thoughtsfrommareincognitum

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

The girl who fell to Earth.

"One day, I'll come out of my shell, I'm sure," says Aldous Harding. She does not seem to be speaking to anyone in particular; her words seem directed mostly at herself. A few minutes later, she repeats those exact words as if she hasn't said them before. Aldous Harding—real name Hannah Harding; her stage name is presumably taken from the author of Brave New World and even now produces a brief mental ripple of confusion every time I say it out loud—is from New Zealand, and this is the second time I have seen her. My dear friend Andi is with me; this is the third time she's seen her. Harding is just that sort of singer, the kind you wish you could see every year.

Harding is playing at a small Phoenix lounge, but I keep feeling I'm back in the early '90s, a time I am increasingly persuaded was the last truly magical time I've lived through. Hints are everywhere: Something about the solemn, ghostly atmosphere reminds me of the setting of Nirvana's Unplugged; the red curtains that frame the band, meanwhile, are straight out of Twin Peaks. This is just a daydream, of course, not rooted in any kind of reality outside my own head, but that sort of free association seems perfectly suited to the world of Aldous Harding, who seems to have one foot in the world and one foot out of it. She walks the stage with the dreamy deliberateness of a creature moving underwater.

This venue couldn't be better suited to her. Thus my annoyance at the fellow about six feet in front of me who keeps bobbing back and forth like he's at a different type of concert; thus the audience's growing and palpable disdain for the people who keep shouting things at Harding, "You rock!" and that sort of thing. Like they're trying to be helpful. While it works at some shows, it seems grotesquely inappropriate here because Harding doesn't respond. She gazes out at the crowd with a peculiar expression—part curiosity, part revulsion—every time someone yells something. Finally she explains, in halting words that won't quite form themselves into full sentences, that talking to the audience distracts her from the music.

There is something alien about Harding, a primal otherness that leaps out of her deepest self and seems to shape every movement she makes, every syllable she forms. You wonder if she would be just as happy without an audience. She rolls her eyes, grins, grimaces, makes faces that seem to have nothing to do with what she is singing. After one song she stares at us with unnerving intensity for a long time, like a sailor who's spotted a storm on the horizon. It's hard to imagine her living in a house, like other people; I picture her tending a small garden on an asteroid, like the Little Prince.

In the last match he ever played, Bobby Fischer insisted that a soundproof glass wall separate him and the crowd; his fragile mind couldn't tolerate the sound of regular people making their revolting noises. Harding seems to be retreating in front of our eyes into her simple but, often, unfathomably strange songs, which she sings with a feral intensity that belies her voice, a serene and stable instrument that could easily have been used for much more ordinary purposes.

After a while you start to notice everything else—the drummer who, at one point, pulls out a trumpet and toots on it a bit; the piano player who every so often stands up to give Harding a turn at the keys. She moves from instrument to instrument, now standing, now sitting, smiling harder the more deeply she is allowed to plunge into the music; somehow she seems more of a star the further she pulls back into herself. She sings about birds a lot, and perhaps that's apt; birds are near us one second and gone the next, friendly and solitary, alert and still, the only surviving members of an ancient family that once ruled the world. So it is with this visitor from another world, who eventually will leave the stage without a word.

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

Last thoughts on Trump.

In his last days in office, Donald Trump reportedly ordered his dwindling circle of attendants never to mention Richard Nixon's name in his presence. We can guess the reason: Nixon means failure. Even people who know nothing about politics know that. But even if Trump and Nixon ended up in roughly the same place—political oblivion—the roads they took to that destination could not have been more different.

The single most revealing moment of Nixon's career did not happen while he was in office. It came a few years after his resignation, when he informed a television interviewer that, from his perspective, "if the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." This was a belief, Nixon made clear, that he had put a great deal of thought into. If a president ordered his underlings to break the law, whether for reasons of "national security" or "a threat to internal peace and order," they had to assume that they would not face potential legal consequences when they did it; otherwise, Nixon explained, they would be in an "impossible position.” Thus, anything the president wanted done was, by definition, legal. At the bottom of all of Nixon's misdeeds lay this crackbrained conviction, a circular argument that had nothing to do with the written law, legal precedent, or anything else outside of one man's peculiar vision of the way things ought to be. 

Last April, Trump informed the nation that he had the right to stop governors from keeping their states locked down in response to the pandemic, making this remarkable assertion: "When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total." His own vice president—often cast as a voice of reason within the Trump administration—was quick to back him up, asserting that presidents possess sweeping authority during "national emergencies." Republican leaders did not rebuke the president, even in private. 

The differences between these two statements are negligible; it is safe to say that Trump's understanding of his own power was, if anything, even more grandiose than Nixon's. But there is one difference that is worth dwelling on. Nixon kept his strange theory of the presidency a secret as long as he held office; he no doubt knew that most of the country, in their woeful ignorance, would probably not agree with him. "The average American is just like the child in the family," he remarked to an interviewer in 1972. Not until he was well out of office, and desperately trying to redeem his reputation, did Nixon reveal the odd convictions that had led him to certain disgrace. Trump, however, felt free to proclaim his "total" authority in front of a roomful of newsmen, and the question is why. 

Trump's greatest asset as a politician, right up until the very last month of his presidency, has always been an uncannily accurate understanding of how much he could get away with. He knew as well as anyone that Republicans had long since adopted their own version of Nixon's motto: If a Republican president does it, that means that it is not illegal. Thus, Trump was not encumbered—as many people in his place might have been—by his profound ignorance of the law, or even of the duties of his office. He knew that his faction would defend him no matter what he did. Republican leaders, in those long-ago days when the party was divided between conservatives and moderates, understood when Nixon was finished, and told him so. They told him to resign, and he did. Trump never had any reason to worry about that. 

