Deputy Secretary John Sullivan officiated the swearing-in ceremony of theDepartment of State 191st #ForeignService Generalist class.

Deputy Secretary John Sullivan officiated the swearing-in ceremony of the Department of State 191st #ForeignService
Generalist class.
class. Congratulations! [JB -- and Good Luck :)]

• 
  

The Making and the Breaking of the Legend of Robert E. Lee - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

By ERIC FONER, New York Times, AUG. 28, 2017 [original article contains links]

Lee image from article

In the Band’s popular song “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” an ex-Confederate
soldier refers to Robert E. Lee as “the very best.” It is difficult to think of
another song that mentions a general by name. But Lee has always occupied a
unique place in the national imagination. The ups and downs of his reputation
reflect changes in key elements of Americans’ historical consciousness — how we
understand race relations, the causes and consequences of the Civil War and the
nature of the good society.

Born in 1807, Lee was a product of the Virginia gentry — his father a
Revolutionary War hero and governor of the state, his wife the daughter of George
Washington’s adopted son. Lee always prided himself on following the strict moral
code of a gentleman. He managed to graduate from West Point with no disciplinary
demerits, an almost impossible feat considering the complex maze of rules that
governed the conduct of cadets.

While opposed to disunion, when the Civil War broke out and Virginia seceded,
Lee went with his state. He won military renown for defeating (until Gettysburg) a
succession of larger Union forces. Eventually, he met his match in Ulysses S. Grant
and was forced to surrender his army in April 1865. At Appomattox he urged his
soldiers to accept the war’s outcome and return to their homes, rejecting talk of
carrying on the struggle in guerrilla fashion. He died in 1870, at the height of
Reconstruction, when biracial governments had come to power throughout the
South.

But, of course, what interests people who debate Lee today is his connection
with slavery and his views about race. During his lifetime, Lee owned a small
number of slaves. He considered himself a paternalistic master but could also
impose severe punishments, especially on those who attempted to run away. Lee
said almost nothing in public about the institution. His most extended comment,
quoted by all biographers, came in a letter to his wife in 1856. Here he described
slavery as an evil, but one that had more deleterious effects on whites than blacks.
He felt that the “painful discipline” to which they were subjected benefited blacks by
elevating them from barbarism to civilization and introducing them to Christianity.
The end of slavery would come in God’s good time, but this might take quite a while,
since to God a thousand years was just a moment. Meanwhile, the greatest danger to
the “liberty” of white Southerners was the “evil course” pursued by the abolitionists,
who stirred up sectional hatred. [JB emphasis] In 1860, Lee voted for John C. Breckinridge, the
extreme pro-slavery candidate. (A more moderate Southerner, John Bell, carried
Virginia that year.)

Lee’s code of gentlemanly conduct did not seem to apply to blacks. During the
Gettysburg campaign, he did nothing to stop soldiers in his army from kidnapping
free black farmers for sale into slavery. In Reconstruction, Lee made it clear that he
opposed political rights for the former slaves. Referring to blacks (30 percent of
Virginia’s population), he told a Congressional committee that he hoped the state
could be “rid of them.” Urged to condemn the Ku Klux Klan’s terrorist violence, Lee
remained silent.

By the time the Civil War ended, with the Confederate president, Jefferson
Davis, deeply unpopular, Lee had become the embodiment of the Southern cause. A
generation later, he was a national hero. The 1890s and early 20th-century witnessed
the consolidation of white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South and
widespread acceptance in the North of Southern racial attitudes. A revised view of
history accompanied these developments, including the triumph of what David
Blight, in his influential book “Race and Reunion” (2001), calls a “reconciliationist”
memory of the Civil War. The war came to be seen as a conflict in which both sides
consisted of brave men fighting for noble principles — union in the case of the North,
self-determination on the part of the South. This vision was reinforced by the “cult of
Lincoln and Lee,” each representing the noblest features of his society, each a figure
Americans of all regions could look back on with pride. The memory of Lee, this
newspaper wrote in 1890, was “the possession of the American people.”

