Uncategorized – Page 4 – Paola Trimarco

The Week in Feminism

With Saudi women finally getting the right to drive and the death of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, I’m reminded of the continued sexism and misogyny of our day.

While I’m pleased that women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are not only allowed to drive cars, but are able to do so unescorted by a male, I’m annoyed by the idea that this part of the new Saudi King’s programme of ‘modernisation.’ KSA is technologically one of the most advanced countries in the world. The King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology was started in Riyadh back in 1977. According to Forbes, KSA is one of the world’s largest investors in technology today. And they have already launched several space satellites. A typical Saudi owns smart phones, tablets, laptops and an array of high-tech home entertainment systems. In terms of education – another indicator of modernisation – their primary and secondary schools were among the first in the Gulf States. Literacy rates in the Kingdom are now comfortably above the global average.

Yet for all of this, women were only given the right to vote in KSA in 2015 and now in 2017 the right to drive. Modernisation has been rather selective.

Of course, many countries, including some in the West, would also fail the fairness test when it comes to women’s rights relative to other developments. Saudi women 2

With this news about Saudi women, I’ve been reminiscing on my driving experiences in Oman, the country next door. While Oman is a country where women could drive, few did. Usually, I was driving with David in the passenger seat and I only had to deal with the dangerous habits of other drivers, typically young, male, on their mobile phones, speeding and cutting across lanes of traffic as if at the Monaco Grand Prix. When I was in the car driving by myself, I also had to deal with male drivers pretending to drive me off the road, revving up their engines and blinking their lights behind me or driving closely alongside my car, looking at me and laughing. I should point out that this was often on the highway between home and work with a posted speed limit of 120 kilometres per hour. I knew this harassment was because of my gender. I felt I had landed on a planet where the men – on the road at least – never stopped being teenagers.

This brings me to Hugh Hefner. I’ve been cringing these past few days as glowing tributes have been paid to this professional womaniser. It has been said, mostly by the man himself and now in his obituaries, that he was largely responsible for the sexual revolution of the sixties. If that’s true, such a revolution according to Playboy magazine was for men only. In a complete and fair sexual revolution, men and women would have been featured in the magazine full frontal nude or engaging in sexual acts together. But we all know that Playboy and the persona that Hefner embodied were about the objectification and demeaning treatment of women. Where women weren’t treated like life-size dolls, they were reduced to bunny rabbits.

Having said this, I’ve also been comforted by the many writers and commentators – nearly all women – who have reminded the public of the man’s misogynistic remarks and his emotional abuse of women which continued until his death. Famous or infamous – the fact that there is a divide in opinion, like the views on women driving in the Gulf, illustrates that the struggle for equality has a long way to go.

Where I wasn’t when Diana died

Having just flown back to Seoul from a short break in Guam, we were enjoying a late breakfast and listening to BBC World Service. Breaking news – Diana, Princess of Wales, had been in a car accident. My first thoughts were something along the lines of it being a fender-bender. No big deal. Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed had probably walked away from it. The media makes so much of her life. My second thoughts were that in Britain, it was about one in the morning, while in South Korea it was just after nine. There was a sense of satisfaction knowing that we had heard this nugget of news while most of Britain was sound asleep.

Within an hour, we learned that Dodi Fayed had died and that Princess Diana was in hospital. This was serious after all. Living at the foreign faculty apartments, the rest of the morning was spent in gossipy speculation. Any colleague I bumped into on my way to the laundry room or shops was quick to ask if I’d heard anything. They didn’t have to say what it was about. As the hours passed without any news from the BBC, we suspected that it was likely a life changing injury or that she was dead.

It was late afternoon, David was off playing cricket with some international ex-pats and I was by myself in our tiny apartment preparing my lessons. I turned on CNN for an update and heard for the first time that Princess Diana had died. Even though I expected it, the news still stung and caused my eyes to tear. I was aware too that with an eight-hour time difference, Britain was waking up to this surreal headline. I felt reconnected to Britain, to my friends there and oddly to people I didn’t know.

