Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 41

The Most Dangerous Thing In America--A Brother With A Passport

Over at the American Conservative, Rod Dreher has been kind enough to respond to my writings about Paris. He did the same thing last spring, and I've been meaning to say how much I appreciate it. My experiences here are necessarily a neophyte's view, so any context from folks with a little more experience than me is appreciated. Rod, having done this trip before, is one of those people. But we come at this from different places, though perhaps not the different places he might suspect.

Before I get into that, I want to clarify something, because it comes up later in Rod's piece. To claim the game is rigged--as I do--is not to relieve people of responsibility to act, nor to strip credit from people who actually achieve something. Dan Marino never won a Super Bowl. John Elway won two. I think "luck" has something to do with that. But it does not follow that John Elway didn't work hard or that he didn't actually do anything himself. And it also doesn't follow that John Elway worked harder than Dan Marino. Life is complicated. Being born rich has advantages but it does not then follow that it's impossible to ever achieve anything of your own.

Moreover, I was privileged. You can't really buy the kind of parenting I had. My pops had seven kids. Some of them were born to friends. Some of them were born in the same year. All of them, except me, graduated from college. Some of them are engineers. Some of them are computer programmers. Some of them are lawyers. Some of them are in the family trade. And some of them are writers. All of them are alive and healthy. And if you asked my dad about this (as I did only weeks ago) the first word that would come from his lips is this--lucky.

What you must get is that we were privileged and we were lucky and we worked hard and were black in America. All at the same time. There's no contradiction there. The game is rigged--and it can be won. One doesn't cancel out the other. Jackie Robinson's greatness doesn't make the MLB of his era any less racist.

That aside, there's something else in Rod's post that I find really fascinating. Here is a portion where he discusses how someone very close to him (his sister) reacted to his excursion:

It's not that I was born wealthy, or from people who traveled (except my great-great aunts, who died when I was small). I did not, and my sister, to her dying day, resented me for becoming the sort of person who liked to go to France...

I can't account for Ruthie's views, which she never shared with me (but did share with others), but I believe it comes from her instinctive resentment of anything to do with wealth and privilege. Wanting to go to Paris is something only rich people do, in her worldview. That I wanted this, and repeatedly satisfied that desire, offended her, I learned after her death. It did not matter that I always stayed in modest hotels (sometimes very modest hotels), or traveled on cut-rate fares, sometimes in the dead of winter, to make it affordable. The desire itself was a moral offense, a betrayal of my class.

For many years I have generally doubted the import of the "acting white" thesis, mostly because I never experienced or saw anything like it. I was a pretty weird kid in my Baltimore days. I played D&D, collected comics, and read a lot of obscure books. My family ate strange foods, and clearly had ambitions beyond the hood. I got called a lot of things. White wasn't among them. But I've heard from enough black people who did have this happen to them to understand that it is real, and I suspect it is a sub-specimen of what Rod is talking about here--a kind of tribal border-patrolling.

I felt really, really sad reading this. By the time I graduated from high school I was writing poetry and I was really beginning to blossom as a thinking person. I can't really imagine how I would have taken it if someone had accused me of "getting above my raising." A number of you here have said you had that very experience and I am amazed that many of you moved on despite it.

I think, in some ways, the quasi-black nationalism of my childhood shielded me. You have to remember that Malcolm X read everything in jail--not just black stuff--that Malcolm traveled to London and Paris. There's some portion of the nationalist tradition that holds that the acquisition of knowledge--any kind of knowledge--is self-improvement, and thus improvement of black people. You can hear this in the lyrics of Public Enemy. Or in the old nationalist saw that the best place to hide anything from a black person is in a book. Or in Brother Muzone's quip about a "nigger with a library card." It's actually older than the nationalist and goes back to the slave narratives. The idea is that knowledge was transgressive, something that "they" don't want you to do and thus cool. I could turn half of 125th francophone just by saying, "The white man don't want you parlez-vous Françaising, brother. He got a plan." OK, so maybe not. Plus half of 125th is already francophone. But you get my point.

And to the extent that I am still a quasi-nationalist, this is the portion of the tradition that I cling strongest to: There's nothing "white" about reading Rousseau or Tocqueville or visiting Paris. This isn't getting above your raising. It's burning down the Big House, the caveat being that you can bring some of this back and flip it to relate to the nature of your people. And you always can. Because your people are human.

       

The Intoxicating Fear of Language Immersion

Gora Mbengue's painting of Sheikh Ahmadou Bamba (National Museum of African Art)

So I went off to face the elephant today, still a little woozy and weak from yesterday's adventures. But as much as I love the food, and as much I love the fashion, and as much as I love the river, the weather, the small streets like sanctified alleys, the kids who roll papers, the old people who will not surrender the street and are not asked to, the Parisians' galactic disregard for the science public health, I came to Paris to learn French. If you are studying a language, you eventually reach a point where learning the rules--divorced from any applicable environment, excised from hot, random reality--becomes insufficient. It is one thing for me to run through the conjugations of the verb vouloir. But to, in the moment, say "Ils ont voulu plus d'argent" without thinking, without conjugating, without searching, is something else. It's the space between theory and practice, between diagramming a safety blitz and seeing whether you actually like hitting and being hit.