Reconciliation excised slavery from a central role in the story, and the struggle
for emancipation was now seen as a minor feature of the war. The Lost Cause, a
romanticized vision of the Old South and Confederacy, gained adherents throughout
the country. And who symbolized the Lost Cause more fully than Lee?

This outlook was also taken up by the Southern Agrarians, a group of writers
who idealized the slave South as a bastion of manly virtue in contrast to the
commercialism and individualism of the industrial North. At a time when traditional
values appeared to be in retreat, character trumped political outlook, and character
Lee had in spades. Frank Owsley, the most prominent historian among the
Agrarians, called Lee “the soldier who walked with God.” (Many early biographies
directly compared Lee and Christ.) Moreover, with the influx of millions of Catholics
and Jews from southern and eastern Europe alarming many Americans, Lee seemed
to stand for a society where people of Anglo-Saxon stock controlled affairs.

Historians in the first decades of the 20th century offered scholarly legitimacy to
this interpretation of the past, which justified the abrogation of the constitutional
rights of Southern black citizens. At Columbia University, William A. Dunning and
his students portrayed the granting of black suffrage during Reconstruction as a
tragic mistake. The Progressive historians — Charles Beard and his disciples —
taught that politics reflected the clash of class interests, not ideological differences.
The Civil War, Beard wrote, should be understood as a transfer of national power
from an agricultural ruling class in the South to the industrial bourgeoisie of the
North; he could tell the entire story without mentioning slavery except in a footnote.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a group of mostly Southern historians known as the
revisionists went further, insisting that slavery was a benign institution that would
have died out peacefully. A “blundering generation” of politicians had stumbled into
a needless war. But the true villains, as in Lee’s 1856 letter, were the abolitionists,
whose reckless agitation poisoned sectional relations. This interpretation dominated
teaching throughout the country, and reached a mass audience through films like
“The Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the Klan, and “Gone With the Wind,” with its
romantic depiction of slavery. The South, observers quipped, had lost the war but
won the battle over its history.

As far as Lee was concerned, the culmination of these trends came in the
publication in the 1930s of a four-volume biography by Douglas Southall Freeman, a
Virginia-born journalist and historian. For decades, Freeman’s hagiography would
be considered the definitive account of Lee’s life. Freeman warned readers that they
should not search for ambiguity, complexity or inconsistency in Lee, for there was
none — he was simply a paragon of virtue. Freeman displayed little interest in Lee’s
relationship to slavery. The index to his four volumes contained 22 entries for
“devotion to duty,” 19 for “kindness,” 53 for Lee’s celebrated horse, Traveller. But
“slavery,” “slave emancipation” and “slave insurrection” together received five.
Freeman observed, without offering details, that slavery in Virginia represented the
system “at its best.” He ignored the postwar testimony of Lee’s former slave Wesley
Norris about the brutal treatment to which he had been subjected. In 1935 Freeman
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in biography.

That same year, however, W. E. B. Du Bois published “Black Reconstruction in
America,” a powerful challenge to the mythologies about slavery, the Civil War and
Reconstruction that historians had been purveying. Du Bois identified slavery as the
fundamental cause of the war and emancipation as its most profound outcome. He
portrayed the abolitionists as idealistic precursors of the 20th-century struggle for
racial justice, and Reconstruction as a remarkable democratic experiment — the
tragedy was not that it was attempted but that it failed. Most of all, Du Bois made
clear that blacks were active participants in the era’s history, not simply a problem
confronting white society. Ignored at the time by mainstream scholars, “Black
Reconstruction” pointed the way to an enormous change in historical interpretation,
rooted in the egalitarianism of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and
underpinned by the documentary record of the black experience ignored by earlier
scholars. Today, Du Bois’s insights are taken for granted by most historians,
although they have not fully penetrated the national culture.