In the days that followed, I sensed a closer bond to my fellow British, American and other Western colleagues and acquaintances. We were all shocked and felt the sense of a void being created with the young princess’s death.

Koreans, on the other hand, couldn’t understand all the fuss. One of my Korea students explained to me that Diana was no longer popular in Korea because she was a divorced woman. They couldn’t understand how people could still like, let alone admire her. Watching British people on the news leaving bouquets and blubbering in front of Buckingham Palace made my students shake their heads, some even smiled. At some point, a Korean student asked me if I was sad about Diana dying. Yes, I guess I was, but not deeply sad.

In truth, Diana didn’t mean much to me. She hadn’t said or written anything famous or thought provoking. But like millions of others around the world, I enjoyed watching her, envying her clothes and style, delighting in her expressions of joy, empathising with her looks of boredom. When she first came on the scene as Lady Diana, she was a breath of fresh air among the stiff, restrained royals. She soon filled her job description giving us the heir and the spare, but was otherwise not particularly interesting. I started to pay attention to her again when she supported AIDS research, holding the HIV babies in her arms and sending a message to the world. Around that time she had started to diminish, becoming thinner by the month. The stresses of her life were there for all of us to see before the advent of reality TV. Only after her divorce did Diana appeared to be a healthier and happier person, travelling the world to draw attention to various charities, entertaining us with her stylish appearance. There was little not to like, but not enough substance to dislike.

As ex-pats, David and I had become regulars at the British Embassy in Seoul. In those days, the Embassy had a pub in the basement, complete with British ales and a dartboard, that was open to UK citizens and their guests. I can’t imagine, post 9/11, the pub still operating. As most of us didn’t have access to BBC television in Korea – and the internet was in its infancy – the Ambassador invited us pub regulars to his private home to watch the funeral. About thirty of us sat in a grand room silently viewing the service on a wide screen, the only movement, the occasional face dabbed with a handkerchief.

The images and the emotions of those days seem as clear in my mind as if they were yesterday, or the day before. I suppose it’s the effect of shocking news that’s shared with a wider public, along with the fact that I was in South Korea. Having been a toddler when JFK was killed, this is my moment of remembering exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news. And that might be all it will ever amount to.

The Ms Thing

Last week saw the death of Sheila Michaels, the woman credited with ‘introducing the honorific Ms into common parlance,’ according to the NYT obit.

While it might be ‘common parlance’ in the United States, it still hasn’t completely caught on here in the United Kingdom.

Virtually any time I give my name to a stranger, whether it be a builder, a ticket office clerk, shop keeper, whatever, I am asked ‘Is that Miss or Mrs.?’ This question in itself divides the UK from the US, where people often don’t use title at all, just the person’s name. Here in England, when I respond with ‘Ms’ I’m typically looked at with a baffled expression. Sometimes the person tries again, as if my accent either made my response incomprehensible or my brain too small to understand that Ms was not one of the options. One time, a Cambridgeshire garage owner even asked me what it meant. I had to explain that Ms is for women whether they are married or not, like what Mr is for men.

But most of the time, the linguistically constipated stranger ignores what I’ve just said, looks at my hand, sees the wedding ring and writes down ‘Mrs.’ Problem – I’m not Mrs Trimarco – that was my mother, or some other woman who married a Mr. Trimarco in generations before mine. Like so many women, I chose not to change my name when I got married. Not only do I object to the symbolism that I become my husband’s goods and chattels upon marriage, but having been published under my birth name makes any name change professional suicide – not to mention downright messy. For those of you who say that it’s easier for the woman to change her name if she has children, I say wake up. With all the stepparents, foster parents and other guardians with different surnames to their little ones these days, people’s expectations have changed.

