Travelogue 708 – July 23
Los Angeles
Part Segundo

This is Daisy Dell in the 2010s. In the 1910s it was a popular picnic spot in the Cahuenga Pass above Hollywood, just grass and sea breezes among the dry needles of the trees. In 1920, the pacific little valley was scouted and then purchased by one Christine Wetherill Stevenson, heiress and theatre enthusiast. The dell was a natural outdoor amphitheatre. There were recitals and theatre productions. A few short years later, the son of Frank Lloyd Wright was offering designs for the shell over the stage. His second attempt produced the concentric arches that have formed the basis of all subsequent designs.

Daisy Dell is lit up and resounding with sound. I’m taken back by the power, We’re halfway up the steep incline, and still the flashing lights right behind the band are blinding. The bass vibrates among the benches, even as high as we are. We’re about halfway up the steep incline. The band itself is a set of small, dancing figurines. We can watch them in the massive TV screens. At least, we can watch Mr. Sting. Peter Gabriel prefers to devote his TV time to distortions and abstractions.

I have never been one to go to many large concerts. I wondered what the point was if you could not see the musicians. For me, ‘seeing’ music was witnessing the making of music.

The audience answers my concerns. It’s a celebration, they say, rising from their seats when Mr. Sting launches into ‘Message in a Bottle’. The song is a palpable artefact of our culture. It has defined a mood and a time. It has inserted itself into private moments among all these thousands of people. Now we are here together. The artist is present. He makes the song again, just for us. We celebrate.

Daisy Dell is a lovely spot for a celebration. A hundred years on, the theatre could still be the location for a picnic. Up above the highest rows of seats, you can still see the natural summit of the hillside, the grass and the trees. The sun sets; the gloaming settling in among the quiet hills. Gentle breezes bring a sense of the ocean. ‘Hollywood,’ declares the sign on Mount Lee. It was once an advertisement for a real estate development

There is still the feeling of magic and possibility to Los Angeles, city la más grande of the Golden State. I’m surprised to discover again this youthfulness. I left it so many years ago, I have imagined it to have changed as much as I have. I have fast-forwarded it from my childhood into its own adulthood and senescence, imagining it a dirty, decaying, and cynical city to match its prodigal son. Instead, I find the same sunny insistence on hope that I remember, the memory more like a dream than life.

On another day, Carolyn and I drive through Santa Monica. It’s sunset. We wait patiently in the traffic on Ocean Avenue, while hundreds of people promenade in the park by the road. The park overlooks the beach. It feels like a holiday. There is a bright-eyed ebullience to the procession. Any day can be a holiday. Just like every day is a traffic jam.

We come in sight of the pier. The entrance is marked by the famous arching neon sign from 1941, advertising Sport Fishing and Boating. We can see the amusement park, a feature of the Santa Monica Pier since the 1910s. More importantly, we see the heavy tide of people surging across the park and the pier. We decide it may be more fun to watch the action from inside the Red O on Ocean Avenue, contemplating the ocean sunset over margaritas. It’s dark by the time we merge. The Ferris wheel on the pier is lit in many colours.

Carolyn met in another California beach town when we were both university students. It was our freshman year. We lived in a dorm off-campus, and we were devoted to the kind of perpetual, riotous celebration we see broiling around the Santa Monica Pier. That was Santa Barbara, before it was a TV show, before it was another expensive lifestyle, laid out for boutiques and spas. Back then, the town was just a town. And there were beaches under gentle bluffs. Oil rigs stood at intervals in the ocean. The beaches smelled like tar. I ran the circuit around the university’s lagoon. I ran in sand. I attacked the cold water, swimming straight out, in defiance of the slanting lines of the powerful waves.

Travelogue 707 – July 22
Los Angeles
Part One

‘Red rain,’ he says, ‘red rain is coming down.’ He has said this before. He is offering it to us, a crowd of seventeen thousand. He is standing at the keyboard and singing. The video is capturing him and relaying it on to seventeen thousand people arrayed up the side of the canyon. ‘Red rain is pouring down.’

That was Monday. I’m back in Nederland now. The jet-lag is so powerful it drags me into heavy sleep at night. I awake in the dark gasping. In a dream, something has fallen on me. Maybe there’s been an earthquake and a massive beam has taken me down and trapped me. A policeman is telling me they won’t be able to move it in time. He tells me I’m going to die. I feel it coming then, like a swelling tide. It shuts out the light. It has a certain light of its own. I’m thinking to myself, this is the thing I have feared and wondered about for so long. I have to figure out a way to say good-bye, and all I can think of in the rush of events is to say, ‘I love you’. It’s a kind of declaration to all things and all people.

Monday, I was in Los Angeles. In the morning, Carolyn and I visited the beautiful Getty villa, a place like a dream, made for L.A.’s golden light, a museum for antiquities with a garden laid out like a senator’s villa in Pompeii. It’s empty when we arrive, peaceful under a cloudless, blue morning sky. I wonder about the leisure that a garden like this one suggests, a life of rest. And a life of politics. From what I hear, the modern institution also does a decent job replicating the Roman politics behind the scenes. We are just guests. We stroll the circuit of the garden just once. Busts of forgotten men watch us with terrible restraint.

Monday night, we attend a concert in the hills. It’s light when Carolyn and I tales our seats. Through a break in the brown hills ahead, we can see the Hollywood sign on Mount Lee, white letters raised among the California brush and grasses.

‘Mr. Sting,’ he calls his friend. They are sharing the stage for this tour, collaborating in each other’s music, thirty years of catalogue. ‘Red rain,’ he’s singing, and Mr. Sting shares the stage with him still. They have shared more than the music, each taking a turn voicing concern over the violence of recent weeks. Peter Gabriel knew Jo Cox, the MP shot by a fanatic supporter of Brexit. Was this really a reason to shoot, a reason to die? If there is a soul, I wonder if it hungers for absurd ways to die. There might be a sort of spiritual symmetry to the absurd exit from this kind of world.

I’ve been in America two weeks and there have been half a dozen scenes of violence, in Dallas, Baton Rouge, Minnesota, and more. I’m stopped one morning in a long line of traffic down University Avenue. I turn down a side street and escape, taking a long route round the highway entrance. The radio informs me that the traffic was caused by a protest on the highway, an expression of rage for the police killing of Philando Castile.

Will the soul of Philando have seen much irony in his demise? It seemed something desolate to the rest of us, a smear on the glass, an offense against decency.

But then, if my dream is any indication, death comes as a surprise, making up its own urgency and blotting out the rest. I still wonder, because I only have dreams. ‘Pouring down all over me,’ he sings, and it sounds like a kind of protest. It wasn’t what I had in mind.

Travelogue 706 – July 7
Racing West

Outside, the clouds gather. Outside the windows of this dull café, the clouds are gathering. They gather out east, beyond the Minneapolis city park across the street. The park is one city block of green grasses, sedate trees, and chain-link fences setting apart play areas. There’s a squat, orange building with curving walls. It looks like a playground toy itself. It couldn’t house more than a few rooms. The park lies very still underneath the grey skies. The clouds are dark in patches, proposing rain and then holding back.

Earlier, at 5am, there was a light rain falling, like a Dutch rain, and the cool breezes that blew in the open window of my bedroom cooled me. I dressed in running gear, and I went outside. I have switched lodgings, from my friend’s house to an Air BNB recommendation. This is a small house in a little neighbourhood west of downtown, wedged in among highways, railway tracks and large tracts of parkland. Jogging no more than half a mile, I can cross over a railroad track and over a creek, and then turn onto a bike path that circles an extensive city park. This park is larger than a city block. It’s at least a dozen city blocks, fields of grass that stretch alongside one of the busiest highways rushing out of downtown. People meet there in the afternoons to play soccer, ultimate Frisbee, and even cricket. I know this because I took a long walk after moving in, and I slowly passed by game after game under a strong summer sun.