And I got hit today. Four hours of punishing French. Plus, as I discovered, the groups actually start at the beginning of the month, so I was a week behind. Plus I missed yesterday. The professor looked at me doubtingly and said, "Vous connaissez le passé composé n'est pas?" When I answered "Oui," she said "Whew" and kept trucking.

I need to practice. I lost my language in these last few weeks of American travel. I should be practicing right now. But I am here with you.

My teacher was nice but all business. American French teachers have a way of slowing down the language for you, so that you catch every word. No dice over here. Madame Pascal spoke like the people on the Parisian streets. Catch up or get run over.

Here is something else--I am old. The average student in my class is about 19, and there were some as young as 17 (I think.) I'd seen the same thing in Switzerland, where I met kids whose parents sent them away to Montreux for whole weeks to learn French. I think back to what I would have done at 16 had my parents sent me away. They could barely send me to school without complaints. In France, I would have settled for nothing less than a second revolution. (Or is it the third?)

But I am old now. There were always two parts of me. Gandalf Ta-Nehisi and Peregrin Ta-Nehisi. Gandalf Ta-Nehisi always knows what's wise and correct. Peregrin Ta-Nehisi is all chicken and beer. Peregrin Ta-Nehisi runs up the credit cards, leaving Gandalf to pay them off. Peregrin stays out drinking till four, then shows up for pancakes a Veselka at five AM. Gandalf wakes up at six, takes the boy to school, then nurses his hangover with chicken patties and ginger beer. For a great many years Peregrin has had his way. Now Gandalf is rising and a new power stalks the land.

But Gandalf is grey, son. And these kids today are magic. Their brains shift through languages as though shifting lanes on an empty highway. With five lanes. Because all of them are bilingual, and none of them are American. They know their native language (Japanese, Spanish, Italian) and are now about the business of picking up a third. They are killing us, son.

For at least half of the class today, I was lost. And no one would slow down. My wife was in another class and basically got the same treatment. Afterwards we met, walked down Rue de Rennes and bought some cake, because we had earned this. I thought about stopping for beer. But I had to come talk to you. And more, Paris will vanquish your bank account, your credit cards, and even menace that 401k if you are not watchful.

As we walked my wife gave me that "The fuck have you gotten me into?" look. Whatever. She likes it. She knew what she was doing when she first came here, and insisted I follow. And we both like it. We both like being hit and hitting. There is something about being down, about being lost, about being estranged that is narcotic. It is that hit of fear you get the first time you swim in the deep end and understand that your feet can not touch the bottom.

So I blame it all on my wife. But I specifically blame this post on Jim and Deb Fallows, who are heroic to me and my small family, who are, together, our own Gandalf. I don't want to go into other people's business. But I think it's public information that they have made a life together, raising children and traveling the world. I didn't even know people who knew people who did things like that. And now it is so much of what I want. I blame them for talking to me about it and urging me and Kenyatta on. You can't hear them and not feel the glamour. It is the sorcery of the wide world. It is the song of the wanderers. It is the knowledge of a one-shot life. Who can truly live, hear such music, and decline to dance?

Dakar--watch out. We are coming. Again.

       

On Food Poisoning and Rousseau

The 15th New York aka "The Harlem Hellfighters." Regiment of black and Puerto-Rican soldiers. Winners of the Croix de Guerre in World War I. (The National Archives)

We are doing a house-swap in order to spend these eight weeks in Paris. House-swapping is the trusted method of travel for those of us with European dreams and a Baltimore budget. I didn't even know house-swapping existed until last summer when I first began plotting my way out. This might be pedestrian for the folks here, but for those who were like me, house-swapping is what it sounds like--you live in someone else's home and they live in yours. I know a family that does this, every summer, sight unseen. Keys are left in appointed places, supers are informed, and whole families from other continents make moves. For others it's like dating--personal ads, vague guarded e-mails, g-chat, then video-skype to see if you like the look of your paramours. 

