There Are No Small Parts, Or Actors, In History

As I have gotten older, I've given some thought to my place in the baton race of human progress.  That's really what human life is, after all:  a baton race.  We take the baton from our forbearers, and hand it off to the generation that follows us.  All of us are a part of that race, whether we realize it or not.  Some of us not only realize it, but seek to have as prominent a place in it as possible.  They want to be famous.  They want to be appreciated for who they are and what they've done.  In some cases, they just have a genuine desire to do good for others, and want to do as much of it as possible.  Full disclosure:  at different times in my life, I have been each one of these people (sometimes, I have been more than one of them at once).

The truth, however, is that there are not leading roles in the baton race of life, just as there are no leading roles in baton races.  All roles are supporting roles.  Success literally depends on everyone.  There are no leaders.  Everyone is a follower.  And everyone shares in the success that everyone earns.

Which brings me to the case of Frank Wills.

Chances are that his name is not familiar to you, unless your memory reaches back to the summer of 1972, when Richard Nixon's presidential campaign attempted to burglarize the Democratic National Committee headquarters.  That botched crime, and Nixon's role in attempting to cover-up the involvement of his campaign, nearly led to Nixon's impeachment and did, in any case, led to his becoming the first President in American history to resign from office.

And none of this would have happened without Frank Wills doing his job.

Wills was a security guard at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., where the DNC headquarters was located.  He was the one who discovered duct tape on one of the doors to prevent it from latching shut, and called the police.  Together, they discovered the Nixon burglars in the DNC offices.  And the rest, of course, is history.

What he did was not dramatic.  It did not require any extraordinary talent or training.  And, sadly for him, it did not lead to much in the way of rewards from a grateful nation.  He did get to portray himself in the film version of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate book, "All The President's Men," but, beyond that, he had what could be described as a checkered life, dying alone and in poverty.

And yet, his simple act, combined with some quick thinking on his part, changed our nation profoundly for the better.

One never knows how one might make history.  It may be in a dramatic way; it may not.  What matters, for the sake of history and for all of our sakes, is staying in the race, and running it well.

So, as you celebrate our independence in these profoundly troubled times, keep running the race, in whatever position in that race, life has put you.  You never know when you might be the next Frank Wills.  None of us do.  But we all need someone to take that position in the race.

Or, since I'm an actor and a producer, I'll just throw in a variation on a show business cliché:  not only are there no small parts, there are no small actors.

Run the race.  Take your place on the stage.  Whatever you do, don't give up.

What We Can Learn From Immigrants

I wrote last month about the Supreme Court's impending decision in the Dobbs case, after a draft of the majority opinion had been leaked to the press.  Sadly, and expectedly, that opinion is, as of last Friday, the law of the land, and the inevitable backlash against it has already begun. I expect to have more to say about both in a later post, as well as the mass murder of elementary school students in Uvalde, Texas, and recent developments in the hearings conducted by the January 6th House Select Committee.  On a more positive note, the ongoing recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic has (knock on wood, pu pu pu!) reached the point at which my wife and I are able to travel, which has made our summer months busier than they have been in three years.  Which is by way of explanation for why this space has not been as filled as it has been in past months, and as I feel it should be in any case.  Time to catch up.  History has not ended; if anything, it's hit the accelerator pedal.

But I'm going to start discussing none of these things, as worthy as they are of discussion.  Rather, and for reasons that hopefully will become clearer in a few paragraphs, I'm going to discuss a story that hasn't gotten as much media attention as the others, certainly not in relation to what I and many of my wife's colleagues think of as its importance.

This.

Stories such as this one are a testament, perhaps no longer fully deserved, to the fact that our dysfunctional, disintegrating nation is still treated as a powerful beacon of hope for the world's hopeless.  People such as the victims and survivors in this story are routinely dismissed as threats to the American way of life.  Stories such as this one, however, expose the reality that these people put themselves in mortal peril to exercise one of the most ancient rights in the history of the world, a right that is the foundational fact of the nation we all take for granted:  the right to travel, and in particular, the right to travel in order to find sanctuary from danger.  It's worth noting, in light of recent public discussions in a different context about the common law and 19th-century legislatures, that the recognition of this right dates all the way back to the Pharaohs.

