From Hateland Into Graceland

TUCSON — Paul Simon’s long-ago South African trip echoed in my head as I flew to Arizona from Paris after votes were finally tallied. Human nature hasn’t changed since Aristotle pegged it. When decent people synchronize, hatemongering demagogy hasn’t got much chance.

“Thank you, Pima County, for saving America,” I said with mock formality to the deeply suntanned rental car lady. She smiled. It was hardly just Arizona. We both knew a nation at war with itself is far from saved. But still. America seems to be inching toward Graceland.

Simon’s original “Graceland” single was about Memphis, but he used the name for 1985 recordings in Soweto that called out social injustice. Concerts in blazing color went far beyond black and white. Joyful sounds and painful lyrics exposed what Apartheid had masked.

The unmissable message: harmony, not wealth, puts diamonds on the soles of our shoes.

Simon ignored a U.N.-imposed cultural boycott, a decision that nudged history hard. Five years later, Nelson Mandela was freed from Robben Island, and a fractured society began to heal.

As the doomsday clock ticks ever louder, a sense of global harmony is growing among Americans who see what is at stake beyond their narrow issues at home.

Young voters made a difference, yet only 27 percent of them cast ballots — 4 percent fewer than in 2018 midterms. Two years remain to make up for decades of insular schooling and news coverage. Americans need to synchronize with the other 95 percent who share a dying planet.

With all its problems, America is hardly comparable to South Africa at its worst. But I see troubling parallels between today’s rural Republicans with radios spotwelded to fact-free bullshit, and rural “rock spiders” — Afrikaners fearful of “replacement” — I covered in the 1980s.

Simon hit home for me in Soweto when he sang “Under African Skies.” A bit of it goes: “I said take this child, Lord, from Tucson, Arizona. Give her the wings to fly through harmony, and she won't bother you no more.”

That “child” was Linda Ronstadt. Her Mexican roots in Arizona predate by two centuries such carpetbaggers as Kari Lake, the ex-Fox fascist who denies she lost the race for governor and “Sheriff Joe” Arpaio, who Donald Trump pardoned after he ignored a federal judge’s order to stop profiling brown people as suspected illegal immigrants.

In the early ’60s, Linda sang in coffeehouses with her sister, Susie, and her brother Pete, a juvenile delinquent who became police chief. She moved to California to dazzle the world. I went off to report on the world’s inner workings. We each saw people everywhere are far more alike than different, all sharing that same human nature.

By 2016, after covering countless coups, I knew violent ones end fast, one way or another. Slow, insidious ones are worse. Elected cult leaders offer simple solutions to complex problems, targeting minorities in their midst. Once entrenched, they stay. Trump had all the earmarks.

To gauge his appeal, I cruised rural Arizona from remote borderlands to Mormon heartland and along the Colorado River through high desert to Nevada. The mood was plain right off the bat in Wikieup, a desolate wide spot between Phoenix and Las Vegas. A diner sign touting Chicago-style hotdogs brought me screeching to a halt.

Behind the counter, I found a grizzled veteran and two beefy sons in combat pants, with jingoistic tattoos on bulging biceps. A bumper sticker by the cash register read: “We the People Are Pissed-Off.” I asked one son why. “Obama,” he said. When asked what would improve things, he growled, “A rope.”

The funky old town of Salome, once on a main highway to Los Angeles, got a boost from private land sales to a Saudi dairy. It pumped a fast-dwindling ancient aquifer to grow alfalfa that was trucked to a California port and shipped to Jeddah to feed cows so kids in the kingdom had enough ice cream.

At a busy restaurant-motel, the owner rolled up in a monster Ford truck. We sat down for coffee. When I asked what attracted people to Trump, he eyed me narrowly, put a hand on the revolver at his hip, rose from his seat and said: “I’m beginning not to like this conversation.” That was answer enough for me.

It was easy to see why rural counties were red in 2016. Trump sold himself as an all-knowing swamp-draining billionaire TV star — and “a populist,” whatever that was. Even in Las Vegas, cabbies from India and Somalia told me they admired an outsider who said what he thought.

But those counties were redder still in 2020 and now in 2022. The Arizona-style rock spiders I interviewed were a tepid foretaste of what followed later in Trump country across America as lies and bombast intensified.

Alternative facts laced with Christian evangelism evoke that Gene Wilder line in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” when townsfolk revile his friend, a new black sheriff: “You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know, morons.”

As Trumplicans tell it, Biden bears the blame for Covid mass death and the price-spiking economic disruption it caused. The Afghanistan debacle is all his fault, as is Vladimir Putin’s belief that NATO, which Trump tried to cripple, would allow him to steamroll Ukraine.

Whatever polls say, I suspect the overriding issue is the visceral fear Trump hammered home when he descended that escalator to inflict himself on an unsuspecting nation still committed to a Bill of Rights and the rule of law.