I haven’t yet run into an equivalent for Ms in other languages, but there are countries that either no longer or never have used titles to distinguish married women from unmarried ones. These include, surprisingly, Iran and South Korea, two countries with notorious track records for the oppression and ill-treatment of women. Moreover, in both Iran and South Korea a woman keeps her surname after marriage. Having said that, one Korean woman once told me that a woman kept her maiden name so as to not confuse the family tree in a country where ancestor worship is paramount. Her interpretation on all of this was that women didn’t count in the tracing of family trees, that they were mere conduits of babies, not important enough to have their names passed on.

In some South American countries, a woman becomes a signora, but her surname stays the same. When she has children, part of her surname, usually a double-barrelled one like Sanchez-Perez, goes to her children. The other half of the children’s double-barrelled names comes from their fathers.

So, what’s the problem with Britain? Maybe people here resist the title because they’re used to Miss or Mrs, or as one shopkeeper once told me ‘it’s only for feminists’ (as if that were a bad thing). Are things all that bad on this score here? Well, just a couple of years ago, I felt a glimmer of hope when I went to the opticians and was given a form to complete that gave me the options Miss, Mrs, Ms, Dr, Mr. I happily circled Ms. I turned in my completed form to the receptionist, who looked at it carefully and said, ‘Is that Miss or Mrs?’

Fast-forward to a few days ago. I was at Homebase getting a quote for our bathroom refurbishments when the bathroom designer, sitting at her computer, was filling in my contact details. A dropbox for titles came down with Mr, Miss, Mrs, Ms, Dr etc. as she asked me my title. Seeing the options, I said, ‘Well, Ms or Dr, either is fine.’ She looked at the ring on my hand and said, ‘But you are a Mrs, aren’t you?’ It was clear that that was her preferred option, a world she understood.

I replied, ‘But I’m not Mrs Trimarco. My husband isn’t Mr Trimarco. I didn’t change my name when I got married.’

Her expression was too plain for me to tell if she was an anti-feminist, repulsed by the title, or simply confused. Finally, she said, ‘Okay, let’s use Dr then.’

Local Elections

It’s taken me a week, but I think I have recovered from the mini-depression left behind by the local elections here in South East Cambridgeshire. I credit my recovery largely to the power of satire – thank you, Have I Got News for You. And I must acknowledge the Trump administration, although they are not aiming to be satirical, they have certainly achieved it over the past week with the firing of FBI Director James Comey – a tin-pot dictator fires the man who is leading an incriminating investigation against him and claims that it’s because of the way the man treated the dictator’s rival which brought him to power in the first place. (But as I write this Trump has now contradicted his spokespeople by saying that it was the ‘Russian thing.’)

Our local elections this time around proved the stuff of satire by showing us once again how human beings do stupid things at the ballot box. Not so funny – and hence a week of the blues – has been the nastiness and spreading of false information that has marked this particular campaign. It reminds me of J.K. Rowlings’ The Casual Vacancy, where a parish council seat suddenly becomes vacant and the private wars and backstabbing begin.

Here in Ely, a group which calls itself ‘Progressives’ advertised itself as an alliance of progressive political parties, made up of Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens. They even sent out social media postings showing a diagram of red, yellow and green stick people coming together to defeat the blue stick people, also known as Conservatives.

I clicked on their link expecting to see them supporting the Liberal Democrat in my ward for County Council. Much to my horror, they were telling people to vote Labour. Then I looked at other wards, and saw that the recommendations were either Labour or the Greens. No sign of the Liberal Democrats. This seemed odd to me as the Lib-Dems either won or came in second to the Conservatives in these local wards as long as I could remember.

I left a comment: What you are saying on your website doesn’t look anything like this diagram. Why can’t the LibDems have a win?

Response: We had been working with all 3 progressive parties for about 18 months but the local LibDem party decided [to] pull out last autumn. We’re hoping they will re-engage with us in the future.

Me: So you are only advising voters to vote Labour or Green? That doesn’t seem right. Especially in Ely where LibDems are more likely to beat Tories.

