Leave the Politics

Rick Steves, of swinging his arms and strolling through Edinburgh thoroughfares on PBS fame, might not strike the average public television viewer as a particularly political person.  I mean, just look at him!

But when me and my wife went to see Rick give a talk on Ohio State's campus in February, us two ardent Steves-heads had some idea of what was coming.  We've known for years about Rick's advocacy for legal marijuana, his specials on global poverty and fascism, and his book "Travel as a Political Act."  In truth, you don't have to examine any of his guides or shows too closely to see, in this man who spends his life traveling OUTSIDE OF THE UNITED STATES, somebody who's obviously a bit of a lib.  

But anybody who didn't know that became aware of it over the course of Rick's stay at the Mershon auditorium.  There to promote his new memoir "On the Hippie Trail," about the revelations the young traveller had while on the route from Istanbul to Katmandu in the 1970s, Rick seemed to go off script (or did he?) maybe every other minute or so to expound on the sorry-ass state of our country.  The man did not mince words.  At different points in the speech, Rick chastised the Republican party for attempting to defund public television, tore into the Trump administration and DOGE for their evisceration of foreign aid, argued that the US had "wasted" over two trillion dollars in an Afghanistan war they could never win, and suggested that Americans try to visit and learn about the countries their government tells them not to go to-- namely Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and Palestine.

It was when Rick had the supreme gall to suggest that J.D. Vance (who he didn't have to name) misunderstood Jesus's ideas about loving your neighbor-- how your neighbor is not just your family or the people in your geographic vicinity, but the entire human community-- that a women sitting near us in the audience had enough, crying out (in that distinctive Ohio whine), "LEAVE THE POLITICS!"

I don't think Rick heard this lovely lady, but everybody in our section certainly did, and I was pleased when several people immediately shushed her.  Still, I can't stop thinking about that moment, and specifically the precise phrase that the woman used when trying to get Rick to, presumably, talk about the thing he's "supposed" to talk about.  She didn't say "shut up liberal" or "enough with the commie shit, Rick"-- she said "leave the politics."  The issue that the woman had was of course the specific content of Rick's politics-- his global perspective, his antifascism, his obvious distaste for the MAGA thing-- but she didn't have to specify anything when she made her first and only appearance in the auditorium, because in the United States, "the politics" is all that lefty shit.  Normal American speech, or "nonpolitical" speech as most Americans understand it, is not about engaging with ideas or arguments or concepts about the world that are not your own.  Good ol' normal nonpolitical American talk is about the things we all agree on, you see, things like "support the military," "support your local police," "don't do drugs," "the only good protests are nonviolent protests," "we need a secure border," "you need to work hard, show up early and stay late, and then you can achieve the American dream," etc.  In challenging some of those notions, even in his genial Rick Stevesy way (though he did drop a VERY SURPRISING F-bomb at one point), Rick was not "leaving the politics" the way entertainers and travel writers should.  Why would a person I paid money to see be challenging me?  Doesn't he know what his role is?

We are at such a fucked up place in the United States and the reasons why are myriad, but the pathological need for Americans to "leave the politics," to insist on spaces that are free of anything thoughtful or serious or controversial or connected in any way to the larger world, surely does not help us.  It just seems so important for people on the left to not leave the politics, and to rather keep on putting the politics forward, because everything is political, especially calls to be apolitical.  Putting the politics forward is at least part of what I hope to do here on this blog, Bleak Ohio, which has begun with this post on Rick fucking Steves, lol.