Re-Reading

 Mad Dog typically has five or six books going on his Kindle and bedside books, most of which he has already read months or years before, and is now re-reading.

Klimt, Before the Deluge 

Short attention span, poor memory, for whatever reason. Mad Dog just likes it.

Isherwood

Of the new books is one Mad Dog has had on his Kindle for years: Christopher Isherwood's memoir, "Good-bye Berlin," which Mad Dog just never got around to reading but  just recently read, having stayed up all night, unable to put it down. Not since "West With the Night," that singular Beryl Markham memoir, has Mad Dog been so enthralled with a book. 

Reading this while re-reading Nancy Isenberg's "White Trash," and Kuznick and Stone's "Untold History of the United States,"  and Edmund Morris's series on Teddy Roosevelt, and Daniel Okrent's "The Guarded Gate," H.C. Richardson's, "West from Appomattox," and Bruce Caton's "A Stillness at Appomattox," affords a soul roiled by the daily news, which is All Trump All The Time, a certain emolument quality.

One realizes, this too, shall pass, and today did not arise as a random, unlucky asteroid which slammed into our nation. 

Isenberg traces the whole phenomenon of the unpropertied, white, rejected rural poor called "white trash" by both the gentry and colored folk, as a culture of people who love to brag and who love braggarts, the man who will claim to be the best President ever, the man who kilt him a bear when he was only three. These folks do not know the rules of debate, and do not care to know. They elected Andrew Jackson because he talked like them, married an already married woman, and simply ignored the Supreme Court's rulings and went right ahead and deported Cherokees and other Indians along the Trial of Tears to claim Florida for the (white) United States.

Isherwood, speaking of Weimar Berlin, explores how everyday people, whether they are wealthy Jews who own department stores, or spinster women eking out a living by subletting rooms in their houses, or young men barely out of adolescence trying to discover their own identities, flirting with prostitutes at night clubs or declaring themselves revolutionaries as puffery, for effect, and  all of them just trying to live a life, as an unseen tidal wave approaches.

Next up may be "Charlottesville" by Deborah Baker, which just got a review in the NYT Book Review, and explores "old-fashioned white nationalism and white supremacy, with its grab bag of bigotries, wrapped in contrarian, countercultural and hypermasculine cool."

Democrat Terrence O'Rourke

This brought to mind Terence O'Rouke, who spoke at the Exeter Hotel in a candidates' forum in 2017 running the Democratic primary among 11 candidates. Mad Dog was sitting in the back of the room, yakking with his friend and foxhole mate, Olivia, making fun of various people in the crowd, when a sentence emanating from the podium caught his attention: "As divided as our country is right now, with all the arguments and cultural divides, I would have thought the one thing we could all agree upon is that there is no such thing as a very fine Nazi."

"Wait!" Mad Dog hushed Olivia. "What did he just say?"

Of course, O'Rourke was referring to Trump's response when Trump was asked about the mayhem in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally, where James Alex Fields, Jr., a man who kept "Mein Kampf"  and a photo of Hitler at his bedside, ran his car into a group of people protesting against the vile Unite the Right and the "We Will Not Be Replaced" mob. Fields aimed his car and stepped on the accelerator, crashing into that group trying to stop Nazis,  killing a 32 year old woman, Heather Heyer, and hospitalizing 36 others. When asked about this, Trump said, "Well, there were very fine people on both sides." Oh, then Mr. Fields, is a very fine person. A murderer, a self proclaimed Nazi, but still, a very fine person.

There are always those who shrug off whatever Trump says--as Trump marvels at the fine command of English of the President of Liberia, who is the president of a country where English is the official language and taught every child from an early age, or when asked when and why Trump halted arms shipments to Ukraine shot back to the reporter asking the question, "I don't know. Why don't you tell me?"  Or when a reporter asks about  the federal response to the Texas floods, and Trump replied, "You have to be an evil person to ask such a question. You are an evil person." 

All of this is predictable, expected, and not at all a sign of diminished cognitive function, at least not a precipitous decline; it's just always been there and it's what his fans voted for. 

So, yes. None of this is a surprise. Nor is it a unique American characteristic. As Rick Perlstein said, "If you're not writing about the berserk, you're not writing about America."

Ernest Hemingway said that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

And, of course, the pivotal moment in that book is often said to be when Huck has to choose between returning the slave, Jim, to slavery, which is what polite Confederate society insists is the morally correct thing to do, or he can choose to abet Jim's race to freedom, which Huck is sure will mean Huck will go straight to Hell. 

For me, however, there is another pivotal moment, mostly unmentioned, when Huck returns to their raft after disappearing in the fog and Jim expresses his relief that Huck is alive and tells Huck how devastated he was at the thought of Huck's drowning in the fog. But Huck tries to convince Jim that Huck had never left the raft, never been absent and Jim must have been dreaming. It's an early case of what is now called "Gaslighting" after the movie "Gas Light" where a husband tries to manipulate his wife into questioning reality as she perceives it and claims he knows reality, where she is only imagining it and getting it wrong. Jim tells Huck that attempt at manipulating Jim is cruel and unworthy of him, a man who has loved Huck and would never do anything to hurt Huck.

And Jim, of course, is absolutely correct. Huck has been cruel, just for the fun of it. That's one quality inimical to the qualities of "white trash"--cruelty, and the others are braggadocio,  and hate of authority.

And now, in the 21st century, we are living in the gas lit world of Trump, where we are told we are threatened by an infestation of criminals--who are not here to pick our crops or roof our homes--but to rape our white women; where we are told masked goons throwing people into unmarked vans are here to protect us; where we are told tariffs will magically cause new factories to arise from the rusted out hulks in the Rust Belt; where we are told measles vaccines kill more kids than measles ever would; where we are told fluoridation of drinking water poisons our bodily fluids; where we are told government waste is what is causing inflation, economic despair and it's all because of lazy, or evil civil servants who are supposed to be protecting and maintaining our nuclear missiles in their silos;  where we are told Confederate generals were not fighting to preserve chattel slavery but were only fighting to preserve Southern heritage;  where we are told patriots seeking only to tour the Capitol on January 7, 2021 as ordinary tourists, while they smeared feces along the marble walls and invaded the offices of Congressmen were only brave, patriotic tourists; where we are told Trump did not incite an insurrection; where we are told by the Supreme Court that Trump is king and any break on executive power is unconstitutional; where we are told by that same court separation of church and state is unconstitutional; where that same court says the First Amendment is unconstitutional and the Second amendment guarantees the individual the right to own a howitzer;   where we are told Ukraine started the war by invading Russia; and finally, where we are told there were very fine Nazis out there in Charlottesville.

Berserk is something of an understatement, of course.