Sunday, September 30, 2018

Travelogue 823 – September 30
The Rip Tide
Part Two


I’m watching the airplanes at rest, like beasts in deep meditation. Even repose is purposeful at an airport. There may be no better place to observe the zeitgeist in play than an airport, where business travellers are the model citizens, crisply dressed and self-contained. The atmosphere is one of undisguised utility. Everything serves the schedule, even the strenuous efforts to calm the human spirit. We must be offered every resource to make our peaceful progress through the queues.

I’ve been reminded of Ethiopia, sitting here at my Starbuck’s. With some perspective, the past six years, since the death of Meles, may prove to have been an attenuated and turbulent interregnum. The political party is still in place. In their compromised wisdom, they may have found their way to the future after all. Meles’s first replacement was sacrificed to the impossible contradictions embedded in the policies of the past twenty years. There was no way round that conclusive disillusionment. It might have been that the party and the man himself had predicted as much and had set out to weather the storm, dampen the rage, and survive. The interim PM was a bland enough character, hard to blame, hard to love. When he resigned, he left us all dry-eyed.

Then the party appointed Abiy Ahmed to take over. It’s difficult to know what they were thinking. It seems hardly possible they understood that the nation needed a tonic for themselves, and yet that is what Abiy has been. He has come in with a blast of charisma and optimism, bringing with him a policy agenda written to undo many of the worst effects of his own party’s rule. He’s made peace with Eritrea. He’s released political prisoners. He has promised liberalization in law and economy.

I pack up and start my slow amble toward the gate. My routine is to allow time to browse among magazines and newspapers. It’s a short flight, so one daily ought to keep me entertained. At the shop, I scan among the new book titles. The airport market exhibits a healthy appetite for self-help for business managers, for thin guides to immediate results. It’s also hungry for non-fiction, ideas and history packaged for self-improvement. I’m as vulnerable to the charms of these pop compendia as anyone, and if I had more time and money, I’d read them all and find six-figure enlightenment. Browsing titles will have to do. At least I can learn what I’m lacking to be a doer, a decision-maker, successful, important, happy, efficient, indispensable.

It’s been nice to see hope return to Ethiopia. They’re a people with hopeful dispositions. It’s only right that the universe reciprocates once in a while. Hope hasn’t returned without risk or without disruption. There are those in the party who regret Abiy’s appointment. There are those working to undermine him. There has already been one grenade thrown at him. Most of his adversaries are subtler, throwing obstacles in his path at every opportunity. And the disturbances among ethnicities during recent years haven’t disappeared. If anything, the liberalization of speech and policing have only excited more conflict in the short term. The illness of past administrations must run its course before the cure kicks in. I’m wishing then well.

The lines at the gates are crowded, and they seem tangled. I advance toward the flight to Newcastle for some minutes before I realize I should have been in the adjacent line. Once I’ve advanced to the right gate, I am stopped. The first bus is full, and we must wait for the second. The windows are tinted, adding to the shadows from the parking ramps. We might be boarding a submarine, judging by the murky blue of the spaces beyond the door.

Friday, September 28, 2018

Travelogue 822 – September 28
The Rip Tide
Part One


I’m back at Schiphol. It’s almost disturbing how well I know this place, how well I know even the train ride from Rotterdam. Coming here can feel like entering a familiar dreamscape. It’s a break from daily life, but not a real place of its own. It’s a setting for lines and waiting. It’s a café I see once or twice a year.

I recall that it was in this Starbucks that I heard that Meles Zenawi had passed away in a hospital in Brussels. That was just over six years ago. Meles was the strongman who had dominated Ethiopian politics for twenty years. I remember the shock I felt that the little dynamo could actually die. There had been rumours circulating about his illness and even his demise for a year or more already. It didn’t seem real when his end finally came.

I was sitting just two tables away from where I’m sitting now, at one of the high tables by the window. I was stunned by the news. I was waiting to board a flight to the U.S. I tried to quickly reason through the implications. Ethiopia had never seen a peaceful passing of power in the modern era. I was afraid for loved ones I had left behind. I was worried about our schools, staff and children. I debated turning back, returning to Ethiopia. I didn’t, and I suppose it was because I had a fairly clear understanding of my power in this situation, which was next to nil.

The café is tucked into a corner between wings of the airport, D gates on our side and E gates across the tarmac. Outside the big windows, I can watch the busy work of preparing for air travel.

The airport experience is one of being trapped indoors. The dreamscape is one of walls and corridors and stale climate control. The views outdoors offer little respite. They only reinforce the feeling of being in an alien city. The oversized and monumental – whales of the air ferrying across parade grounds of tarmac toward their vast hangars, -- mix with the oddly ludicrous – miniature trains zipping around, passing men in orange waving coloured batons.

With six years’ perspective, I can see there was little cause for alarm. People did suffer; the country did suffer. But it was suffering of the slow and simmering sort, as the party in power clamped down, put a friendly puppet forward as prime minister, and settled in for a long siege. They didn’t have to wait long. This was going to be an agonizing transition. Without the little magician, all the party’s parlour tricks went awry. Where Meles had managed to play ethnicities off each other to maintain control, the new man could only club them down and create common cause among them. In a few years, he united old enemies against himself and the party.