Thus, where Nixon had once justified breaking the law in the name of "national security," Trump could justify almost anything he wanted to do in even starker terms: He was good and his opponents were bad. His enemies were America's enemies. To love Trump was an act of patriotism; to hate him was to hate the nation itself. 

Trump pushed this message so forcefully that the entire country seemed to absorb it; it was no accident that his critics so often found themselves arguing that America itself was odious and that the president was simply an authentic reflection of its odiousness, a claim that I don't remember hearing from many liberals during George W. Bush's wretched eight years in office. This, too, was a novel development of the Trump years; numerous Americans now think of their country as a rotten place, its cherished ideals a sham, every hero a fiend in disguise. 

Who benefited from such an argument? Quite plainly, Trump did. If America is beyond redemption, then who could argue against the open crookedness of the Trump administration? In these arguments, America as a republic does not even exist. There is no democratic project to be saved, and no rule of law worth upholding. If there is nothing to value in the country, then Trump is not to be denounced for his criminality but admired for his honesty. A few weeks ago a local activist group in Idaho defaced a statue of Lincoln; the group’s spokesperson proudly informed a reporter that they had done it because Lincoln owned slaves. This, too, is part of Trump’s horrible legacy—ignorance in response to ignorance, crassness in answer to crassness, contempt for public space to match Trump’s own contempt for the republic.

That was the direction that Trump seemed to be pushing the entire country in, and nothing seemed to stand in his way, not even losing an election—until he provoked the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6. In a few hours, the glue that had held together the entire Trump machine simply dissolved like sugar water. For four years, the president had claimed to be the defender of "law and order"; now his goons had murdered a police officer. He had claimed to stand for "America" against what he characterized as a left-wing mob; now a mob had launched a brutal attack on the People's House itself. It was as if a land of sleepwalkers had been jolted awake. As I write, Trump stands on the brink of deeper and more lasting disgrace than Nixon. 

That is entirely fitting, for what Trump did to this country was worse than anything Nixon ever dreamed of doing. Nixon tried to circumvent the law, driven by a crazy but sincerely held notion of what self-styled great leaders ought to be permitted to do. Trump acted as if there were no law, and encouraged his admirers to do the same. The result is what we saw on January 6, and it felt like the long-simmering eruption of a volcano. 

That the Republicans would refuse to convict Trump was obvious; they have supported him so long that to label him a criminal would be to convict themselves. But it scarcely matters. He really did go too far this time. Trump will never return to politics, no matter what his followers want to believe. Already he seems little more than a shadow, reduced to issuing press releases like any schmuck. Trump is gone. But think of what he did to us—is that gone? 

After Nixon’s fall, many people found themselves echoing the words of the man who took his place—the system works. That comforting thought is not available to us; this time, the system didn’t work. That is a bitter lesson to take to heart as we leave this strange era behind. Asked what kind of government the writers of the Constitution had given us, Dr. Benjamin Franklin famously answered: “A republic—if you can keep it.” Whether or not we can keep it remains to be seen.

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

24 hours to go.

Surely we must be dreaming. Can the election really be tomorrow? I write with full awareness of how absurd it is to try to say anything about what is about to happen. In less than 48 hours, anything I write here will look either obvious or stupid. The closer the election gets, the harder it is to imagine what the world will look like the day after Tuesday. Donald Trump's presence in politics is like a distorting mirror at a carnival; he makes it impossible to see reality for what it is. Once a garishly strange anomaly in our politics, he has made it nearly impossible to imagine our politics without him. 

Half the people I know don't believe the polls. They believe, without wanting to, that Trump will somehow pull off the impossible and land a second four years in the White House. They worry, not unreasonably, that Trump's loyal goons will simply steal the election for him. They rightly dread the outcome if any disputed results wind up before the Supreme Court, now dominated by right-wing fanatics. Perhaps the most crushing possible outcome is the one nobody even wants to think about: The polls turn out to be horribly wrong and Trump simply wins, without any need to cheat. 

I don't think this will happen. I dread the thought of enduring Tuesday night as much as anyone, but I dread it in the sense that you might feel your stomach lurch walking through a dark, deserted house at midnight, even when you don't believe that there are any phantoms waiting to jump you. I think that Joe Biden will win. I think he will take the country in a different direction, one that will eventually make the last four years seem like an evil dream. If a Biden presidency is currently unimaginable, it is because Trump has made the normal world of American politics, good and bad, seem as remote as the Russia of the Czars. 

Trump's total dominance over every aspect of our public life—wherever you look, there he is—has made it harder to perceive that his political hopes are becoming more diminished every day. FiveThirtyEight now reckons that Trump has a 10 percent chance of winning the election; on the eve of the 2016 election, they gave him a 28.6 percent chance of winning. The difference here is more drastic than it might look at first glance. Last time, Trump had better than a 1 in 4 chance of winning; now, he has a 1 in 10 chance of winning. This is "roughly the same as the odds that it’s raining in downtown Los Angeles," the site charmingly notes. To put it more bluntly, if the polls turn out to be exactly as wrong as they were last time, Biden would still win the election. 

We shouldn't forget that Trump's victory in 2016, as shocking as it was, was always less inexplicable than we wanted to believe. Remembering this makes it easier to understand the difference between then and now. In the summer of 2016, Trump pulled ahead of Hillary Clinton in the polls. In 2020, Trump has never, even once, pulled ahead of Joe Biden. Clinton's candidacy was fatally damaged in the final two weeks of the race by FBI Director James Comey's letter to Congress, which caused several key states to flip to Trump. With 48 hours to go until Tuesday, no comparable scandal has appeared to beset Biden. Trump in 2016 was a political unknown with a blank record; Trump in 2020 is a sickeningly familiar quantity whose latest year in office has consisted of one national emergency after another, all of them handled with singular incompetence. People hate him as they have hated no other president in my lifetime. The only people I know who genuinely hate Joe Biden are left-wingers who plan to vote for him anyway. 