He called Mexicans rapists and murderers who take American jobs and poison the country with drugs. His wall fixation destroyed natural beauty and sacred Indian sites. Flouting international conventions, he turned away even asylum seekers fleeing death at home. A huge backlog waited in misery for things to change.

Trumplicans date the problem only back to January 2021 when they say, inaccurately, that Biden flung open the gates to all comers. Congressional wrangling and state governors who overstep their authority hamper efforts to streamline processing.

The southern border was first “invaded” in 1540 when undocumented Spanish Franciscans entered Arizona with soldiers who forced peaceable tribes to build missions, plant fields and fight off warrior tribes that preferred to roam free. We can skip over the broken-arrow, Manifest Destiny history that followed into the 1900s.

By the 1950s, when I started crisscrossing a border marked mostly by loose strands of barbed wire, if that, the Bracero Program worked well. Mexicans came north for seasonal jobs, paid taxes, and went home where they would rather be until gringo employers started hiring again.

We are way past that now. Border controls are essential. Perhaps 100 million people are on the move, and that number will swell with climate collapse and conflict. Some just want better lives. Some are badasses best turned away. Many are desperate to survive.

International law and human decency require all countries to consider each case as quickly as possible. America is hardly “full,” as Trump insists, and a thriving economy needs immigrants. Most do dirty work Americans shun. A few of them end up in Congress.

Physical barriers aren’t the answer. Janet Napolitano, Arizona’s last competent governor, left in 2009 to be Obama’s secretary of Homeland Security. “Show me a 50-foot wall,” she said back then, “and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.”

The broader solution requires aid to poor and war-wracked regions to help people stay home. “America First,” an ugly, selfish slogan for any point in time, is deadly today. If the United States spurns concerted action with other wealthy nations, besieged borders are inevitable.

The flipside of hope in Arizona is despair in Wisconsin, where I spent my first three years until my parents moved west. Wisconsin was tough for Jews who fled a Russian revolution that went wrong but were “leftists” because they knew firsthand the danger of antisemitic authoritarians.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin began a ruthless campaign to root out anyone suspected of communism until a defense attorney finally shut him down with an enduring rebuke: “Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Today, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California is bereft of any decency, a spineless, fork-tongued hypocrite so eager to be House speaker that he allows full rein to Margorie Taylor Greene’s clueless lunacy. And Wisconsin has another hardline soak-the-poor Republican senator.

Ron Johnson kept his seat by a razor-thin margin against a progressive black challenger, a long-time elected state official with an evocative name: Mandela Barnes. And that encapsulates the challenge in 2024. Voters respond more to “optics” than character and qualifications.

It is time for new blood. Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn of South Carolina are backing away from leadership roles. Biden may decide to step aside if he can finish cleaning up Trump’s mess and equip a successor to be what is essentially the CEO of an unruly world.

Those optics produced a lot of bad news.

Republicans won the House by defeating left-leaning Democrats they depicted as Marxist extremists. Execrable truth-twisters like Jim Jordan of Ohio plan to squander time and money to impeach Joe Biden over his son’s business dealings. Whatever Hunter might have done pales to insignificance compared to outrageous improprieties of Trump’s offspring.

A Democratic Senate won’t convict, but relentless badgering of Hunter, along with Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, will likely make an impact among gullible voters.

Because Trump let the coronavirus run wild, vaccine-resistant variants spread at alarming rates. Tony Fauci’s long success at controlling mysterious pathogens is crucial. But he is also targeted for vengeful payback. Faithless legislators are bent on killing people they are sworn to protect.

Republicans plan to stonewall whatever Democrats propose, tying the country in knots to blame what they will call an incompetent administration when that creates havoc. All bets are off if divided Democrats scare away wavering Republicans and independents.

Trump’s return to public housing quarters may be a federal prison, but others in the running — housebroken demagogues with functioning brains — may be worse. Ron DeSantis scares the bejesus out of me. His hostile press people shun truth, and he now channels God in TV ads.

On a global scale, it gets worse. Putin blasts civilian infrastructure to let winter subdue Ukraine; he commits war crimes by the hour. On CNN, Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations cited one aged, ailing friend who trudges up 21 floors to her apartment. Like most Ukrainians, she still fiercely supports resistance that relies on U.S. military support. Yet Greene insists that Congress won’t approve another penny for Ukraine after January.

But Haass saw promise in the three-hour meeting between Biden and Xi Jinping, just like the old days when big-power leaders found ways to work together toward mutual benefits. China is keeping its distance from Ukraine. Taiwan is a wild card; so far, so good.

All in all, I’m still humming along with Paul Simon. The midterms suggest older voters have had enough crazy, and more young ones are beginning to pick up on his decades-old message of harmony in a world where borders are mostly lines on a map.

Fingers crossed. America now seems haltingly headed toward Graceland. But If 2024 goes badly, forget about that. It will be a hard-edged Hateland, perhaps for keeps.