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might start having some assimilation problems
Saturday, December 17 2016
Enough snow had fallen during the night to make walking the dogs a big of a trudge. Gretchen undertook that chore after Saturday morning coffee, while I began shoveling out the driveway. I was about two-thirds of the way through (and listening to a Sound Opinions podcast about the best albums of 2016) when Gretchen joined me for the last bit. In places there were nearly 12 inches of snow on the ground, though some of that was from that previous storm. By the time I was done, my teeshirt (one of three layers that also included a sweater and a light jacket) was thoroughly soaked in sweat.
This evening Gretchen and I drove through rainy, slightly treacherous conditions to meet Falafel Cathy and her husband Roy for dinner at La Florentina, the only Italian restaurant we like in the area. We ordered what we always order: minestrone soup for me, salad for Gretchen, a big poofy bread, and the red cabbage sformato (a kind of calzone) with tahini sauce. Roy and Cathy had pretty much the same thing as we did, though while I had a Goose Island IPA, Roy had a Michelob Ultra.
After much falafel-and-work-related conversation, we inevitably got to talking about the horrors of the impending presidency of one Donald J. Trump. We were all in agreement that the near future would be a grim, dystopic one. But Roy thought it important to understand the other side and what their hopes and desires had been. Unfortunately, Roy's first language is Hebrew, not English, and the word he used was "respect," which almost caused Gretchen to blow a gasket. What followed from her was fairly boilerplate condemnation of racists, ignorant rednecks, and union busters. Initially it didn't seem like a helpful response to the subtle point Roy was trying to make. I wanted Roy to get the opportunity to flesh out his opinion more without having to immediately defend it, which he eventually did by pointing out all the millions of people who did vote for Trump. He also said something seemingly neutral or even postitive about Ronald Reagan, which gave Gretchen an opportunity to brief him on what Reagan was like for people living here (which we did but which Roy did not). Gretchen's connection to the awfulness of Reagan's administration was personal; Gretchen's mother had worked at the Civil Rights Commission during the time that Ronald Reagan successfully undermined it. It got to the point where most of the staff fled and it shrank into a bureaucratic irrelevancy so small it could be drowned in a proverbial bathtub. Then, of course, there was Reagan's dunderheaded reaction to the AIDS crisis and the way he systematically destroyed the union movement. But all Roy could remember of Reagan was how he'd reached détente with the Soviet Union and significantly decreased the risk of global nuclear war. Evidently history, even in the minds of those who should know, had forgotten Reagan's initial bellicosity, and the ridiculous way it had come to an end. According to Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, Ronald Reagan's mind was changed by watching the made-for-teevee movie entitled The Day After, a production that probably deserves all the Nobel Peace prizes subsequently given to others. I found this discussion between Roy and Gretchen a bit tiresome, since it seemed to be based more on a different understanding of the meaning of terms (such as "respect") than on an actual disagreement.
Roy also talked for a time about Muslims in Europe and how they really are changing society there. In this part of the conversation, he sounded a bit more like a European nationalist than I would've expected. This attitude might've been the result of all the other airline pilots he works and socializes with; such people tend to be significantly more right-wing than, say, our social circle. Roy seemed to be under the impression that the gradual arrival of Muslims in Europe was going to eventually make Europe into a conservatively-religious Muslim continent, and that this would inevitably destroy democratic and cultural institutions. I had my doubts; while it's true that Europeans aren't reproducing and a great number of the young people there are indeed Muslims immigrants and their children, there are only four million Muslims in France, a 66-million-person country. And some of those Muslims must be assimilating, the way they do here in the United States. Of course, in the United States, we get a very different sort of Muslim immigrant than they do in Europe. Ours are frequently educated and secular, while French Muslim immigrants are poor, often religious, economic refugees. Of course, with Trump doing his best impression of a rabid ape for the next four years, we might start having some assimilation problems here as well.
Towards the end of the meal, Roy kept fielding requests on one of his two cellphones (the other only works in Isræl) from a pilot (and then the airline) trying to convince him to take over that pilot's shift for the flight back to the Holy Land. The pilot was claiming he was sick, and Roy had been trying all day to get out being a replacement. First he'd had the excuse of being snowed in. And now he had the excuse of the beer he'd just drunk. The rule on piloting a commercial airliner after consuming alcohol is ironclad: no flying within 12 hours of any drinking, no matter how little.
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