My connection was as old fashion as you can imagine in these times. A sharp, learned journalist on this side was a fan of my blog and a native New Yorker. We exchanged a few e-mails, then dined together in Paris and instantly liked each other. He wanted to get home with his son for the summer. I wanted to get out with mine and my wife. Et voilà. C'est ça.
Before he left, my new found homeboy plugged me into to a number of Parisians--most of them people of color with some kind of immigrant connection. Their job, I suspect, is to get me out of the Sixth and into the underbelly of things. I saw some of it yesterday riding the RER. The further out you go on the train, the more African and Asiatic the world becomes. The kids look like our kids with their headphones and haircuts. They talk loud and boastfully, as I once did, so that you might know that they are alive.
"Here is the thing," my buddy said to me, just before leaving. "I am not trying to get you to hate France. I want you to love France. But I want you to love it for the right reasons."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," I thought. "Pass me a pain au chocolat and let's get this swap-joint popping."
And popping it was. Yesterday, when I went out to get milk, I saw a man outside the store preparing le poulet et pommes de terre.  I want to pause here and point out that "Pomme de terre"--"apple of the earth"--is beautiful name for a potato. The man was preparing this in a rotisserie oven. At the bottom the potatoes were roasting in the juices. I came back, told my wife, and I had found dinner.
After we dropped off our son we picked up dinner along with a salad and some chocolate for desert. We drank a bottle of wine together--it's becoming a tradition--and ate an awesome dinner. I got up this morning and hit La Seine for my morning run. I came back, showered, and was immediately felled by food poisoning.  So this is loving France, wholly, right reasons and all.
Illness aside, there is always the danger in falling in for a distant lover who seems magically free of all the complications back home. I was raised by a generation that--to varying degrees--found this out. My friend Brendan Koerner just published a book which is getting raves everywhere-- The Skies Belong To Us . The most bracing portion, to me, is Brendan's hard look at the New Left. I got my first lessons in skepticism and counter-intuitiveness from a lot of these guys. But it's worth remembering that there was when they sung the praises of Kim il Sung. 
I don't want to take this too far. If America has the right to be wrong, then so do its reformers. It mirrors our discussion here where we find people attacking other countries for not being "democratic" without understanding our own long, ugly and sometimes dishonorable path. More, I would say that because of my particular background, my canon was a little different than most, and whatever differences you might find in my voice are attributable to that.
It's also attributable to discovering the Western canon, and the significance of the West, almost as something exotic since my roots seemed elsewhere. That allows me to be fascinated, to be blown away. Nothing is more fascinating than finding your allegedly foreign roots are common. I thought of this recently digging through Rousseau:

This passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a most remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his behaviour and endowing his actions with the morality they previously lacked before. Only then when the voice of duty succeeds physical impulsion and law succeeds appetite, does man, who until now had thought only of himself, find himself forced to act according to other principles, and to consult his reason before heeding his inclinations.

Although in this state he denies himself a number of advantages granted him by nature, he gains others so great in return � his faculties are exercised and developed, his ideas expanded, his feelings ennobled, his entire soul soars so high � that if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below that from which he emerged, he ought continually to bless the happy moment that wrested him thence for ever, and out of a stupid, limited animal made him an intelligent being and human.

Right down to the language around civilization, this is remarkably similar to Malcolm X's parable of transition wherein black people go from being savages "deaf, dumb and blind" and "lost in the wilderness of North America" to civilized black men committed to some higher ideal. In Malcolm's vision it was Islam. Among his nationalist descendants it was black people.

For one such as myself, schooled on the savagery of Cortez and Pizarro, once inculcated with the theories of a natural impulse toward warfare among white people, raised up to seethe after the partition of Africa, it is still odd--a decade and a half after I left that world--to see myself in the image of people I once solely took as conquerors and barbarians.

I like to think I've come some ways since then, bearing the skepticism of those days, but free of the prejudice and the utopian romance. I like to think that I know that every home is imperfect, that I don't come to France looking for something better than America, that I know that America is my own imperfect home. I like to think that you need worry about me going too zealous and hard. This is a great great trip. But it's the food poisoning that makes it real.        

The Atlantic In Paris--Dispatch #3

The 15th New York aka "The Harlem Hellfighters." Regiment of black and Puerto-Rican soldiers. Winners of the Croix de Guerre in World War I. Source: The National Archives.

We are doing a house-swap in order to spend these eight weeks in Paris. House-swapping is the trusted method of travel for those of us with European dreams and a Baltimore budget. I didn't even know house-swapping existed until last summer when I first began plotting my way out. This might be pedestrian for the folks here, but for those who were like me, house-swapping is what it sounds like--you live in someone else's home and they live in yours. I know a family that does this, every summer, sight unseen. Keys are left in appointed places, supers are informed, and whole families from other continents make moves. For others it's like dating--personal ads, vague guarded e-mails, g-chat, then video-skype to see if you like the look of your paramours. 
My connection was as old fashion as you can imagine in these times. A sharp, learned journalist on this side was a fan of my blog and a native New Yorker. We exchanged a few e-mails, then dined together in Paris and instantly liked each other. He wanted to get home with his son for the summer. I wanted to get out with mine and my wife. Et voilà. C'est ça.
Before he left, my new found homeboy plugged me into to a number of Parisians--most of them people of color with some kind of immigrant connection. Their job, I suspect, is to get me out of the Sixth and into the underbelly of things. I saw some of it yesterday riding the RER. The further out you go on the train, the more African and Asiatic the world becomes. The kids look like our kids with their headphones and haircuts. They talk loud and boastfully, as I once did, so that you might know that they are alive.
"Here is the thing," my buddy said to me, just before leaving. "I am not trying to get you to hate France. I want you to love France. But I want you to love it for the right reasons."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," I thought. "Pass me a pain au chocolat and let's get this swap-joint popping."
And popping it was. Yesterday, when I went out to get milk, I saw a man outside the store preparing le poulet et pommes de terre.  I want to pause here and point out that "Pomme de terre"--"apple of the earth"--is beautiful name for a potato. The man was preparing this in a rotisserie oven. At the bottom the potatoes were roasting in the juices. I came back, told my wife, and I had found dinner.
After we dropped off our son we picked up dinner along with a salad and some chocolate for desert. We drank a bottle of wine together--it's becoming a tradition--and ate an awesome dinner. I got up this morning and hit La Seine for my morning run. I came back, showered, and was immediately felled by food poisoning.  So this is loving France, wholly, right reasons and all.
Illness aside, there is always the danger in falling in for a distant lover who seems magically free of all the complications back home. I was raised by a generation that--to varying degrees--found this out. My friend Brendan Koerner just published a book which is getting raves everywhere-- The Skies Belong To Us . The most bracing portion, to me, is Brendan's hard look at the New Left. I got my first lessons in skepticism and counter-intuitiveness from a lot of these guys. But it's worth remembering that there was when they sung the praises of Kim il Sung. 
I don't want to take this too far. If America has the right to be wrong, then so do its reformers. It mirrors our discussion here where we find people attacking other countries for not being "democratic" without understanding our own long, ugly and sometimes dishonorable path. More, I would say that because of my particular background, my canon was a little different than most, and whatever differences you might find in my voice are attributable to that.
It's also attributable to discovering the Western canon, and the significance of the West, almost as something exotic since my roots seemed elsewhere. That allows me to be fascinated, to be blown away. Nothing is more fascinating than finding your allegedly foreign roots are common. I thought of this recently digging through Rousseau:

This passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a most remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his behaviour and endowing his actions with the morality they previously lacked before. Only then when the voice of duty succeeds physical impulsion and law succeeds appetite, does man, who until now had thought only of himself, find himself forced to act according to other principles, and to consult his reason before heeding his inclinations.

Although in this state he denies himself a number of advantages granted him by nature, he gains others so great in return � his faculties are exercised and developed, his ideas expanded, his feelings ennobled, his entire soul soars so high � that if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below that from which he emerged, he ought continually to bless the happy moment that wrested him thence for ever, and out of a stupid, limited animal made him an intelligent being and human.

Right down to the language around civilization, this is remarkably similar to Malcolm X's parable of transition wherein black people go from being savages "deaf, dumb and blind" and "lost in the wilderness of North America" to civilized black men committed to some higher ideal. In Malcolm's vision it was Islam. Among his nationalist descendants it was black people.

For one such as myself, schooled on the savagery of Cortez and Pizarro, once inculcated with the theories of a natural impulse toward warfare among white people, raised up to seethe after the partition of Africa, it is still odd--a decade and a half after I left that world--to see myself in the image of people I once solely took as conquerors and barbarians.

I like to think I've come some ways since then, bearing the skepticism of those days, but free of the prejudice and the utopian romance. I like to think that I know that every home is imperfect, that I don't come to France looking for something better than America, that I know that America is my own imperfect home. I like to think that you need worry about me going too zealous and hard. This is a great great trip. But it's the food poisoning that makes it real.        

Egypt and the Process of Democracy

I've been meaning to spotlight a very perceptive comment from last week on Egypt. Now seems to be the right time. First today's events--40 or more people shot down in Cairo. The Times reports:

Bullet holes in cars, lampposts and corrugated metal barriers indicated that gunfire was coming from the top of a nearby building where the sandbag barriers around makeshift gun turrets were visible. Bullet casings on the ground and collected by Islamist demonstrators bore the label of the Egyptian Army.

There were pools of blood on the pavement. Some of the blood and bullet holes were hundreds of yards from the walls of the facility's guard house, suggesting that the soldiers continued firing as the demonstrators fled.

Ibrahim el-Sheikh, a neighbor, said the police officer, Mohamed el-Mesairy, was killed by military fire. He was hiding in his car in the parking lot of a building in a side street that the Morsi supporters were using for shelter. Mr. Sheikh, who signed a petition and joined protests for Mr. Morsi's ouster, said he and others carried the officer's body out of his car. "He did not have a head any more," he said.

The Nasr City hospital, a few minutes drive from the scene of the shooting, began receiving hundreds of victims around 4 a.m. and at least 40 were dead, according to Bassem al-Sayed, a surgeon. The doctor said all the victims he saw were men with gunshot wounds.

The emergency wards and the intensive care unit were full of patients and distraught relatives. Near the emergency room, two dozen men lined up to donate blood.

Dr. Sayed said he had seen similar scenes in the hospital only once: around January 25, 2011, when Egyptians began their revolt against President Hosni Mubarak.

"This is worse," he said

An Egyptian journalists was kind enough to weigh in last week, with some on the ground information and some unfortunate foreshadowing. Here is an excerpt:

In the link that Ta-Nehisi provided above, Mona Eltahawy touched on this when she said that "Islam is the solution" does not fill gas tanks or get someone a job. But being anti-Islamist or "revolutionary" doesn't do that either. In all my time here, I haven't really heard Morsi's opposition articulate any real policy platform aside from being anti-Brotherhood. And as for military rule, keep in mind that while power cuts, gasoline shortages, dwindling foreign currency reserves and crime are pretty recent issues, the more entrenched problems -- torture, religious discrimination, gender-based violence, unemployment, government repression of civil society, environmental degradation, the complete atrophy of education, health and transportation infrastructure -- go back decades, when the country was firmly under military/authoritarian rule.

