Ruth Conniff
Mexicans are more comfortable with death than Americans, who don’t even like to say the word.
On the Day of the Dead, here in Oaxaca, Mexico, our two younger daughters dressed up as Catrinas—fancy ladies with white-face skulls—a popular kid costume. They marched with all of their classmates behind a brass band, through the streets of San Felipe del Agua, our little town just outside Oaxaca City. Later, in the evening, we joined the neighborhood party, drank mezcal shots in the graveyard, and joined the dancing among the tombstones and up the cobblestones to the local church.
Standing by the family gravesite of our Oaxacan friend, Mauro, I noted how much responsibility it is to have to come and tend the tombs of your loved ones in perpetuity, the way people do here. You wouldn’t want to neglect you relatives, while all around them the other graves are constantly visited, covered in little offerings of food and fresh flowers.
It’s more than that, though. When someone dies, friends and family do everything, Mauro explained. They wash the body, arrange it, carry it to the cemetery and dig the grave. Then there are the days of eating and drinking and music and partying and accompanying the living. Our sterile funeral parlors and talk of “the departed” are cold comfort beside the great, big emotional catharsis that comes with death in Mexico.
As Mauro and I spoke, candles flickered and band music played and tons of people traipsed through the cemetery, eating, drinking, greeting each other, gathering in groups around family tombs.
America is a country where “everything is done to prove that life isn’t tragic,” Suzy Hansen writes, quoting Albert Camus, in her amazing new book, Notes on a Foreign Country: An American in a post-American World.
Hansen puts her finger on something you notice about Americans while travelling—their sunny ignorance, their “terrible innocence,” as James Baldwin, the guiding spirit of Hansen’s book, puts it.
“Because the Americans had never looked their tragic history in the face, they could delude themselves into believing that their own comparable superiority might create a better world,” Hansen writes.
Reading her book in Mexico in the era of Donald Trump, I knew what she meant.
It’s more than being embarrassed by the goofy, loud American tourists you see when travelling abroad.
Americans are inclined to believe in our blamelessness, that the world owes us a fresh start. We act as if death, decline and tragedy cannot happen to us.
In a deeper sense, we Americans have been conditioned to live as though untouched and untouchable by tragedy, and by our own history. Hansen shines a light on the way Americans somehow manage to remain at a distance from the way our country’s projections of power have distorted the world. We are inclined to believe in our own individual blamelessness, that the world owes us a fresh start. We act as if death, decline and tragedy cannot happen to us.
But, of course, they can.
A lot of Americans are shell-shocked by the disastrous, farcical, tragic administration of Donald Trump, the prototypical Ugly American.
Good timing for Suzy Hansen’s book about the decline and fall of American empire.
Ruth Conniff
But the truth is, as Baldwin pointed out, America has never been the America we Americans like to believe it was.
“From abroad, when I used to hear President Obama say that America is the greatest country on earth. . . . I felt like I did as a child, not wanting to admit to my parents I knew there was no Santa Claus,” Hansen writes.
Hansen captures the shock of recognizing that you are a beneficiary of a system set up to make you feel as if freedom and opportunity are your birthright, at the expense of other people around the world.
My oldest daughter thought she’d dress as Donald Trump for the outrageous parades and parties on the Day of the Dead.
We even bought a rubber Trump mask at the big outdoor market in Oaxaca. But when we brought it home, she changed her mind.
Our friend Mauro put it on instead, to hilarious effect.
It turns out that a Mexican is a far funnier Trump impersonator than a tall, white gringa. “If I went as Trump, It’s almost like I like him,” my daughter said, trying to explain why she didn’t want to wear the mask.
Everything about Trump, from his crudeness to his overt racism, to his ugly dyed blond hair, is not a Mexican problem. It’s our problem.
Trump is our tragedy. America’s history is our tragedy.
We can’t laugh about it and cry over it and be comforted, together, as Americans, until we get over our gooey innocence, and face up to what we’ve lost.
Ruth Conniff is working as editor-at-large for The Progressive from Oaxaca, Mexico.