And the need for millions of people all around the planet to exercise that right has perhaps never been greater.  Tyranny is rising.  The planet itself is on fire.  Whole economies are, as a part of that fire, falling to pieces.  Diseases are rampant and multiplying, perhaps beyond the ability of medical science to control them.  Never, in the entire history of the United States, has the immigration system on which its growth and power depend needed to be as strong and as adaptable as the nation itself has proven itself to be in the past.

But therein lives the proverbial crux of the problem.  We are no longer as strong as we used to be, because we are no longer as adaptable as we once were.

The history of America has been a history of adaptation.  In the process, adaptation would lead to failures, but those in turn would lead to renewed efforts toward success.  European settlers adapting European ideas about individual freedom, and later democracy, to the needs and limitations of a frontier society.  Making commitments to the peoples they found on their arrival, and then breaking those commitments, leaving to later generations the need to make good on those commitments.  Treating later arrivals to these shores not as a window of national opportunity, but as a spigot to be turned on and off as the short-term demands of the economically powerful dictated.

And yet, as time passed, we continued to adapt, to do what we could to address the problems we helped to create.  We are a long way from making up for our failures to Native peoples, but, in our better moments, we recognized the commitments we have made and attempted to honor them.  We may not have always been a nation that responded to the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breath free with an open heart and an uplifted torch, but we have reaped economic, cultural, scientific, and even political benefits from those moments when we willingly opened the golden door and added to the size and diversity of the American family.

Putting it simply, we understood that change was not a threat to stability.  We understood that true stability depends on making change an ally in the process of ensuring that stability lasts.  Change is a fact of life.  Adapting to it is the only way to go on living.

But today's America is a nation in which only half, perhaps a bit more, are willing to do so.  The other half, rather than tacking to the wind, would prefer to spit into it and not worry about getting wet.

It is composed of people (and their badly misguided followers) who would twist not only the Constitution, but medical science, in order to create a world in which women can be placed under the thumb of men (or another appendage, perhaps), but people cannot be required to abide by common-sense health procedures that equally benefit us all.  It is composed of people who would rather regulate a woman's body, but not the guns that can be and are being used to take her life as well as the lives of her children.  Perhaps worst of all, although there's room for disagreement about this, it is composed of people who claim the mantle of small-government advocates, yet freely admit to using the power of the State solely to persecute their political opponents, while protecting their allies from their obvious and multiple infractions of the law.

They are brazenly "adapting" the truth to conform to the only reality that matters to them, and that is preserving a world in which while, male, "Christian" property-owners are in charge of everyone else.  They are attempting to hijack the meaning of our history to pretend that it only supports the structure of our society as of its beginning.  And there are, quite literally, no limits to what they are willing to do in order to make all of this happen.

Which brings me back to the tragedy of the poor souls in the tractor-trailer seeking a better life in what they hoped would be a welcoming society.

For the folks in the half of America I've just been describing, those victims are not welcome additions to the strength and vitality of a free society.  They are job-grabbers at best and murderers at worst.  How does this half of America know this?  Well, it doesn't.  Not really.  Decades of accumulated evidence about the social and economic benefits of immigration simply don't matter.   For one-half of a nation of immigrants, the Golden Door of Emma Lazarus is now a barbed-wire barrier.

And, as it does in so many other areas of public policy, our national political debate mirrors this ugly reality.  I'm not sure any incident does a better job of reflecting this reality than this ugly post on Twitter from Greg Abbott, whose day job as governor of Texas is a masquerade concealing his full-time identity as a greedy bigot.  You may or may not have seen the post; if you haven't, I'll give you a moment her to pause and take in its vile content so you can follow along with me after that.