There’s a place where you can pass underneath the highway, and underneath another railway line, and reach a set of busy bike paths, where dozens of cyclists pass with the same sort of iron determination exhibited by cars racing by on the highway. They race the length of this pretty little valley, sided by the raised highway one on side and hills on the other. Over the hills is a well-to-do neighbourhood called Kenwood, where expensive houses line tidy, meandering lanes. Down here, there are only quiet meadows with high grasses, and stands of high trees that obscure the distances the summer cyclists will cover. Atop one of the Kenwood hills is a brick water tower dating back to 1910. It’s a stern watch tower the colour of dried blood.

When I first moved to this sombre town, many years ago, I rented a room just down the street from that tower. That would have been as long before dating Leeza as it has been since she died.

I invite the vision: He’s thinner. He has more energy. He has blustering confidence, even though his life is a mess and he’s scared. He has left the east coast for Minnesota. He’s working terrible temp jobs to survive, riding the buses in the chilly weather of autumn. Winter is closing in.

The chaos makes sense to him. His struggles are brushes with meaning

‘I am unequal to these puzzles,’ I say to him. He nods. That was apparent to him. He’s asking what was the point of it all, if at my age I have nothing better to say. When he contemplates all he is suffering for his passions and his ideals, the older man and the subdued narrative he represents seem hardly worth the effort. My life, these many years later, appears arid. What is life without the wrenching emotions, the wild risks, the life-changing decisions over and over, the reeling emotions, the daily confrontation with meaning?

There are things he doesn’t foresee. Passion is a branching road, and one offshoot leads to Addis Ababa. Young people conceive a passion for experience. They have energy like the winds off the sea. But we don’t have the resilience of the winds. Experience batters the sea walls. We get older.

‘I am unequal to these puzzles,’ I say to him. What I can’t say is that the puzzles become landscape, and then they become a part of you. They aren’t solved. They aren’t there to be solved. They unfold, eventually revealing a certain intuitive sense. Maybe they solve you.

I release the vision. I’m not moved. Perhaps it only validates Youth’s low opinion of me that I’m not moved. I’m after all content with my sangfroid. Youth must return to his struggles, and all I have to do is to complete my peaceful walk among the meadows of the westward valley.

That was yesterday. Already. Today is a day just starting. The beginning of it is brooding. The clouds gather over the park. There might be some rain to slow us down this morning. I am watching from this cold room, the café over-climatized in Minnesota style. We shiver as the midsummer day progresses.

Travelogue 705 – July 5
Peace Be Upon Us

The sun hasn’t risen, but I’m sweating. There’s no one out but the mosquitoes and a few conscientious dog owners. When I start my run, clouds are tinted pink in the east. That’s the direction I’m headed. I jog alongside the long chain link fence enclosing the V.A. Hospital. It takes a full eight minutes to get from Wes’s house off 43rd Avenue to the expanse of asphalt that is the 55. I’ve run this way many times before. I know exactly how long it will take. Traffic is light. I don’t have to wait for the slow lights. On the other side of the highway is the park.

Jet lag has gotten the better of me. After 3am, I won’t sleep again. I plan for the day. I call Menna, who is now thousands of miles away. We activate video, and I chat with Baby, who has recently starting walking She stands and stares at me through the phone uncertainly. It’s midday there. The light in my video is dark and yellow. I look like I’m broadcasting from a cave.

I dive into the trees, following the bike path that winds among the bluffs underneath Fort Snelling and above the Mississippi River. The canopy of leaves is thick, and it counters the growing strength of the sun. The air is humid and rain forest green. The running is effortless. I am reluctant to turn around. By the time I emerge onto the broad roads of the city again, the roseate effect of the dawn has moved into the western sky. The daylight is approaching full intensity.

I left Holland in the morning. It was a sunny day. But there was nothing of the sultry heat of the American Midwest. You are so rarely out of the reach of the North Sea chill in Holland. I delayed my departure as long as I could. I wanted to watch Baby wake. I wanted to hold her on my chest as she dozed. There’s a ritual to her waking. She has to cry out loud and raise her head to scan for us with bleary eyes. She has to drop her head again, like a heavy sack into the mattress. She might catch your chin or nose with a sharp blow. She rolls over a few times. After quite a while, she opens her eyes, suddenly alert. Yesterday I was gone before that happened.

I’m sweating. I’ve made it back to the house, and I’m pacing to cool off. The neighbourhood is so silent. I feel, among the tall trees, as though I were in the country.

Summer has been a spinning wheel of climates for me, flying from chilly Adds to sweltering Dubai, and back to Holland, where you’re never quite sure whether you want to be in a T-shirt or a jacket.

It was Ramadan in Dubai. The streets were sleepy. The cafes were closed. I was drawn to walk in the heat, but could only stand it in short bursts. The sky was a white haze. It wasn’t until I was about to wrap up the day that I could make out the Burj Khalifa in the distance, sunshine glinting off the glass windows of the spire.

I watch Ghost Protocol again on the plane. The man next to me is fidgeting. He’s a big man and he has a lot of energy for someone fasting. He explains to the stewardess that it’s Ramadan. He holds up his watch, and he tells her exactly when he can eat. When it comes time, there is still sunlight coming in the windows. The Prophet might find this a strange world.

Travelogue 704 – June 19
She Plays with the Balloon

I’m missing Baby. This trip is work and sleep. In between there is solitary time to reflect. I think of her often. I laugh when I think about her first birthday party. I watch the video in which she’s crawling across the floor with a balloon held in her new teeth. This is a trick she really enjoys. With all the formalities of the party, she was a star, taking centre stage very naturally.

It was all Ethiopians and Eritreans at the party. Chuchu and his family drove up from Antwerp, so Baby had friends. Chuchu’s second daughter is one week older. We had a big cake, and all the adults sang birthday songs. Solomon worked the camera. Baby sat serenely with her friends in front of the cake. She seemed to find all our antics intriguing. Left to play, she found the balloons the most fun.

I go to the office. The children sitting in the library make me think of Baby, make me wonder which little girl she might be like. Will she be the shy and giggling one, the bold and saucy one, the serious and bookish one?

We work in the top floor conference room. That room has a small balcony outside a sliding glass door. I take a break and I watch the activity in the tiny courtyard below. The children take breaks. Several small boys play outside. They kick a ball around. When they tire of that, they kick puddle water at each other out in the small dirt road. A passing grandmother admonishes them, but they don’t stop. Two little girls are playing on the swing set frame that we are storing in the courtyard. One climbs to stand on the supporting bar, and the other tries to push her off. One looks up to see me watching. She smiles in a most beguiling way. She whispers to her friend. Then she pushes her. The guard stops the game.

I take a break on the third floor balcony, and I look out over the neighbourhood. From here the view is rich with detail. The hills seem tightly gathered around us, houses amid the trees and roads winding among them. The few multi-storey buildings appear nestled among the houses, and then again farther out, where one senses the big city. But bigger than the big city are the mountains beyond and, here and there, the domes of the churches, echoing the spirit of the heights.

It’s funny, but with all there is to look at, my view is habitually drawn down to the familiar street view. People pass only occasionally. Some notice me up on my balcony. Most don’t. I prefer they don’t, because even these sorts of innocent interactions between the local and the foreign can become complex. I prefer the children. They see the same white face, but the difference between us is a kind of game. I smile at them, and they become shy. They shout back. They perform. They pose, and they run away.

I’m wondering which little girl is Baby. And how can I make her laugh?

Travelogue 703 – June 18
The Anxious Clouds

Places like Minnesota and Holland may boast their construction seasons. Certainly there’s every day a new detour in Rotterdam these days. But nothing compares to Addis Ababa. There is no landscape as mutable as the cityscape in the Ethiopian capital. Whole districts change beyond recognition from one year to the next. Selfishly, I’m sad to note on this morning’s taxi ride that there is more work at the Sidist Kilo campus of Addis Ababa University. I remember it as a calm place of trees behind the several antique stone gates that survive from the days of the Emperor’s palace. I remember a spacious campus inside reflecting the layout of the imperial gardens. Now, many of the trees are dug up for ambitious construction. New buildings are claiming piece after piece of campus space, and the gates seem imperilled, crowded by scaffolding and covered in dust.