Morsi's fall doesn't guarantee any of these problems will be addressed. But it does raise the specter of a population divided into mutually hostile factions based on one's political allegiance, while any semblance of a functioning state and civil society crumbles around them. Some of the Islamists (I'm thinking the Nour Party here) are no doubt not that sorry to see Morsi fall, but his rank-and-file Brotherhood supporters are convinced that he has legitimacy, and some of the more militant groups, such as Gama'a al-Islamiya have been threatening violence against Islamist opponents long before the current crisis.

For now it's the military doing the violence, with horrific results.

Here's a piece from Kyle Thetford on the variable fate of new democracies:

Democratic optimists have also commended Zambia for its commitment to democracy, where regular elections have been held since 1991, but until 2011, the same party had held power, and allegations of endemic corruption continued. Despite the reformist platform of the country's first democratically elected president, Frederick Chiluba, by the end of his tenure he sought to manipulate the constitution to perpetuate his rule. Though he failed in his effort, the attempt illustrates the dangers of democratic backsliding once the initial euphoria has dissipated.

The 2010 election victory of the Ivory Coast's Alassane Ouattara was also held up as a victory of democracy over autocracy, but the actual transfer of power involved French military intervention to override the ruling of a blatantly biased Constitutional Council, which pronounced victory for the incumbent strongman, Laurent Gbagbo. Ouattara was formerly a key member in the government of the country's first authoritarian ruler, and the autocratic Gbagbo began his political career as an exiled dissident advocating for multi-party politics.

Constitutions are also vulnerable, a fact exhibited by the late Hugo Chavez. Venezuela's legislature was outmaneuvered, and then neutered. A constitution is an impediment to the ambitions of an aspiring dictator, but by no means an insurmountable one. Similarly creative methods of circumventing term limitations have been employed effectively by Putin in Russia.

One could push this analysis back even further. At what point did the United States actually become a democracy? How long did the democratizing of Western Europe take? What happened in between the moment of declaration of democratic ideals and the actual fulfillment of those ideals?

I'd also add that democratization is more of a process than an end game. In this country, right now, there are people who are firmly in the tradition of poll taxing, and other anti-democratic tricks.

       

How Can We Toughen Our Children Without Frightening Them?

I went out this morning for a quick run along La Seine. That was fun. There were very few people out, which made it easier. Paris is a city for strollers, not runners. In this small section of the city, everyone seems to be offering a variation on the phrase "And I wasn't even trying."

Women pedal their bikes up the streets, without helmets, in long white dresses; or they whizz past in pink daisy dukes and matching roller skates. Men wear orange pants and white linen shirts. They parler un petit peu then disappear around corners. When I next see them they are pushing porsches up St. Germain, top down, loving their lives. Couples sit next to each other in the cafes, watching the street. There are rows of them assembled as though in a spread from Vogue, or as a stylish display of manequins. Everyone smokes. They know what awaits them--grizzly death, orgies, in no particular order. 

I came home. I showered. I dressed. I walked across the way and bought some bread and milk. My wife brewed coffee. We had breakfast. Then a powerful fatigue came over me and I slept till noon. When I woke, my son was dressed. My wife was wearing a Great Gatsby tee-shirt, shades, earrings and jeans. Her hair was pulled back and blown out into big beautiful Afro. We walked out and headed for the RER. My son was bearing luggage. This is the last we'd see of him for six weeks. 

It was on the train that I realized I'd gone mad. I started studying French through the old FSI tapes and workbook. I then moved on to classes at Alliance Française. Next I hired a personal tutor. We would meet at a café in my neighborhood. Sometimes my son would stop by. I noticed he liked to linger around. One day he asked if he could be tutored in French. It struck me as weird, but I went with it. In June he did a two-week class--four hours a day. He stayed with my father. He woke up at 6 a.m. to get to class on time, and didn't get back until twelve hours later. He would eat dinner and then sleep like a construction worker. But he liked it. Now I was sending him off to an immersion sleep-away camp--Française tout les jours.

It is insane. I am trying to affect the aggression of my childhood home, the sense of constant unremitting challenge, sans the violence. A lot of us who come up hard revere the lessons we learned, even if they were rendered by the belt or boot. How do we pass those lessons on without subjecting our children to those forces? How do we toughen them for a world that will bring war to them, without subjecting them to abuse? My only answer is to put them in strange and different places, where no one cares that someone somewhere once told them they were smart. My only answer is try to mimic the style of learning I have experienced as an adult and adapt it for childhood.

But I am afraid for my beautiful brown boy. 

