VIEWPOINTS Saturday, June 22, 2019 East Oregonian All stories are about coming home T oday is my father’s birth- day. He’s been gone for three decades — if he were alive he would be 104. He was still very much with us when we gathered at the home place above Idaho’s Clearwater River on Father’s Day. Our mother was there, too, in the memories we shared, in our expressions, in our voices. All five of us told the same stories we always tell. Of course we already know these sto- ries, sometimes even filling in each other’s words. In fact, that’s why we gather every summer, I found myself thinking. True, we catch each other up on the events of our lives, but what we’re really there for is to touch each other. To say this is us. This is what we remember, this is how the air smells, how the light comes through the pine over by the cabin, how syringa lights the hill above the house in June. Our children are grown now, so there were new stories, too. Strong voices, deeper laughs. One of the smart young women teased us about not listening as well as we talked. If you can imagine. But we were all ears when the banjo and guitar came out of their cases. Those guys are good. And my brother’s fiancé — a gentle, thought- ful therapist — was amazed as every- one joined in on Waiting for a Train, a depression-era Jimmie Rodgers song about a hobo trying to get home. “You all know the words?” Well, we all had the same father, we told her. Stories shape the very idea of fam- ily. Of community, of country, of the world. For better or worse, of course. And stories shape our own lives. For- tunately, we can change the story, interpret what we see in the world around us in new ways. Sounds simple. As you and I both know, it isn’t. The poet Anorak Huey has a poem about a man who comes home that brings tears to my eyes every time I read it. “We Were All Odysseus in Those Days” tells the story of a young man who “learns to shoot / & dies in the mud / an ocean away from home, / a rifle in his fingers / & the sky drip- ping / from his heart.” But the poem is really about the young man’s friend, who “watches his final breath / slip ragged into a ditch,” a thing the friend carries (“wound, souvenir, backstory”) back to America. It’s a poem about the one who lives. The one who makes it home. In that life, he will teach stories to young people for 40 years. Coach his daughters’ softball teams. Root for the Red Wings and Lions and Tigers. Dance well. Love generously. Be quick with a joke and firm with handshakes. If asked about the war, he’ll tell you instead his favorite story — Odys- seus escaping from the Cyclops with a bad pun (Nobody, that’s my name, Odysseus tells the one-eyed giant) and good wine and a sharp stick. “It’s about buying time / & making do … It’s about doing what it takes / to get home.” At last, Huey says, you see he has been talking about the war all along. “We all want the same thing / from this world: / Call me nobody. Let me live.” I suppose you could argue that all stories are about coming home, about finding home. A favorite title in my shelf of Ursula K. Le Guin’s books is Always Coming Home. Joseph Camp- bells’s hero’s journey is about leaving the known and familiar world, yes, but also about returning, having learned. Having changed. “There and back again,” as Frodo puts it. Next month, First Draft Writers’ Series will feature Apricot Anderson Irving, whose memoir The Gospel of Trees won this year’s Oregon Book Award in creative nonfiction. Her book is about growing up in a missionary family in Haiti, where Irving’s father, B ette H usted FROM HERE TO ANYWHERE a Pacific Northwest horticulturalist, thought he could save Haiti by plant- ing trees. Was this a good guiding story? she asks. And where and what is home? The series is at 7 p.m. Thursday, July 18, at Pendleton Center for the Arts. There’s no admission. I hope you can come. Bring your stories. ——— Bette Husted is a writer and a stu- dent of T’ai Chi and the natural world. She lives in Pendleton. Your daily dose of optimism S omeone recently gave me a book of photos taken on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1890s. The conditions were horrible: home- less, malnourished children sleeping in a clump, barefoot in a doorway. There was a block, on Bayard Street, with 39 tene- ment houses, and 2,781 people squeezed into them. There were only 264 toilets on that entire block and no showers or baths. There were 441 rooms on that block with no ventilation, where people lived in the shadows, catching tuberculosis and diphtheria. My grandfather, Bernard Levy, grew up there, off Bayard Street, a few years later. He went to a public high school and a public college and rose to become a law- yer. He spent his evenings writing let- ters to the editor that he hoped would be printed in The New York Times. He didn’t live to see me get a job here, but I am liv- ing out his dream. Our family life, from the Lower East Side upward, is a social mobility miracle. When you grow up with this back- ground, you have a deep sense of the goodness and purpose of America. Amer- ica is the land of milk and honey. Lin- coln could go from a log cabin to the White House. A Jewish boy from the Bronx named Ralph Lifshitz could grow up to become Ralph Lauren and redefine American preppy. You could be born on the fringes and assimilate into this new thing called an American. and the Jews were cast into exile, the I used to think we could revive that prophet Jeremiah had a surprising mes- story for the 21st century, but we proba- sage: Go to new lands. Build houses. Plant bly can’t. Too many people feel left out of gardens. Seek the peace and it. Plus, there is no longer a single Ameri- prosperity of the cities in which you settle. can mainstream to serve as the structural Jeremiah was saying you don’t need spine of the nation. Mainline Protestant- ism is no longer the dominant religion to assimilate into the new place. Nor do and cultural force. The WASP establish- you need to withdraw into a culturally ment no longer rules the roost. There is no pure enclave. Instead, don’t be afraid to white majority in our be a distinct, orthodox version kindergartens, and soon there of yourself within a larger soci- ety. Build a rich moral commu- will be no white majority in our nity. Just don’t try to universal- society. ize your faith or even become a The big three TV networks dominant minority. no longer dominate the culture Interact with the world the way they did. There is no one around you, confident in your dominant musical genre. The own particularity, but real- national ruling class has lost legit- ize that every time you seek to imacy. Social trust is strongest D aviD dominate others, you will wind at the local levels, which grow B rooKs up dominated. more polarized from one another. COMMENT This stance — aggressive Politically, we’re in an age of interaction without an attempt extremes. to be hegemonic — made the Jews cre- The reality and challenge is that Amer- ative in three ways, Sacks argues. ica has become radically pluralistic. We First, the encounter with other cul- used to be unipolar — one dominant tures led to great flowerings of Jew- majority culture and a lot of minority ish thought. Jews wrestled with the groups that defined themselves against it. best ideas they encountered from out- Now we’re multipolar. We’re all minori- side. Second, Jews were often bridges ties now. between different civilizations. Through That could blow us to smithereens. But who knows? We could learn to be trade, they linked China and the West minorities together, to be what Rabbi Jon- during the Middle Ages. Third, Jews athan Sacks calls creative minorities. In emerged from their secure base and a brilliant 2013 lecture, Sacks noted that made great contributions to the wider when Solomon’s temple was destroyed world: Spinoza, Freud, Einstein, etc. In a world of radical pluralism, we are all Jews. We have no choice but to build a mass multicultural democracy, a soci- ety that has no dominant center but is a collection of creative minorities. Nearly 200 years ago, Tocqueville wrote that democracy was creating a new sort of man. Pluralism today is cre- ating a new sort of person, especially among the young. They don’t just rel- ish diversity; they embody it. Many have mixed roots — say, half-French/half-Do- minican. Many are border stalkers; they live between cultures, switch back and forth, and work hard to build a multiplic- ity of influences into a single coherent life. They’re Whitmanesque, contain- ing multitudes, holding opposite ideas in their minds at the same time. Radical pluralism also necessitates retelling the nation’s history. We’ve always been a universal nation, a cross- roads nation, a nation whose very iden- tity is defined by the fact that it is a hub for a dense network of minorities and subgroups, and the distinct way of life they fashion to interact and flourish together. I used to think that America had to find a new unifying national narra- tive. Now I wonder if not having a sin- gle national narrative will become our national narrative. ——— David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times. Trumpifying the Federal Reserve I n late 2015 then-candidate Donald Trump accused Janet Yellen, chair of the Federal Reserve, of being part of a political conspiracy. Yellen, he insisted, was keeping interest rates unjustifiably low in an attempt to help Hillary Clinton win the presidency. As it happens, there were very good reasons for the Fed to keep rates low at the time. Some measures of the job market, notably prime-age