This summer, it’s the road in front of my home gate that is under construction, victim of the lengthy project to convert all dirt roads in the city to cobblestone or macadam. The way has been steamrolled flat, and along both sides are laid the huge concrete cylinders that will, I assume, serve for drainage or sewage. I never see any activity. Perhaps the road will lie in this unfinished state all rainy season.

I wake early, after going to bed very early. Travel is an opportunity to work and sleep. Between them is only the small window I make for a Euro Cup match and a light dinner. At night, the sleep comes fast and goes deep. There’s an urgency to the sleep that comes from months without much of it.

I’m sleeping a lot, and I’m paying the price. My back aches from the long hours on my tiny Ethiopian bed, sleeping on a foam mattress compressed with years of use. When it comes time to rise, I have to sit a while and delicately work one shoulder to ease the pain in my neck. Nothing comes gratis anymore. Rest is purchased with pain.

There will be more. I check the faucet, in futile hope, and there is nothing. I pull out the bucket, and splash the cold water over my face, over my torso. I wince, and it hurts. I can’t move freely yet because of the neck pain. The air is chilly. It’s rainy season. I dry and dress.

It’s not raining when I leave, but it’s cloudy. There is something unsettling about these moody storm fronts during rainy season. They impress the unconscious with dread. Maybe it’s just me. The Ethiopians seem to enjoy rainy season. But these aren’t the peaceful clouds of Holland, or the gentle showers of northern Europe that can be beautiful and soothing. The weather seems unstable. The clouds gather and menace, sometimes eerily yellow underneath, like the sky is bruised. The darkness they bring doesn’t tease out any beauty in the cityscape, like the European clouds can, highlighting the greens of the parks, the opaque depths of the rivers and canals, and the weird sentience of the architecture. What is highlighted here is the dirt and everything aged.

The only beauty comes in the morning, when I’m walking up my little road, now under construction and lined with mud, when I can catch a glimpse of the mountains, topped by mists and carpeted in shadowy greens. I relish that. The hymns emanating from the churches in the hills seem written for these moments.

Travelogue 702 – June 16
The Ethiopian Story of Beer and Coffee

The top two football teams in Ethiopia are called Beer and Coffee. Ostensibly, this is a matter of sponsorship, though that only seems true in one case. Either way, Addis Ababa’s top two teams have been around for years, battling each other for the title in the capital city’s decrepit old stadium before rowdy crowds. At the moment, Coffee has been banned in two stadiums because of the hooliganism of their fans. They are the Russians of the Ethiopian leagues.

I arrived in Addis Ababa yesterday. After a few hours at the office, I retired to a hotel for dinner. The Slovakia-Russia game was on. Actually, what was on at the moment was a frozen picture of the game on one small TV, an abstract caused by the broken broadcast, yellow squares dispersed among the green of the pitch, players in red and white stopped mid-play. And in the lounge area, a few of the waiters were engaged in what appeared to be a comic skit, trying to set up a recalcitrant projection screen. They extended the frame, and it wouldn’t catch. They stretched the screen; it snapped back and fell to the ground. They tilted it. They kicked it. Then there was the projector. They had to focus and re-focus. Ultimately, the game was projected on the screen in all its distressed glory. We were sixty minutes into the game.

Having lived in Slovakia for a year, my allegiance was decided. And I was immediately, enthusiastically, engaged when I saw the Slovaks were winning. They were winning by two points. Much of the rest of the game was Slovakia on the defensive, as the Russians launched assault after assault. They did manage one goal, but no second to tie. The Slovaks were ecstatic. The team joined in a circle, jumped and shouted. Fans in the stands looked stunned.

The Israeli men next to me were similarly stunned. I don’t speak Hebrew, but it’s clear they were surprised. I couldn’t really tell whether they were happy or sad for Russia’s loss. They dismissed the topic with the same vigour they brought to every topic during their tenure in the seats next to me. They were big fellows, and occupied much more space than seemed possible, with their luggage spread around the room, their voices booming, their legs splayed in all directions. They had ordered nothing. Rather than leave the table in front of them empty, one placed his feet there. Football is universal, so when I asked one to sit rather than gesticulating in front of the screen, he complied meekly. There was no need to explain. It was the Euro Cup.

Apparently it was the Greeks who launched modern football in Ethiopia, with the founding of the St. Giorgis team in Addis in 1935, just as the Italians invaded. The team became a symbol of Ethiopian nationalism. These days, it is still Ethiopia’s favourite, often number one, and arch-rival to the Coffee Team founded in 1975. Though it is popularly associated with the beer of the same name, I’m not sure there is actually any connection between St. Giorgis beer and St. Giorgis football. It is supported by Sheik Al Amoudi, Ethiopia’s richest and most influential man outside government offices.

When I ask about Coffee’s antics, Ijigu is immediately defensive. He cites Russia and England, and I assure him that, yes of course, I know the European teams are far worse. But, hey, give me the dirt. He shrugs, and in his inimitable way, states in a few words that it’s a story as old as time. The fans had stormed the field in Hawassa in protest of an opposition goal. The coach is being investigated for inciting violence. And Coffee is under a shadow of scandal. Ijigu cynically implies that Beer is just as bad, but they are protected by the riches of Al Amoudi. And so it goes in the perennial struggle between Beer and Coffee.

Travelogue 701 – June 9
The Spaansebocht

Behind my apartment complex, the Effen Block, there’s a quiet little canal that describes a gentle arc between the Marconiplein and the Sparta Stadium. That kilometre or two is the extent of its existence. Beside the canal runs a quiet brick lane called the Spaansebocht.

In the mornings, I steer the bicycle out the gate of the complex, turn onto the Potgieterstraat, and then right onto the Spaansebocht. I turn the pedals as slowly as it takes to keep the bike upright. I listen to the breezes among the leaves, and I watch the ducks as they make their waddling way across the grass beside the canal. There’s a mama coot that sits on a makeshift nest made of sticks and grass in the middle of the shallow canal.

The canal follows an old rail line no longer in use. The tracks are raised above the level of the road, hidden from view on top of a grassy slope. There is a line of trees and shrubbery at the base of the slope. There is a footpath with benches every hundred metres or so.

It’s a comfort to me that the Spaansebocht is there every morning. It’s a bit of peace first thing in the morning. It’s called ‘Spaanse’ after the nearby polder project, the Spaanse Polder, completed in 1961. So says the historical sign attached to a nearby school building. Bocht corresponds to the English word ‘bight’. And ‘bight’, I have discovered, refers to the curve in the canal. It can also mean a loop of rope.

It’s a comfort to me that the Spaansebocht is there every morning. The solstice approaches. Dawn comes earlier every day. I was awake briefly at 5:20am, and I stood before the window looking up at the pink clouds. I went back to sleep for a short while. Before I rose to go, I held Baby on my chest, listening to her breath as she slept.

Leaving the apartment in the morning, I walk along the upstairs balcony, assessing the sky and the prospects for the day. Today is chillier than yesterday, but there’s enough blue sky to make me hopeful. I say hello to the caretaker, who is setting up a vacuum in the stairwell. He doesn’t speak English, but we exchange friendly greetings in Dutch. He throws a one-word question after me as I descend the stairs, and I reply with a hearty ‘Ja,’ though I didn’t understand. I’m thinking it was something about the weather.

I unlock the bike, and I’m off, steering out the gateway and into the road. During the night, I was enduring some variation of this year’s repetitive dream struggle, some knot that will never come loose, and I wake tired. I’m longing for peace, and the bike ride in the morning is one of my only opportunities for it. The birds are sympathetic, offering their song, telling me every little thing is going to be all right.

It’s a peaceful routine.