But the most important thing is this: As false as they were, Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton worked. People believed them. The attacks on Biden haven't worked. No reasonable person believes that Biden is "senile." And nothing will ever persuade any intelligent person that Biden, a man with a 46-year career of moderate politics, is a bloodthirsty socialist who has spent half a century dreaming of the day when he can abolish private property and send his enemies to the gulag. Even Trump's nickname for Biden, "Sleepy Joe," is one of the weakest in his arsenal. Has anyone in the last 200,000 years ever disliked another person for being “sleepy”? 

A number of observers have insisted that we shouldn't believe the polls, that many people will simply lie to pollsters about whether or not they plan to vote for Trump. In my experience, Trump supporters are more outspoken about their love of their candidate than any other supporters of any candidate I have ever encountered. If any candidate gets the benefit of anyone’s secret support, I suspect it will be Biden, whom much of the political left regards as beneath contempt, just as they despised Clinton, Kerry, Gore, and—though some of them wouldn't admit it—Obama before him. This phenomenon ought to be familiar to anyone who has lived through more than one election. We are always hearing how this year's candidate is the worst one we've had since the candidate we had four years ago, who was even more awful than the previous one, who was a real comedown from the guy who ran before him, who wasn't any good to begin with. 

As Robert Kennedy once lamented to a reporter in private, there are a disturbing number of liberals who would rather lose than win, as long as they can lose with their ideals intact. So let us never forget the single most important thing to know about politics in this country: the point of elections is to win. Without political power, we cannot accomplish anything. When Republicans get a candidate they don't really like, they grit their teeth and vote for them anyway. For once, we should emulate them. 

If Biden wins, he will take office in a country that is broken in every sense of the word. The damage runs far deeper than a ruined economy or a pandemic with no end in sight. Most Americans no longer trust their government; if a vaccine were magically developed tomorrow, one in every three people would refuse to take it. Most Americans no longer trust the press, the courts, or any other political institution. Worst of all, we distrust each other—a situation that leaves us vulnerable to the mercies of the first clever demagogue who hits upon the right formula for setting us at each other's throats. In 2016, it was Donald Trump; next time, it might be someone worse. 

With lack of trust comes cynicism, and with cynicism comes indifference. Why pay attention to something you can’t do anything about? I know people who refuse to discuss what they call "politics" at all. None of my business, they say. Doesn’t make any sense. Too controversial. I listen to these conversations with something close to despair. If politics is none of our business, then our rulers really do rule us with impunity, and the most we can hope for from our government is to be left alone. If this is the case, then democracy is nothing but a pleasant fantasy that we use to ease the burden of living in an authoritarian state. If the public no longer cares about having a democracy, then we will not have a democracy for long. 

I can imagine scenarios where we climb our way out of this morass, where we restore some semblance of public spirit to this deeply damaged country. But all of those scenarios rest on the disappearance of Donald Trump from our public life. So let us wait and see. 

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

So great I couldn’t speak: Little Richard remembered.

Like many people, I knew Little Richard was great before I understood exactly why. I was born in 1982, and I can't remember a time when I wasn't aware of him. He hadn't had a hit in years, but he was as unmistakable a presence in the pop culture of my childhood as Prince or Cyndi Lauper. You'd see him everywhere: ice-skating with Pee-Wee Herman, singing a rock-and-roll version of "Itsy Bitsy Spider" at a piano shaped like a giant spider, or playing Old King Cole to Shelley Duvall's Little Bo Peep. Every time he popped up, he would inevitably be greeted with joy. Not awe or admiration, but joy—how could you not be glad to see Little Richard? For the longest time, though, that was all I knew of him.

Eventually, though, anyone who cares about popular music finds their way back to the wondrous recordings Richard made from 1955 to 1957, when he created, essentially, a new type of music. People love to argue over who invented rock and roll, and there really is no answer that will satisfy everybody. Truthfully, there are plenty of records from the late Forties and early Fifties that sound, more or less, like rock and roll. But nobody had ever sounded like Little Richard before. Nobody had ever even tried to sound like him before. He drew a line between himself and everything that had come before him. You can listen to Jackie Brenston’s 1951 “Rocket 88,” which the textbooks tell us is the first true rock and roll record, and you can hear a hint of what Little Richard would become. But only a hint. 

On song after song, from “Tutti Frutti” to “Kansas City,” you can hear his band struggling to keep up with him, trying to match the incredible speed and momentum of his voice. Richard sang as if he wanted the sound of his voice to break through every barrier in its path, to scorch its way around the entire world. And it did: To a teenage John Lennon, sitting and listening to "Long Tall Sally" at a friend's house in Liverpool, Richard sounded "so great I couldn't speak." 

He still sounds like that. These recordings are still as much fun as ever—and that is not to diminish them one bit, because fun matters as much as anything does in this world. They are also deeply strange, the product of a mysterious person who was utterly in touch with his own mystery. You can't imagine how they must have sounded in the context of Fifties America—that is, the context of a world where there was no Little Richard. Perhaps that is why they have escaped that context so completely; when you hear "Long Tall Sally," you don't think of soda jerks and sock hops, you only think of Little Richard. He created his own world, and he brought it with him. (Stylistically, the Eighties suited him better than the Fifties ever had.) 