I wait at my Starbuck’s. I can tell they work very hard to keep the dreamscape of Schiphol as clean and light as possible. And still it is hard to avoid the sensation that the place is in perpetual slide into griminess and stink. The inertia of the airport, serving almost seventy million people per year, tends toward rapid decay. It’s not difficult to feel the strong rip tide underneath toward the dystopian. One surrenders willingly to the distractions of high-end window shopping, the wonderful opiates of perfumes and electronics. One indulges in snacks and magazines and social media and movies.

Sunday, September 23, 2018

Travelogue 821 – September 23
Why We Wake


Baby has wondrous reservoirs of energy. She can devise all sorts of strategies to avoid taking a bite at the dinner table. It can be quite entertaining. It can be frustrating. The latter sensation has its undeniable moments. Surprisingly, it never unseats the former sensation, the enjoyment, which is a feeling born of love.

Being an older parent, I have access to many years’ worth of bachelor memories. I know how a single man thinks. If I could have been a time-travelling fly on the wall in my own future, I would have observed Baby’s behaviour with only irritation and frustration. How could Future-Me be so indulgent, I might have wondered?

Tell a young person that, every day, for years, s/he will struggle with his/her child at the dinner table, that nearly every day the child will tire of the previous trick the parent used to get him or her to eat, and watch the young person recoil. It’s good trick in itself, a wake-up call in the face of hormones.

The steadfast love of a parent is a mystery. It’s a useful case study in meditating the eternal riddle, the one with many answers, none of them conclusive, ‘Why do we get up in the morning?’

Since I find the politics of our age a mystery, I relate one mystery to another. In this case, I am like the young person who has never been a parent. I read the news every day in a complex mood made up of elements like cynical amusement and horror. One element that has faded away is hope. I develop theories to simulate understanding.

What I see is humanity pulling away from hard-won sophistication, and doing so wilfully, like a child who doesn’t really need telling that she needs to eat and who doesn’t really need reminding that meals are part of the healthy routine of the day. She loves other forms of ritual, even making a show of replacing the meal-time ritual with one of a very scripted game. She holds up a hand in refusal and she smiles coyly.

I happened to catch a video clip on TV recently of Mussolini in the early days of his triumph, speaking to a crowd. His oratory was interspersed with the most ridiculous grimaces. I hadn’t seen it before. We are all familiar with the histrionics of Hitler. They make high school students laugh, which in turn makes teachers uncomfortable. We laugh that way at Trump, when he mugs for the crowds at his rallies.

I know that democracy is the answer. But I hold it true in the same moment that I feel that democracy is fatigued and ineffective. I am divided, and not in a way that excites action.

I have friends who are smart and politically active. I watch them with admiration, the way I watch certain indefatigable activists in the public eye. This is unalloyed admiration; it’s not diminished by a sense that I know better. These are the manifold parents, the ones who know that every day they wake they will have to cajole their children into just action.

Tell the people that democracy is every day the same struggle at the dinner table. Watch them recoil. It’s a wake-up call for the immature.

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Travelogue 820 – September 12
School and Dinner


The school year returned, and it rushed in with force. I was vulnerable, indulging as I was in my writing idyll. I was actually, vaguely, looking forward to the start of classes. But one anticipates with the imagination, and imagination without work requires little strain. One actualizes with the body, the poor body that rises early, submits itself to the Metro, mounts the stairs when the lift is filled to capacity with students. The poor body stands at the head of the class for long stretches, wearying the back and the vocal cords in courageous shows of futility.

Priorities shift. Progress in writing my little book has slowed to a crawl. I am happy to add a few paragraphs at a time. Sometimes all I do is open the Word file and review where I was, edit a few sentences. I wake in the night, and I scribble ideas, things I must remember. Sometimes I find those notes. Sometimes I find them a second time.

Writing comes second when duty calls, as nagging and insistent as the voice of the book may be. They say that delay makes fulfilment sweeter. It adds philosophical depth to any enterprise. I’m not sure I can corroborate, as I have no points of comparison. I mean, life has never stopped for my creative work.

When dreary duty calls, I answer. I resist, but I answer. That seems fundamental to the human condition. We submit; we surrender; we resign ourselves. But the precondition to those noble acts is resistance. I imagine I can hear the truth in the word ‘work’. It isn’t a melodious word. It sounds like the short grunt of effort, effort made in an attitude of stolid and Spartan realism.

Baby has decided that eating dinner is her work. She must resist. I find it funny. I can’t remember ever feeling like that about meal time, but maybe it’s common among children. Her tactic is to demonstrate what the alternative is, what she should be doing with her time. “No, papa,” she says. “I have to play.” I protest, and she shushes me, placing a hand over my mouth. I laugh. Mama doesn’t appreciate that I indulge Baby, but I have to admit that I’m won over by the creativity she brings to her resistance.

Last night, her game was to hold up her hand like a crossing guard and announce that she would be right back after she slept. She calmly slid off her chair and went into the next room. She returned after only a moment, and climbed onto her chair, only to repeat the ritual before we could get a bite of food into her. My wife sighed. I made an effort to remonstrate, but it was half-hearted. I was smiling.

The trouble is, little Ren worships her sister, and she mimics everything Baby does. She holds up her hand, and climbs off her chair, even as she’s chewing her food. Ren has no issues with eating; she just wants part of the game. She bustles off into the next room, and Mama gets that weary look in her eye. I smile apologetically. I scold the girls from afar. But I’m enjoying my meal.