On June 28, when I boarded a plane at LAX for Norway, the flippant thought crossed my mind that maybe, just maybe, I’d stay on the other side of the Atlantic until the Nov. 5 presidential election was behind us.
But today, as I write from a sweltering Italy, the United States looks different from the country I departed — startlingly, horrifically different.
I flew to Norway the day after an elderly, occasionally incoherent candidate blathered his way through a debate; but it was his slightly older opponent, though more honest and humane, who sent his party into a prolonged panic with his own — unexpected! — incoherence and blather. Perfect timing, I thought, because my Norwegian family would have questions. After all, they follow American politics more closely than a lot of Americans do.
Sure enough, when I landed at Oslo’s airport, my cousin’s husband couldn’t wait more than five minutes to ask a real-life Californian about it. I joked with him that we may have to extend our stay.
Now, there are no more jokes.
Two days after we arrived in Norway, the U.S. Supreme Court found monarchical powers somewhere in the Constitution and conferred them on the president, effectively putting the office holder’s “official acts” above the law. Fittingly, I had just toured the Norwegian royal palace when I found that out.
This time, relatives had no questions, only expressions of concern and offers of sympathy. One said she might put off a visit until the political situation “resolves,” echoing the way Americans have long talked about the troubles of faraway governments.
More recently, I visited the site of Julius Caesar’s assassination in Rome, after which I read in disbelief that former President Trump was nearly killed — and one of his rally goers was killed — in Pennsylvania. Watching an attempted assassination in your own country sparks a special kind of dread that cannot be described, only inflicted.
This far from home, one may as well be 100 years into the future, reading the part of a U.S. history textbook on all the events that, in hindsight, obviously portended a long, dark period for our country.
But to stay in Europe? Those jokes from last month are appalling now. Retreat to Norway’s stable social democracy? Hell no — I’ve never wanted to go home more in my life. Even knowing I’d be the frog tossed back into the boiling water.
It’s an unusual kind of helplessness to be so removed from your home when it’s burning down. Perhaps the alarmism and dread increase with distance — I guess I’ll find out when I return to Los Angeles soon and see the fires, literally and figuratively, up close.
But as for offering insight into the darkness of American politics for foreign relatives, I’m out of explanations after that bullet grazed a former president’s ear. I’ve become used to answering questions from vexed Norwegians looking for some kind of logic in our chaotic political permutations. There, political parties exchange power all the time, but not in a way that brings U.S.-style upheaval. Their mainstream conservative party, Høyre, isn’t anything like the modern Republican Party.
The morning after the assassination attempt, the same cousin’s husband who picked me up at Oslo’s airport wrote to me, “WTactualF … happened with Trump right now?”
As American pundits were making sweeping pronouncements about what this means for November, all I could offer was this: “I have no idea. There are more guns than people in the U.S., so this was bound to happen some time.”
That’s as far as my insights go. Beyond there, what I’ve got is dread and the unquenchable desire to go home, even if home is something far different from what I left.