Other comments came flooding in with arguments and counterarguments. The most telling was when someone said ‘You’d rather attack the Lib Dems than genuinely try to defeat the Tories.’ The response was a ‘Yes.’

A few weeks later, the local elections were held. For Ely North, the Conservatives won with 49.3% of the votes, the Lib-Dems had 35.4% and Labour 15.3%. In Ely South, the Conservatives won with 46.1%, the Lib-Dems had 38.7% and Labour 15.2%. For both wards, these were high results for Labour compared with previous elections. If about 60% of their votes went to the Lib-Dems in the spirit of an alliance, the Conservatives would have lost. Clearly, divided we fall.

Winter’s End

Even though spring has already arrived in Nice and some of the early blooms have died off, our return to England later this week marks the official end of winter for us – even if the weather in England doesn’t agree with that idea.

Naturally, I’m in a reflective mood, evaluating the past four months. The weather nicoise of nearly daily sunshine has dominated my assessment. I can say that it’s been a good winter break. This good feeling has been bolstered by meeting my writing targets for the time in France – most writers will tell you the importance of self-imposed deadlines and the arrogant self-satisfaction of meeting those deadlines. David and I also give the winter break full marks for being an opportunity to improve our French. It hasn’t bettered by leaps and bounds, but we both have noticed that following the news media, written and spoken, has become easier.

Above all else, it’s also been a good winter for reinforcing acquaintanceships and building new friendships. Being ex-pats, we naturally seek the company and wisdom of the more seasoned ex-pats on the Riviera. While this clearly has its benefits, it can be a tight compartment of overlapping Venn diagrams. People we know from the British Association might also be writers I know from the Nice branch of the Society of Authors or women from the International Women’s Club (which I only attended a few times). But this year’s Women’s March at least expanded my network, creating another Venn circle. I’m grateful for that.

With winter’s end I prepare mentally for a political spring with local elections in the UK and ongoing protests against Brexit and Trump. My writer self looks to the change in location and the start of a new season to view the quotidian differently and to be inspired to make connections between the mundane and the new and between my little existence and the bigger human landscape.

This reflective time with the changing of seasons also reminds me of the New England Transcendentalists, e.g. Emerson and Thoreau – the latter, especially. Thoreau was quite the diarist, logging the cycles and habits in his natural environment of the woods surrounding Walden Pond. I can’t think of a setting more different from the cityscape of Nice, with its seacoast and palm trees or the town of Ely, with its cafes and cathedral. But such is the power of the imagination. I close with a snippet of spring immortalised in words:

To a Marsh Hawk in Spring

There is health in thy gray wing,

Health of nature’s furnishing.

Say, thou modern-winged antique,

Was thy mistress ever sick?

In each heaving of thy wing

Thou dost health and leisure bring,

Thou dost waive disease and pain

And resume new life again.

–Henry David Thoreau

Let’s not forget Steven and Brendan

Like millions of people who have watched the Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer, I was left bemused and angered by the cases of Steven Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey.

The filming of this programme began back in 2003 when a Wisconsin man named Steven Avery had been exonerated as a result of DNA evidence after serving eighteen years in prison for rape. As the government offered him a paltry sum for his years served, he decided to sue the Manitowoc Country Police for their negligence – and by many people’s account, deliberate mishandling of evidence and witness statements. While this lawsuit was going on, Avery was accused of murdering Teresa Halbach, a 25-year old woman who had gone to Avery’s auto scrapyard to photograph a vehicle and had no other connection to Avery.

The same officials who were being sued by Avery were involved in investigating this murder case against him. To avert any appearance of conflict of interest, the state Attorney General assigned another county to work on the case, alongside Manitowoc County. The incriminating evidence against Avery was discovered by the officers from Manitowoc County, mostly under suspicious circumstances. For instance, finding Halbach’s car keys in Avery’s trailer days after other investigators found nothing. There were also blood stains with Avery’s DNA found in Halbach’s car, said to have come from a cut on Avery’s finger though there were no fingerprints or other evidence to link Avery to the car. The vial containing Avery’s DNA from his case back in 2003 was still in police lockup and had been discovered to have been tampered with – a discovery filmed in the process of making the Netflix documentary.

