Socks and sandals

The inspiration to write hasn’t quite been here lately, as Americans – and probably North Americans more broadly – have been in a kind of limbo, waiting to see how the election will turn out. I’ve been actually a bit blown away at how Matt has been developing The Deckle Edge into an amazing multimedia platform, and how Mark has been expanding on the themes of identity and translation, while in the background I’ve been caught up trying to find a couple cords of firewood for the winter and keeping the boy focused on learning.

In the midst of it all, though, our merry band has been continuing to challenge one another with new reading – most recently Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited, after a couple of weeks ago we read William James and before that, Susan Sontag and Michel Foucault. It’s my turn to choose for the next reading, and I’ve selected Charles Peirce, the father of pragmatism but also the man who originated the term “semiotics” – the linguistic or philosophical study of signs and signification. I had thought of trying to find something by Umberto Eco, but most of his work is either not well translated, or isn’t sufficiently philosophical, or is fiction; the latter two categories have been excluded by design from our reading group, and the first just makes me annoyed. But he did have one work which resonated maybe too well given events of late, Ur-Fascism, written back in 1995.

Eco was born in the early 1930s, which looking back on it was a sort of magical moment. I think of my father, who was born in 1939; none of World War II really meant anything to him, because it ended when he was six and his father, a fire engineer, was never drafted because his job was too essential to the war industry homeside. For Dad, the early years were just early years. For Eco, the war broke out when he was seven, and the real war – when the allies fought up the peninsula, when Mussolini was deposed and established his fake republic and the Nazis took over the war, as the allies then fought the Nazis until the end – happened in that moment of youth when your sense of self is being established. Being born in 1932 in Italy gave you an awareness of what evil, what authoritarianism, what fascism was, but you got to experience it as a child, at a remove. He writes about the requirement that he join the Fascist youth organisation but in the way that you’d write about being forced to take piano lessons or sell magazine subscriptions to raise money for your school field trip: it was nothing real, it was just what adults told you to do when you were ten.

Eco’s essay lays out the signifiers of fascism in a way which only a child could have recognised after the fact, and part of the charm of the essay is how he knows as an adult, as an academic, what signifies fascism, but how those signs were first transmitted to him as a child. He writes about the things that he saw intoxicating the adults around him, the things that convinced the adults who otherwise should have been more aware of what is essential to freedom to give up that freedom in the pursuit of its opposite, of an illusion of safety and stability and the control of action.

What really struck me, though, was thinking about my son. He’s eight years old, and his best friend will turn ten in a month. The difference between them is actually kind of amazing: 18 months of physical age translates into a different kind of voice, a different kind of patience or lack thereof, and also a different kind of observation. My young man still observes with the earnest trust of a young child; his friend observes with just a tinge of doubt, especially with respect to what adults tell him, that demonstrates he has made the turn into becoming a young adult. My son is much better at math and reads at a higher grade level than his friend (although I’m working with his friend two days a week and I’m getting the sense he’s a genius too), but the older boy has a maturity of sight that I know my boy will eventually have but doesn’t have yet.

Both cannot escape the noise of the election here, and both have been making noise about who they “support” or don’t. It’s all sort of childish; they repeat the slogans from television campaign ads (“Sara Gideon is a Pretty Pathetic Politician”; “Susan Collins Has Sold Out Maine”) and they argue about who is the right person to vote for. It’s been complicated talking to them about the actual election though, because Maine adopted ranked-choice voting a few cycles ago, so it’s not like you vote for one candidate. This has actually been helpful: when they ask who I voted for, I got to explain to them that I actually ranked my choices. I preferred the Green party candidate, knowing she’d go nowhere and that my second choice would therefore have more power assuming the vote was divided (it turned out it wasn’t, but as a pedogical exercise it was pretty good).

When talking about the presidential race, I did my best to stay away from direct commentary. I have a strong view on the election, and I don’t want to impose that on my child or his friend. Especially his friend, actually; his parents – they’re divorced which makes it more complicated – both trust me and have allowed their son to be part of our Covid bubble, and trust me to teach him math and reading and work with him on science and social studies at a fourth grade level, twice a week. They both have different views on politics than me, and I don’t want them to think I’m indoctrinating their son. So I’m gentle.

But Eco’s work reminded me that there are lessons to learn with signs, with signifiers. It gave me a mechanism to teach a kind of good and evil of public morality, in ways that young men in particular could understand, in particular in Maine.

Fascists, I told them, are people who demand that you think what they think, and are willing to beat you up and be mean to you if you don’t. And they also expect you to be mean to those who don’t think the way you do.

But they have a weakness, because fascists are people who would wear a uniform – particularly a bad uniform – with the idea that it somehow demonstrates their power. It might be a white cloak with a pointy hat, or a black or brown shirt and jackboots. No one these days, though, dresses like that. It’s too obvious. Every age has its uniforms of oppression.

Today, I told them, it’s all about people who wear socks with sandals. They’re fascists. But, kids – I told them – be careful. They’ll change their uniforms soon.

They laughed and said they’d never wear socks with sandals. I congratulated them and applauded their wisdom. But I reminded them again that someone might ask them to wear a uniform and be mean to people for no other reason than because the uniformed people said so. And that they should walk away, in their socks and sneakers or in their bare feet and sandals, and just be kind.

I’m reasonably certain neither of them will ever vote for a fascist. The next trick is to make them realise that throwing Lego planes out of the window is a bad idea. That will be harder.