“Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. Let men work and love and fight it off.” —Jack Kerouac

I woke up early this morning, like I do most mornings—especially in cities where I don’t have a mailing address. It’s not that I’m a “morning person” by nature. I’m not even sure such a thing exists. I mean, sure, I guess some people are biologically wired to wake up early or stay up late—circadian rhythms and all that. Still, we love our labels. Night owls and early birds, like astrology signs or political parties. Just more ways to try and pin ourselves down. Bullshit, mostly. But comforting bullshit. And maybe as much about habit and circumstance as anything hardwired. Who knows. I’ve been just as happy staying up till five as I’ve been waking up at five.

Still, there’s something about choosing to be up before the sun. The world hasn’t put on its makeup yet. It hasn’t masked itself with noise and people rushing off to wherever they’re supposed to be. It’s quieter. Maybe not clean, but unclaimed.

The sidewalk in front of the Marlton Hotel—the spot where Kerouac lived while writing The Subterraneans—isn’t the same place at sunrise that it was the night before. The zip code hasn’t changed, but everything else has. The blue jeans and dive bars give way to yoga pants and hot Americanos. The weird hush of Sunday night turning into Monday morning gets swallowed by garbage trucks disappearing mountains of trash, and city bus air brakes groaning against gravity. Greenwich Village resurrects itself all over again.

It’s always been a place that attracts a certain kind of person. Ginsberg, Baldwin, Patti Smith, Dylan, Millay, Hansberry. Poets and prophets and misfits with notebooks in their pockets. Back when rent was cheap and publishing didn’t require a platform, the Village gave people space to think and speak freely, to contradict themselves without apology. It was a place of contradiction and conviction. The Stonewall riots sparked a movement here. Folk singers in smoky basements turned protest into melody. Writers tapped out manifestos at café tables not far from where I’m sitting. Even now, there’s something about this part of the city that makes you want to sit down and try to catch whatever it is that’s always just out of reach. Café Wha?, itself resurrected, is just around the corner. Dylan played there when nobody knew his name. If there’s any place that makes you want to bang on a keyboard or scratch poetry into a notebook, it’s here.

I always forget how alive and almost natural New York can feel, even though nothing about it is natural. Concrete, steel, scaffolding, steam vents. None of it should feel organic, but somehow it does. Maybe it’s the density of life packed into every square inch. Or the way the city never really sleeps. Or maybe some other cliché.

If I sound like a tourist, it’s only because I am. I don’t live in New York, and probably never will. But I get the appeal.

Usually when I visit the city, any city, I do my best to blend in. Not to pretend I’m a local, but just enough to not stand out. This trip is different, though. I’m embracing my tourist status in all its glory. My 12-year-old daughter, Phoebe, is with me and it’s her first time in New York. My friends Cynthia and Mike live here, and I’ve visited them regularly over the past dozen or so years. Back when I was still drinking, I got to know the insides of bars in the Village pretty well. This time we’re spending more time at museums and art galleries and anywhere else Phoebe wants to go.

One of those places she wanted to see was the Statue of Liberty. So yesterday, Cynthia set up a sunset tour, and that’s what we did. I don’t need to launch into a dissertation about the statue itself. There’s not much I could write that hasn’t already been written. But as a lover of words—and of the ideals that have, at least in theory, made this country unique—I’d be remiss not to mention Emma Lazarus and her sonnet, immortalized on a plaque at the base of the colossus. Especially while sitting in a city built by immigrants, within a country of immigrants, at a time when anti-immigration fervor is being stoked daily.

The statue wasn’t originally built to welcome newcomers. It was a gift from France, intended to celebrate democracy and the end of slavery after the Civil War. But as ship after ship passed through the harbor, full of people fleeing famine and war and persecution, it became something else. Emma Lazarus helped reshape the meaning. She wasn’t some distant poet writing for posterity. She was directly involved in helping Jewish refugees find safety in New York after escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe. And while her poem is beautiful, it wasn’t written as a mere ornament, but rather a bold political statement.

As Trump continues to whip his base into a frenzy of fear and resentment, Emma’s words still stand by the harbor, affixed to the most recognized symbol of freedom and belonging this country has ever offered.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

At least for me, it’s hard to read her words and not feel both proud and ashamed. Proud of what they once meant—and still could mean. Ashamed of how far we’ve drifted. This has long been the American paradox: we celebrate ourselves as a nation of immigrants, even as we invent new ways to keep people out.

We’ve never had a perfect track record. There’s always been fear, racism, and suspicion around newcomers. The Chinese Exclusion Act. The internment of Japanese Americans. Quotas that once limited how many Southern and Eastern Europeans—especially those of Catholic or Jewish faith—could enter. Mark Twain write that history doesn’t repeat itself, but often rhymes. It also shape-shifts. The targets change while the cruelty stays familiar. We call it policy, and then act shocked when it doesn’t age well.

But what’s happening now feels different. Harsher. Less ashamed of itself. Mass deportations. The erosion of civil liberties. The disregard for due process. The hostility toward judges and courts. The push to end birthright citizenship. Plainclothes DHS agents showing up at elementary schools, lying to staff to question kids. The masked ICE squads patrolling neighborhoods like occupied territory. The jingoistic language that whitewashes the country into some perfect past that never actually existed.

I’m not arguing for open borders. That idea feels as unrealistic as it does simplistic. But it’s obvious that what’s happening now has less to do with border security and more to do with punishment and retribution—rounding up asylum seekers and longtime residents, families, children, and sending them off without hearings to private detention centers or prisons in Central America and, in some cases, South Sudan. The rhetoric, the cruelty, the racism—it’s all become a kind of sport.

The asshole in charge has given his sycophants the green light to be assholes too. Language and behavior that wouldn’t have been considered socially acceptable by the “party of family values” just a few years ago is now openly celebrated—not just tolerated. They clap while Emma’s words get trampled. And while that lamp she wrote about isn’t completely snuffed out, it’s definitely flickering. The golden door doesn’t shine the way it did for my own immigrant ancestors.

But I didn’t set out to write about any of this. I’m sitting at a café table outside the Marlton, drinking coffee as the morning sun peeks between tall buildings. I didn’t plan on writing anything at all, really. Just wanted to describe how mornings feel in unfamiliar cities. Maybe say something about the history of one of my favorite writers, since Kerouac is half the reason we booked a room at this particular hotel in the first place. Maybe talk about MoMA and SAMO, about street art and Basquiat—how some of the most honest work in the city started as graffiti and still lingers in corners, if you know where to look.

Last night, I was thumbing through a beat-up collection of Kerouac’s old journals in the hotel lounge when a line jumped out at me:“Let nature do the freezing and frightening and isolating in this world. Let men work and love and fight it off.”

I think maybe that’s a good reminder of our place, not just in nature but in society. We don’t have to operate on fear or hatred or tribalism. We don’t need to be the ones freezing and frightening and isolating each other. The universe already has that part covered. The rest is on us. And it really shouldn’t be so goddamn hard.

The post Beside the Golden Door appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed