20 AUGUST, 2021

Dear Harry,

England! These are parlous times, here in America and I sometimes think how good it might feel to go back there to live, after more than sixty years away. But then I think of the rain, the constant clouds, the miserable winters, and I come back to my senses. Ellie was born and bred under the clear, always sunny skies in California. The climate in the British Isles would soon embrace her in its own ineluctable gloom. I could not wish that upon her.

But this is not the America I came to, Harry, back in 1964. I escaped a country in which I felt myself to be a marked man, identifiable—classifiable—by any of my fellow Brits at the sound of the first word I uttered. Public school and Cambridge. Well-educated, privileged, upper-ish class, acceptable at every level of society. I was a toff, respected by some and scorned by many, not for myself but for how I was pegged by others. In America, I was delighted by the fact that no self-respecting gas station attendant would regard himself as somehow less of a man than any other because of his job. Would not resent those who did better than himself but instead be confident that with work and dedication he could do as well as anyone. I can’t tell you, Harry, how refreshing this seemed to me when I first arrived here.

Oh, there was discontent. There was, first and foremost, the war in Vietnam, which caused a rift between young and old, the educated and the less well educated, even between Democrats and Republicans. But it was great, I thought, that everyone felt free to go out there and make their opinions loudly known. The push-and-pull, the clamor of democracy at work seemed to me entirely beneficial, a healthy alternative to the angry, resentful politics of class that I had left behind.

But then the resentments started to open up and turn ugly even here. I think I first became aware of the seismic shift that was taking place with the tax rebellion in the early 1970s, when I was already in California. I discovered to my surprise that “socialism” was a dirty word, to be used as a weapon by (mostly) Republicans against (mostly) Democrats. Then Ronald Reagan burst onto the scene, first as Governor of my home state, then as President, with what I despised as a poisonous agenda to benefit the rich and privileged at the cost of working people and the poor. I watched, at first with disappointment and then with increasing horror as America swung more and more wildly to the right, until even “Democratic” presidents were intimdated by fear of powerful, monied conservatism. I kept thinking, well, the pendulum will swing back, as it always does. And it didn’t. It never has, not even at this moment. We ended up, logically, it seemed to me, with a smug rich man in the Oval Office who was himself the very model of the money-grubbing, money-worshipping oligarch, a man so vile, so little concerned with the welfare of anyone but himself and his own kind, so transparent in his greed, nepotism and corruption that you would think Americans would soon reject such a creature from his position of power over them.

But no. The spectacle of an entire political party and a “base” of rabid, violence-prone supporters groveling before him leaves me appalled, in a constant state of disbelief. This is no longer the America I came to with such hopes for a democratic future, the America that leads the rest of the world with its respect for human rights and its support for anything that improves the lot of the human race. There are even vast numbers of people who call themselves Christian in America these days, who spurn the very Christian values that you brought me up with: justice, mercy, care for the poor, the sick, the powerless. And the latent racism that has stained my adopted country’s history has been unleashed by an ugly would-be emperor with no clothes.

Oh, Harry, good socialist, good Christian, I know that you would be just as appalled as I am by the direction that not only America but the world has been precipitously following in the few years since your death. You would find it hard to believe, I’m sure, that the insatiable greed of powerful corporate interests and their grip on compliant politicians are at this very moment opening a path for the (yes! imminent!) destruction of the human species and the planet that is our only home.

It is monstrous, Harry. We are careening, seemingly unstoppably, toward a self-created, self-ordained apocalypse as we squabble pathetically over a few crumbs..

And I have to ask this: what about your all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful God? Is he a cynic, Harry? A black humorist? Or a sadist?

Or is he simply Satan in disguise?

Your son, Peter