Donald Trump doesn't understand generosity. That's why Europe loathes him.

For modern capitalists, there is no more horrifying word than λειτουργία, pronounced "liturgy". In ancient Greece, so the story goes, the wealthiest men competed with one another for the honor of funding, completely, signficant public works in the city. The Athenian Democracy would list off the tasks needed, elections would be held, and then the wealthy would bid with one another to pay for them. Naming rights and sacrificial rituals with their names prominently mentioned were of course part of the prospect of participating.

The idea was simple: the wealthy of Athens understood that they were not wealthy alone. They relied on the work of others, that their good fortune was just that, fortune, and that their civic pride was to be fully engaged. To not participate in the liturgy would be remembered when the time came for war, and the war tax, the εἰσφορά ("eisphora"), would remember those who failed their city in times of peace.

The United States is the wealthiest country on Earth. And after World War 2, we recognized our responsibility to keeping the peace, and we have contributed generously to NATO and other organizations. We're not angels, and we've screwed up badly, and certainly our interventions since then have resulted, sometimes deliberately, in humanitarian disasters, but overall The Long Peace has held out a lot of hope for our planet.

Donald Trump doesn't understand generosity. Generosity is for suckers. So when he says other countries aren't paying a fair share, he's basically claiming that the United States is being played for a sucker for being generous, for wanting to maintain peace, and that if other countries want peace they should pay for it, and if they don't, they get war, and that war wouldn't affect the United States.

Of course, he's wrong about the last part. But he's a grifter and a fool. And for all I know, his claims may play well with the vast majority of Americans. After all, the America I grew up with and learned about was actually hidden away from most of America because the educated, egalitarian country depicted by its coastal elites, the people who actually traveled to other countries, met and conversed with people who didn't speak English, was considered "controversial" to rural America.

I wonder whatever happened to my grandfather's farm.

I awoke this morning with a very odd sense of nostalgia; a dream of my grandfather's farm in upper New York state, which I think I visited exactly once, when I was seven. I wondered if it was still farm country, or if it had been long overrun by fevelopers and turned into a plot of condominiums.

I don't much like discussing dreams; I don't believe they're that useful. Dreams, to my mind, are the leftover impressions you get while your brain is sorting through its memories of the day before. They're literally detritus, the leftover connectome of your neurons as they transition from sleep to wakefulness. Still, I'm curious: What experiences from yesterday led my brain to tap into those memories?

I'm not even sure they are memories. I do know that I visited Amel's farm once, and it was when I was seven. I have vague impressions of a white house, a porch, some wrought iron, a rusting plow, a lot of dirt thrown around. It was late fall. But for all I know, those memories are jumbled together with farmhouses where I stayed once during a youth-oriented Outward Bound thing I did when I was twelve, or the later summer schools I went to in New Hampshire when I was fifteen and sixteen. Every time you remember something, that act of remembering is itself an experience, and your memory of the thing gets re-written slightly, modified.

I have no idea where the farm is, or was. Somewhere near Buffalo, but that's about it. Amel came to America as an immigrant and not a refugee; he left his small town on the German-Italian border when he could see the rising tide, and he was no fool, so when he arrived in America he had money and spoke English. His first wife passed away, and his second wife, Beverly, I'm told was a lovely woman but she didn't register much with my father, her stepson, so I don't recall her at all.