I looked at my considerable library the other day and sighed. The following books--nearly all of which I read cover-to-cover-- are there on the shelves (in alphabetical order of the authors):
- Twilight of Democracy--Anne Applebaum
- Oath of Honor--Liz Cheney
- Disloyal--Michael Cohen
- Border Wars--Julie Hirshfield Davis and Michael D. Shear
- Betrayal--Jonathan Karl
- I Alone Can Fix It--Carol Leonnig and Phillip Rucker
- The Fifth Risk--Michael Lewis
- Unthinkable--Jamie Raskin (actually, I gave this one away after reading)
- A Very Stable Genius--Rucker and Leonnig
- Midnight in Washington--Adam Schiff
- Fear--Bob Woodward
- Peril--Woodward and Robert Costa
I don't publish this list to tell you that I'm smart or smarter than most. I write this to say that I made a thorough investment in absorbing relevant facts. All are evocative, in some way, of the horrors of not only 45-47's mismanagement of government, his ugly stupidity, and his endless lies, but also the potentialities of another term. We are there now. These works' expositions have been all too predictive, and we are just two weeks into four years of onrushing hell.
I thought the idea of reading works like this is to be more informed and forewarned, so at the very least, should the opportunity present itself, one can cast a logical, rational vote in favor of someone else offering an alternative that simply makes more sense--or, in this past case, some sense, which is a lot better than the sense 45-47 projected, which is none. This is how democracy's supposed to work, I thought. I didn't exactly run out and become the first on my block to buy these books--I prefer to read reviews first--but I did spend a considerable amount of money purchasing them.
It all circles back, though, to a single question: For what? These all attack 45-47 in some way. None of them stuck with the general public; they bounced back and forth in the same echo chamber. They created rage, yes, but also numbness.
The authors of these works, too, must be asking themselves this question, too: If a more informed public cannot become a more enlightened public to a degree in which efficacy occurs, does the First Amendment even matter anymore? Does education? Does conversation?
How the hell did this monster win more individual votes? The inefficiency of the Electoral College in 2016 was enough of a misnomer--or what we thought was a misnomer. But this time, he won.
He. Won. All that information revealed above, all that verifiable truth-telling, couldn't amount to success at the ballot box. I haven't read anything from anyone discussing it, and I get the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as MSNBC online. Nobody has touched this. Doesn't this bother anybody?
It brings me to another quandary: What do I do with these books now? Do I go on eBay and sell them as a set of futility? Do I keep them as an example of how incredibly stupid a fraction more than half the nation is and has been? Do these represent a decent archive of what we were supposed to do, but didn't?
Did I overinvest? It would suggest so. By the time I came to the most recently published book, the chaos, the depraved behavior, the idiocy had been well documented both daily and in these kinds of works--to the point at which I, like many have now, gave up because everything represented a reprint, more or less, of what had come before it.
The dead horse had been beaten. I knew who to be disgusted with. I knew what laws had been skirted. I knew that the game had been fixed by people who should have known better or had been consumed by unrealistic fears or inspirations or quasi-religious obsessions. And even though the daily record revealed this implicitly but the books had not--I knew about those who were supposed to be on the side of justice for all had either dragged their feet, didn't step up when they were needed, or overlooked what was right in front of them.
But I digress. Do I keep all these works to skim over them again when the day comes that it becomes finally obvious to even 45-47's supporters that they've been hornswoggled? That they'll be inflationized into oblivion, with no relief in sight? Or will they believe, once again, conjured chimeras invented by those ready for all excuses, any excuses, to avoid responsibility?
Well. Edward Gibbon's The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire is still out there and can be purchased for, perhaps, comparable reading, since our empire is about to collapse into nothing more than empty rhetoric. And there's always Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly, which describes in clear and decisive tones how people with all kinds of advantages squandered them because they valued the wrong things and couldn't get beyond their own myopathy. Seeing as how we are about to be engulfed with blind, ridiculous Christian nationalism--and we are--maybe some of the more daring scholars left will begin work on how religion was used as a weapon turned out unsuccessfully, as it always has and always will be.
Then we will have another set of books to buy, read and collect. They will sell like hotcakes in the first three or four months, then fade away to something else. All of which suggests that there are no universal truths--or there may in fact be, but we can't get ourselves to pay attention much past staring down at our noses.
Sorry this is so dismal. When I get cause to write something more positive, it'll appear here. Give it a minute, okay? Or four years?
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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