I won’t go on about the trial as it was covered in some nine one-hour episodes of the series. In the end, Avery was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Attempts to reverse this decision using the Appellate Court and the Supreme Court systems have failed. From watching this series, this appears to be a terrible injustice driven by the need of authorities to protect their own from accusations of prejudice and framing innocent persons.

There’s more. Avery’s nephew, Brendan Dassey, was also arrested as an accomplice in this case. At the time of the murder, Dassey was sixteen, but with the reading ability of an eleven-year old. He was learning disabled and awkward and shy. He had been brought into this case as a possible witness by his fourteen-year-old cousin who claimed that Dassey had told her about seeing body parts on the Avery property. On the witness stand, the teary-eyed cousin admitted that she had lied about this. Manitowoc County police had managed to get a confession out of Dassey by telling this unintelligent boy that he could go home if he confessed. I only saw about 30 minutes of the four hours of the police interview with Dassey. Given that, two things struck me: one, young Dassey was there on his own, without parent or lawyer; and two, it was obvious that the police were feeding Dassey with their version of the story and getting him to agree. The first lawyer assigned to Dassey had already presumed his guilt and put Dassey through another bullying interview to get more details out of him. In time, this lawyer was fired from the case by the judge. Yet, this additional incriminating evidence was still used against Dassey during his trial.

The so-called confession from Dassey was so weak that it wasn’t considered admissible in Steven Avery’s trial. Yet, despite that and the lack of physical evidence, Dassey was still convicted to life in prison and won’t be eligible for parole until 2048.

Since then, experts in false confessions and groups, such as Innocent Project, have taken up Dassey’s case. As this young man, now in his late twenties, remains incarcerated, I can’t help but to think of other cases where false confessions were extracted from innocent young men. The notorious Central Park Five involved teenaged boys convicted of raping and brutally beating a woman in 1989. They were exonerated on DNA evidence and the confession of the true rapist in 2002.

Both the Avery and Dassey cases point to weaknesses in a complex legal system which have led to these apparent injustices. At a deeper level, these cases highlight prejudices against certain types of people – working class, learning disabled, young males. It also underscores the desire to incarcerate people, as if that is going to deter similar crimes or make our communities safer – studies have shown otherwise. By all appearances, Avery and Dassey are victims not just of a handful of dishonest police, but of a much larger social malaise.

2016: Looking for the Good in Good Riddance

Does any more need to be said about what an awful year 2016 has been? In brief – Syria, Bowie, Brexit, Trump, attacks on Nice, Orlando, Brussels… For Syria, Brexit and Trump, there are lists of hideous events and poisonous rhetoric that have helped to make 2016 notorious even before it’s ended. Finding the good in such a year is not only challenging, but necessary. The alternative would be to shut down and sulk, permitting the bad things to fester and grow worse in the mind’s eye.

As for the positive side, for a start there was the election of Sadiq Khan, London’s first Muslim mayor; women in Saudi Arabia finally got the right to vote; and a solar-powered plane circumnavigated the world. Other good things to happen in 2016 have come from the world of sport. Leicester City football club won the Premier League, having started the season with odds of 5000-1. There was Team GB’s fabulous performance in the Summer Olympics. And on the other side of the Atlantic, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series – a feat they hadn’t done since 1908.

Other good things have emerged out of the many horrible and sad events to happen in 2016. The attack on Nice, my second home, has brought about feelings of solidarity with my neighbours and acquaintances. The shock and sadness of David Bowie’s death similarly connected me with other fans and people whose younger selves had also been transformed and liberated by his creativity. Following the Brexit vote, I have joined several organisations to stay informed and to protest against the economically stupid and xenophobic trail left behind – I have never signed so many petitions and written to so many political representatives as I have in the past six months. Again, there is the sense of unity which is comforting, but to this I must add the satisfaction of doing something political and participating in the bigger debate.

