were not, conservatives were less likely to vote for Ivy Leaguers. It seems that President Trump’s frequent boasts about having attended the elite Wharton School were, to conservative voters at least, less a draw than an obstacle to overcome. And that is as it should be.

President Donald Trump is fuming over a U.S.-bound migrant caravan. Over the course of the past week, he’s posted 15 tweets about the caravan, estimated to consist of as many as 7,000 people, that left from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, earlier this month and has been growing along the way. Trump has placed blame on Democrats, threatened to cut aid to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and urged an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws despite Congress being out of session.

He called the caravan an “assault on our country” at a rally Monday night in Houston and said the “Democrats had something to do with” it. Earlier in the day, Trump had pledged to cut off or “substantially” reduce foreign aid to the Northern Triangle countries.

Many people in Washington are angry at the Trump administration’s coddling of Saudi Arabia. They’re angry at Donald Trump’s efforts to exonerate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. Outrage is spreading to America’s participation in Riyadh’s war in Yemen, where a Saudi blockade on the country’s main port has left 8 million at risk of starvation. Good. Given that the U.S. military is providing arms, intelligence, and fuel for a Saudi bombing campaign the United Nations calls a “war crime,” the indignation is overdue.

But it’s too limited. The Trump administration’s support for Saudi barbarism is a symptom. The disease is its enthusiasm for a new cold war in the Middle East.

The sectarian fervor widely associated with the Middle East has recent roots. A chain of political and religious upheavals, beginning in 1979, ignited and fueled sectarian hatred and added an ethnic bent to it. The results were catastrophic: Sectarianism caused deep societal fissures and cost hundreds of thousands of lives over a sustained period of time.

Almost exactly 40 years after this surge in sectarianism began, however, we might finally be witnessing its ebb. Sectarianism today is arguably at a recent low, and a reversal of the main causes that catalyzed and intensified it suggests that the demobilization might continue.

In 1979, the religious and geopolitical landscape was drastically transformed. In February of that year, the Pahlavi dynasty of Iran was overthrown by a popular uprising led by a Shiite religious cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Later in July, Saddam Hussein formally became Iraq’s president, and he consolidated power after a major purge of the Ba’ath Party. In November, messianic hard-liners hijacked the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, and declared their leader Juhayman al-Otaybi as the Mahdi—the Muslim savior—and thus the only legitimate leader. In December, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, prompting Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan to back the mujahideen to expel the invaders of the Muslim country.

In 2016, shortly after she was appointed to the position, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos declared American public schools a “dead-end.” Instead, DeVos advocates for “school choice,” a code word for charter schools, vouchers, and other privatization efforts.

Families who have watched their local schools struggle might agree with DeVos, but her characterization is still troubling. It reflects a distrust of education as a communal goal, not just an individual one. That’s a big change from the goal of American public schools during their first two centuries. Far from being a “dead end,” for a long time the public school—particularly the public high school—served an important civic purpose. Not only as an academic training ground, but also as a center for community and activity in American cities.

On October 13, a group of hundreds of people gathered together to flee their impoverished home country of Honduras in a caravan headed toward the United States, seeking a better life for themselves and their families. That caravan quickly swelled to approximately 7,000 Central American immigrants as it passed north through Guatemala. As of today, most of these men, women, and children have just entered Mexico, yet they remain more than a thousand miles south of the U.S. border. President Donald Trump has called the approaching group a “national emergency,” vowed to cut tens of millions of dollars in aid to three Central American countries, and will possibly cancel a recent trade deal with Mexico if the caravan isn’t stopped before it reaches the U.S. Below, photographs of the caravan from its first 10 days and some of the difficult paths taken by those involved.