Inevitably, this revised view of the Civil War era led to a reassessment of Lee,
who, Du Bois wrote elsewhere, possessed physical courage but not “the moral
courage to stand up for justice to the Negro.” Even Lee’s military career, previously
viewed as nearly flawless, underwent critical scrutiny. In “The Marble Man” (1977),
Thomas Connelly charged that “a cult of Virginia authors” had disparaged other
Confederate commanders in an effort to hide Lee’s errors on the battlefield. James
M. McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom,” since its publication in 1988 the standard
history of the Civil War, compared Lee’s single-minded focus on the war in Virginia
unfavorably with Grant’s strategic grasp of the interconnections between the eastern
and western theaters.

Lee’s most recent biographer, Michael Korda, does not deny his subject’s
admirable qualities. But he makes clear that when it came to black Americans, Lee
never changed. Lee was well informed enough to know that, as the Confederate vice
president, Alexander H. Stephens, declared, slavery and “the great truth that the
Negro is not equal to the white man” formed the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy;
he chose to take up arms in defense of a slaveholders’ republic. After the war, he
could not envision an alternative to white supremacy.

What Korda calls Lee’s “legend” needs to be retired. And whatever the fate of his
statues and memorials, so long as the legacy of slavery continues to bedevil
American society, it seems unlikely that historians will return Lee, metaphorically
speaking, to his pedestal.

Eric Foner is the author of “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American
Slavery,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history. His most recent book is “Battles for
Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History. Essays From The Nation.”

A Journalist Abroad Grapples With American Power

By HISHAM MATAR AUG. 28, 2017 New York Times; NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY

Image from article, with caption: A view from Istanbul's Eminonu Square, overlooking the Golden Horn waterway

An American Abroad in a Post-American World
By Suzy Hansen
276 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26


When I was 12 years old, living in Cairo, my parents enrolled me in the
American school. Most of the Americans there appeared oddly stifled, determined to
remain, if not physically then sentimentally, back in the United States. It seemed
particularly inconvenient that they had ended up in an Arab country. The school’s
architecture and grounds did all they could to remedy this. Even the urinals and
hand dryers had been shipped from America. It was as though they believed, as Suzy
Hansen observes in her remarkably revealing book, “Notes on a Foreign Country: An
American Abroad in a Post-American World,” that “as you went east, life degraded
into the past.”

This was in the early 1980s, before the two gulf wars and the “war on terror,”
and yet even back then I wondered whether to be an American in the world was to be
limited by a sort of imaginative obstacle. This is what concerns Hansen. According to
her, the situation has gotten worse. “We cannot,” she writes, “go abroad as
Americans in the 21st century and not realize that the main thing that has been
terrorizing us … is our own ignorance — our blindness and subsequent discovery of
all the people on whom the empire-that-was-not-an-empire had been constructed
without our attention or concern.”

Born and raised in New Jersey, Hansen became a journalist (she is a
contributing writer for The Times Magazine), moved to New York and, after
September 11 — when Americans, as she puts it, “had all lost their marbles” — moved
to Istanbul. Her book is a deeply honest and brave portrait of an individual
sensibility reckoning with her country’s violent role in the world. In the period
between 9/11 and the election of President Trump, she lives in Turkey and travels to
Greece, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran and the Mississippi Delta. She uses these places,
their complex histories and fraught present, as lenses through which to look at her
own nation.

Hansen is not only unnerved by but also genuinely interested in the ways her
country fails to “interrogate” itself. She asks why, given the extent to which America
has shaped the modern Middle East — the lives it ended, the countries it fractured,
the demons it created, its frantic and fanatical support of Israel — it “did not feel or
care to explore what that influence meant.” She is unsettled by how absent or illusive
or, worse, unnecessary this fact is to many Americans, including herself — for, before
anything else, “Notes on a Foreign Country” is a sincere and intelligent act of self-questioning.
It is a political and personal memoir that negotiates that vertiginous
distance that exists between what America is and what it thinks of itself. That
dramatic, dizzying and lonesome chasm is Hansen’s terrain. [JB emphasis]

One of the causes of this disparity, she proposes, is that “Americans are
surprised by the direct relationship between their country and foreign ones because
we don’t acknowledge that America is an empire.” She is curious about the nature of
the impediment, about how “ignorance is vulnerable to the atmosphere it is exposed
to.” Without realizing it, she too had absorbed a fear of Islam and the idea that
Muslims “were people that must be restrained.” She admits, “My problem was that
not only had I not known much about the Middle East, but what I did know, and
how I did think, had been an obstacle to original and accurate and moral thinking.”