It would be easy to reduce Richard to just that—to say he was great because he was weird and he was great because he rocked. But there was more to it than that. Listen to "Rip It Up," where Richard's voice moves from one syllable to the next with the speed, grace, and confidence of a tap dancer: 

Well it's Saturday night and I JUST GOT PAID Foolaboutmymoney DON'T Try to save!

Then listen to "Ooh! My Soul," where Richard roars his way down each verse like a freight train, only to skid to a halt and turn to the audience with a wink, chirping the title phrase like a cartoon character. Then he's off again without missing a beat. Listening to it today, I shake my head in disbelief: How does he do that?

I should know these recordings by heart; I've heard them all dozens, if not hundreds, of times. But they always take me by surprise. I can never quite remember what happens next, whether Richard will sing the next line in his sly, knowing coo or whether he'll crush five words into one or whether he'll make a simple word like "don't" explode like dynamite. I have never put on a Little Richard record and thought "Well, that's the last time I'll ever listen to that," and I suspect few other people do.

I could go on, but the last word should really belong to Little Richard himself. 

At the 1988 Grammy Awards, Little Richard walked on stage to present the award for best new artist. Standing beside, of all people, Buster Poindexter—formerly David Johansen of the New York Dolls—Richard tore open the envelope and declared: "And the best new artist is...ME!" 

As the crowd laughed and cheered, Richard added: "I have never received nothing. Y'all ain't never gave me no Grammy and I been singing for years. I am the architect of rock 'n' roll and they never gave me nothing. And I am the originator!"

Richard said these words with a smile, and the audience responded to his warmth and good humor with delight. He could just as easily have spoken the same words with anger, and it would have been entirely justified. But he didn’t have to. Why bother? He was Little Richard. That was all the glory anyone could ever ask for, and it was his forever. 

But he wasn't kidding, either. After all—he was Little Richard. And when was Little Richard ever kidding? 

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

Trump and the intellectuals.

Many years ago, I reviewed one of David Gelernter's books for my college newspaper. It was, and remains, one of the worst books I have ever read, so poorly written and badly reasoned that it stayed in my mind more vividly than a lot of better books did. Bad books have a way of haunting us, which is probably why we hate them so. The worst movie you see in your life will be gone from your head by the next morning, but the worst book you were forced to read in school will be with you till you take your last breath.

The world and I moved on, but David Gelernter did not stop writing. Now he’s written an essay for The Wall Street Journal in which he claims to have solved the mystery of why “the left” hates Donald Trump so much. Since the article is now trapped behind a paywall, I’ll go ahead and spoil the surprise: The reason, you see, is that Trump is a “typical American,” and leftists hate typical Americans because they hate America.

For Gelernter, of course, “the left” means Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama—mainstream Democrats. It means politicians who have spent their careers trying to win the votes of “typical Americans.” If they do hate such people, they are wise enough to keep it to themselves. Gelernter is not wise enough to keep any of his thoughts to himself. He just lets them fly, uncensored by doubt. This is an actual sentence from his essay:

The president deserves our respect because Americans deserve it—not such fancy-pants extras as network commentators, socialist high-school teachers and eminent professors, but the basic human stuff that has made America great, and is making us greater all the time.

Well, perhaps this is not an actual sentence.

Gelernter accepts the right-wing doctrine that contemporary Democrats are somehow different than the Democrats he grew up with. They are different, of course, but not in a way that he would care about. He just means that the Democrats of his youth talked about the greatness of America more than he thinks today’s Democrats do. He’s oblivious to the fact that Barack Obama spent hundreds of hours during his presidency talking about the greatness of America during Veterans Day speeches and the like, because Gelernter, like other right-wingers, experiences the words of liberals only as filtered through his favorite websites and cable news shows. As far as he’s concerned, the non-conservatives are all working for the same team, and the apparent differences of opinion between, say, a Nancy Pelosi and an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are just a ruse. He’s clearly never met the kind of leftist who spits out the word “liberal” as if they were expelling a wayward gnat from their mouth.

Why does “the left” hate us poor working stiffs so much? Gelernter explains:

The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him…comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife. The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans.

“Insofar as” means “to the extent or degree that.” It does not mean “because.” I personally find it hard to believe that Gelernter’s social circle is swarming with “leftist intellectuals” eager to declare a blanket hatred of all software engineers. I am sure, however, that “teamster” deserves its capital letter, and that members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters overwhelmingly support Democrats. For that matter, factory workers, auto mechanics, machinists, clerks, infantrymen, and stay-at-home mothers are all likely to make less than $50,000 a year, and individuals in that income bracket were overwhelmingly more likely to vote Democratic in the 2016 election. Gelernter doesn’t care about any of that. He doesn’t even nod in the direction of a statistic. He has all the swagger of the loudmouth at the neighborhood bar, and about as much wisdom.

But suppose we grant Gelernter his fantasies about the “typical American.” What does that have to do with Donald Trump? It turns out that Gelernter thinks Trump exemplifies the virtues that make non-liberal America great. These are some of his wholesome, all-American qualities:

Mr. Trump’s vulgarity, his unwillingness to walk away from a fight, his bluntness, his certainty that America is exceptional, his mistrust of intellectuals, his love of simple ideas that work, and his refusal to believe that men and women are interchangeable.

There’s not much here, and what is here isn’t worth much. “Unwillingness to walk away from a fight” is a virtue only if you believe that every fight is worth fighting, which is a belief held only by violent lunatics. As for exceptional America, it was Trump himself who chose to defend Vladimir Putin by sneering, “You think our country’s so innocent?”

Vulgarity, simple, bluntness, mistrust—the very words Gelernter uses to praise Trump say more than the actual sentences he puts them into.

