I don't often write about current events because they're too depressing. The unceasing barrage of news about Trump, assorted wars, the corruption of the Supreme Court, and the latest Covid variant feels like an assault on my mental health. So I let other people who call themselves journalists spew their commentary, which I spend far too much time sifting through in search of a grain of truth or a crumb of good news, like, say, a malevolent ex-president being convicted of 34 felonies. Meanwhile, I lose myself in the 1970s, a time of similar despair, as I attempt to transform the raw material of those grim days into literature.
The other weekend I took a day off from this self-imposed masochism, and my wife and I journeyed to an obscure corner of Brooklyn known as Gerritsen Beach. We'd last been there in the 90s, when I was test-driving cars for a magazine I edited. At the time, we found Gerritsen Beach to be a quaint neighborhood of narrow streets, charming bungalows, boats docked in backyards, and a lighthouse. It was reminiscent of a fishing village.
This time we took the Q train to Sheepshead Bay and walked two-and-a-half miles. And what struck me was that in the far reaches of hipster Brooklyn we'd come upon a zone of "Real" America, or "Amerika," if you will. For one thing, the guard dogs who snarled and barked as if they'd tear us to pieces given the opportunity made us feel less than welcome and hesitant to venture down certain streets. And the high-flying Trump flags were disconcerting, especially in a borough where Trump got only 24 percent of the vote. But what really got me was the Christian nationalist flag hanging above a lovely little garden. I took it to mean that the flag's owner believes America should be a white Christian nation and Christianity should be the official state religion. I had an impulse to knock on the door and tell the owner that the First Amendment of the Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." But the impulse passed quickly.
Among the things I say about Trump in the afterword of A Brooklyn Memoir is this: "The pervasive hatred and bigotry that I describe in this book is the same hatred and bigotry that Trump knows intimately, having grown up in Queens, the borough adjoining Brooklyn, in the 1940s and 50s." And based on my recent excursion, I'd say hatred and bigotry are still alive and well in certain pockets of Brooklyn.
At least the flag doesn't belong to a Supreme Court justice.
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