I'll leave aside the transparently obvious point:  if President Biden or anyone else had created "open borders," the people in the tractor-trailer, and the literally thousands of other potential migrants who have died attempting to enter the United States without documentation, never got the memo.  Neither have the people responsible for border enforcement:  the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency (and note that more people are coming from outside the Western Hemisphere).   Abbott's post proves a point that sometimes gets lost in the Internet gabfest:  it actually is possible to be stupid and corrupt at the same time.  Then again, he's a Texas Republican; the point shouldn't even need to be proven.

Instead, let's consider some aspects of this nation's history that might shed some light on a point that may be less obvious and, in any case, needs to be discussed if we are ever to fully understand the unique debt we owe to those attempting with increasing desperation to come here.

For starters, since most of the restrictionist crowd in the immigration debate is obsessed with migrants coming from Latin America, let's talk a little bit about the role the U.S. military, at the behest of the U.S. government, on behalf of the U.S. investing class.  Our economic interests south of the Rio Grande were not the product of arms-length negotiation between people, and even governments, with equal bargaining power on both sides.  What your history textbooks referred to as "gunboat diplomacy" was in fact gunboat capitalism.  Our military resources were used and abused not to protect the vital interests of American citizens, but the less-vital need of the investing class to prop up governments that would make it easier to make millions of dollars by exploiting the misery of their citizens, who often had no legal recourse to assert their interests.

Take a look at the first post here, for a description of what I'm talking about.  Just to reinforce its point, I'll share here the quote from the post that everyone should read, whether you click on the link or not:

I helped make Mexico, and especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba decent places for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in 3 city districts. We Marines operated on 3 continents.

—Major General Smedley D. Butler, US Marines, awarded two Congressional Medals of Honor, the highest medal given by the US government for bravery in combat. In 1938, in bitter reflection on his military career, more than two decades before President’s Eisenhower’s warning against the military-industrial complex, Butler described his military career in War is a Racket.

Welcome to the high human cost of low prices and easy access to consumer goods, folks.  I'm going to let you take it from here and do the additional reading that's out there.  Maybe, just maybe, you'll come away from it thinking a little bit more about what we might owe the folks in Latin American for the harm we did to their ancestors, to their countries, and to our own reputation for fairness and justice.  I think we do.  I think that the sanctuary from the governments these people are fleeing, governments that owe not only their position with respect to their people, but their very existence, to American arms on behalf of American dividends.

And it doesn't stop there by any means.

Remember what I said a few lines back about the increase in potential migrants from the other side of the globe?  To be sure, they're not the ones that immigration restrictionists are obsessed with, at least not routinely.  But the increase in numbers is due in no small part to the environmental harm is being done by our appetite for low-cost purchases produced at high cost to the globe, a cost that is being borne increasingly by poor Third-World counties without the resources to fight climate change.

Even in the case of China, a nation which has the resources to fight climate change on a large scale, it is not doing so.  And from its perspective, which is focused purely on short-term profits, why should it? The U.S. is supposedly the nation doing the most to fight climate change, but it's not doing the one thing it could do to make an enormous difference:  stop subsidizing China's destruction of the global environment by allowing Americans to purchase Chinese goods.  Most of those purchases are of items that can be made, and used to be made, here in the U.S.

If we were genuinely concerned about reducing the flow of potential migrants, we could do so simply by promoting economic policies that stopped giving domestic companies to ship jobs overseas to workers who, apart from working in substandard conditions for less-than-living wages, are watching their world literally crumble down around them.  We could, to borrow a phrase that has unfairly fallen into disrepute, "build back better" here and abroad.  But it's going to take time in any case, even if we elect a government with a majority of politicians willing to make the tough choices that such a path forward would necessarily entail.  And there's no prospect of a government like that emerging anytime soon, especially if the pundit class is correct in forecasting a red wave for this fall's midterms.

Which means that, for at least the short term, we'd better be prepared to accept a lot of climate refugees from all around the world.  Desperate people will do anything, will find a way against the greatest odds and the toughest enforcement policies, to find a safe haven.  As long as this nation looks like that haven, people are coming here.  No wall will stop them.