Gelernter’s essay is not very interesting. But it does illustrate an interesting phenomenon: the plight of the right-wing intellectual in the Age of Trump. In 2018, to be a right-winger and an intellectual means that you either have to reject Trump or find some way to defend him. And rejecting Trump, for a right-winger, is not as simple as denouncing Trump as a person. Trump is no longer just Trump. He has made over the entire party in his image. State and local candidates’ careers are made and ruined by what they say about him.

If you are a thoughtful and honest person, as any intellectual should be, it’s bound to occur to you that everything vile about Trump��his ignorance, his racism, his contempt for the law, his endorsement of mob violence—was there in the Republican Party long before he showed up. To reject Trump is to reject those things, but to reject those things is to reject what the right-wing movement always was. When Max Boot broke with the Republicans over Trump, he didn’t just denounce the man, he denounced the movement that had given rise to him. But Boot is, so far, almost the only right-wing intellectual with the courage to do this.

The alternative is to defend Trump—and perhaps a man of “genius,” as Time magazine once described David Gelernter, is just the man to undertake this hazardous mission. Gelernter, alas, can only give us sentences like this, one after another:

Scholarship is fine, but the typical modern intellectual cheapens his learning with politics, and is proud to vary his teaching with broken-down left-wing junk.

Gelernter’s day job has something to do with computers, and his performance here puts one in mind of HAL in 2001. Perhaps the stress of this particular mission was too much for him. 

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

A wonderful and frightening world.

I’ll begin with a confession: I saw two of the best shows of my life back in 2006, and I don’t remember either of them as well as I’d like to. What I really remember is the feeling that I was at something unique, something that would never happen again. As it turned out, I was right.

The first of the shows was The Fall, one of the two greatest bands to come out of the post-punk movement, a genre as brilliant and short-lived as a firefly.  Post-punk came out of the bright flare of British punk in 1977. The name meant what it said: It came, chronologically, after punk, and that seemed to mean it could be anything—any kind of music, any sound you wanted to make. It meant bands with names like Kleenex and Au Pairs and Cabaret Voltaire. Post-punk was there until, one day or one year, it wasn’t. 

But The Fall—a band that spun entirely around the existence of Mark E. Smith, its lead singer and primary songwriter—never went away. I must have seen a hundred references to them in the imported music magazines I pored over as a teenager before I ever heard them. The references were never like the references to other bands, which ran the gamut from jokey to contemptuous to adoring. The Fall were like some natural landmark that had been standing for eons, and people talked about them as if they were at once utterly awe-inspiring and utterly ordinary. When Mark E. Smith died last month, it felt as strange and wrong as if someone had just said that Niagara Falls had run out of water.

And now here they were in Tucson, after scheduling and cancelling two shows since 2002. I thought I would never get to see them. My friends and I heard them blaring from the sidebar at Hotel Congress and rushed to push our way into the crowd to see them. Smith was cigarette-thin, his face wound in a perpetual unreadable scowl. He bobbed around the stage like a dreidel, not seeming to notice the crowd.

The other people in the band were unknown to us; the lineup of The Fall never held still, with members coming and going at Smith’s whim. A week after the show we heard he’d quarreled with the opening act and fired them from the tour; shortly after that, he’d fired the entire lineup of his band. By all accounts Mark E. Smith was one of the crabbiest and most unpredictable souls on the face of the planet. I didn’t regret not meeting him.

And yet I’ve also heard that Mark E. Smith—MES, everyone called him—was a nice guy, sometimes, capable of extraordinary kindness to random people. He opens the last interview he ever gave by telling the interviewer, whom he knew, how happy he was to be talking to him again, and it feels real. Everything his band ever did feels real, even if all but one of the players changed from album to album. Even the titles of those albums—I Am Kurious, Oranj; Hex Induction Hour; Live at the Witch Trials, The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall—are brittle, tetchy, highly suggestive. The repeated chants of “Hey, hey, hey” in “Copped It” haunt me like a voice that followed me out of a dream. 

Their sound was tightly focused around a few elements—a clip-clop beat that reminded you sometimes of a carousel horse going round and round, humming keyboard notes as bright and vivid as kindergarten construction paper colors, and MES himself reciting his strange magical-realist poetry in a voice as flat as concrete. And that was The Fall, for decades and decades, and it is unreal to imagine them gone.

I got to see postpunk’s other greatest band, The Slits, a few months later—at the same venue, oddly enough. The Slits were a band so strange they didn’t seem to be of this Earth. They were, at least at first, a trio of teenage girls who came from the original punk scene—they toured with The Clash before they had quite learned to play their instruments—and their music sounded like no other phenomenon. Their style, which in their first performances came close to being completely atonal noise, had by the time of their first album evolved into something that moved like slowed-down reggae but also stopped and started at random, with squeaks and trills and ghostly moans and other noises you couldn’t quite categorize hissing out of the speakers like those cans of compressed air. And that was what they sounded like when I saw them.

In one of the strangest moments of my life as a writer, I got to briefly interview lead singer Ari Up. I don’t have the tape of the interview anymore—I recorded it on my friend’s phone and couldn’t figure out how to save it—but it was less an “interview” than a rambling conversation that went all over the place, and from which I ended up having to extract a few uncharacteristically normal-sounding quotes for the story I wrote for my university newspaper the next day, which I’m still proud of. It was, actually, a conversation that felt very much like a Slits song.

Ari Up died of cancer in 2010, and I still remember the sense of shock and grief I felt, probably harder than I would have felt otherwise because I had met her. But it wasn’t shock I could share with the world, not like the deaths of Joe Strummer or David Bowie. A few months after that, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex—whose 1977 album Germfree Adolescents is as magical and luminous as snow on Christmas Eve—died, and I felt grieved that, for all the world seemed to care, she hadn’t even existed. Even now, when people talk about punk, nobody ever mentions X-Ray Spex. And, for that matter, they rarely mention The Slits. Did they even matter?

