Burke: Would Van Winkle give a Rip today?
Published 1:30 am Monday, October 22, 2018
By Tom Burke
We used to hike New York’s Catskill Mountains. They were glorious with expansive views south to New York City, north to Albany and east to the Hudson River. It was only a three-hour drive to the trailheads and a couple of hours to the mountain tops.
The Catskills are noted for skiing, “Woodstock,” Borscht Belt comedians such as Henny Youngman, Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen, and as the setting for Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.”
These days I’m again longing to hike the Catskills, not for the scenery, but in hopes of meeting Henry Hudson’s long-dead crewmen, those ghostly Dutch sailors who poured a bunch of booze into Rip and put him out for 20 years.
I so want to take a long nap and wake up when the horror of Donald Trump is over.
And if I can’t make it east, I’d like to find a “Fast Forward” remote and magically dial up Nov. 7. The torture of listening to campaign news; and campaign advertising; and campaign speeches, campaign tweets, and special-interest-initiative blah-blah-blah would be over.
Same for from now ‘til Nov. 3, 2020. Time for another Van Winkle snooze to avoid the pain of political discourse sinking even deeper into the mire; name-calling replacing debate; and tweets pushing dangerously into the red zone goading the nation into blowing its collective top.
I want to wake up on Jan. 20, 2021, and find Trump gone. History. A footnote. A cautionary tale.
Now when Van Winkle returned to his village his world had changed: George III was no long King of the Colonies, Washington was president; the bane of his existence, his shrewish wife, had passed on to her reward; and his dog growled at him.
He’d missed the turmoil of the American Revolution and the messiness of the Republic’s founding.
But, obviously, he missed playing his part in the new nation’s creation; just as a long nap would put me out of my part of democracy — voting. That’s unacceptable, so awake I remain.
It seems to me a 2018 reawakened Rip would be as flummoxed today as he was those many years ago. He’d find the nation divided into opposing red and blue camps, as the colonies were divided by loyalty to George III or allegiance to the Continental Congress.
But we’ve had similar periods in America, according to Bill Rorabaugh, a history professor at the University of Washington. He cited the deadly national division over slavery and the war that killed 620,000 Americans to end that horror.
He mentioned Andrew Jackson and his “Bank War;” the 1876 to 1896 tariff conflict pitting North vs. South (again); how immigration split the country from 1896 through the mid-1920s; that our entry into WWI was vigorously disputed; and “America First” split the nation over our involvement in WWII; until December 7, 1941. Vietnam saw a rift between the young and the establishment; the battle for civil rights pitts bigots and racists against everyone else; and even way back in 1811 there was bitter division over the War of 1812.
Now Rorabaugh makes the point that political parties stay in power until something big happens or someone screws up. Think war, the Great Depression, Nixon’s Watergate; Trump’s “No collusion” (or his tax fraud, his now-record deficit, his lying, philandering, lying, tweets and lying).
He further explains when the two parties are closer together there isn’t as much tension. And the absence of tension has been our historic norm.
But, he adds, the rise of social media, 24-hour news, and the interwebs all mixed with Trump’s excesses exacerbates the natural divide between opposing philosophies (left and right each roughly a third of the country) leaving the middle 40 percent with no one representing them —thus leading to massive frustration and a time ripe for a political opportunist to light the fuse and await the big kaboom in the voting booth. Change happens.
Washington Irving’s storyline wasn’t new when he wrote back in 1819 (older cultures and other countries have similar tales), just as today’s divided country isn’t new.
And it would be interesting to awaken Irving from his eternal slumber and commission a new story, about a fellow who dozes off, say in 1943 (when FDR was president and the country was united) and let him listen to Donald John Trump while reflecting back on Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He surely would agree with his creator, Washington Irving, that, “a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.” And he would be disheartened to see how Trump’s deliberate malice stirs so very much discord, for Rip was, “a simple, good-natured man.”
Methinks today’s Trumpism would send Mr. Van Winkle back to the safety of sleep faster than all that Jenever (Dutch gin) he guzzled up in the Catskills. Proost!
Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.
