My grandfather survived more than three years in a prison camp. I know the details because he described them himself, in his own words, in the postwar journal I later turned into Behind the Wire.
When I ask myself why I wrote this book, that memoir is part of the answer.
He’d talk about what happened to him. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that nobody wanted to listen.
Why do families resist hearing a hard story?
Not because they didn’t care about him.
Because the subject was uncomfortable, and discomfort is a stronger force in a family than curiosity is. So the man who had survived more than three years in a camp sat with his stories mostly in silence, in a house full of people who loved him. I was the one who listened. Decades later I was the one who turned his journal into a book where the story couldn’t be ignored.
An account that’s difficult to hear doesn’t get suppressed. It simply never gets asked for, and the silence looks like nothing much until the witness dies.
What did World War II veterans believe they were fighting for?
Something concrete instead of abstract.
He believed the country he was fighting for was worth what it was costing him. Not as a slogan and not as a thing he said at parades. As the actual reason a man endures more than three years of that and comes out the other side.
He believed it was the best thing going on this earth, and that what it represented was worth his life if it came to that. None of that changed his conclusion about whether it was worth more than three years in a camp. He came home, he lived his life, and he died believing the same thing he believed when he shipped out.
Any argument about how this country should be talked about has to account for him. His belief doesn’t settle the question. A way of speaking that has no room for him at all is still missing something real.
What do the two opening sentences of The Villainization of America mean?
I grew up in California. I no longer live there.
A country without vigorous criticism of itself is a country in trouble, and I wouldn’t argue otherwise for a moment.
Those two sentences tell you something about the last thirty years. The California I grew up in and the California that exists now aren’t the same place in any way that matters to somebody who has to live in it.
I’m aware that’s a contested claim and that people who still live there will disagree, some of them with good reasons. The disagreement is real. The decision to leave was practical, made over a long time, and shared by a great many people who did the same arithmetic.
The book on this: The Villainization of America is the argument I couldn’t stop thinking about after helping my grandfather get more than three years in a camp onto a page nobody wanted to read.
What distinction does The Villainization of America turn on?
Between criticism and contempt, and they’re not the same activity. Criticism assumes the thing is worth improving. It identifies what’s wrong to make it better, and it’s how anything gets better. A country without vigorous criticism of itself is a country in trouble, and I wouldn’t argue otherwise for a moment. Contempt assumes nothing worth keeping. It sounds similar, uses the same vocabulary, and produces completely different behavior, because there’s no point improving something you hold in contempt. You can only manage its decline or hasten it. My argument is that the second has become the default tone in a lot of places where the first is claimed, and that the substitution costs something.
Why does leaving California connect to writing a memoir?
Because the two are the same problem at different scales. A family that finds a subject uncomfortable stops asking about it, and a man’s account goes unheard in his own house. A culture that finds a subject uncomfortable does the same thing at scale, and the accounts that go unheard are the ones that don’t fit the tone.
My grandfather isn’t a rebuttal to anybody’s politics. He’s one man who endured one thing for one reason, and he’s the sort of person who disappears when a conversation gets simplified in either direction.
| Aspect | Criticism | Contempt |
|---|---|---|
| Assumption | The thing is worth improving | Nothing is worth keeping |
| Purpose | Identifies what’s wrong to make it better | No point improving it |
| Vocabulary | Shared | Sounds similar and uses the same words |
| Behavior it produces | How anything gets better | Managing decline or hastening it |
| In a country | Its absence signals a country in trouble | Has become the default tone where criticism is claimed |
My take
Listen to the uncomfortable story while the person who lived it is still willing to tell it. My grandfather wanted to talk about the prison camp, and his family steered around it because it was hard to hear. Cultures do the same thing at scale, and the accounts that don’t fit the tone disappear. Criticism assumes something is worth improving. Contempt doesn’t, so know what you’re doing before you open your mouth.
What does it take to write about a place you left?
That criticism keeps the assumption that the thing is worth improving.
That uncomfortable accounts get asked for instead of tolerated. Nobody suppressed my grandfather. They simply never asked.
That people be allowed to be specific. He believed something concrete for concrete reasons and both directions of the current argument would flatten him.
That leaving somewhere is allowed to be practical. Not every migration is a statement.
That the argument be made at length. This doesn’t fit in a post, so it’s a book.
He’s gone now, and so are the stories that never got written down, and the ones that did got written because a teenager sat on a folding chair and asked. That’s why I care about this, and I’d rather say so than pretend the argument arrived from somewhere more neutral.
Nobody wanted to hear my grandfather’s story, and The Villainization of America grew from that. It’s about why the story we tell ourselves as a country matters.
