My senator, Ted Kennedy

What kind of Massachusetts liberal would I be if I let the day pass without a few thoughts. Lots has already been said, and I've been surprised at just how positive and sad the coverage of Edward Kennedy's death has been. No matter how we try to explain it away, public mourning is always about ourselves, not the man or the family or the times. And Ted's death comes just at a moment when there is so much to be worried about. So I'll leave it to others to eulogize the great national tragedies that have cut so close to him, or the many personal ones that he bounded over in the course of a career of dedicated service. All I can think about is how far we've sunk, and for what. I'm thinking of the tea-baggers, and the birthers, and the Town-Hallers. About the legions of white men nursing delusional grievances about how women and minorities are out to get them. Or all those folks who suffer from inadequate educations, and can articulate nothing beyond parroting how we must stop "these Nazi socialists from taking over health care and messing up Medicare." These increasingly loud and obnoxious folks who have allowed themselves to believe it is appropriate and kick-ass to bring assault weapons to public policy forums. There are two things that have struck with me throughout the day. The first is the way the Ted and the entire Kennedy clan were able to cut through this fog, and make these people see their interests clearly, and inspire them to think beyond hate and greed and toward a better future. For Ted, this was a skill he learned from his grandfather, the great Irish ward-heeler and Boston mayor John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald. The Democratic Party has completely lost this skill. You don't need to look far to see why. Just check-out the Times OpEd page today, where Maureen Dowd approvingly drops in passing the following repugnant stink-bomb from Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic: "The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.” Here's the thing: these same wretched proles way down there under Wieseltier and Dowd's noses weren't the vanguard of the Reagan revolution. They were for decades the core of Ted's support. And it is no mean feat that they stuck with him through a lot -- from Chappaquiddick, through busing, through all the drunken embarrassments. Whatever his personal problems may have been, politically he was usually right, and he was able to persuade the people who voted for him that he was -- whether against invading Iraq, supporting a sensible and fair immigration policy, or rejecting the hateful "Defense of Marriage Act." Unlike the wealthy today, Ted was raised with the belief that if you were born in the right place and the right time, that you actually owed your country an awful lot. He served his constituents well, and without condescending to them. It doesn't seem that hard to figure out, so I'm having a very hard time trying to figure out why his death should mark the end of an era. The second thing that's been on my mind is what Ted's life says about the real spirit of bipartisanship. It came through loud and clear listening Sen. Orrin Hatch try to stifle a sob talking about his old friend on the radio today. Here is the big secret about compromise: you have to actually have principles before you can start negotiating them away. You have to believe in more than maximizing your chances to be reelected for another term, and can't try to pass off as real values a pile of triangulated, Mark Penn market-tested centrist bullshit ginned up by the Democratic Leadership Council. There's no shame in being a liberal, especially now.