A few weeks ago I was sitting with my dad telling him how I had to crack down on my own son for some indiscretion. I told my dad that the one thing I wasn't prepared for about fatherhod was how much it hurt me to be the bad guy, how much i wanted to let him loose, how much I felt his pain whenever I challenged him. I felt it because I remembered my own days, and how much I hated being 12. I was shocked to see my dad nodding in agreement. My dad was an aggressive father. I didn't think he was joyous in his toughness, but it never occurred to me that he had to get himself up to challenge us. He never let us see that part of him. His rule was "Love your mother. Fear your father." And so he wore a mask. As it happens, I feared them both.

I told my son this story the day before we dropped him off. I told him that I would never force him to take up something he wasn't interested in (like piano). But once he declared his interests, there was no other way to be, except to push him to do it to death. How very un-Parisian. But I told him that pain in this life was inevitable, and that he could only choose whether it would be the pain of acting or the pain of being acted upon. C'est tout.

We signed in. He took a test. We saw his room and met his room-mate. We told him we loved him. And then we left.

"When I e-mail you," he said. "Be sure to e-mail back so that I know you're OK."

So that he knows that we are OK.

When we left my wife began to cry. On the train we talked about the madness of this all, that we--trifling and crazy--should be here right now. First you leave your block. Then you leave your neighborhood. Then you leave your high school. The your city, your college and, finally, your country. At every step you are leaving another world, and at every step you feel a warm gravity, a large love, pulling you back home. And you feel crazy for leaving. And you feel that it is preposterous to do this to yourself. And you wonder who would do this to a child.

       

The Atlantic in Paris: Dispatch #2

I went out this morning for a quick run along La Seine. That was fun. There were very few people out, which made it easier. Paris is a city for strollers, not runners. In this small section of the city, everyone seems to be offering a variation on the phrase "And I wasn't even trying."

Women pedal their bikes up the streets, without helmets, in long white dresses; or they whizz past in pink daisy dukes and matching roller skates. Men wear orange pants and white linen shirts. They parler un petit peu then disappear around corners. When I next see them they are pushing porsches up St. Germain, top down, loving their lives. Couples sit next to each other in the cafes, watching the street. There are rows of them assembled as though in a spread from Vogue, or as a stylish display of manequins. Everyone smokes. They know what awaits them--grizzly death, orgies, in no particular order. 

I came home. I showered. I dressed. I walked across the way and bought some bread and milk. My wife brewed coffee. We had breakfast. Then a powerful fatigue came over me and I slept till noon. When I woke, my son was dressed. My wife was wearing a Great Gatsby tee-shirt, shades, earrings and jeans. Her hair was pulled back and blown out into big beautiful Afro. We walked out and headed for the RER. My son was bearing luggage. This is the last we'd see of him for six weeks. 

It was on the train that I realized I'd gone mad. I started studying French through the old FSI tapes and workbook. I then moved on to classes at Alliance Française. Next I hired a personal tutor. We would meet at a café in my neighborhood. Sometimes my son would stop by. I noticed he liked to linger around. One day he asked if he could be tutored in French. It struck me as weird, but I went with it. In June he did a two-week class--four hours a day. He stayed with my father. He woke up at 6 a.m. to get to class on time, and didn't get back until twelve hours later. He would eat dinner and then sleep like a construction worker. But he liked it. Now I was sending him off to an immersion sleep-away camp--Française tout les jours.

It is insane. I am trying to affect the aggression of my childhood home, the sense of constant unremitting challenge, sans the violence. A lot of us who come up hard revere the lessons we learned, even if they were rendered by the belt or boot. How do we pass those lessons on without subjecting our children to those forces? How do we toughen them for a world that will bring war to them, without subjecting them to abuse? My only answer is to put them in strange and different places, where no one cares that someone somewhere once told them they were smart. My only answer is try to mimic the style of learning I have experienced as an adult and adapt it for childhood.

But I am afraid for my beautiful brown boy. 

A few weeks ago I was sitting with my dad telling him how I had to crack down on my own son for some indiscretion. I told my dad that the one thing I wasn't prepared for about fatherhod was how much it hurt me to be the bad guy, how much i wanted to let him loose, how much I felt his pain whenever I challenged him. I felt it because I remembered my own days, and how much I hated being 12. I was shocked to see my dad nodding in agreement. My dad was an aggressive father. I didn't think he was joyous in his toughness, but it never occurred to me that he had to get himself up to challenge us. He never let us see that part of him. His rule was "Love your mother. Fear your father." And so he wore a mask. As it happens, I feared them both.

I told my son this story the day before we dropped him off. I told him that I would never force him to take up something he wasn't interested in (like piano). But once he declared his interests, there was no other way to be, except to push him to do it to death. How very un-Parisian. But I told him that pain in this life was inevitable, and that he could only choose whether it would be the pain of acting or the pain of being acted upon. C'est tout.

We signed in. He took a test. We saw his room and met his room-mate. We told him we loved him. And then we left.

"When I e-mail you," he said. "Be sure to e-mail back so that I know you're OK."

So that he knows that we are OK.

When we left my wife began to cry. On the train we talked about the madness of this all, that we--trifling and crazy--should be here right now. First you leave your block. Then you leave your neighborhood. Then you leave your high school. The your city, your college and, finally, your country. At every step you are leaving another world, and at every step you feel a warm gravity, a large love, pulling you back home. And you feel crazy for leaving. And you feel that it is preposterous to do this to yourself. And you wonder who would do this to a child.