Yesterday was Baby’s birthday. She’s going to have a big party on Saturday, so we kept the celebration simple. She got her own piece of birthday cake to smear all over the table. She made a face when she tasted it. She preferred the tactile experience. We helped her blow out the candle. I can’t say whether she made a wish. I wished for her happiness.

I marvel sometimes to think she is just starting out. I watch her play, and idly I review experiences from my own life, like flipping through pages, and I marvel that she has all this ahead of her. It’s hard to fathom what it means to be at the start of life. I was there once, wasn’t I? It’s hard to imagine.

Travelogue 700 – May 27
The Consulate
Part Two

We have travelled to far and exotic Brussels in order to visit the Ethiopian Embassy. The travel is tortured, requiring a transfer at two different train stations. But we arrive in time for our business. Brussels still feels like a place under siege. Military personnel patrol the train station in pairs, sporting camouflage and big guns, still trying, despite the deadly machinery slung over their shoulders, to appear like friendly public servants. Beyond that, nothing looks to be in out of the ordinary. But there is an anxious feeling in the air, a kind of dissonant note, sad and subdued. At the embassy, I glance through an article in a local magazine about the crisis of faith in the aftermath of the bombing, the sense that the identity of this world city is in pieces. The article comforts and exhorts. They will find their way again.

The embassy is cosy and casual. The Ethiopians working there are friendly and confiding, with only one Belgian national to uphold the age-old embassy tradition of chilly obstruction. The Ethiopian guard waves us in with the minimum of formalities. The Ethiopian visa officer foregoes ample cause to deny us our papers and send us away. He is a chummy sort, who enjoys being able to help.

In the back of the building sits Mr. Teklu, who is assigned to help us with our legal document. Mr. Teklu is a typical type among Ethiopian officials. He is older, reserved and dapper. He takes our paperwork with a stern look, and begins slowly poring over it. He is a careful man, careful as a lawyer. Though there can be no more than two hundred words in this document, and in Amharic script, Menna is forced to sit in Mr. Teklu’s office for two hours, enduring the frequent interruptions of a young and brash embassy officer who is handling the case of a demanding group of Dutch NGO organizers.

It’s not a large office, and whenever this young man rushes in, we have to turn in our chairs to make room. He’s dashing from shelf to shelf, pulling fat books of policy. Mr. Teklu seems bewildered by his exertions. The office is cluttered and drab. The only decoration is a huge map on the wall, which I spend some time studying. I laugh to see that the map is so old that the borders of Ethiopia are out of date.

Finally, as the time is coming precariously close for the embassy to close for lunch, and shut down all consular functions for the day, Mr. Teklu produces some comments on the text of our document. How are we going to complete this in time? Mr. Teklu helpfully pulls out his white-out. He proposes writing in the corrections with a pen. Menna is sceptical.

I tell him I have the document on a flash drive. He hesitates. He shouldn’t introduce a foreign drive onto the embassy computer. But he nods agreement, reaches for the drive. He crouches behind his computer to plug it in, and his forbidding formality begins to break down. When he sits at his desk, I tentatively stand over his shoulder in order to help. I help him find the drive and open it. And when the document appears, I help him spot the changes made. I’m now enjoying this uncharacteristically personable embassy experience. We print the document and sign. He stamps it, and we shake hands, all friends by the end of the ordeal. The friendly guard is urging Mr. Teklu to allow him to shut down, and I sense this is a familiar ritual necessary with kindly Mr. Teklu. We’re the last ones out of the building.

Outside, we are dazzled by even the meagre Belgian sunlight. We start walking down the Avenue de Tervuren, admiring the row of bourgeois residences become embassies and businesses, tidy and quiet. We’re walking toward the arch of the Jubilee Park, and we’re considering taking a walk through the park’s gardens, though we doubt we have the time.

We’re consulting a map near the Metro station when someone says hello. It’s Mr. Teklu from the embassy. He is offering his help again. Menna asks him about the subway, and he volunteers to guide us through the station, helping us buy tickets, and showing us which line we need to take to get back to the train station.

Three hours later we are seating among the outside tables of a bar in Antwerp. We should have breezed through Antwerp hours ago, but the train lines are all tangled today. We could only find a local train heading north, and it turned a half-hour journey into nearly two hours. At Antwerp, our train north has been delayed an hour. We resign ourselves to our unique fate, stranded by the rail system. Our errands in Brussels will have consumed the entire day. We call Batu to have her pick up Baby before daycare closes.

Fortunately, the sun is out. We sit at the table closest to the street, outside the shade of the patio’s canopy, catching the sun’s warmth. We are within sight of Antwerp’s grand central train station. Our friend Chuchu and his family show up. We have called them in our distress. The three year-old sits at the table and eats the remainder of our fries. The one year-old stares at me from vantage of the sling against Chuchu’s chest. We stay as long as the summer’s evening sun hangs above the roof line of the street’s shops. When it descends, we return to the station to complete our long trip.

Travelogue 699 – May 26
The Consulate
Part One

It was a day of trains, unfortunately. We were up early because we only had until 1pm to conclude our business. The consular hours are very precise.

We dressed Baby while she slept, and we dropped her off at day care, where she awoke suddenly, and cried in despair to be left behind. We hurried off, ignoring all the alarm bells that her crying triggers in our mortal parents’ nerve centres.

We bought our tickets, but the clerk told us that the next train was cancelled. We groaned with such hopelessness, the clerk started typing in a search for alternatives. We had been trying to get this business in Brussels done for so long, and always there had been a hitch. First there would be a Dutch holiday, and then an Ethiopian holiday. Then some urgent homework would come up for Menna, or some deadline in the spiralling misery of my job. This was to be the day to complete the tasks that have lain upon our conscience for months and months. And we had to travel to Brussels to do it. For, you see, there is no Ethiopian embassy in the Netherlands.

The clerk managed to patch together three trains to make up for the one cancelled, and we were on our way. It took two and a half hours to get there, and we had to catch a taxi in order to get to the embassy in time.

Brussels is a town I never see much of, passing through or stopping only briefly, and what I see doesn’t tell me much. Sometimes it looks like a poor cousin to Paris, exhibiting some of the beauty and flashes of the panache, and then at other times it has the grubby nonchalance of the darkest corners of Antwerp, where the architecture on the chaotic streets is a hopeless jumble and people mill about as though lost.

There are times Belgium feels like a failed state, poorly tended and chaotic, Belgians referring to themselves and their sagging national identity with a kind of gritty irony. From this perspective, it may be the perfect capital for a beleaguered European Union, with its porous borders and secessionist states, with its parliament paralyzed by bureaucracy and manned by delegates elected to discredit the institution.

The Ethiopian embassy is a pleasant stop, recommended for anyone who has travelled a lot and who has suffered in a number of world embassies. The building is a fine old residence on the Avenue de Tervuren, a short walk from the monumental arch of Jubilee Park, a vestige of a time of high nationalism. The nation wasn’t even one hundred years old then, and already exerting itself in the imperialistic rush on Africa. Within another generation, the Germans would launch their first of their devastating campaigns across the territory of the small nation.

Inside the humble residence, one still sees the ornamental plaster work on the high ceilings. One sees a few old tapestries on several of the walls. There are only a few rooms on the ground floor. A guard greets you at the entrance and writes your passport numbers by hand in an old ledger, and you pass into what must have been the salon, where a woman sits at a reception desk, very ready to ignore you. She’s the only Belgian national working there, and the only one with a traditional embassy attitude. There is a TV in the salon, broadcasting ETV, the most Ethiopian element to the atmosphere. In Ethiopia that broadcast is something nearly impossible to escape.

We have a few tasks to accomplish, so we separate and work with two different officers. The officer in charge of passports and visas is in the front office that opens off the salon. He is a small and jovial man, whose first response to any query is a loud complaint. “Where is your form? Where are your photos? Why didn’t you fill this out properly? Look here.’ Then he nods in confidence like a friend, and he tells you he’ll take care of it. And he does!

