My Year With Proust - Day 332

"Ah, I'm glad you reminded me of him," exclaimed M. de Guermantes, "I was forgetting that he had asked me to dine with him on Monday.  But whether he's a Dreyfusard or not is entirely immaterial to me, since he's a foreigner.  I don't give two straws for his opinion.  With a Frenchman it's another matter.  It's true that Swann is a Jew.  But, until to-day - forgive me, Froberville - I have always been foolish enough to believe that a Jew can be a Frenchman, I mean an honourable Jew, a man of the world.  Now, Swann was that in every sense of the word.  Well, now he forces me to admit that I was mistaken, since he has taken the side of this Dreyfus (who, guilty or not, never moved in his world, whom he wouldn't ever have met) against a society that had adopted him, had treated him as one of his own.

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 703

As we start a new year I wish this were a passage from Proust that seemed terribly old-fashioned, one which could not possibly teach us anything about the world today.  Sadly, the sentiment seems terribly present as we rush headlong into the uncertainty of the racist and misogynist Trump era.  M. de Guermantes draws a clear distinction between a Jew and a Frenchman.  Half a century later one of the accusations thrown around when Kennedy ran for president was the the question of whether he, as a Catholic, could run the country without being under the thumb of the Pope.  And now a half-century later we have the alt-right, and sadly a broader base than simply the alt-right, suggesting that Muslims can not be true Americans.  At the mosque we received this letter recently, which, underneath an American flag, lays out this claim.  In previous posts I've described this period as the high point, but also the last rant of the angry white man.  This election didn't change the "browning of America," as it is sometimes called, and our students today are more tolerant and worldly than the previous generations, but it's obviously more complicated.  Does any nation have a more complicated and shameful history in regards to race - and a wider divergence between its aspirational goals and its convenient reality - than the US?  Having grown up in southern Indiana I've known enough racists to last a lifetime, and judging from so many of their posts on Facebook they haven't changed much.  America will be "great" again not by building walls and blaming others, but by being that nation which, even when it failed, strove for equality and inclusion and respect for diversity.

Happily this hateful message inspired over five hundred letters of support from other around Vermont, representing a myriad of different faiths.  While I often, and appropriately mock this silly state, I do love Vermont; it's one of the bastions of tolerant thought left in this increasingly angry, intolerant country.

Despite all the uncertainty and the dark cloud hanging over us, let's hope for a Happy New Year, and let's all make a concerted effort to treat each other better this year.