       

The Atlantic In Paris--Dispatch #2

I went out this morning for a quick run along La Seine. That was fun. There were very few people out, which made it easier. Paris is a city for strollers, not runners. In this small section of the city, everyone seems to be offering a variation on the phrase "And I wasn't even trying."

Women pedal their bikes up the streets, without helmets, in long white dresses; or they whizz past in pink daisy dukes and matching roller skates. Men wear orange pants and white linen shirts. They parler un petit peu then disappear around corners. When I next see them they are pushing porsches up St. Germain, top down, loving their lives. Couples sit next to each other in the cafes, watching the street. There are rows of them assembled as though in a spread from Vogue, or as a stylish display of manequins. Everyone smokes. They know what awaits them--grizzly death, orgies, in no particular order. 

I came home. I showered. I dressed. I walked across the way and bought some bread and milk. My wife brewed coffee. We had breakfast. Then a powerful fatigue came over me and I slept till noon. When I woke, my son was dressed. My wife was wearing a Great Gatsby tee-shirt, shades, earrings and jeans. Her hair was pulled back and blown out into big beautiful Afro. We walked out and headed for the RER. My son was bearing luggage. This is the last we'd see of him for six weeks. 

It was on the train that I realized I'd gone mad. I started studying French through the old FSI tapes and workbook. I then moved on to classes at Alliance Française. Next I hired a personal tutor. We would meet at a café in my neighborhood. Sometimes my son would stop by. I noticed he liked to linger around. One day he asked if he could be tutored in French. It struck me as weird, but I went with it. In June he did a two-week class--four hours a day. He stayed with my father. He woke up at six AM to get to class on time, and didn't get back until twelve hours later. He would eat dinner and then sleep like a construction worker. But he liked it. Now I was sending him off to an immersion sleep-away camp--Française tout les jours.

It is insane. I am trying to affect the aggression of my childhood home, the sense of constant unremitting challenge, sans the violence. A lot of us who come up hard revere the lessons we learned, even if they were rendered by the belt or boot. How do we pass those lessons on without subjecting our children to those forces? How do we toughen them for a world that will bring war to them, without subjecting them to abuse? My only answer is to put them in strange and different places, where no one cares that someone somewhere once told them they were smart. My only answer is try to mimic the style of learning I have experienced as an adult and adapt it for childhood.

But I am afraid for my beautiful brown boy. 

A few weeks ago I was sitting with my dad telling him how I had to crack down on my own son for some indiscretion. I told my Dad that the one thing I wasn't prepared for about fatherhod was how much it hurt me to be the bad guy, how much i wanted to let him loose, how much I felt his pain whenever I challenged him. I felt it because I remembered my own days, and how much I hated being 12. I was shocked to see my dad nodding in agreement. My dad was an aggressive father. I didn't think he was joyous in his toughness, but it never occurred to me that he had to get himself up to challenge us. He never let us see that part of him. His rule was "Love your mother. Fear your father." And so he wore a mask. As it happens, I feared them both.

I told my son this story the day before we dropped him off. I told him that I would never force him to take up something he wasn't interested in (like piano). But once he declared his interests, there was no other way to be, except to push him to do it to death. How very un-Parisian. But I told him that pain in this life was inevitable, and that he could only choose whether it would be the pain of acting or the pain of being acted upon. C'est tout.

We signed in. He took a test. We saw his room and met his room-mate. We told him we loved him. And then we left.

"When I e-mail you," he said. "Be sure to e-mail back so that I know you're OK."

So that he knows that we are OK.

When we left my wife began to cry. On the train we talked about the madness of this all, that we--trifling and crazy--should be here right now. First you leave your block. Then you leave your neighborhood. Then you leave your high school. The your city, your college and, finally, your country. At every step you are leaving another world, and at every step you feel a warm gravity, a large love, pulling you back home. And you feel crazy for leaving. And you feel that it is preposterous to do this to yourself. And you wonder who would do this to a child.

       

Privilege Is Like Money: Reflections From France

We hit the ground running with no time to look pretty or cool or like anything more than what we are--Les Américains vont à Paris. I was there but I wasn't alone. I was there with my family--my wife and my son. We have bumbled into everything we've ever gotten, smacked into it sideways and awkward and shameless. We are living in le 6e arrondissement, and we got here in our particular fashion. A year ago I did not know what an arrondissement was. Two years ago I could not pronounce the word. I can barely pronounce it now.

Privilege is like money--when you have none it is impossible to get and when you have more people offer it to you at every turn. Last week, in short order, I treated with Tim Pawlenty, met Annie Lennox, and greeted Elena Kagan on my way out of town. And then I flew to Chicago and watched everyday people lose their lives. What haunted was the barrier of tissue paper I felt between the cold world and me. I saw families living in disorder and squalor, living in fire-traps built by men who should be prosecuted by the city.  