Travelogue 698 – May 13
Donald in Wonderland
Part Three

And so the controversy continues. Mr. Trump has secured the nomination, but not the love of his party. He meets with Republican leaders, and he succeeds in keeping his name in the papers, if nothing else. The controversy serves.

Outrage and negative publicity is like oxygen to the fire, and this candidate needs a blaze that never goes out. In starting fires, Mr. Trump had the best of mentors early in life, in his lawyer and friend Roy Cohn.

‘He once told me,’ wrote Mr. Trump, ‘that he’d spent more than two-thirds of his adult life under indictment on one charge or another.’ That has an impact on young rich boys. With his usual strangely flat affect, Mr. Trump wrote, ‘That amazed me.’ It did more. It inspired.

Mr. Cohn about himself: ‘My scare value is high. My area is controversy.’

‘I confess that I am an agitator,’ wrote Lewis Charles Levin in the nineteenth century. ‘What storms are to the atmosphere - what tempests to the ocean - the agitator is to the political world.’ The words of the first Jewish Congressman, whose political program consisted solely of persecuting Catholics.

Spectators enjoy these sorts of arsonists. They celebrate them as ‘winners’. Winning is the light and the heat. The details are left among the ashes.

Sixty-five years ago, Cohn was an ambitious young lawyer working his way up through the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan. He landed a place on the team prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviets.

While there was never much doubt about Julius Rosenberg’s guilt -- an operative for Mr. Stalin, he recruited spies and arranged the theft of secrets, -- the case became something more than the sum of its parts. Mr. Cohn crafted it into a political performance piece. There had to be symmetry. There had to be climax.

It seems Ethel Rosenberg had very little to do with the espionage. But that didn’t serve the aesthetics of the case. Mr. Cohn pressured a key witness to falsely testify against Mrs. Rosenberg – in order to protect the actions of the witness’s own wife, as it turns out, -- and make of the villains a husband and wife team. The two were convicted, and then they were sent to the electric chair. Mr. Cohn boasted later that it was his influence that had led to the death penalty.

He wasn’t even twenty-five yet, and he had reached these heights, professional and moral. He had attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, and the great man recommended him to the junior senator from Wisconsin. It was a career begun with much light and heat, leaving people’s lives or careers among the ashes, and on it went for decades as he represented corporate overlords and Mafia bosses, always with much sound and fury.

In 1986, he was disbarred. One of the four cases against him sounded like this: ten years earlier, he had entered the hospital room of a dying multi-millionaire and forced a pen into the old man’s hand so he could sign a codicil to his will that would have made Mr. Cohn and the old man’s granddaughter executors. The signature was found by the court to be indecipherable.

‘He was no Boy Scout,’ Mr. Trump shrugs. But he was a winner.

Travelogue 697 – May 7
Donald in Wonderland
Part Two

Europe is on the move. The people respond to sudden summer as though called to rally for the nation. Maybe it’s the spirit of Liberation Day on the 5th. They are out and mobilized. Bikes crowd the bike paths with purpose. Trams and trains are ringing with determined celebration. The massive hall of Central Station is occupied by swirling groups of summer partisans. In the café, we stand next to three policemen with guns on their hips. It’s a reminder that the terroristas may find the weather just as exciting.

In the U.S., Mr. Trump starts up with some midsummer night’s rhetoric, conjured from mysteries and fancy. He accuses Clinton of planning to repeal the Second Amendment of the Constitution. (How does one person do that?) And he adds, ‘The government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own.’ I’ve never applied for a gun license. I’m nervous I wouldn’t pass the ‘good and honest’ test. Is it a blood test? A colour on the tongue?

Mr. Trump is combining ideas here in a creative way. His opponent will abolish the right to bear arms, and will also restrict choice of guns for the good and the honest. I’m failing my license test: I don’t get it. Is the Second Amendment a guarantee of consumer rights? Do we need a Constitutional Amendment for every consumer item? Shall we guarantee the right to beer? I would vote for that. I will not have my choice of beers circumscribed. We can’t go back to the days of 3.2 monopoly.

It’s cases like these that mark politics as an arcane science. I will sooner understand quantum physics. I had imagined the Second Amendment as an early sign of American paranoia, perhaps more justified in the days when we were a tiny republic of farmers who had recently pissed off a powerful empire.

We survived our fragile beginnings. One might think that that would have bolstered confidence. But it seems we became more scared with every generation. When Senator McCarthy suggested we were being betrayed by Communist agents within our government and our army, the good and the honest people responded with panic.

Mr. McCarthy took charge of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. During the next two years, the subcommittee held 169 hearings. There were a shocking number of Communist agents in the government. It might have taken Mr. McCarthy three of four more terms to root them all out.

But then the mysterious properties of quantum politics interfere, and I don’t feel competent to follow the logic of it all. The subcommittee takes a detour. It becomes interested in prosecuting homosexuals, as some sort of ancillary threat. Mr. McCarthy’s chief counsel on the subcommittee is a homosexual. He doesn’t publicize the fact. Does that make it better? The chief counsel is Mr. Roy Cohn, a somewhat brutal litigator who had just participated in the Rosenberg trial.

All seems to be going swimmingly, all sorts of dangerous people paraded before the subcommittee, until Mr. Cohn decides to take on the Army. It seems Mr. Cohn and Mr. McCarthy have developed a very close relationship with one G. David Schine, pretty boy and heir to great wealth. Mr. Schine has been recruited to advise the subcommittee because he wrote a six-page pamphlet excoriating Communism. Mr. Cohn and Mr. Schine have toured Europe together for ten days, inspecting Voice of America libraries for pernicious Communist influence, one more light moment in Euro-American relations.

But there is a complication. Mr. Schine has recently joined the Army, and he is upset that he has been forced to start his military career as a private. Mr. Cohn feels his friend deserves better. He makes calls. He cajoles and threatens. He declares he’ll ‘wreck the Army’ if they don’t promote his friend. The Army eventually threatens back with legal action. Mr. McCarthy declares the Army’s accusations a scurrilous campaign motivated by Communists, and the game is on.

The Senate creates a special subcommittee to hold hearings, since Mr. McCarthy can’t chair in his own case. The proceedings are televised, and somehow the chemistry of the situation changes. Mr. McCarthy starts to lose support. He is finally acquitted of charges, but the damage is done. He has lost so much credibility that the Senate turns on him with a censure. He dies in relative obscurity only a few years later.

Mr. Cohn’s career, however, is just getting started. He goes into private practice, and he represents many wealthy clients with a singular ferocity and flair for playing the press. He carries on for several decades, leading a flamboyant and controversial public life in New York City. He never moderates his aggressive style. The one inspirational quote I can find online attributed to Mr. Cohn is, ‘Go after a man's weakness.’ Among the good and the honest he represented: mafia boss John Gotti and Donald Trump.

Travelogue 696 – May 3
Donald in Wonderland
Part One

But, hey, ho, the wind and the rain, the rain it raineth every day. Even as the sun stages its resurgence, even as Christian Ethiopes celebrate the resurrection, I’m struck down again by the same virus I’ve been fighting for weeks. And so winter stays with me, lodges in my throat and shuts down my voice, makes every swallow an ordeal.

I think my little baby girl, half Ethiopian, is my new Ethiopia. I escaped the country itself, where I was repeatedly ill. But now my Ethiopian baby brings home all the choice viruses from day care. I don’t stand a chance.

'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate. It seems Mr. Trump has secured the nomination. He celebrated a latest string of victories with another strange speech, sounding his own quirky note of optimism, declaring about Hillary Clinton, ‘the beautiful thing is women don't like her, okay?’

It’s a form of oratory, I suppose. Or it’s a modern American innovation, an anti-matter to rhetoric. For millennia, the demagogue relied upon powers of oratory. Now it seems that nonsense and buffoonery are the demagogue’s best devices. It’s a modern twist for the religious conservatives, perhaps, a demonstration of faith. At every challenge to the candidate’s logic or sanity, the supporters flock to him with greater vehemence. He dismisses the opposition. He declares his Mexican wall will be so high, you won’t see the ground from its apex.