They did. Nothing I have heard since underlines the sheer strangeness of existence, the unlikeliness of being alive, so well as these now-ancient records by people who weren’t so much aspiring rock stars as they were aspiring cranks and weirdos—not pursuing success so much as pursuing an impenetrably private vision, and turning themselves into the artists they needed to be in order to express it. It’s no surprise that many of them, once they were done communicating that vision, just disappeared back into private life. What was unique about The Fall was that they never got to the end of their own vision, never exhausted what it had to give them—and us. Had their singer not been mortal, you felt they could have kept on going for centuries.

I thought of all this when Mark E. Smith died last month, of all the music that engulfed my life when I was younger, the bands that meant so much to me. I feel a strange sense of grief that I’ve spent so much of my subsequent life not listening to these bands, not even thinking about them. I never feel guilty for not listening to The Beatles, my favorite band at the age of 14, though I’m always delighted to come back to them—The Beatles, I somehow feel, are doing just fine without me. But these bands feel precious and personal to my world, like a houseplant that will wither if I don’t pay enough attention to it. This sound felt like my sound, waiting to be discovered, when I was in my late teens, and no matter how many other bands I come to like and enjoy throughout my life, no other sound will ever be that sound.

Perhaps you have a band like this—perhaps even just a song. As likely as not, your band is not my band. Even if it is, the songs that move you are probably not the ones that move me—and even if they are, we are probably moved by different things. But it doesn’t matter, because what we feel is really the same. And if I feel braver now after finding my way back to these records, readier to talk back to a world that never stops trying to shut all of us up, I can only hope that the records that mattered like this to you, that promised you your own universe, can do the same for you. 

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

Donald vs. the Declaration.

“The Declaration of Independence makes a difference,” said Herman Melville. So, we might respond, what difference does it make? When National Public Radio tweeted the words of the Declaration over Independence Day, the tweets were seized on by supporters of President Donald J. Trump who called them "propaganda," mistaking Thomas Jefferson's condemnation of King George III for a "biased" liberal attack against their hero. Other people dismissed the tweets as "spam" and wondered if NPR's account had been hacked, perhaps misled by what The Washington Post called the Declaration's "capitalization of random words."

Indeed, the unfamiliar orthography of the Declaration, awkwardly broken up into the familiar bumpy cadence of a Twitter thread, 140-character blurbs popping up on your phone like phantomic texts from the eighteenth century, made it feel right at home in the context of Twitter. The author of America's founding document was just another guy on the internet, typing furiously into the void, maybe checking back every 20 seconds to see if anyone had responded yet.

For Melville, the Declaration meant freedom to write, freedom to blaspheme, freedom from any constraints on radical thought. For most Americans, it has long since lost any transcendental meaning it may have once had. Nobody recites it in class or learns it by heart. We're most likely to encounter it in a textbook, and I suspect most students skim Jefferson's long list of charges against the king. If you don't thrill to the melodramatic charge of eighteenth-century American prose, each line surging toward the sun and tumbling down on you like an ocean wave, the Declaration is probably a bit of a bore.

For the hapless Trump supporters who bumped into its scrambled, out-of-context lines on Twitter, though, the Declaration came to life again. It shocked and infuriated them. They were ready to call for a boycott or worse. How dare anyone write such things. Imagine their horror, these poor confused souls, when they came face to face with themselves—when they realized that they had been spitting and shouting against their own country on its birthday. It must have been like one of those terrible moments in a dream that haunts you for hours after you awaken, an obscure revelation that you can't figure out before it fades and leaves you forever.

Unless, of course, they did recognize it—and some of them did. Perhaps it is not their nightmare, but our nightmare—our fear that, between the Declaration of Independence and Donald J. Trump, plenty of Americans will side with Trump. Better that than embrace the idea that all humans are created equal, a concept that they may accept in a textbook but not in their own lives. “Literally no one is going to read 5000 tweets about this trash,” yelped one alt-right type, clearly understanding what NPR was up to. You can feel the rage quivering in that line, the impatience bleeding out of it. Rage that NPR even exists. Impatience at the reminder of the old country, a country where Donald J. Trump was not yet our president. That person, whoever he is, saw the Declaration of Independence for what it was and called it "trash." That is entirely fitting. In fact, it has happened before.

In 1951, at the height of McCarthyism, a Wisconsin reporter typed up a copy of the Declaration and the Bill of Rights, made it look like a petition, and took it to a Fourth of July celebration at a park. He showed the petition to 112 people, and only one person would agree to sign it. Some people did not want to sign any petition because they feared that making any political statement at all could be twisted and used against them, but others took the words of their own country's founding documents for a "radical petition" penned by communists, and denounced the reporter for even showing it to them. "That might be from the Russian Declaration of Independence, but you can't tell me that it is ours," one woman angrily informed the reporter.

It is ours, whether we want it or not. It would be easy, after all, to bury the Declaration under a mountain of conscientious objections. It is a wild, fearless assertion of absolute freedom and universal equality composed by a man who did not, in his own life, honor either of those principles. It was not an objective description of the world as it was in 1776. It was an arrow fired into the future. Sometimes it still strikes us and draws blood.

Perhaps it is only in moments of existential fear that we rediscover the radicalism of our revolution, of the rebellion against unjust power that gave us our country. Then the familiar lines of the Declaration become unfamiliar, and their flinty words begin to scrape against each other and make noise again. It is radical, after all, to say that when a people is threatened by a despot, "it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government." When the country has been seized by a McCarthy or a Trump, it becomes the most radical sentiment imaginable.