One would think that, given the need to address the increasing influx of migrants attempting to escape the consequences of our nation's past sins, our elected representatives would want to do something about it.  But, as is the case with other needs we all face, one party is willing to do something about it, even to compromise deeply in order to do so, and one party is not.

I have mentioned this before, but it's worth mentioning again .

In 2013, on the heels of Barack Obama's re-election and an expanded Democratic Senate majority, representatives of both parties in the Senate--the so-called "Gang of Eight"--put together a comprehensive overhaul of our immigration laws and enforcement.  It required compromises from both sides that each side hated--hated--to make.  They made them in good faith, however, because they recognized that a major problem needed to be solved, and they had been sent to Washington by the voters to solve problems like this one.  In the end, they came up with a bill that passed the Senate with 68 votes, a more-than-two-thirds majority.  This was, in other words, the sort of goo-goo bipartisan moments for which most of the Washington media circus lives.  Everybody was happy, right?

No.

The then-Speaker of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, John Boehner, was having a problem keeping the more rabidly-right-wing members of his caucus happy, and thereby keeping his rather cushy job in Congress.  And some of the more rabidly-right-wing members of the aforesaid media circus argued that Congress should wait until after the 2014 midterm elections, which would be likely (and did, in fact) give Republicans complete control of Capitol Hill, thereby increasing the chance that a more conservative-friendly immigration bill could be negotiated.

Result?  Immigration reform died.  And, nearly a decade later, there is no hope of reviving it, not in a Congress where Democratic control of each house is by a paper-thin margin, and the prospect (once again) that the upcoming midterm election will lead to a Republican Congress.

Nothing could better illustrate the cancer that has taken hold of our political life than this.  While we have one party that genuinely cares about solving problems. we have another party that is locked into a permanent political campaign, because it doesn't see problems as requiring solutions.  They only care about power, and they only care about manipulating problems, and the debates surrounding them, in order to hold onto power and to gain and keep more of it.

And, from their perspective, the effort has paid off.  They now have a Supreme Court that effectively operates as a kind of super-legislature to destroy anything a Democratic President or Congress might accomplish.  That, combined with gerrymandering, dark money, and a filibuster rule that appears to be going nowhere, and you have a recipe for permanent minority government.

And, if you're an immigrant trying to come here for any reason, you are coming to a country that not only doesn't care about your dreams, but also doesn't care about your life.  In truth, it doesn't care about any lives.  Not immigrants. Not public school students.  Not the women whose lives may depend on a therapeutic abortion.  Not even, based on a decision today from the aforesaid Supreme Court, the right to clean air and water, something that each one of us needs whether they're in power or not.

But immigrants are especially vulnerable.  They are largely invisible and anonymous to most people.  Yet they perform essential services across the entire nation.  Like it or not, they perform jobs that American citizens are not willing to perform.  There is no huge line forming to the right to work in or on the farms, the hotels, the office buildings, the nursing homes, the hospitals, the public schools in the jobs that immigrants take.  Both because of the work environments they are willing to enter, and because they are often undocumented as a consequence of our broken immigration system, they routinely put themselves in physical danger.

Ask yourself this question:  why would anyone do anything like that, unless the alternative was even far worse?  For most if not all of these people, it is.  And, as noted above, we bear no small amount of responsibility for that fact.

We're in one hell of a mess.  We've got a large number of existential problems, and no clear way forward on how to solve them.  But, if there's one thing we can learn about the tragic lives that were lost in their attempt to find the American Dream, it's this.

If people fleeing disaster still haven't given up on coming here, we shouldn't give up either.  On ourselves.  Or on them.  We owe them a lot.  They're willing to give us a lot.  They represent the best of this nation's history, and we will need them to be a part of our future.  As we try to find light in the present darkness so that we can move forward, we need to bring them into the light, and bring them with us.  They have much to teach us.

Especially when it comes to the need to adapt.