Mr. Trump breaks from tradition with his Wonderland rhetoric. He breaks from it with his breezy manner. The presidency is just a part of his legacy. Daddy had set it aside for him in his will, set it aside for the Donald’s seventieth birthday.

Studying, for example, Mr. Lewis Levin in the mid-nineteenth century, you see a more typical history of frustrated attempts to succeed. What sets the demagogue aside from other failures is the engine of rage that generates boundless energy. Mr. Levin created quite an oeuvre of florid rants in a burst of only a few short years. He rode the momentum of his bitterness into the House of Representatives. He almost succeeded in creating the first nativist political party to operate on a national scale.

One hundred years after Mr. Levin failed in his bid for a fourth term in Congress, the junior senator from Wisconsin rose before a women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, and he held high a piece of paper that he declared was a list of Communists working inside the State Department.

The senator had already served three years without distinction. He was a popular orator outside the Senate, but not a very effective legislator. He was looking for a crusade. Oddly enough an earlier attempt had shown a strange sort of nobility, participating in an investigation into charges of torture in the aftermath of World War II. Of course, the defendants were Nazis charged with a massacre of American prisoners, and the senator was already proving himself something of a headstrong sensationalist. He eventually walked out of the proceedings, accusing the Army of a whitewash. Within a year, he had struck gold with his next crusade, holding high that list of alleged Communists.

Four years later, Joseph McCarthy had another go at the Army.

Travelogue 695 – May 1
May Comes

It’s the first of May, and just like that everything looks like May. The skies are clear. People are taking their coffees outside in the sun, even though the morning air is still chilly.

It’s also Ethiopian Easter today, something I might have forgotten were it not for the mass of people in white shawls at Central Station this morning. Most of the celebrants will be Eritrean, rather than Ethiopian, something I can confirm passing near to them and listening to the throaty accents of the Tigrinya language.

I find it an uplifting sight, this sudden evocation of the horn of Africa. I have no memory for holidays, so they always come as a surprise. Today’s surprise is a sunny one, the white shawls in the new light like spring inside spring. There’s something so joyful about Ethiopian and Eritrean celebrations. They have brought us the sun.

The last week of April was a challenge. We were plunged back into winter for a week, and it was more of a test than the darkest days of January. I have a race coming up, and last Tuesday was going to be my last long run in preparation. I knew I was taking a risk. The weather had been awful, but there was no point delaying. The weather was projected to be awful all week. I checked out the window. There were breaks in the clouds. There was no rain falling. I would take my chances.

I was only twenty minutes into the run when the rain started. Chasing the rain was an icy wind. By the time I’d been running thirty minutes, the rain was coming in at a forty-five-degree angle. My face and hands were raw from the cold. The clouds were a solid bank of grey, and there was little hope of a break. I needed to put in another hour of running. I headed toward the Zestienhoven Park. My only hope was the refuge of some high trees.

The strategy worked. I made it to the park, and I followed the sheltered trails there for most of the next hour. I circled a field of green grass, and I wound through the woods of the park, re-emerging by the field of grass. I turned slowly again around the rectangular meadow, so quiet but for the patter of rain.

I kept this up under the gloomy skies, sheltered from the worst of the wind, until finally it seemed as though the rainstorm took a breath. The clouds were allowing some light. I could see that the grey mist was lifting, allowing the high clouds to take shape. This was a sign that the rain was going to relent. I was soaked. My shoes were heavy with water. My hands were frozen. It was just about time to head home.

I was thinking about the people who, for hundreds of years, have ventured out into the cold here. I was thinking about how it feels to age, even as the elements themselves never aged. I was thinking this conflict must be bred into us, hard-wired into our genetic code by now. The winds never became tired. They were fresh every season, even as each of us humans slowed and bowed. The enthusiasms that drove us out into the weather faded.

We’re made to see life as a struggle. We import it to our modern stories, the ones told behind the strong walls we built to break the wind.

I had earned my stripes. My body ached as I eased into my final steps, entering the compound where I lived. I was eager to get inside, get warm. But I paused to stretch, breathing in the last punishing draughts of the chilly afternoon, walking among the puddles, feeling the mix of sweat and rain water on my skin.

Travelogue 694 – April 24
Cry for Change
Part Four

Mr. Levin was a prolific writer. In between prodigious amounts of copy for his newspapers, in the same year he led rioters into Catholic neighbourhoods in Philadelphia, and the same year he first ran for Congress, in 1844, Mr. Levin delivered a lengthy lecture about temperance at Lafayette College. He told the story of a British author famous in Levin’s youth, a man who Levin felt had betrayed his promise and gone bad, giving in to the corruption of alcohol and gambling, eventually committing suicide. He doesn’t mention that the poor man, age 52 by that time, was escaping a painful illness. Nor that the author spent his final years in Paris collecting fine art and appeared to have enjoyed life to the fullest. The stripped down morality tale was enough for Levin, who found such quantities of political fodder in America’s Puritanism

He says, early in his essay, ‘It is in the daring character of genius, that we behold at once, the grandeur of its conceptions, and the imbecility of its virtue.’ If we allow, for one generous moment, a small share of genius to our own Mr. Levin, then we may see a certain prescience in his verdict. It’s clear he believed in his genius, and he was quite unaware of the lack of virtue there. Perhaps that’s why he clothed it in such heavy-handed morality.

He had a genius for moving the crowds with inflammatory words. He moved them to violence. He moved them to vote for him.

It can be instructive to see what the loud mouth does with power once he gets it. Sometimes we shrug, and we figure it makes little difference who wins office.

Mr. Levin rode his wave of nativist emotion all the way to Washington, becoming representative in the House for Pennsylvania’s First District in Philadelphia. He served three terms there, seeming to manage the electorate back home much better than he did his colleagues. He had cobbled together a new party, called – awkwardly in hindsight – the Native Americans. His platform was simple, lengthening the naturalization process and requiring that only native-born Americans may run for office.

His methods among voters didn’t work as well among politicians. His style at the podium in the House of Representative was to rant and harangue. It didn’t play so well. He denounced the Pope at the podium, and the Representatives were embarrassed. He shouted repeatedly about naturalization and about foreigners, until colleagues were perplexed. Representative Chipman from Michigan asked for the record, ‘Who are the Native Americans … but those who derived their very existence from foreigners?’

After another impassioned denunciation of Jesuit plots, a fellow Representative from Pennsylvania commented, ‘I do not know whether my colleague ever saw a Jesuit.’

Levin never quite got the hang of politics. He sensed that he needed to court Southern colleagues, calling the abolitionists ‘disunionists’. He supported the Mexican-American War, which opened up slave territory, while opposing expansion to the West. Of course, the sad truth was that his support for the Mexican-American War was really about going to war with a Catholic regime.

Any progress he had made wooing Southerners, and it wasn’t much, he torpedoed when he argued with typical vehemence against states’ rights in the instance of naturalization, citizenship, and the vote. These were Federal prerogatives, he insisted. Southerners were disgusted with him..

Mr. Levin’s early efforts to form a national party and field presidential candidates, presaging the more successful Know Nothings of the mid-1850s, he again spoiled with the exercise of his unique charms. When the New York delegates insisted that the viability of any party relied upon the votes of foreign-born Americans, he resisted. He quibbled over the name of the party, insisting on ‘Native American’. Delegate attendance at subsequent conventions dwindled. The cause stagnated until the 1850s.

By 1850, Mr. Levin had used up the good will back home, and he did not win re-election. He had accomplished precious little in three terms. Six years later, he was pulled from the stage at a political rally, driven to fits of rage by the new Republican Party. He didn’t survive to see the presidency of Mr. Lincoln, a colleague from the Thirtieth Congress, during Mr. Levin’s second term. Mr. Lincoln had served only one term.

History adds one final touch of irony to Mr. Levin’s story. In 1880, twenty years after his passing, Mr. Levin’s widow and son converted to Catholicism.