Hansen is doing something both rare and necessary; she is tracing the ways in
which we are all born into histories, into national myths and, if we are unfortunate
enough, into the fantasies of an empire. She traces the ways in which “Americans
were in active denial of their empire even as they laid its foundations.” She is
interested in and does well to expose the machinery — the propaganda, the economic
authoritarianism, the military might, the manipulative diplomacy, the myriad aid
agencies and NGOs — that made this possible. She also shows the ways in which
America, in its anti-Communist craze, has consistently supported the religious right
in the Middle East and aided the rise of Islamic extremism. Hansen wants to uncover
the lie, and this, of course, is both dangerous and hopeful, for as much as this book is
a lament — what its author calls “a study in American ignorance” — it is also a plea.

The tone is at once adamant and intimate. This is a book that is spoken softly
rather than screamed; and one senses that it took great personal discipline to be so.
In fact, what is admirable is the extent to which Hansen implicates herself. She does
this soberly and without self-pity. She is, to herself, independent but by no means
innocent. The “foreign country” of the title is to be interpreted in different ways: as
the writer’s adopted country, Turkey; as her homeland, America, made new and
unfamiliar by the journey she has taken; and, perhaps most poignantly, as the
existential place she finds herself in relation to the present and the history that has
led to it. She takes James Baldwin’s words (he is as close as she gets to having a
guide through this difficult landscape) and turns them on to herself, asking: “I ran
the plantations, and I owned the slaves, and I lashed the whip — for everything?”

Strangely though, and as “un-American” as this book might seem, “Notes on a
Foreign Country” is in fact a very American book. It is interested in personal
transformation; it is both a record of conversion — “Once you realize that the way
you have looked at the world has been muddled, you begin a process of shedding
layers of skin” — and an optimistic attempt to convert. Because, as she writes, no
one tells Americans that they will spend their first months abroad “feeling superior to
 everyone around them and to the nation in which they now have the privilege to live.”
Hansen wants to be the one to tell them.

The problem, however — and it is a problem to do with conversion — is that it is
assumed that the question is one of persuasion. If only America were like Hansen:
disquieted, self-analytic and imaginative. Perhaps, in other words, Americans know
that they feel superior and are quite content with their superiority. Perhaps their
naïveté, if that is what it is, is not as deep as Hansen imagines; perhaps they are
aware of the myth of themselves and have simply decided it is too useful a myth to
give up. For as she herself notes, “The largest existential threat to Americans might
have been admitting the Afghans would be better off without them.”

This is why Hansen’s book is as much a gesture of despair as it is an expression
of confidence in her people, that once they see what she saw and learn what she
learned they would be persuaded. It is also an attempt at redemption — a word that
appears in the final sentence of the book — for just like the Americans she criticizes,
those who travel the world seeing nothing but themselves, Hansen too at times slips
into a consciousness that looks at other countries in order to diagnose America’s
perversions, as though part of her purpose is not only to show but also demonstrate
how, if you are fated to be American, everything, including your well-intentioned
desire to see the world clearly, will most likely lead you back home.

Hisham Matar’s most recent book is “The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in
Between,” winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
A version of this review appears in print on September 3, 2017, on Page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Empire in the Mirror.

Identity - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

From: Emma Brockes, "Salman Rushdie: ‘A lot of what Trump unleashed was there anyway,’" The Guardian

Image from article, with caption: "Taking on America … Salman Rushdie."