While the political is personal, there is the smaller concentric circle of my personal life. In 2016, David and I went to America to visit friends and I was reunited with a friend I hadn’t seen in 34 years. I also visited my father’s grave for the first time – a sad, but fulfilling experience. Back in England and France, we have enjoyed good health and the company of friends and family, interspersed with reading, writing, playing golf and going to cinemas, concerts, galleries etc. Life has been full and satisfying, even under the cloud of this annus horribilis.

Let’s hope for a better 2017.

Facticide

I would have published this sooner if there hadn’t been for so many journalists beating me to the goalposts. I write this knowing I risk being just another voice waxing on angrily about the prevalence of lies that have produced the vote in Britain to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s presidential victory. Since most intelligent people are familiar with these lies, I won’t even start by listing the more outrageous or popular ones.

I’ll start with language. The word post-truth has gained currency in recent weeks. While it encapsulates the idea that we are beyond truths or are willing to ignore truths, I think it is far too gentle. Post-truth rings too much like postmodernism, poststructuralism or post-realism. I prefer facticide. This word more aptly suggests a killing of truths.

Of course, truth is a slippery concept. When we think of truths, we think of facts, those things that can be evidenced or scientifically tested. We all know how evidence and testing can be interpreted in different ways. And some truths can change over time. For instance, the BBC quiz programme QI, known for its thorough and accurate research, once acknowledged that many of its ‘correct answers’ of the not too distant past were no longer true or correct because new information and scientific research changed the so-called facts.

And then there’s factoids, untrue or unreliable ideas that have been reported and repeated so often, they are taken as fact. The word itself, apparently first coined by writer Norman Mailer, takes its ‘oid’ suffix form the Greek word for appearance or form. This definition has been expanded and according to a few online dictionaries, a factoid is also a small or trivial fact. In this newer definition lies another danger – factoids are no longer half-baked truths, they’re just mini-truths.

These are some of the subtle ways that truths can be tampered with. In recent months, the world has witnessed the more blatant attacks on facts, expertise and truths. But what has been more worrying are the falsehoods that are standing in their place. I know this is nothing new. Back in the fifth century BCE, Sophocles said, “What people believe prevails over truth.” It the time between then and our present day, many philosophers, artists and writers have made similar comments. But I’m more aware and fearful of this tendency now. The believed falsehoods of the Brexit and Trump campaigns, and their ilk in other parts of the world, are full of isolationism, nationalism and hate. I cannot see what good could possibly come from this.

American Patriotism and Me

A few days after the terrorists’ attack on the World Trade Center, I received a chain email that read ‘All Americans wear RED, WHITE and BLUE today.’ The email told its readers to pass this message on to ‘ten other Americans.’ In other words, members of the same club. It concluded with ‘Let’s unite against terrorists. GOD BLESS AMERICA.’ I coiled up in my revulsion and wondered if there were any way I could take the ‘dual’ out of my dual citizenship, cut my elongated vowels and just be British. I then braced myself for a round of nauseating American patriotism.

Over the years, I’ve run into non-Americans who assume that if someone is American, they are by definition patriotic. Not true. There’s something about American patriotism that has always gotten under my skin. Having spent most of my adult life outside of the US, I’ve clung to only a portion of my youth – the unpatriotic portion. I was growing up when the Vietnam war and television characters like Archie Bunker made patriotism look foolhardy and ‘uncool.’ Certainly, other Americans grew up at this time – this awkward border between baby boomers and x-ers – but many of them seemed to have shaken off this brief trend of embarrassment at being American, this blip in American history.