On my grandfather's passing

I was in Budapest when I heard about my grandfather's final illness and death last week. Whenever you are away from home you feel more attune to how time and space work, how the simple act of stepping out of your day-to-day life exposes how the threads of narrative that tie people and places together weave around each other, overlap, veer apart, and come together. It was what I thought about standing on the balcony of our friends' apartment in Budapest, thinking about how someone I tied so closely to my hometown spent so much of his youth not a day's journey away from where I was. The world felt a little smaller, and a lot more mysterious. The details of my grandfather's passing were predictable: he was 97 years old, after all, so you couldn't call it unexpected. He had been in declining health for years, which in some ways is a very sad and slow way for things to happen, but for those of us who survive it is in some ways the best, for you have plenty of time to make peace with the idea of loss before it happens. It was certainly sad to be so far away when it happened, unable to make a last visit and see the rest of my family when it did. The experience gave me a chance to witness just how pitiless airlines have gotten in these rough economic times. I hoped to make it back for the funeral on Friday, but thanks to some unfortunate restrictions on my type of ticket, it took only ten minutes on the phone with a Delta representative to reach that very rare point in customer service in which you only hear monosyllables and silence on the other end. "No. Anything else?," followed quickly by just plain "no," and waiting for me to hang-up. (I paid my respects Friday morning at St. Margaret of Hungary Church on Lehel Ter near where we were staying.) My grandfather led a full and long life, and is hard to really grasp when you think about it. When he was Mila's age, Archduke Ferdinand was murdered in Sarajevo, setting the fuse on the tumultuous 20th century. The entire history of the Soviet Union, from Bolshevik conspiracy to its restless aftermath, fits comfortably within his lifetime. I'm certain he could have told a multitude of interesting observations and impressions, but I didn't hear many of them. My grandfather was a profoundly laconic man, at least around me. My wife often scolded me for not learning more about his life and times. But I don't think she fully realized realize how many hundreds of afternoons I spent fishing with him on his boat on the Connecticut River, and how few questions I ever got answered. What was the 1933 Paris Exhibition like? Lots of crowds. What was interwar Poland like? we lived in a village, like any other. The stories I heard most -- about why he never took up smoking, or about how the local kids teased him for his Polish first name -- were interesting, but felt like small details of a much bigger picture. I'll never be able to say for certain why this was. Some people just don't like to talk much. I've found myself that as I get older, the days when I felt any and every occasion deserved a poem and every impression should be shared have decidedly ended. Or maybe I was just being a pest and asking the wrong questions. But it could also be that we saw things differently, and that he couldn't see what I thought was so interesting. I grew up in a small town, and didn't really begin to travel until I was done with graduate school. So the world seemed very big and interesting to me. I was full of romance and illusions. It could be my grandfather, who had seen a lot of the world by the time I came around, just saw them with a realist's eyes. That would probably be a very Old World way of looking at things. We Americans have a touchingly naive sense of history as straight line, always going up. Even our ugly chapters have a sort of cheery optimism -- like race relations for example. The big story most of us probably have in our heads is of our unfortunate history of slavery, wiped away in the Civil War, delayed during the Jim Crow era, blossoming in the Civil Rights movement, and culminating in Barack Obama becoming president. Whatever comes next, most of us probably think, will be great. We stick to it admirably, but it constantly struck me traveling around the Balkans and Hungary that no one else thinks this way. In Budapest I visited the Museum of Military History, which is located in the northern corner of the heavily touristed Castle Hill. But it was largely empty when I went -- a grandmother and her son, one other English visitor, and myself. These kinds of museums are usually of a type -- lots of uniforms, swords and armor, and usually the kind of basest nationalist chest-thumping. Hungary's museum has plenty of costumes, but the chest-thumping was astonishingly meek. Partly, that is due to Hungary's rather spotty military record -- it is a history of lamented losses, bad luck, and worse decision-making. It reflected itself in an almost self-effacing sort of museum experience. One major exhibit focused on the years 1918 to 1945. National museums are always incredibly careful about what they show and how they show it, so how this period was framed is astonishing. It begins with how the Austro-Hungarian army disintegrated at the end of WWI and was at the mercy of Czechs, Serbs, and Romanians. It follows the efforts in the interwar years by the Horthy regime to rebuild the military. It traces the country's disastrous decision to follow Hitler in the invasion of the Soviet Union (though perhaps tries a little too hard to justify this unfortunate chapter), and ends with the army's complete annihilation by the Red Army. The story goes: Big Loss, Bad Decisions, Enormous Loss. It used to be said that American southerners were the closest to Europeans because they were the only Americans that had lived through a story like that. Americans don't have the patience for this kind of difficulty and honesty in our national storytelling. Take immigration, for example, which is consistently presented to schoolchildren as a tale of osmotic motion, of people suffering in the Bad Old World, having the gumption to adventurously seek out a better life, and then arriving on America's shores to live happily ever after. It never worked that way, and for the record, it still doesn't. Consider my grandfather, who was born in Easthampton in 1912, but then moved with his family back to Poland when he was 11, after Poland became an independent nation once again. He would decide on his own to come back in the 1930s. There is something very childlike in this kind of linear sense of history, and it is perhaps something many of us carry as we are launched into the world. I always thought, for example, that as I grew older I would learn more about things. When I was younger, I was always aware that there was much I didn't know, but was confident they would be revealed as time went by. But in truth, what you learn comes in disconnected drops, and doors are constantly shut for good. So I'll never know if my father thought of me as anything other than a lingering inconvenience from his distant past. And I'll never know what my grandfather thought when he was boy traveling across the sea to Poland, or what he thought years later on another ship coming back.