Travelogue 693 – April 22
Cry for Change
Part Three

I’m not entirely awake. The first wind in my eyes bring tears. I pedal very slowly as I get going, so early. The first stretch as I pedal away from home is the canal that curves beside the old train track, describing an arc from our block of flats over to the Sparta Stadion. At the stadium I have to abandon the peace of the canal and its grassy verges, its birdsong, in order to join the busy road and cross over the little Schie on its big bridge.

I realized with some sadness, as I awoke, that the blackbird who had been serenading us at sunrise had moved. That little bird had been the spirit of early spring. I would see him as I left the house. He would be perched in the tree in the first quadrangle of the complex. Or he would stand on the roof just where the brick road passes underneath a bridging section of the building.

It feels like a sad morning for other reasons. Yesterday’s sun has given way to clouds. The temperatures are supposed to drop again in the coming days. Maybe the sensation of spring’s first days will attract the blackbird back.

Yesterday Prince died. Why do we feel the loss of celebrities personally? Clearly they represent our younger selves, reflecting back to us the memories of youth. Musicians captured the spirit of one age or another in our precious lives. The experiences and feelings ‘shared’ with them make for personal feelings. But then, suddenly we care. He died so young. He had his own story.

I remember my impressions of the boy who made ‘Purple Rain’. He seemed the plucky boy from Minneapolis, the weird boy so sure of himself he never wavered. He forced you to acknowledge his talent. And he knew he had it.

The talent was the beginning and the end. Prince was all music. The rest of the show, the tauntings with madness and perversity, that was fun, but it could only enhance or elaborate the music.

But weren’t we examining the history of the American demagogue? It’s a proud and strange history. Whereas in Prince’s case the message was the music and the rest was florid show, in the demagogue’s case the message was relative, and it was made to serve the madness and the perversity.

In the case of Lewis Charles Levin, the madness overtook him. He died younger than Prince, leaving this life in 1860 while housed in the Philadelphia Hospital for the Insane. It was his second stay there. The first was after a collapse during 1856 presidential campaign. He had delivered a frantic speech, attacking John C. Frémont, the first Republican, and he had been pulled from the stage by Frémont partisans. Soon afterward he was committed to the hospital’s care.

This was only the final manifestation of a career in madness. It really gets going in May, 1844, when he was the prime mover in a series of riots in Philadelphia that left people murdered and whole neighbourhoods burned to the ground. By the end of the same year, he had been elected to Congress. He was to serve three futile terms, a marginalized figure in the House, harping continuously on his one issue, never taken seriously by his colleagues.

Levin had found his one great idea. The Pope was orchestrating an attack on American democracy, and the Irish immigrants were the Pope’s foot soldiers. Most delusions have a few facts to prop them up, and it is true that Levin had been frustrated by the party machinery that dominated politics in his day, that shut the door to the many of the young and ambitious. And it was true that immigrants were a pawn in the political game. The Democrats were especially adept at herding fresh immigrants into the polls during critical elections.

The disaffected young Turks of the 1830s and 40s turned to working through the penny press, newly popular and growing powerful in the U.S. Levin made the Daily Sun into his vehicle for relentless nativist rant. And the topic of the moment was the Bible.

The Catholics of the city didn’t object to Bible study in the schools. They just wanted the freedom to read from the Catholic Bible rather than the King James. Our stalwart Jewish Puritan led the charge against this impertinence. He painted the Catholic protest as somehow anti-Bible. He organised rallies and he practiced his oratorical flourishes. He led expeditions into Catholic neighbourhoods, and reported on the carnage afterward in his paper, defending the nativist against all charges of aggression. It was always self-defense. It was always indicative of the vulgar character of the immigrant.

Over the summer of 1844 this turned into a campaign for office.

Travelogue 692 – April 20
Cry for Change
Part Two

My nose is sore. It feels as though there may have been a brush fire run through my lungs. But I still rise to face the day. I know I am recovering. The skies aren’t as promising as they were. There are more clouds, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not raining. At this hour, the clouds are tinged with rose. It’s warmer.

When it’s spring, people pull their bikes out of storage. I have more traffic to contend with. As I take the traffic circle by St. Willibrord’s on Beukelsdijk, I have to be careful not to run into a mom and her baby. The baby looks to be one year-old. He is merrily riding behind mom, talking to himself. Mom is keeping up a very good pace. I let them pass.

I take a minute to admire St. Willibrord’s again. It’s one of my favourites. There’s something old world about it, even though it only dates back to the 1920s. The dark brick and patinaed spire invite a sensation of another time. These days the church seems to have been adopted by the Polish community in town.

Settled in at my café, I review the news quickly. Yesterday was the New York primary. Mr. Trump won the Republican primary, and I see that he found it a great ‘honour’ to vote for himself. His analysis of the contest with Mr. Cruz over New York State: ‘I’ve pretty much knocked the hell out of him.’ Yesterday I read that Mr. Trump was being sued for libel. He called a fellow Republican a ‘dummy’. They say this is America’s demagogue of the moment. I wonder if he realizes the great tradition he is heir to.

‘I confess that I am an agitator,’ said Lewis Charles Levin about himself. ‘What storms are to the atmosphere - what tempests to the ocean - the agitator is to the political world.’

By the end of the 1830s, Mr. Levin had settled in Philadelphia. Like many young and ambitious lawyers, he started his long crusade for prominence with writing, speaking, and ‘agitating’. He was to repeat often in later life that all great achievements originated from one idea. He was to have a few of those in his public life.

His first great idea was temperance, the fight against booze. Liquor was the most dangerous vice in the young republic, corrupter of democracy. Interestingly, Mr. Levin extended the crusade to the theatre. Theatre inflamed the passions and corrupted youth. He had become the protector of America’s Puritan tradition.

He did discover a wonderfully nineteenth century angle to a seventeenth century morality. People were driven to drink by poverty, he said, and he ranted against the wealthy capitalist class. ‘The oppressions of avarice lead to intemperance as a refuge from avarice,’ he wrote.

Ultimately, it should seem no surprise that he found the party system culpable, and particularly those who were holding power. They were invested in the system, and they were invested in drink. Political offices were filled by candidates chosen in the back rooms of ‘groggeries’, as he called them. Mr. Levin was to set his sights higher.

When he moved to Philadelphia, Mr. Levin had given up law. He had bought out a small newspaper, the Temperance Advocate, and made it his voice and his issue. After only a few years, he sold that paper and bought the Daily Sun. The rhetoric took a new turn, became more ambitious. The issue became nativism. There was a plot afoot, a plot originating in Rome.

Travelogue 691 – April 18
Cry for Change
Part One

It’s spring. I’m sick. I’ve spent the weekend dragging myself out of bed because there were things to do, and then retreating to bed once I have given an honest and failed effort. I cough up quantities of yellow stuff. I feel cold all the time.

Outdoors, my favourite type of weather has taken over the skies, light winds and high clouds breaking up bright fields of blue. The air is fresh. There is just a remnant of winter chill. The clouds release the occasional misty shower, even when the sun is shining. It’s nearly impossible for me to stay still and rest in bed.

I’m on the mend, but exhausted. I’ve made it out of the house early. As I cycled into the city centre, the sun was a bright orange ball of light just risen above the horizon, perfectly framed by the buildings ahead. I enjoy the ride thoroughly. I believe life is worth living. And I arrive in no real shape to work. I’m going to push myself, anyway, though my body aches and shivers.

Glancing through Facebook first, I see that we need to be demanding change again. In the final weeks of primary season we must be strident. Everybody loves Bernie’s ideas, but Hillary folks question his ability to lead. Bernie supporters respond with the cry for change. Don’t compromise. Make change.

It’s hard to keep up with. I suppose as I get older, four years doesn’t seem that long a time. And the urgent calls for change every four years are taxing. We know the only constant is change and all that, but it’s sobering to be reminded every four years how far we’ve fallen, how radical any healing will have to be. According to Ted Cruz, we have to wipe out whole branches of government, including the IRS, switch to the gold standard, build more fences against the scary people out there. Bernie seems like a milquetoast compared to the Republican front-runners.

