Chinese Checkers

When we arrived in Cabo on January 10th, the inauguration seemed safely far away. It’s amazing how the mind can distort reality, how I can condense and expand time to suit my purposes. Now, we have been here for twelve days and Donald Trump is president again. A dark cloud hangs over us even as the sun also rises every day over Baja California Sur. These two conditions are difficult to reconcile. The situation might call for pharmaceuticals. There are farmacias on every corner. They advertise sleeping pills, muscle relaxers, medication for pain and something called smart pills. We’re going to need a lot of those.

In the year since we last stayed at the Fiesta Americana resort in Cabo, the Mexican ownership sold it to the Chinese. They did not, of course, disclose this fact when we made our reservation but there have been some subtle changes. The drinks are diluted. The bread in all six of the restaurants is uniformly unimpresssive. The resort still overlooks the Sea of Cortes and still offers a pristine desert climate featuring one day of blue sky and sunshine after another with temperatures in the low ‘70s. No hint of humidity. But staying here, you feel like you’re part of some larger global shift involving Tik Tok and Xi, a shift that you can’t begin to understand. It makes you feel small like a marble in a game of Chinese checkers. There are still a lot of Americans and Mexicans here, but also a great many Asians, often families with small children. The atmosphere on the surface is anodyne international like an airport lounge. Dig deeper and it’s a fairy tale or maybe a masked ball. We’re having a wonderful time in the water, on the sand, doing a lot of writing, but something has been scrubbed out, sanitized, watered down like the margaritas. Under the new regime in Washington, if something outrageous isn’t staring you in the face, you can bet something insidious is crawling up your leg. You can feel the global creep.

That word global itself has gone through some serious changes. It used to be a good thing if you came from a progressive background. It used to mean that something or someone was capable of thinking beyond their own national borders, a sort of Family of Man mindset. I remember coloring books with pictures of children in “native” dress, Mexican boys in sombreros and Chinese girls with very small feet. But now the word suggests dehumanized market forces that exist beyond localities, beyond cultures. And with the advent of Musk, Bezos and company, beyond the Earth itself.

It was surreal to be here on Inauguration Day. The sun continued to shine. The young Americans liberated from offices in Silicon Valley, continued to drink too much. With the first shock, we feel like we have no agency save the decision to limit our exposure to the events in Washington. I look around the poolside and barside gatherings, the middle-aged men with stomachs like beachballs, the women in tight skirts and I wonder. Are they celebrating? Are they worried? Who did they vote for?

Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, living in the Berkshires for fifty years and spending significant amounts of time in Berkeley, I am at a disadvantage. I don’t have a feel for the world I find myself living in. I know what I believe…..I believe that the Puerto Rican kids I went to school with in liberal New York in the ‘50s belonged in class with me, not segregated by skin color. I am certain that my great grandchildren have a right to grow up breathing clean air and eating uncontaminated food. I feel strongly that no one should die for lack of health insurance. I believe that all of us who had abortions before Roe should not have been called to risk our lives in support of somebody else’s faith claims. I maintain that everyone is entitled to the high quality of public education that I got as a child, endowing me with respect for science and scholarship and a healthy skepticism towards making stuff up. I believe that people who riot at the seat of government should be held accountable. But I don’t know what anyone else believes. I don’t have a handle on it.

I see that some people believe in a God who gets to decide who lives and who dies. The president thinks he was saved when the bullet grazed his earlobe in Pennsylvania because God wants him to take back the Panama Canal. Some people want the government to limit its activities to defense and infrastructure projects. No environmental regulation. No social safety net. If you can’t cut it, too bad, these people say. Some people just want to amass bigger and bigger piles of money to roll around in. These are not necessarily all the same people. I am trying to sort it out, to see the common thread if there is one. But so far, I am still moving the marbles around the game board. Sometimes they roll onto the floor and disappear, under the couch, leaving me even more clueless than I was before. Trying to figure out my next move.

Please comment on the site this week as I’m not able to respond on email from Mexico. Next week, you can comment on the site or on email as usual

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