Nobody knows how many Americans understand this or even believe it, but we may have a clue. Of the 113 tweets that made up NPR's Declaration marathon, the one most retweeted was this: "A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

Last night.

When I woke up this morning, I knew I was going to spend a lot of today wondering whether I should have done anything differently. Whether we could have done anything more to stop this. I'm sure a lot of you feel the same way.

But consider this:

Hillary Clinton won this election. She won the votes of more Americans than her opponent. Most of us wanted her to be our president. She should have been giving that victory speech last night, and our tears last night should have been tears of joy.

Just like in 2000, a victory that should have gone to a candidate chosen by the people of this country was awarded to a candidate chosen by an absurd and senseless device known as the electoral college. How absurd and senseless is it? I've been reading and thinking about American politics for my entire adult life, and I still stammer when somebody asks me how the electoral college works, or why we have it. The shortest answer is, it doesn’t work and we shouldn’t have it. 

Because our country continues to rely on this ridiculous system to decide who gets to hold the most powerful office in the world, we do not actually vote for the president. We vote for a bunch of electors who then cast their own votes. Most of the time, they vote for the people we chose—and sometimes they don't. They aren't legally required to in most states. At least one Democratic elector this year announced that he would not vote for Hillary Clinton on "principle." 

Because of the electoral college, it doesn't matter how many votes a candidate earns; all that matters is that a candidate get the right amount of votes in the right combination of states. We sometimes call elections popularity contests, but they really aren’t. They’re more like elaborate poker games, with both players sweating over their pencils as they try to calculate the right bets to place.

Many of us take this state of affairs for granted. Last night tells us why we should not.

The electoral college means that we do not have a direct say in choosing the person who picks new Supreme Court justices, who appoints the heads of federal agencies, who commands the most powerful military in the history of the world. It means that presidential elections aren't about who can win the votes of the people, but who can triumph—by however slim a margin—in three or four "important" states. It means that some votes matter more than others. A handful of people decided the outcome of last night's election. That's not okay.

The electoral college may have made some sense in 1787, when nobody had ever voted in a national presidential election, and when few Americans even had the right to vote. It makes no sense now. It stands in the way of democracy. Those who insist that the Constitution was immaculately conceived should ask themselves what our country would look like today if we had never changed it. Did you know that the vice presidency used to go to the candidate who came in second?

An election system without the electoral college would have given us President Al Gore instead of President George W. Bush. It would have given us eight years of peace and prosperity, instead of war and recession. And it would have kept us safe from the unspeakable man preparing to move his suitcases into the White House.

If I sound angry, it’s because I am. This is the most painful event I’ve ever lived through. I don’t know what will happen in the next four years. But I do know that we tried to reject the hate, the lies, and the fear being spread by that unspeakable man. It was painfully close, but we did it. We voted for a smart, capable woman to be our president. And that victory was stolen from us by a political contrivance left over from the days when it was legal to own a human being.

Vote, we all said on Tuesday morning. Voting matters. Every vote counts. But if our votes had been accurately reflected in the outcome of the election, a candidate who was overwhelmingly supported by women and people of color would have been declared the winner, not a candidate who appealed to angry white voters by demonizing everybody else in the country. Our system betrayed the people who voted for the rightful winner on Tuesday. How can we look them in the eye today and say that every vote counts? 

Abolishing the electoral college will not undo what happened last night. But we must do it anyway. Because we deserve better than this. We deserve a country that represents all of us—not simply the angry and the privileged. If it cannot be that, then it is our country no longer. 

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

The last election.

Has any other election seemed so much like it could turn out to be the last one we ever have? Perhaps the 1932 election, deep in the fog of the Depression, with a hapless President Hoover ordering the army to rough up the penniless veterans who were camping out on the lawn of the Capitol and burn their tents. (The commander of that mission was none other than Douglas MacArthur, Donald Trump's favorite general.) Before that, we have to go back to the eve of civil war. There isn't much to prepare us for the world that might await us beyond Tuesday night.

Three possibilities stand before us. First, Trump wins. We can probably expect an immediate wave of resignations from every level of the executive branch, every agency, by people who do not want to work for Donald Trump. We can also expect Trump to fire anybody who offends him. All of these people will be replaced by the new president's hand-picked flunkies. We can probably expect a financial crisis, as panicked investors flee the markets that Trump has promised to play dice with. We can expect the opening stages of an international crisis, swirling around Trump's vows to "tear up" the Iran deal, to refuse to defend America's NATO allies, to "cancel" the Paris climate agreement, to pull out of NAFTA and every other trade agreement he dislikes. In other words, much of the damage will be accomplished simply by a Trump victory; he doesn't even have to take the oath of office to lay siege to our democracy.

Second, Clinton wins by a wide margin. This victory could conceivably be accompanied by crushing blows to the Republican Party across the country, at the entire party suffers from its association with Trump. The Democrats have a good shot at winning back the Senate (they need to defend 10 seats and win at least 4 of the seats controlled by Republicans), but they'd need to win 30 seats to win back the House of Representatives. Clinton, thanks to her three astounding performances in three straight debates, would take office with the wind at her back; the email gobbledygook will be old news the day after the election.

The third possibility is, for me, the most disturbing: Clinton wins, but the race is close enough that Trump refuses to concede his loss. It doesn't even have to be that close; Trump is already gearing up for a fight. The nightmare would begin as soon as the race was called for Clinton. Trump could conceivably challenge any close race in any state, bellowing that it had been "rigged" against him. And he might not be alone. The Republicans have spent years crying up the menace of "voter fraud," a statistically non-existent "problem" that they have used as an excuse to make it more difficult to vote in many parts of the country. Now the specter of "stolen" elections can be used to question the legality of any election won by a Democrat. Nothing the Republicans have done in the last decade -- repeatedly shutting down the government, risking America's credit rating, holding up judicial nominations -- suggests that they would hesitate to put their own interests before the good of the country.