Well, who is going to miss the IRS? We all still hurt from the April 15th bleedings. It is a pleasant fantasy, imagining all the nasty tax men packing up the stuff from their desks, adjusting their glasses, trying to exit the building with dignity. But then the street lamps start going out, one by one, and no one is picking up the garbage. The dead start walking.

While studying the Know Nothing movement of the mid-nineteenth century, I realized the party was like a training camp for young orators. During the period between the passing of the Revolutionary generation and the Civil War, America was a laboratory for democracy. (See de Tocqueville.) It was a golden age of oratory. Its best exemplars might be Webster, Lincoln and Douglas. But of course there were hundreds of others, struggling to capture the attention of the crowd.

This fertile soil produced some odd blooms. One interesting character was the virulent anti-immigrant campaigner who became the first Jewish member of Congress.

Lewis Charles Levin was a native of Charleston. His path almost crossed that of young John C. Frémont, who started college in Charleston just as Levin was graduating from college in Columbia, South Carolina. But the young firebrand Levin moved on to teach in Mississippi, where he was quickly ejected for participating in a duel. Legend has it that Jefferson Davis was his second. Levin practiced law in Maryland and Kentucky, and eventually came to ground in Philadelphia. Here he started building his reputation as an orator. His first issue, interestingly, was not nativism.

Travelogue 690 – April 8
To Be an Immigrant

I’m meeting with Jan early in the morning. He has an idea that I would benefit from some office space. It seems as though he’s always in the market for a better deal. The eye for the deal is a part of the Dutch character, they say. Jan keeps a finger on the pulse of real estate in this town. He wants to show me a space that has come recently available in my neighbourhood. He thinks I could share it with a friend of his, Rene.

It turns out the space is in one of the three landmark towers in Marconiplein. These three blocks of white stone with square black windows mark my neighbourhood in the west of Rotterdam for kilometres in all directions. They were built in 1975, designed by a Chicago firm.

The realtor leads us into the first tower. It’s eerily empty. I had no idea that it had been emptied recently. This tower used to be the home of some gemeente, or city government, offices. Now the building is gutted. The realtors are filling the place floor by floor, so we’re only shown offices on the first floor. Jan is thorough. He asks many questions, walking the circuit of the floor imperiously, peeking in every corner. The windows are dusty. They look out over dusty roofs of the ground floor foyer. Jan sniffs at this. He says it’s worth waiting until they’re renting on higher floors, where there is a real view.

He’s been talking to the realtor in Dutch, of course. I listen. My Dutch is equal to following about half of the chatter.

I’ve lived overseas for over twelve years now. The day to day in another language is fun, and then it’s tiring. What it never is, is easy. Especially for someone coming to it in mid-life. You never move lazily through the day, drifting through conversations as though they were pleasant scents in the marketplace. Dialogue is work. You listen with concentration. Speaking is like vigorous exercise. It can be exhilarating, if the mind is clicking. But when the mind is slow, the work of speech is painful.

This is how life as an expat ticks along. I’m no refugee. I didn’t row any rafts to get here. I’m escaping no persecution worse than the hectoring despair that speaks in Donald Trump’s voice. I’m rescued from nothing worse than the grim pranks that America business plays on its workers.

And yet, as I watch Europe struggle with its bad immigration dreams, and fitfully act out against the strangers among her children, I can’t help but feel targeted. I am an immigrant, after all. I fight for my right to be here, a battle fought with lots of paperwork. And it costs, even in the fees levied when I misread a tax notice. We receive many mysterious letters from the city, and often they are delivering one unexpected expense or another. And sometimes you’re too tired for the effort of deciphering.

After meeting with Jan, I have to stop by our daycare. There has been a glitch with the paperwork. The administrator there wants to explain in Dutch. I encourage her to. I drop one word then another. She sees the strain in my eyes, and she begins to switch gradually to English, first with English words in Dutch sentences, and finally all English words in Dutch order. I don’t fight it. I know how hard it is to slow down in your own language. It took me years as a teacher and an expat to learn how to speak English for the foreigner, the basic syntax, the simplified vocabulary, the rounded enunciation, giving every vowel it due and making sure my words don’t slur together. It’s asking a lot for people to tailor their mother tongue for the visitor from far away.

So this is the life of the immigrant. It has is rewards. It is rarely dull. But sometimes you long for a dull day.

The Dutch voted against the Ukraine the other day, in a test of a new referendum system. Collect enough signatures, and you can call a popular vote. You can be sure that no one has the charisma to collect four hundred thousand signatures over an obscure economic treaty with a minor European power like the Ukraine. It was a referendum about the E.U., another measure of the water temperature as Brussels sinks into the sea, abandoned by all high-minded principle. It stands accused of heavy-handed bureaucracy. It stands accused by proxy for all the problems that have discomfited Europeans at home, economic crisis and austerity, civil war in Syria, the unrelenting ill will of Mr. Putin, and a long list of other things that have required patience and a charitable spirit for one or two too many years. And so we say no to Ukraine, and in doing so, strangely, aligning with Mr. Putin’s will.

Travelogue 689 – April 2
After the War

Carrying on, following the Republican Party through its early days, through the war that they had provoked and they had won, we do come to the third presidential candidate, only the third, though it feels like the difference of a century since the party could be led by the freewheeling mountain man and gold-rush privateer, John C. Frémont. There had been much blood spilt, a long war persecuted brutally, leaving half the country broken and burnt. The bitter and the vanquished were to be re-integrated into the union. Poor Mr. Lincoln had to be sacrificed. There was a pall like smoke over the capital.

The years that produced the first candidate, Mr. Frémont, were dust. The years that made him were the optimistic 1840s, the years of Manifest Destiny and the Mexican-American War. Our third candidate was also formed by those years. He fought bravely in Mexico. But notably he was to say many years later that the Mexican-American War was ‘one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.’ He opined that this war was a land grab in order to expand American slavery. The Civil War was a natural consequence.

That’s a surprising variety of honesty from a political man. And surprisingly specific. We’ve come a long way.

After Lincoln, there was to be one last Democratic president of the pre-war mould. He was an accident, the product of Lincoln’s desire to create a National Union government. Andrew Johnson was the only Southern senator to stand with the North, and he was rewarded by a last-minute inclusion on the ticket in 1864. A month after becoming vice-president, he was president.

Mr. Johnson didn’t do so well. He was stubborn. He was sympathetic toward Southern leadership. He was against civil rights for the freed slaves. And he had a few fatal flaws competing for primacy, his drunkenness, his rages, his inability to pull off a coherent speech. His inaugural speech, delivered just before Lincoln’s in 1864, was such a shocking failure that he hid from public view for weeks.

When half a million people die in civil war, not in a war against dangerous foreigners, there needs to be more than healing afterward. There needs to be some reason for it. There needs to be an effect achieved by the fighting, or there needs to be change. Johnson was all for the healing, and not so active in seeking change. He obstructed the Republicans, and they responded with impeachment. They didn’t succeed in ousting him. Mr. Johnson stayed in office for the duration of his term, to delay with petty dog-fights, to tour the country making outrageous speeches. The Democrats passed him over in 1868.

It could be that Mr. Johnson sealed the fate of the Democrats in presidential politics for a while. With exception of Grover Cleveland, the Republicans were to own the White House until Woodrow Wilson’s election. More accurately, until Franklin Roosevelt was able to redefine the party system. In 1868, it was going to be Ulysses S. Grant.

Jumping to the today’s Republican Party, I see that Mr Trump is falling from grace. And it was never going to be his ‘Know-Nothing’ comments against immigrants. It was going to be his misogyny. He publishes insinuations about his opponent’s wife. He says abortions should be punished. There are a few more women than Arab terrorists, and they vote. The candidate grumbles that he’s being persecuted.

We’ve come a long way since 1868.