Budapest

I'm in Budapest this week, having come up from Croatia a few days before Olga and Mila to get a Russian transit visa. This is an extension of the visa hassles I wrote about a few months ago, proving that the consequences of taking your eye off the ball when dealing with Russian bureaucracy are long and annoying. But while the Russians play with my passport, I have had some time to explore what is really shaping up to be one of my favorite cities. I'm staying at our friends' apartment in the Ujilipotvaros neighborhood of the city, a quiet district along the Danube north of the center. It is almost entirely residential, and full of modernist apartment blocks built between the wars. Although it is rather densely built-up, the buildings seem designed for humans, with an abundance of balconies and courtyards. It feels like a healthy, middle class sort of place, full of shops and cafes, and with an interesting mix of people from young families with children to seniors. It is what I imagine the Upper West Side must have been like before Manhattan lost the plot and became a gentrified shopping arcade. Before I arrived, I imagined that the city was like a sort of smaller, more provincial Vienna. And indeed, a great deal of the city dates from the second half of the 19th century, during the Dual Monarchy when the country enjoyed a long golden moment in the Hapsburg fold. But its most pompous buildings -- St. Stephen's Basilica, the Opera, Parliament -- are so ridiculous that they almost become self-effacing. By some strange and pleasant force of aesthetics, it achieves a king of harmony. And if parts of Budapest feel a bit too much like it jumped out of a travel brochure, Hungary is remarkable in just how dramatically it sticks out from its neighbors. It starts at a very basic level, with the faces you see on the street, most of whom have rather striking, dark features. But it really goes to a whole new level when it comes to the language. I've never actually traveled to a place where the language is not related to something I've learned before. So the words of the language, which is closer to Finnish and Siberian native languages than to anything Romantic or Slavic, often seem like just a pile of haphazard syllables. This partly explains why despite closely studying and comparing bottles at the shop, I still keep bringing home carbonated bottled water. So much of how I see the world comes through the prism of America and Russia, and I am always pleased to come to a third country that seems comfortable and happy with itself, which I think is the direct result of not having pretensions to superpower status, either in reality or in their imagination. This is what shapes my personal adjustment process when I arrive in a new place. There are usually a few days that I spend sputtering in frustration about why Russia, a country I have so much invested in, has to be so comprehensively inadequate in how it treats guests. And there is also the inevitable reflecting on being an American, the kind of self-awareness that is so important but which way too many of my fellow citizens lack (I mean, in what civilized country do people insist on bringing firearms to a debate about health care?). You realize how we are seen, for good and for ill. When I arrived on Sunday, I took a walk around the center of the city and came upon Szabadsag Square. There is a statue there of Harry Hill Bandholz, someone I'd never heard of. He was in charge of a peacekeeping detachment sent here in the chaos of 1919, and organized the defense of the National Museum from pillage-minded Romanian troops. It is a touching thing, and in a substantial way made me proud to be American. I kept walking to the north part of the park, and noticed that a whole quadrant was blocked off by ugly grey metal pylons. I saw a ring of jersey barriers and metal gates blocking traffic, and signs in Hungarian and English wanring that photography was strictly prohibited. Yep, I'd stumbled upon the U.S. Embassy. It is a perfect embarassment, and as a taxpayer and citizen I hope that Obama is successful enough at restoring our standing in their world -- and our sense of basic self-confidence and decency -- that our embassies will someday soon stop looking like colonial outposts perched among the natives waiting to be attacked. When our embassy in a friendly, peaceful ally like Hungary looks like it belongs in Islamabad, something is deeply amiss.