employ- ment, were still well below precrisis lev- els, and business investment was going through a significant slump — a sort of mini-recession. Fast forward to the present. The employment picture is much stronger now than it was then. There are hints of an economic slowdown, partly because of the uncertainty created by Trump’s trade war, but they’re considerably fainter than those of 2015-16. And Trump himself keeps boasting about the econo- my’s strength. Yet he is openly pressuring the Fed to cut rates, and is reportedly looking for ways to demote Jay Powell, the man he himself chose to replace Yellen — declining to reappoint Yellen, according to some reports, because he didn’t think she was tall enough. But wait, there’s more. While there are, as I said, hints of a slowdown here, there are much stronger warning signs in Europe, where manufacturing is slump- ing and recession worries are on the rise. icies mainly benefit people richer than Yet even as he tries to bully the Fed into themselves. cutting rates, Trump flew into a rage So Trump is, in effect, demanding over reports that the European Central that the Fed bail him out of the conse- Bank, Europe’s counterpart to the Fed, quences of his own policy failures. And is considering rate cuts of its own, which if that were the whole story, the appropri- would weaken the euro and make U.S. ate response would be some polite, Fed- industry less competitive. speak version of “Go to hell.” If these various positions But as it happens, Trump and sound inconsistent to you, you’re his tantrums aren’t the whole just not thinking about them in story. There is, in fact, a strong the right way. The common prin- ciple is simple: Monetary policy case that the Fed was too quick should be whatever serves Don- to raise interest rates from 2015 ald Trump’s interests. Nothing to 2019 — that it underesti- mated how much slack there else matters. still was in the U.S. economy And Trump’s current rage at P aul and overestimated the econo- the Fed should be understood K rugman my’s underlying strength (which mainly as an expression of frus- COMMENT tration over the failure of his it has done consistently over the 2017 tax cut. past decade). Yes, the tax cut gave the econ- And there is correspond- omy a boost, as you would expect from ingly a case for partially reversing recent policies that widened the annual full-em- Fed rate hikes, and cutting rates now as ployment budget deficit by about $400 insurance against a possible future slump billion. (Imagine what the Obama econ- — getting ahead of the curve. Donald omy would have looked like if Congress Trump is the worst possible person to be had let him spend $400 billion a year on, making this argument, but that doesn’t say, infrastructure.) But it was a pretty mean that the argument is wrong. modest boost, considering, with much of So what should the Fed do? the tax cut being used just to buy back Central bankers, like those running corporate stock. the Fed, try to portray themselves as apo- litical and technocratic. This is never More to the point, the tax cut was a quite true in practice, but it’s an ideal political bust: Trump isn’t getting much toward which they strive. Thanks to credit for good economic numbers, and Trump, however, whatever the Fed does a plurality of the white working-class next will be seen as deeply political. If voters on whom the tweeter in chief it does cut rates despite low unemploy- depends believe (correctly) that his pol- ment, this will be seen as giving up its independence and letting Trump dictate policy. If it doesn’t, Trump will lash out even harder. And if I were Powell, I’d be worried about an even worse scenario. Suppose the Fed were to cut rates, and growth and inflation end up being higher than expected. Conventional policy would then call for reversing the rate cut — right on the eve of the 2020 election. The political firestorm would be horrific. And I’m sorry, but in Trump’s Amer- ica no institution can ignore the politi- cal ramifications of its actions, if only because these ramifications will affect its ability to do its job in the future. What this means for monetary policy, I think, is that while straight economics says that the Fed should try to get ahead of the curve, the political trap Trump has created argues that it should hold off — that it should insist that its policy is “data-dependent,” and wait for clear evidence of a serious slowdown before acting. Now, this might mean that if the Fed does eventually cut rates, whatever boost this gives the economy (which would be limited in any case, since rates are already quite low) will come too late to help Trump in the 2020 election. But if that’s what happens, Trump will have only himself to blame. ——— Paul Krugman is a columnist for the New York Times. A5