Image by Teemu Paananen.

Cambridge, UK — I just returned to this medieval English university town last week after a three-and-a-half week visit to the US where my harpsichordist spouse performed four concerts in Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon, and I must say that the feeling of coming “home” was much stronger when I began hearing British accents around me than when, after spending the last seven months in the UK, I had initially landed in Newark Liberty International Airport.

I’ve been following, and writing about, the dizzying wrecking-ball assault on democratic governance by the second-term Presidency off Donald Trump, watching in horror as my graduate school alma mater Columbia University prostrated itself to Trump and the Republican hyenas in Senate and House, left courageous student protesters against Israeli genocide to the not-so-tender mercies of New York’s Finest Tactical Thugs, and even helped the more brutal thugs of the federal Department of Homeland Security, on private university grounds and without court orders, arrest, detain and attempt to deport students who are Palestinian.

That outrage—which included summarily and without due process suspending foreign student activists for exercising their 1st Amendment rights and thus losing their student visas —ws reminiscent of the post-WWI Red Scare era and the post-WWII HUAC-McCarthyite nightmare combined was awful. But my horror was amplified when I tried to get my Columbia Journalism Class of 1975 classmates, many of whom had gathered at Columbia to celebrate our 50th anniversary reunion, to sign a letter composed and circulated by the Journalism class of 1969 (some of them veterans of the 1968 student takeover of several campus buildings). Addressed to J-School and University administrations and condemning their sell-out of the First Amendment so fundamental to our work as journalists, I could only find six classmates willing to add their names to it!

Later in my US stay, both in my home community in a suburb just north of Philadelphia, and during a cross-country side trip for another harpsichord concert engagement in Portland, Oregon, I was dismayed to find myself picking up a weird sense of almost enforced normalcy or fearful passivity among my fellow Americans. Given the endless evidence of a fascist regime in the process of consolidation in Washington, I had hoped and expected to see signs of resistance and rebellion—cars sporting outraged bumperstickers, demonstrators outside of Social Security buildings, threatened Post Offices,........

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