We saw a real guillotine on this year’s summer travels, with the original blade and bag to catch the head still attached. It was a gruesome reminder of Terror past as we visited three countries living in the shadow of Terror present.
Some friends and acquaintances questioned our decision to make this trip Continue reading “Paris in the Terror”
President Obama was speaking, his image almost filling the television screen, but my eyes were drawn to two people in the group behind him. They sat in the front row, one on either side of the President at his shoulder level. Two white police officers, a man and a woman. Together the image of the podium, President Obama, and the two officers formed a kind of triptych of mourning. It was Dallas on Tuesday July 12th 2016, the memorial service for the Continue reading “Body Language in Black and White”
A few years ago I received a mysterious Christmas gift from my San Francisco brother. I opened the long, narrow box to find a crudely formed human figure made of wood. It looked like something you would find in the “exotic” home décor aisle at Pier 1 or World Market, along with the carved elephants and brass Buddhas. Standing 18 inches tall the figure was armless with a disc shaped head, a rudimentary nose, and a single eye. Just above the legs a round hole was an ambiguous indicator of gender. I stared at the figure for some time wondering what on earth my brother was thinking Continue reading “The Dagenham Idol”
In the movie The Truman Show there is a moment when Truman realizes that the horizon he sees is just a backdrop that rips open to reveal the real world beyond. His entire life has taken place on the stage set of a reality TV show. Something like that actually happened last week. But it didn’t happen to just one person; it happened to an entire nation. Now the truth is out. The United States of America doesn’t really exist. It is USA: The Reality Show! Continue reading “The End of Reality”
My obsession with hedgehogs began with the gypsies. Every summer when I was a child the gypsies, in their colorfully painted caravans, made camp in a nearby field. We would creep through the trees to spy on them playing explorers encountering an exotic tribe, to use the imperial language that still lingered on in Britain long after the Empire’s sun had set. Until the coming of the gypsies my Belgian mother was all the “diversity” we had in our east of London Cockney neighborhood. The gypsies brought with them Continue reading “Confessions of a Hedgehog Collector”
Belgium is my arcadia, my beloved country of memories and dreams. A different Belgium than my mother knew – a country suffering under German occupation, so poor that her widowed mother had no choice but to place her little brothers in an orphanage. My father was among the British soldiers who liberated the medieval city of Ghent in 1944. Later he inscribed a book: Continue reading “Belgium. Cry, My Beloved Country”
I started these Dispatches five years ago with the idea of trying to explain the curious ways of Americans to the English. I viewed the carnival of American politics with the ironic eye of an outsider. In the last Presidential Primary season I wrote this piece imagining the Republican debates as a kind of reality TV show. I presumed I would write in the same vein this year. The 2016 campaign promised another season of harmless entertainment before Continue reading “The Trumping of America”
The British perpetrated many insults upon the American people when they burned Washington in 1814, perhaps the worst to contemporary eyes being the destruction of the Library of Congress. Over 3,000 books went up in flames. But the disaster had the unintended consequence of making the national library better than ever. At his home Monticello in Virginia former President Thomas Jefferson read an account of the loss in the newspaper Continue reading “Mr. Jefferson’s Books Go to Washington”