“In America when you talk about identity issues, at the moment a lot of that is gender identity. If you’re in England, there’s this other argument about national identity, which was behind the Brexit catastrophe; and in India, when people talk about identity, they’re really talking about religious sectarianism. In all three places, the identity subject is colossal but it is understood completely differently. ”

The Tragic Tale of Egypt’s Decline: Is It Also the Story of America’s Future? - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Steven A. Cook, Council on Foreign Relations; via AA on Facebook - Many thanks!

image (not from article) from

Excerpt:

There are good reasons for Egyptians to admire Nasser and Sadat, though the latter remains significantly less popular. The Nasser years were a moment of empowerment and the Sadat period was a time of (partial) victory and the (partial) restoration of Egypt’s sovereignty. These events were supposed to recapture Egypt’s lost greatness, worthy of a society that is the inheritor of the Pharaonic civilization. Yet in their parochial politics, they manipulated identities, whipped up nationalism and sowed division. The result is an Egypt that has lurched dysfunctionally from one crisis to the next, unable to solve its problems because society has become so deeply polarized, mistrust and cynicism reign, and violence is an ever-present possibility. Unless Americans are careful, Egypt’s present reality could be our country’s future.

The Moral Debate Over Statues

The Moral Debate Over Statues (Letters to the Editor, New York Times) SEPT. 2, 2017; original entry contains links.

uncaptioned image from entry

To the Editor:

Jon Meacham’s Aug. 22 Op-Ed essay, “Why Confederates Should Go,” proposes
a test for which figures we should still venerate with a statue. “Those who took up
arms against the Union were explicitly attempting to stop the American odyssey”
and should not be venerated, he says. Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall
Jackson all have to go, but supporters of the American journey, slavery and all, can
stay.

I think it is a bad test since it is completely devoid of any morality and does not
actually address the problem of slavery. Slavery was profoundly immoral, and all
good people knew this, even in 1776.

That does not mean that Washington’s statues should be removed: He was a
great American who helped establish the United States, even though he owned
slaves. Even great people have moral warts, and Washington’s support of slavery was
such.

I would propose a different test: Great Americans get statues, even if they had
some warts and were imperfect people. That might be the most important lesson for
us all: Even great people — never mind we mere mortals — have warts that can never
be overlooked, but can be forgiven.

MICHAEL J. BROYDE, ATLANTA
The writer is a rabbi and a law professor at Emory University.

To the Editor:

The statue torn from the Confederate monument in Durham, N.C., was not that
of Robert E. Lee, or any other leader of the Southern rebellion, but that of a foot
soldier in the army. Such monuments were erected by the hundreds in memory of
the untold thousands of husbands, uncles, fathers and sons who perished.

These were not monuments to victory, but to grief and loss, and were a perpetual
reminder — as they are still today — that the South did not win the war. As such
these monuments to the “common man” remain as potent reminders of misguided
beliefs and tragedy, not of supremacy or triumph.

DANIEL D. REIFF, KENMORE, N.Y.
The writer is co-author of the forthcoming study “Column Monuments:
Commemorative and Memorial Column Monuments From Ancient Times to the
Twenty-First Century.”

To the Editor:

The decision to remove statues of historic figures should not be based on how
their words and deeds are judged by current liberal standards. Rather, they should
be judged in the context of their times and by whether they contributed more good
than harm to the world in which they lived.

To take an extreme example, President Lincoln was a racist. He wrote that he
was not “in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the
white and black races.” Does this mean that we should tear down the Lincoln
Memorial?

Well, no. In spite of his flaws he deserves his memorial because he opposed
slavery, and ultimately was able to abolish it. History does not consist entirely of
saintly people who were opposed by evil ones. To the extent that monuments
encourage viewers to read about and understand our past, they can serve a useful
role in guiding us to a better future.

WILLIAM D. DUPONT, NASHVILLE

To the Editor:

“Topple Columbus, Too? Statue Outcry Spreads” (front page, Aug. 26) describes
the growing demands to pull down monuments that celebrate Confederate leaders
and other “symbols of hate.” But the article cites some who balk when “the
symbolism is far murkier, like Christopher Columbus.”

