Westerlies

I moved this fall to the 12th floor of a 14-floor brick apartment building built in World War II to house workers of the Brooklyn Naval Yard. The apartment's best feature is its southerly and westerly views. While downtown Brooklyn's new glass and chrome towers obstruct much of the view of New York Harbor, I can glimpse bits of it, as well as Staten Island and New Jersey (and, looking northward, the spires of the Manhattan Bridge and the towers of Wall Street). I can watch storms roll from the west and close in on the city; any westerly breeze has few obstructions before it crashes into my building. On stormy days the apartment's sound is a rhythmic drone of wind, with staccato smacks as gusts hit the bricks and whistles as they whip through window cracks. That's been my soundtrack this weekend.

Earlier in the week I picked up from the borough library Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness." I was ignorant that the diary came in two volumes and ordered, it turns out, the second, from 1942-45. To read its opening pages is to be plunged into the quotidian terror of late-stage Naziism. On a tram on his way to buy groceries Klemperer is confronted by a "dogcatcher" -- a police or military officer, I'm not sure which -- quietly ordered off, and taken for questioning at a local police station. He is instructed to avoid trams to that neighborhood and to limit his shopping to the Jewish section, where offerings are meager by comparison. Though Klemperer must wait hours at the station he is not physically mistreated or arrested. The stop's point, it becomes clear, serves dual purposes of terror and segregation. Segregation not only makes Jews easier to track and herd, it also keeps "good" Germans from interacting with any and thus aids propaganda against the sub-human.

The wind and the diary colored my weekend readings from a variety of reporters and Nostradamuses. Those include a NYT account of a weekend white power conference, a gathering of "people of the sun" that included call-and-response chants in German (including "lugenpresse" -- lying media); Azmat Khan's summary of U.S. government actions to track Muslims since 1996; lessons Americans should draw from the failures of the Israeli left to confront four decades of increasingly radical right-wing politics; plus messages of doom from Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Chait.

I'm paying special heed to folks familiar with authoritarian governments. Today that includes Sarah Kendzior, who's studied state power in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. Her piece in the Dutch publication The Correspondent, How to be your own light in the Age of Trump, has powerful words of warning and advice for living as a dissident. She calls on us to write down our moral values, our personal codes and creeds, and to do so now, before the power transition: "Authoritarianism ... eats away at who you are. It makes you afraid, and fear can make you cruel. It compels you to conform and to comply and accept things you would never accept, to do things you never thought you would do."

I was heartened by the stout constitution and working moral compass evidenced in writer Amy Ferris's Dear Trump Supporter Who Called Me A Cunt. She cites her mother as someone who paid for living with small-minded fear, an example Ferris is determined to resist.

Amid the whipping winds, may we all heed the better angels of our nature.