I’ve written about subscribing to a “real American newspaper.” The paper that gets dropped at the end of my driveway every Saturday and Sunday is one of the “failing” papers that our always-aggrieved president regularly runs down for its “fake news.”
To call journalism “fake” exposes our bloviator-in-chief for the shallow huckster and carnival barker that he is at his essence. A man with small hands, a smaller heart, and who is totally clueless about the history of the nation he threatens to run into the ditch once and for all. For him, news is always “fake” when it’s not intended to flatter behaviors that are unflattering at best.
To malign reading and intellectual breadth and depth as “elitism,” is a solipsistic sleight-of-hand employed by lazy, shallow dolts who don’t, won’t, or can’t read. Bringing facts to these types is like arriving at a gunfight with a knife or worse: a sheet of paper.
But, to be well-read opens up a well-lit vista that is ever-expanding, rather than the world of the those striving at nothing. For the latter, their realm is a darkened square where the walls continue constricting, forcing out necessary oxygen.
I don’t expect every Saturday (or Sunday) to be a banner news day or one where The New York Times Book Review is bursting with books I want to run out and pick-up. Today, however, was a day when my book supplement had me jotting down notes and making plans to add to my ever-growing pile of “books to read.”
Saturday newspaper reading.
A full-page ad for the new novel by first-time writer Stephen Markley had me at its description as “A descendant of the Dickensian ‘social novel’ by way of Jonathan Franzen.” Ohio: A Novel is definitely fiction I plan to acquire and read.
Andrew Sullivan is arguably one of our most astute writers and social critics. A conservative in the classical sense of the term, prior to the word becoming the domain of fundamentalist Christians and “emotionally arrested Randians.” I don’t always agree with everything he writes, but if I see his name bylining an article or review, I’m going to read it.
He reviews Jill Lepore’s new book on the American past, These Truths: A History of the United States, opening with this: “It isn’t until you start reading it that you realize how much we need a book like this one at this particular moment.” He grabbed me with his lead sentence, but I read his 1600-word review in its entirety because Sullivan can write and I was enthralled with the rest of the review.
As a longtime reader of Sullivan, I know he isn’t some sycophant who lauds other writers and thinkers unless he respects their work and considers them worthy of his effort to read and understand their work. Lepore isn’t a conservative—neither is she a liberal apologist, either. But, having read her work in The New Yorker over the years, I know her politics didn’t perfectly align with Sullivan’s. I almost expected a negative review. It wasn’t.
Living in this age of digital truncation, a perusal of Facebook or Twitter makes it painfully evident that many read very little and think even less about what they read. Understanding our world doesn’t have to be an exercise in binary reduction, but it often is at its social media best.
Do you want to trumpet the political prowess and leadership of the president? Fine. Demonstrate to me that you have something beyond a second grade understanding of history and show some evidence that you’ve passed Economics 101. If you can, I’ll cede a point or two in argument. But you can’t and you won’t. That would mean work and heavy-lifting that you long ago gave up on. So, just fall back to your usual default response and logical fallacies.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that another writer/thinker I admire and have gleaned so much from, Chris Hedges, has a new book. Better, it was also reviewed on the pages of the NYTBR by Thomas B. Edsall.
Hedges’ book, America: The Farewell Tour, continues Hedges’ orientation towards characterizing America as an empire in decline. Edsall quotes Hedges on America, “The American Empire is coming to an end…The death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will no longer exist within a decade, or at most, two.”
Back to Sullivan on Lepore. While Hedges’ writing might be a jeremiad, Lepore offers us a panoramic sweep of our past and since the past helps us understand the future, a sense of where we are at the moment. And like Hedges, it’s not comfort for comfort’s sake.
Sullivan writes that Lepore offers us a book that we need. He describes it as “a classic tale of a unique country’s astonishing rise and just-as-inevitable fall.” He indicates that Lepore frames our present in terms that most resemble “the late 1850s and early 1860s.”
This was just prior to the Civil War, when America was wrought with division and political strife.
From Lepore:
“A sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart.”
It seems like we’re back there, again.