However, there is nothing murky about Columbus’s legacy of violence and
slavery. Columbus initiated the trans-Atlantic slave trade in February 1494, sending
several dozen Taíno people as slaves from the Caribbean to Spain, and later
hundreds more. And when the Taínos resisted, Columbus sent an armed force to, in
one Spanish priest’s words, “spread terror among the Indians to show them how
strong and powerful the Christians were.”

To celebrate Columbus is to celebrate his crimes — and the greed and racial
chauvinism that motivated them. Native Americans have been saying this for years.
It’s time to listen.

BILL BIGELOW, PORTLAND, ORE.
The writer is co-editor of “Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years.”

To the Editor:

Tearing down statues and burning artifacts will do nothing more than bury
history. Our history is filled with moments that we can look at with pride, and
moments when we lost our humanity. These moments need to be part of larger
conversations as they relate to today.

To this end, why not use these artifacts as “teachable moments.” Rather than
cover the statue of Columbus, have a museum label that explains who he was and
what he did. Let this statue and other symbols of hate and prejudice encourage
discussions about right and wrong, good and evil, kindness and cruelty. Use these
artifacts in museums across the country, along with primary documents and other
artifacts to again remind us all that we can do better.

If hate can be taught, so can love. We don’t have to repeat the past; we do have
to learn from it and remember.

ANITA MEYER MEINBACH
BOCA RATON, FLA.

To the Editor:

Has anyone considered that those engaged in tearing down images of certain
icons of the past are following the barbaric examples of the Taliban and ISIS, whose
practice it has been to destroy relics of the past that they have found to be offensive
to their particular sensibilities? Let’s put a lid on the frenzy.

WILLIAM M. GREEN, NEW YORK

To the Editor:

Re “Relocate Statues Honoring the Rebels” (Critic’s Notebook, Aug. 21):
In urging us to preserve Confederate monuments, Holland Cotter quips, “When
you find yourself at a crime scene, you don’t destroy evidence.” The problem with
this formulation is that the statues were an integral part of the long, concerted effort
by the Southern elite to rewrite their story.

A huge part of that project was erasing the traces of the true history of African-Americans
in the South during and after slavery. The graveyards of enslaved people
are paved or sodded over (at my family’s former plantation the slave burial ground is
now a Christmas tree farm), while the graveyards of our white ancestors are carefully
tended. Slave cabins were torn down. Lynching sites remain unmarked.

When we talk about preserving the “evidence” of history, we must also ask:
Which history? Whose history?

ELIZABETH THOMAS
PITTSBURGH

To the Editor:

Having just finished Shelby Foote’s three-volume history of the American Civil
War, I was deeply disturbed by the riot about the removal of the equestrian statue of
Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. The fact that Lee chose to support the
Confederacy and owned slaves does not detract from the fact that he was one of the
greatest generals in American history, following his conscience and doing his duty as
he saw it. We should be mindful of the moral contradictions of Lee’s career, both his
triumphs and his failures.

In my opinion it is altogether fitting that the reminders of Lee, Stonewall
Jackson, P. G. T. Beauregard and others should not be seen as their glorification.
Rather, such artifacts of history should be left standing as a reminder that following
one’s conscience and doing one’s duty may not always put one on the right side of
history. The men, their personalities and even their wrong decisions should not be
reduced to symbols of slavery to be erased from our memory.

We cannot simply write off the men who died for their cause, as we continue to
fight for liberty and justice for all.

NICHOLAS SPIES, DOWNINGTON, PA.

A version of this letter appears in print on September 3, 2017, on Page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline: The Moral Debate Over Statues.

A Country of Fear and Courage

spiegel.de

A Country of Fear and Courage - [via EC on Facebook -- Thank you!]

What I Learned from Two Years in America

Veit Medick recently spent two years as SPIEGEL ONLINE's correspondent in the United States. He lived with his family in a Washington, D.C., suburb. The experience taught him a lot about America's psyche, but also Germany's.

