Hardscrabble Road(5)

“If they didn’t, they were fined. Yes, I know, Krekor, don’t say it. Things have changed and they’ve changed for the better. I wish the elections were all over. Since I came to this country, since I first received citizenship, I’ve been the most conscientious voter on the entire continent. But I’m tired of them already, this year.”

“The conventions haven’t even happened yet.”

“It doesn’t matter. It will all be anger and craziness. When I first came to America, people weren’t angry like this all the time, Krekor. People were passionate about politics and, yes, there were some, idiots in the New Left, what they were thinking I don’t know, but most people were not angry like this. It is not one side or the other now. It is both of them. And it doesn’t matter what the issue is. If you don’t like the tax cuts, you are a traitor who wants to sell out the country to Islamic fundamentalists. If you don’t like abortion, you are a fascist murderer who wants to enslave women as breeding machines with no right to a life of their own. It’s not that there isn’t any center anymore. It’s that there isn’t any sense. First the Republicans accuse President Clinton of paying for a hit man to murder his friend. Then the Democrats accuse the Republicans of allowing the 9/11 attacks to happen on purpose, if not causing them themselves. It doesn’t matter who gets elected in November, it will be the same thing all over again, and do you know why? It’s because it’s not about politics. It’s not about are we going to have a welfare state or a laissez-faire one. It’s not about should there be public schools or private schools that get vouchers. It’s not about politics. It’s about religion.”

“It is? Are the Democrats pushing religion?”

“Tcha,” Tibor said. “You’re too limited in your scholarship. There is real religion, which is about our relationship to God, which is important. But there is another kind of religion, and that is the religion that is about identity. It is about banding together in a group and defending ourselves against what we fear, when what we fear is each other. It is about not wanting to live in a world where we are in a minority, because it is uncomfortable to be a minority. That kind of religion talks about God sometimes, but it doesn’t have to. It can call itself Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Communist or Libertarian or Green. I like real religion, Krekor. It’s been of enormous importance and value in my life. This other stuff, I look at it and I fear for the survival of civilization.”

“That’s quite a lecture for five minutes to seven on a Monday morning.”

“Don’t be flippant, Krekor, it matters. I’m more American than most Americans. From the day of my naturalization, I’ve kept a flag in my house; now I keep it in my kitchen. I have little lapel pins with the flag on them. I have a red, white, and blue baseball cap. I embarrass the people who were born here with my enthusiasm. I think this is the greatest experiment in the history of the world, the story of the Tower of Babel falsified. But lately I am not so sure it is going to survive. Not in any form in which I recognize it.”

“I think it will survive,” Gregor said. “I think it’s just one of those times, like during the Civil War—”

“—This you think is a comforting analogy, Krekor?”

“I didn’t mean I think we’re going to have a civil war. I mean it’s one of those times that we go through where we reinvent ourselves. The Civil War was the worst of it, but there have been other times. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Great Depression, for instance.”

“Tcha. I like Roosevelt. I like both Roosevelts, though the first one was perhaps a little overenergetic.”

“I’m just saying that we get angry and we get upset and some of us even get nuts, but we don’t fall apart. We didn’t even fall apart when we fell apart, so to speak. And now I’m talking like a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, instead of the son of two immigrants from Armenia. Would you go back to Armenia, if you could? It’s free of the Soviet union   now.”

“No, Krekor, I would not go back, not even with the craziness here. And it’s more than just a matter of central heating, although that’s certainly a factor. It’s odd to think, isn’t it, that people can be born out of place and out of time? You’d think that the force of culture alone, of upbringing, would suit you more for the place you were raised than some other place, but it doesn’t always work like that. It didn’t work like that for me.”

They had arrived at the Ararat, and Linda Melajian was just unlocking the plate glass front door. “Come on in,” she said. “I know it’s five minutes early, but I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be and you can’t stay outside in that cold. I keep thinking about that phrase everybody uses. When Hell freezes over. I think it did.”