Going home

I’m a secular Jewish liberal New York writer living in bucolic Havelock North where my neighbours include a field of steers who are occasionally marauded by wild turkeys. 

After six years in Hawke's Bay, I’m about to return to the US for most of the year to join my Kiwi husband who is once again working for the state of New Jersey, helmed by the former contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Chris Christie, notorious for allegedly encouraging his staff to order the closing of tributary lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge, causing abominable traffic jams, in retribution for Fort Lee’s mayor’s refusal to endorse his re-election.  No wonder I’m strangely ambivalent.  Chris Christie left his campaign and immediately endorsed his adversary, Donald Trump, in the hopes that he will have a job in his new administration as he is now totally loathed in his home state for being absent at the wheel and unabashedly self-serving.

The irony of returning home doesn’t escape me, for six years ago I wept for two straight weeks when we decided to pack up and sell our beautiful apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side because we could no longer afford the city that we loved. Manhattan was becoming the playland of the über rich and the teachers, lawyers, doctors and entertainers who had originally inhabited my high-rise were being replaced by hedge fund managers, oligarchs and international kings and queens of industry.

Interestingly, our departure was catalysed by the election of Christie to the governorship on the promise that he would cut the state’s tax burden by axing state workers and, as my husband was the last one hired in his office in Trenton, he knew he would be the first to go.  So he started searching for work elsewhere, including back home in New Zealand. When he received an offer from Hawkes Bay Regional Council, close to his family in Otane, we had 24 hours to decide and our situation decided for us. Between tears, I e-mailed my friend Graham Beattie, who had long ago opened a bookshop in Napier, and asked him if I could survive living in the Hawkes Bay and he said, I could, if I got out a lot.

I was what my nephew Charlie refers to as the consummate New Yorker: singing with the New York Choral Society, going to the opera, theatre, philharmonic, literary readings, spinning classes, Pilates workshops and museum openings. I even knew where to find the best clean, free restrooms in most of the five boroughs. I could not imagine leaving that life behind. But I did. Once we emigrated, I continued to cry a lot but I followed Graham Beattie’s advice and travelled home as often as I could afford. I re-learned how to drive a manual transmission on the wrong side of the road, and became accustomed to the fact that everyone in  Hawke's Bay was up at dawn, the streets deserted by 5pm and, the town for the most part asleep by 10. 

I learned how to garden,  I joined a wonderful local choir, was asked to join a co-ed book club and was happily surprised to discover that it was almost impossible to get a bad cup of coffee anywhere.  My village boasted an excellent local cinema and world class restaurants. 

I gradually came to love the Bay, and even dressed up for its heralded Art Deco weekend, especially after the local firemen came to rescue me from my own house when the lock to the door to our back rooms failed, making my phones and computers inaccessible.  Since my windows were too high to leap down, especially as I had recently endured two complex orthopaedic surgeries and was still healing, my neighbour called the local volunteers, who didn’t even laugh when they extended their fire ladder to my bedroom window.  

Walking through the area’s beautiful gardens and parks with my new miniature schnauzer, who was inheriting both my curiosity and my tendency to bark at strangers, had enabled me to regain my strength and health. Free of pain, I started writing again, and ultimately landed a great gig as a local television host. 

But my husband was restless and couldn’t find satisfying employment after he chose to leave the regional council.  He worked for a while in Wellington and got to know the first names of all the drivers on the Intercity Route, but that job nearly broke him so, when he returned with me to the US for a holiday for the first time after five years living in New Zealand, he went to visit his mates at the Geographic Information Systems Division and discovered that his group hadn’t contracted at all but had actually expanded following the debacle of Hurricane Sandy.  His old job was available again and his former boss moved heaven and earth to re-hire him.

Though I had happily settled in Hawke's Bay, I was now facing the prospect of returning to the US. So we came to a compromise. We would keep our house in Havelock North and I would return for most of the summer. And then I started crying again. This time for the fate of the country of my birth.  

Dismayed by the unpredicted, horrifying rise of Donald Trump, my friends and family in the US were asking me why the heck I was returning home since I was so happy. Then they asked if Americans were treated well in New Zealand, anticipating their own flight in case the Drumpf manages, against all logic, to seize the most powerful position in the world.  

Meanwhile, my New Zealand community was equally perplexed by the popular rise of this initially comical, badly coiffed, narcissistic bane of reality television and unique symbol of gauche American excess.  No matter how egregious his offences to women (Megyn Kelly, Carly Fiorina, Hillary Clinton), beloved political figures (Senator John McCain), Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants and American institutions, he was rousing the rabble to fascistic anti-establishment frenzy, evoking terrifying parallels to Nazi brown shirt rallies with his encomiums to violence as he urged his supporters to beat up peaceful protestors, mostly young people of colour, crying ‘get rid of the infiltrators!  Let’s make America Great again!”

To decode his message, one doesn’t have to be a respected political analyst at a renowned think tank. What the Drumpfmeister is appealing to is a nostalgic atavistic longing for the democratic Christian America of the rustling cornfields and noble moral heart where midwestern farmlands and industrial factories fed and supplied the world with motor vehicles and airplanes and our soldiers liberated minions from the oppression of dictators and, dare I say the word, the Communist scourge.