Of course, my contemporaries were helped back into patriotism by the usual culprits, the US media and public relations firms. I recall in 1979 when Americans were being held hostage in Iran, marketers had discovered that patriotism could sell. Then, it was through advertising that ideas and trends gained their currency in America. The Pepsi ads that ran during the Iran-hostage crisis had pop stars singing about Pepsi as being ‘the American way’ while dancing in a sea of red, white and blue. Now, of course, this fervour is drummed up largely on social media.

Most of this patriotism has been harmless, but it does have an ugly side. I first experienced this nearly 30 years ago. I found myself in the States in 1990 just as the first Gulf War was starting. I strongly opposed US involvement and felt that the escapade was a set up to use the stockpile of arms left by President Reagan and to help his successor G.H. Bush overcome his image as a wimp. One morning, I stopped by my local convenience store in Boston to pick up a newspaper. When I was handed my change, the cashier held out a little foot-high American flag and said, ‘Here, Ma’am.’ The last thing I wanted was an American flag. What was I going to do with it? Wave it around like a cheerleader, promoting a country I was embarrassed to be from at a time when it was policing the world to the resentment of millions? Being polite, I simply said, ‘No thank you.’ I saw her mouth hang open and her eyes roll in disgust as I turned away to walk towards the door. I heard the cashier spit out the word, ‘Bitch.’ I knew it was meant for me, but I pretended that it was for someone else or that I hadn’t heard it. This stranger’s hostility shook me to the core.

Since then when the topic of American patriotism came up and someone would comment about my lack of it, I would give them one of two responses. One – I would remind them of Samuel Johnson, who once called patriotism ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ Or two – I would confess to experiencing patriotic moments, such as when the American hockey team beat the Canadians at the winter Olympics or when Obama give his acceptance speech in Chicago on the night of his first presidential election. Honestly, goosebumps.

Flash forward to 2016. Donald Trump is running for president and he is gaining support. And this is not a joke. The people who support him are mostly the flag-waving, intensely patriotic Americans who seem to be the stuff of satire. Supporters of Trump’s opponents will wave flags at rallies, but are otherwise more subdued in their patriotism.

Throughout this presidential campaign, Trump spewed out racist, intolerant and misogynistic attacks – and gained patriotic supporters. Now here’s the strange thing – given my history with American patriotism, you would expect me to roll my eyes, get angry at the television and computer screen and feel even more alienated from American patriotism than ever. But that didn’t happen. Trump has injected poison into America. He’s ruining it. In doing so, he has reminded me of the many good things America stands for – even if it doesn’t always get it right. Things like liberalism and democracy. Like many Americans, I find myself feeling protective and perhaps even patriotic over the country of my birth. Perhaps I have finally fallen into the grips of patriotism – the kind of patriotism that happens at a time of war when you don’t want to see your country destroyed. But, frightfully, in this war, the enemy is within.

The People of Eyam

Following the Brexit vote and the Trump win, it’s easy to wallow in despair and feel the weight of hatred. I’ve been grappling with the feeling that humans are innately derisive and clannish in their own self-identified groups. Especially in the face of fear, it seems people would choose blame and division over understanding and unity. But here’s a counter example from the past that I stumbled upon a couple of months ago when I visited Derbyshire. The village of Eyam (some pronounce it /i yam/ others /im/) today enjoys a small tourist trade because of something its citizens did in the seventeenth century. In 1665, a tailor in Eyam received a package of cloth from London. The tailor died and it was soon realised that the cloth carried the bubonic plague, which had already killed thousands in the nation’s capital but had not spread into the countryside. With knowledge of this, the people of Eyam sealed off their village so that the disease would not spread to nearby villages or beyond. Their act of self-sacrifice meant that some 260 people died in the village of Eyam, but thousands of other lives were saved.

Today many of the old homes carry signs, commemorations, with a list of those who once lived there and died of the plague. Whole families died, some losing children within days of each other. As sad as this is to contemplate and imagine living at such a time, I felt touched by this act of humanity.