Politics

I am back in the United States, now, since the end of May. I was warned, when I gave up my residency in the Netherlands, that I would be unhappy: not just warned by friends--Dutch friends as well as ex-pat USers--but warned by a kindly commiserating government employee who officially took me off the roles of legal immigrants.

I am unhappy. Candidates for the presidency have spent half a billion dollars on a pair of primary campaigns, which could much better have been spent on food and housing for the poor and homeless in this country, or on improving our woefully inadequate primary and secondary schools, or providing health care for the uninsured--or maybe rebuilding New Orleans, where I live. Or try to live.

New Orleans is the country's murder capitol. A weekend with fewer than three murders is called a safe weekend. Our public officials are either on their way to prison or should be on their way. I hve been living in calm, quiet, safe, and civilised Amsterdam for seven years; it is a shock to be back here.

And the nation I have come back to? We have a seven year-old concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, where we torture prisoners--and nobody cares. Our nuclear weapons cow other nations into near silence, and neither our elected representatives nor our presidential candidates nor simple USers like you and me can manage to protest this violation of all civilised laws and conventions. We live in a land that has suspended the right to habeas corpus--but we don't care. We are ruled by a man who lies, takes us to war illegally and dishonestly in order to make more money for the rich, changes laws passed by Congress--and we say nothing. We are more concerned with the price of gasoline, John Edwards's adultery, Britney Spears, and the Olympics.

Surely nobody but Justice Scalia thinks adultery is a crime. (Scalia has also written, in a dissenting Supreme Court opinion, about laws against masturbation.) But then our Congress impeached Bill Clinton-an utterly irresponsible man, to be sure--for engaging in fellatio in the Oval Office, which is a serious crime compared to violating the Constitution, waging an illegal and immoral war, etc.

Europeans have been paying $7.00 a gallon for gas for years; they now pay $9.00 or even $10.00. But then they don't live in their cars, and for the most part they drive cars that get good mileage. Eat your wallets, USers in SUVS.

The Olympics have become--thanks to the US--a substitute for war. Of course, that's what football and various other American sports have long been. We fought the Soviet Union in the Olympics, and now we fight China. We used to count medals, weighing gold times three, silver times two, and bronze as one. But this year, in order to beat China, we have decided to count total number of medals. Never mind that China has won more than twice as many gold medals as the US has; our bronzes beat them. The Olympics should be abandoned if we can't reform them, to get rid of the nationalism.

We still have somewhere around 8,000 homeless people in New Orleans. (The US government statistic is a mere 782.) Just before Christmas we had a cold spell, with temperatures down below freezing at night. Poor people here don't own winter coats; homeless people don't have them or anything else to defend themselves from the cold.

I have long thought that, to keep their tax-free status, churches ought to be required to open their doors to the public for at least forty hours a week. When the cold spell hit New Orleans, I started calling churches, asking them toopen their doors to homeless people. I called seven big churches in Uptown New Orleans. None of them is open, ordinarily, more than ten hours a week. I telephoned six Roman Catholic churches and the Episcopal cathedral.

Roman Catholic churches all have a little red light burning in their sanctuaries, to indicate that Jesus is there, in the church: physically present, they believe. I wanted to suggest that he would be happy to receive the poor and homeless into his house. That's what the Christian gospels say he wanted.

At three of the Roman Catholoic churches I got recordings which told me to call back "during regular business hours." At a fourth the priest I was talking to hung up before I could even finish my request. The priest at the fifth told me to call "one of the charities who do things like this." At the sixth I was able to say what I needed to say to the priest. His answer was, he said, "sympathetic." But he couldn't open the church doors: "Those people would steal things." I asked him where in the Christian gospels Jesus ever told us to value things more than humans. He hung up.

At the Episcopal cathedral a young priest answered the phone. He listened to me, and agreed to my request. I told him I would start delivering homeless people to him by taxi. "Well, I can't open the doors on my own. I will have to ask the boss." I requested that he call me back after he had talked to his bishop. He didn't call.

That night, two people--one in her forties, one in his fifties--froze to death in New Orleans.

So . . . as you can see, I am happy to be back in my native land.