In that mythic nation, everyone who worked hard was guaranteed a job and education was free, granting even the children of that other scourge, immigrants, the opportunity to be accepted to the greatest institutions of learning and become high earning professionals.  Perhaps that image was propagated by that other great American export – film and television – where Dorothy and Toto long to leave Oz to return to Kansas, and superheroes of every ilk and denomination rescue the world from unmitigated evil destruction.

Mr Trump doesn’t say how he is going to make America ‘great’ again but that doesn’t seem to matter. His cry is giving hope to the disenfranchised factory workers whose jobs have been exported to Mexico and China, and the hard-working low wage earners who were persuaded to buy real estate during the boom before the recession and have wound up penniless, their homes and businesses foreclosed upon with the ruthless speed with which they were granted exorbitant mortgages which ultimately exceeded the worth of their post recession devalued property.  While they were struggling to make ends meet, the government bailed out the banks whose bottomless greed for even greater profits was never punished except for a lone trader.  

The American economy has rebounded but not with any great number of well-paying jobs. Unemployment is at its lowest rate in years, but what kind of positions are former professionals resorting to, to support their families?  Fast-food workers?  Golf caddies?  Cleaners?  Their rage has been seething for years, unleashed by the rise of the Tea Party whose rhetoric appealed to not only the economically oppressed but the fascistic xenophobic populist fringe which has existed in America since the rise of Andrew Jackson and the War of 1812.

Until the 20th century, America’s leaders professed a strict policy of isolationism, perhaps, as Abraham Lincoln realised, to tend to its internal struggles and work for what the writers of the country's constitution declared to be ‘a more perfect union.’  The US only entered the Great War in 1917 when German U-boats started to sink American vessels in the Atlantic and President Woodrow Wilson urged the Congress “for a war to end all wars” “that would make the world safe for democracy.”  Its entry into World War II was forced on it by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Though Emma Lazurus’ poem at the feet of the Statue of Liberty pleads “give me your tired and your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free,” those waves of immigrants endured frequent hostile receptions and blatant prejudice before melting into the big pot that is America.

But the fuel feeding the frightening fire of Trumpism is simply blatant racism. For years I’ve been saying to my New Zealand friends that there are many people in the US who have woken up every day of President Barack Obama’s term, disbelieving that there was actually an African American in the Oval Office. Despite the fact that President Obama’s mother was a white woman from Kansas, and that he was basically raised by her and her parents, including her father Stanley Armour Durham who fought admirably in World War II and is distantly related to six American Presidents including Bush Jr and Sr, his Caucasian heritage was eclipsed by his absent Kenyan father and the colour of his skin. 

When I went home for visits, I would occasionally hear strangers speak of Obama as if he was the devil incarnate.  Was this the same president who steered the country out of the worst recession since the Great Depression, mindfully struggled against an intransigent Congress to ensure the minimum of health care to the millions of uninsured, opened the doors to Cuba, stealthily managed to give the go ahead for the successful capture of Osama bin Laden, regained the respect of the United States from the nadir of George W. Bush’s administration while keeping his own house free of scandal while maintaining a loving, healthy supportive family?  I would argue that if Obama was Caucasian, he would be applauded along with Daddy Ronald Reagan.

But this is America, even a post-racial America, with a strong evangelical strain and a division established by the Civil War that has never really been healed.  Though Americans embrace and even laud the diverse colours and sexualities of their athletes and entertainers, they are still reluctant to bow their heads in respect to a president of colour.  Many to this day don’t acknowledge the commemoration celebrated by Martin Luther King Day.  What other commander in chief of recent memory has been subjected to heckling during his State of the Union address the way Representative Joe Wilson of the great Confederate State of South Carolina interrupted President Barack Obama by shouting,‘You lie.” 

Despite the attempts of the ‘birther’ movement (helmed by the Donald, which is, perhaps, the foundation for his current popularity with the Tea Party fringe despite the fact that he has been married and divorced three times, two of his three wives are immigrants, and his daughter has converted to Orthodox Judaism after her marriage to the real estate scion, Jared Kushner,) Obama has emerged unscathed.  Whether he is liked or disliked, his demeanor, intelligence, humor and persona can not be disavowed.

But the seething rage of disbelief unleashed by his election, embraced by the Tea Party, nurtured by the jingoism of Fox Television and the Republican Super Pacs which have been reluctant to cede a modicum of their power, has found its expression in the rhetorical hate speech of Donald Trump, the master of the media, who has been a great illusionist, flashing his golden signage on the tallest buildings, hiding his failures and bankruptcies behind closed doors.

One hopes that the demographics of 21st century America will defeat the populist revolt of the soon-to-be-disenfranchised white minority. 

Former President Bill Clinton has said that Americans have always been uncomfortable at the extreme ends of the political spectrum, and one can only hope that sense, sensibility and a huge voter turnout will set back the rabid hordes. Having said that, what will happen if Hillary does get elected in the fall?  That I would happily witness and report on, knowing I’ll be returning to bucolic Havelock North in the spring. 

Cheryl Pearl Sucher is a fiction writer and journalist as well as a frequent contributor to the NZ Listener. 

Tune into NBR Radio’s Sunday Business with Andrew Patterson on Sunday morning, for analysis and feature-length interviews.