Image from article, with caption: Photo Gallery: Two Years in SuburbiaPhotos

I recently took another walk around our neighborhood with my children. We went out through the front door, down the four steps from our porch and then right onto Highland Avenue down to Lynbrook Park. It's a nice park with lots of tall trees, a basketball court, a playground and a large green field. It's surrounded by those American suburban homes that always seem to be built the same: driveway, garage, porch and front yard. Some of them have the American flag flying over the entrance.

It's an idyllic setting. At least on the surface.

The kids wanted to swing a bit on the playground. The sun was shining and it was warm out, but hardly anyone was out and about. No people, no cars on the road, no children throwing balls or walking dogs. The field was empty, as was the playground. The neighborhood felt like a still-life -- as it so often had before.

We spent two years living in Bethesda, a privileged, almost exclusively white suburb located a few kilometers north of Washington, D.C. In many respects, it was a wonderful and exciting time. We experienced history in the making. We had to find our way in foreign surroundings, but learned that we had the skills to do so.

Over time, my daughters became little American girls. They now sing songs by Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus, they love motorhomes and collect Shopkins and they say things like "it's beautiful here" when they walk into a Disney Store. On those rare days when we don't drive our car to the supermarket, they think something must be wrong. In them, it is possible to see just how powerful the lure of the American way of life can still be. That can be annoying. But it's also kind of cute -- at least for a short amount of time.

Empty Streets

I liked living in our neighborhood. We had great neighbors and the one's next door quickly became our friends. It's often said that relationships in the United States are superficial, but that wasn't out experience.

Nevertheless, the emptiness and sterility of the streets often got to me. Something was missing: vibrancy, public life and the feeling that a neighborhood is something that actually gets used and isn't just some movie set. Our neighbor Craig says that many Americans prefer to stay home because they have become comfortable, immobile. Because everything can be ordered online. Because air conditioning makes things so much more comfortable than the real weather outside. Because cars have become a second home for many. "We're complacent," Craig says. But is that really it?

I read a book a while ago by Barry Glassner, a sociologist. Glassner's theory is that Americans live in a culture of fear and don't do anything to try to counter it -- instead allowing their lives to slide into a downward spiral of paranoia. I've thought a lot about this theory. In Bethesda, there's not really much to be afraid of other than, perhaps, mosquitoes or car accidents. But even a single neurosis can be enough to make one's home seem like a refuge. To me, Bethesda often seemed like one big refuge.

Fear, of course, is nothing new in America. It's a country that has always believed that the apocalypse is somehow just around the corner. But the level of fear that has developed in the United States -- both on a smaller and larger scale -- my God! You don't have to look very far to find it. Stores provide anti-bacterial wipes to protect their customers from germs on grocery carts. Parents obsessively coddle their children by driving them to school and picking them up each day. Fences surround playgrounds to prevent anything bad from happening. Alarms to protect classrooms from school shooters are ubiquitous. Hysteria is everywhere on the cable news channels.

A study was released recently about the things Americans fear the most. It includes literally everything. Terrorism and identity theft. Corrupt companies and financial ruin. Tornadoes and adultery. There is an explanation for this. America is no longer winning wars. Other countries suddenly also have a lot of power. Everything has become insanely fast. And the fear of external threats can influence the psyche -- there's no question about that.

There's also a domestic dimension to this fear. Many Americans no longer trust their politicians or the elite. They no longer know what to believe in a situation where the macroeconomic indicators are trending positive but the amount of money that lands in their wallets is getting ever smaller. Many believe they have to take their fate in their own hands. And that can be exhausting.

American Fear Can Be Contagious

Donald Trump has been masterful in understanding how to take advantage of that fear -- in many areas of life. In politics, in the real estate market and also in the media. At home, we subscribed to The Washington Post. My wife read the entire newspaper, even the local section -- leading her to say things like, "Let's not drive through Prince William County -- there are constantly shootings there." At first, I laughed at her. That is, until I also noticed that I myself had grown more cautious. For example, I no longer like going to stadiums that don't have security gates. Is that silly? Yes, but fear in America can be contagious.

