Remains of the Day

After the jump, a political post! And sort of a literary one! What kind of blog is this these days anyway!

I've had the great pleasure in working my new job of a gentle commute with some reading time built in. Since my dissertation work requires more sprawl and often translation work that isn't train-friendly, this has necessarily become pleasure reading time, for which I'm wildly grateful. One of the first books I took on was Kazu Ishiguro's  Remains of the Day. I'd read his Buried Giant, coincidentally, right around when he won the Nobel Prize, and quickly snapped up a few others. (Shout out to the Sulzer Public Library and libraries in general!)

As I suspect may be true with others, I mostly knew the book from its movie adaptation, and not even really from that so much as from the movie's cultural reputation as a Merchant/Ivory production. Not having seen it, I'd filed it away as a sort of period-set "repressed British brooding" piece and figured I'd get to it eventually. The novel does have a heartbreaking portrait of a man profoundly out of touch with his emotional life to an almost pathological degree, but what I wasn't expecting even slightly was its political content.

Without getting too detailed about it: Remains of the Day is in part about its protagonist's gradual awareness (though: does he ever fully understand? It's not entirely clear) of how he absented himself from the great political debate of his day, namely the treatment of Germany between WWI and WWII. The novel is deeply sad in capturing both the cruel postwar treatment of Germany and the perverse manipulations of German agents winning over British sympathizers during Hitler's rise. But Mr. Stevens, the figure at the novel's core, simply... stands by. Some of this is related to Ishiguro's portrait of the serving class in pre-war Britain, some of it is his incisive deconstruction of British stiff-upper-lip mentality, but it was rather shaking to read it in the middle of the Trump regime.

Stevens, as a butler, feels it is not his place to form opinions or offer his voice on the pressing issues of his time, instead believing it his duty to offer dignified service to his master, to whom he owes deference. Much of the book's undertow consists of his grappling with whether his master was in fact worthy of this deference, or whether he did the right thing, though Stevens never quite brings himself to ask these questions.

I keep thinking of Remains of the Day as the daily outrages of the Trump administration roll out. There's a sense of hapless resignation that feels common to both pieces: "what can I, one person, do in the presence of such monumental events?" I've seen this expressed many ways by others; some, like Stevens, simply say that because they don't know enough to consider themselves an expert, they're not sure they ought to have a voice; I've seen some Christians lean on verses ("render unto Ceasar" and instruction to set your mind on higher things) as a justification for, essentially, silence.

And while I can understand the impulse - my midwestern polite genes are unbearably resilient - Ishiguro's novel puts forth a compelling case for silence as complicity, for taking no stance as enabling accommodation.

So this is where I want to close this quick thought: especially if you live somewhere with a GOP representative or senator, please make your voice heard. You may be laughed at, you may feel awkward, you may be made to feel ignorant (let's not forget that some people - Peter Roskam is a great example - have become fast studies in lying to their constituents to defend indefensible votes, so don't take this last bit too seriously) but speak. Identify the issues that animate you, and let your representatives know that you are paying attention, that you care, and that you expect the right thing from them. (Eventually, you'll probably have to vote them out of office, but that's for another day. Right now it's about attempting to constrain the attempt to dismantle the twentieth century through public pressure.)

Not sure where to start? Hey, it is an administration of unendingly wretched venality! Here's a few places you might want to be heard, limited mostly to national issues (though local issues matter a lot, and you might in particular for instance want to talk to your local politicians about racial justice and police misconduct):

1. Trump's repeated attempt to install a Muslim travel ban and his unacceptably-frequent attacks on Muslims. He's openly racist on this and other fronts, and many GOP congresspeople have opted for silence in the hopes that they won't offend anybody. Ask them to take a stand and let them know your disappointment if they don't.
2. The tax bill. A lot of this is esoteric and creates winners and losers, but either version of the bill will necessitate huge cuts to Medicare and other social services due to the sequester. The GOP has managed to mostly dodge those questions, but you can let them know that you expect better, and that you will count their vote for this bill as a vote to attack a lot of necessary government services. (Bear in mind, the Senate and House versions have to be reconciled and re-voted on, so there actually is a narrow, bad-odds window to try to push back on this.)
3. Education. One of the things the tax bill will do, at least in the House version, is triple the tax burden on graduate students by taxing their waived tuition. (Think living in Boston on $20k/year is fun? Try being taxed on $50-60k at the same time.) They're now, per the WSJ, working on ending loan forgiveness programs for students who go into public service or nonprofit work. These moves will functionally demolish higher education in America, which perhaps it's obvious I think would be Very Bad, unless you've built a party that can only continue to function if their public grows increasingly ignorant and uncritical.
4. Oversight. It's hard to remember in the century that's passed since the Obama administration, but Congress technically can exert oversight over the executive branch! (Look up "Benghazi" sometime, if you want to see what it looks like when the GOP pretends to care about this stuff.) There's a lot to ask for here: I would start by asking them to conduct hearings into the conduct of, let's say, EPA chief Scott Pruitt, who has basically turned his agency into a fire sale on the environment, and who might doom our children/grandchildren to an uninhabitable planet? (For a bonus, if your representative claims to be a Christian, see how they think the Parable of the Talents might apply here.)
5. Sexual abuse. Congress has, as we're learning, a terrible procedure for reporting sexual harassment or assault; as a body of predominately powerful men, it's not surprising that we're starting to learn of what one can only assume is the tip of the iceberg. Ask your congressperson what they are doing to address this systemically - not whether they want Al Franken or John Conyers to resign or Roy Moore to be elected (although if your representative/senator disowns Moore without saying a vote for his opponent would be the right thing to do, they have in fact taken no morally meaningful stance) but how they want to protect victims, to make it safer and easier to report and be believed. It's hard to believe a party whose leader has bragged about serially raping women will do anything real about this, but it's worth demanding it of them.
6. Serve the poor. This one is huge for me personally. If your representative professes Christian faith, press them on whether any of Christ's teachings on our responsibility to the poor and marginalized have an impact on their legislative work. If their answers aren't to your satisfaction, let them know. It's decades past the point that Christians ought to have held their alleged standard-bearers to account, and while I'm mindful that there's always the worry of hypocrisy - we're all broken and fail constantly to live up to our charges - it still seems of value to ensure that people don't profit from a pharisaical public pronouncement of faith that has nothing to do with their behavior.

Finally, if any of you are from Roskam's district or similar, and my rhetoric feels overheated or unfair to your representative: let's talk, truly. With Roskam in particular I've been incredibly lit-up about researching his voting record and his statements, and feel pretty strongly about his lack of legislative moral character (obviously) but I'd love to discuss all these things in a way that's perhaps more effective than me hammering out a post online that you read at home while vaguely grimacing and wondering when Pat got to be such a socialist crank.

OH AND ALSO: read Remains of the Day. It's really, really, really good, humane, and incisive, beyond its political overtones. There's a lot to love!