We talk about a culture of poverty as a way of damnation, but not as a way of comprehension. America loves winners, and tells us that we can all be winners, and it says this at such a volume that when you do not win, you might believe that something deep in your bones condemns you to losing--and believing that you might take whatever is given to you. You might be thankful for your squalor. You might come to believe that it is a divine plan for you to be under and down. I don't want to overstate this. I simply want to say that if I punch you in the face enough times, and you lack the power to stop me, you might come to believe that it is what you deserve. Rousseau says that strength must be transformed into right; likewise, weakness becomes destiny.

But the game is rigged. I know this because I loved my craft for many years and it meant nothing to anyone save my mother, my father, my siblings, my wife and a few close friends. At 25 my only noteworthy success was playing some part in the creation of my son. I stayed loyal to his mother. I think I stayed loyal because I could park myself there--perhaps I failed at all other things. But I was a good father and I was a loyal spouse. And then one day a  man of some privilege (bearing his own struggles) spoke to another man of some privilege and I became a man of some privilege with a megaphone, which I now employ, across an ocean, to bring these thoughts to you. And I love both of these men of privilege--power is a fact, it is not morality. Losing is tragic, but it is not noble. How many freedom fighters turned despots in the possession of superior guns?

But the game is rigged. Let me tell you how I came here. I write for a major magazine and this is a privilege. I would say that it is earned, except that many people earn many things which they never receive. So I shall say that it was earned and I was lucky. I shall also say that my whole aim when I write is to blow a hole in that great forever, to make you feel the particular fire that burns in me. Someone who felt that fire wrote me. He lived in Paris. We struck up a friendship. Now he is in New York with his family, and I am here in Paris with mine. Privilege multiplied many times over. 

And we are here now, and all around me is the incredible music of French. I walk into stores and bumble my way through. I take my family for le boeuf et frites and bumble through. I inhale a bottle of red wine with my wife, and stumble out. I walk into pharmacies with my son mishandling verbs, fumbling pronouns, wrecking whole grammars. And by my heel, I care not. It is not for them. It is for me. I know how we got here. I do not know when we may be called back.

       

The Atlantic in Paris: Dispatch #1

We hit the ground running with no time to look pretty or cool or like anything more than what we are--Les Américains vont à Paris. I was there but I wasn't alone. I was there with my family--my wife and my son. We have bumbled into everything we've ever gotten, smacked into it sideways and awkward and shameless. We are living in le 6e arrondissement, and we got here in our particular fashion. A year ago I did not know what an arrondissement was. Two years ago I could not pronounce the word. I can barely pronounce it now.

Privilege is like money--when you have none it is impossible to get and when you have more people offer it to you at every turn. Last week, in short order, I treated with Tim Pawlenty, met Annie Lennox, and greeted Elena Kagan on my way out of town. And then I flew to Chicago and watched everyday people lose their lives. What haunted was the barrier of tissue paper I felt between the cold world and me. I saw families living in disorder and squalor, living in fire-traps built by men who should be prosecuted by the city.  

We talk about a culture of poverty as a way of damnation, but not as a way of comprehension. America loves winners, and tells us that we can all be winners, and it says this at such a volume that when you do not win, you might believe that something deep in your bones condemns you to losing--and believing that you might take whatever is given to you. You might be thankful for your squalor. You might come to believe that it is a divine plan for you to be under and down. I don't want to overstate this. I simply want to say that if I punch you in the face enough times, and you lack the power to stop me, you might come to believe that it is what you deserve. Rousseau says that strength must be transformed into right; likewise, weakness becomes destiny.

But the game is rigged. I know this because I loved my craft for many years and it meant nothing to anyone save my mother, my father, my siblings, my wife and a few close friends. At 25 my only noteworthy success was playing some part in the creation of my son. I stayed loyal to his mother. I think I stayed loyal because I could park myself there--perhaps I failed at all other things. But I was a good father and I was a loyal spouse. And then one day a  man of some privilege (bearing his own struggles) spoke to another man of some privilege and I became a man of some privilege with a megaphone, which I now employ, across an ocean, to bring these thoughts to you. And I love both of these men of privilege--power is a fact, it is not morality. Losing is tragic, but it is not noble. How many freedom fighters turned despots in the possession of superior guns?

But the game is rigged. Let me tell you how I came here. I write for a major magazine and this is a privilege. I would say that it is earned, except that many people earn many things which they never receive. So I shall say that it was earned and I was lucky. I shall also say that my whole aim when I write is to blow a hole in that great forever, to make you feel the particular fire that burns in me. Someone who felt that fire wrote me. He lived in Paris. We struck up a friendship. Now he is in New York with his family, and I am here in Paris with mine. Privilege multiplied many times over. 

And we are here now, and all around me is the incredible music of French. I walk into stores and bumble my way through. I take my family for le boeuf et frites and bumble through. I inhale a bottle of red wine with my wife, and stumble out. I walk into pharmacies with my son mishandling verbs, fumbling pronouns, wrecking whole grammars. And by my heel, I care not. It is not for them. It is for me. I know how we got here. I do not know when we may be called back.