And it's true, this country often drives people to despair, even if you live in a bubble. It is wrought with contradictions. Everyone talks about security, but the Americans haven't even managed to impose reasonable controls on weapon ownership. Everyone talks about freedom, but then, at the swimming pool we went to a few streets to the north, girls were made to wear bikinis even as babies. If I bought a bottle of wine at the store, I had to keep it hidden in a dark plastic bag until I got home.

We recently got pulled over by the police because I had allegedly swerved outside my lane. What would happen if I didn't sign the ticket, I asked? "Then I will arrest you," the officer said. Don't go to jail dad, my daughter called out. Sometimes you feel like you're under observation in the United States -- and not free at all.

It Doesn't Matter What, It Just Has to Be New

Many say the country is going down the tubes. Trump, the injustice, the debts to China. That may be, but I'm not so certain.

In January 2016, a house stood across from our own. When we looked out the window, we could see that the house didn't really belong anymore. It was small and old and a little dirty and run down. No one had been taking care of the yard. At some point, a bulldozer showed up. Within an hour, the house no longer existed. Only two months later, a new home had been built on the same property -- with six bedrooms, four bathrooms for $1.6 million. Of course, it also had a driveway, garage, porch and front yard. A family is living there now, and they appear to be happy -- at least when they make an appearance.

Was it displacement? You could see it that way. But for me, that house remains a metaphor for the way the country ticks. And how we tick as Germans. We would have approached the problem differently. We probably would have tried fixing up the house -- putting in a few new windows and giving the place a fresh coat of paint. We would have somehow tried to rescue it. After all, it used to be grandpa's place.

When you live in another country, you also learn a lot more about your own culture. As Germans, we're not fond of getting rid of old things. We preserve and optimize things. One thing we're definitely not very good at is the idea of just scrapping everything and starting over from scratch.

Americans have an uncanny ability to do this. If they get tired of something, they just order a bulldozer. Cars are discarded, as are homes, theories, ideas, sports heroes, professions, companies and politicians. All that matters is that they are replaced by something new. The moon? Been there, done that! Next time it's going to be Mars. Things aren't going well at General Motors? Then we'll build Tesla.

I personally believe that, to a certain extent, Hillary Clinton was also a victim of this mentality. She had been on the scene for too long. The Americans were bored by the prospect of her becoming president and instead just chose to vote for someone else. And this despite the fact that they knew doing so might be extremely risky. Or could it be that this desire to take risks is also what led them to vote for someone else?

A Country that Still Has Dreams

The readiness to question everything can be dangerous. But I also admire it. It makes the country creative, dynamic and exciting. It ensures that America is a country that can shed its skin and transform itself. It's something that will eventually be felt by Donald Trump, as well. After Barack Obama's election as president, we thought to ourselves: That's the real America. But the tide can shift pretty quickly here. Trump will be gone in 2024 at the latest. Nobody can predict what will follow him. Perhaps a king -- who knows?

America is a place where people have dreams. They still do today, despite everything. My neighbor Mark is actually a painter. But for the last few years, he's been a psychologist. Mark wrote an article that he believes will revolutionize neuroscience. I don't understand any of it. But the strange thing is that, when I listen to him talk about it, I wouldn't rule out that possibility.

During the election campaign, I met Zoltan Istvan. Zoltan also wanted to become president. He believes in eternal life and wants to evade death by becoming a robot. Zoltan had no chance of winning the election. And that robot idea? Not sure anything will come of that either. But I was deeply impressed by the enthusiasm with which he traveled across the country.

A street fair recently took place in our neighborhood. A woman in her late 40s named Lisa organizes it twice each year. She collects signatures and then goes to the local authorities to get a permit to block the entire street. She even set up a Facebook group and manages a small budget. Lisa has a day job, but she tends to her block in Bethesda as if it were her true profession.

On the day of the street fair, which was also intended as a send-off for me and my family, everyone was suddenly outside. The children rode a pony across the intersection. Then they did gymnastics in the street. We drank beer in our front yards, played games and ate like kings. My neighborhood had suddenly become very lively.

It was a good farewell.