If the Supreme Court were once again asked to weigh in on a disputed state election, there is a very real risk that there would be a tie. Thanks to the Republican Congress's refusal to hold hearings for Merrick Garland, President Obama's nomination to replace the late Antonin Scalia, the Court only has eight members. So the judgment would have to go to a lower court. Imagine this happening in multiple states. None of this would be likely to result in Trump being handed the election, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have an effect. Clinton, like George W. Bush in 2001, would take office under a cloud; Clinton, unlike Bush, would be facing an opposition that refuses to acknowledge the basic legitimacy of any Democratic president.

Which of these scenarios will play out on Tuesday? I hope and believe that it will be the second one, and that by Wednesday night all of this will seem like a bad dream. The 1932 election, which seemed like the stuff of nightmares, ended with FDR sweeping into the White House to save us from revolution or ruin. But this election is different. We can pick only one of two doors. Behind one door waits the world of increased tolerance and enlightenment that President Obama and millions of Americans have fought for these past eight years; behind another door waits only darkness. In less than 96 hours, we will know what we chose.

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

A dangerous man.

Last Tuesday, aspiring gangster Donald Trump told some of his adoring followers that Hillary Clinton “wants to abolish the Second Amendment” and suggested that maybe they should do something about it. The people who work for him, of course, were quick to assure us that he did not really mean what he seemed to be saying. All he meant, they insisted, was that people should vote against Hillary Clinton.

He was lying, and so were the people he pays to lie on his behalf. What Trump said, as you can see for yourself on YouTube, was that, if Clinton became president, she would get to choose Supreme Court judges who would take away the right to own a gun; in that event, he said, there would be “nothing you can do, folks.” And then: “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.”

It remains unclear whether Trump meant that the “horrible day” would be the day of the election, the day Hillary Clinton installed new judges on the Supreme Court (all of them on the same day?), or the day when his loyal followers took to the streets with their guns to go to war with the Clinton regime. Trump, who usually seems to have forgotten one sentence by the time he’s finished with the next, probably didn’t really know himself what he meant. But it is absolutely clear what he meant when he said that “maybe there is” something that “the Second Amendment people” could do about Clinton. He was not saying that they could vote against her, because his words implied that there was something specific that “the Second Amendment people” could do about Clinton that other people could not.

There is no ambiguity there. Trump, in his garbled way, was clearly referring to the popular notion that the Second Amendment is designed to give every person in America the power and ability to overthrow the government, should the government get too high and mighty. That theory is an utter lie. For the first hundred years that it existed, the Second Amendment was overwhelmingly considered to be about state governments’ right to maintain their own militias. The Second Amendment did not turn into a different law simply because state militas became obsolete. Even the Supreme Court’s current stance does not support the “insurrectionist” theory. It has no legal basis at all. It was invented by the gun lobby, who have used it to convince the public that the “right” to own a deadly weapon is no less precious than the right to publish a newspaper. But nobody has ever taken it further than Trump, who has offhandedly suggested that his followers should take up arms against the government in the event that he loses the election.

And, of course, Trump’s call to violence itself rested on a shameless lie. Even a Supreme Court entirely composed of liberal justices could not unilaterally abolish the right to own a handgun, since the Supreme Court does not write legislation. At most, a liberal-majority Supreme Court could reverse the Court’s previous verdict that the Second Amendment protects the right to own a handgun, but this would not take away a single individual’s gun. In order to abolish handguns, a liberal House and Senate would have to approve such a bill, a liberal president would have to sign it, and a liberal Supreme Court would have to rule in its favor after it was challenged. It is not clear whether Donald Trump knows this, and is simply lying, or whether he does not know it, and is simply stupid. Both of these scenarios seem entirely possible.

The moment when it seemed just barely conceivable that Donald Trump could win the election is over. He can scarcely expand his appeal any further than it already is, while Hillary Clinton can appeal not only to her own party but to anybody and everybody who is appalled by Trump and what he stands for—independents, left-wing critics of the Democratic Party, disgruntled Republicans, even people who have never voted. Trump hasn’t even tried to appeal to anybody who didn’t fall in love with him right away. He can’t go a day without saying that Russia never invaded Ukraine or that Barack Obama is the founder of ISIS. Having won the nomination, all he needed to do to remain a serious contender was to keep his mouth shut while his campaign quietly assured everybody that he wasn’t as crazy as he sounded. Having failed to do that, he’s virtually ensured that he’ll spend the next three months wasting his money (or Vladimir Putin’s) and then suffer a humiliating defeat.

But we may never recover from what Trump has done to us. He has changed the limits of what it is possible to do and say in public, for the worse. He has made it possible to threaten the life of his opponent and continue on with his campaign as if nothing very serious has happened. But after a year of Trump, it scarcely seems surprising. Over that year, he has done his best to dredge up all of the blind rage and hatred and resentment and racist fury that can be found in every state, every city, every neighborhood. He has made it far more acceptable to be openly and unapologetically racist, hateful, and misogynistic than it was before he began his campaign. That was the entire basis of his campaign, and it is likely to be his only real legacy.

The Republican Party that stands behind Trump is utterly corrupt from top to bottom. Sixteen years after nominating and electing the worst president in American history and allowing him to wreck the economy and shatter the peace of the world, they have managed to find somebody worse. Much worse. If he is qualified to serve as president, then there is nobody who is not qualified. We would be better off dialing a random number and inviting whoever answered the phone to start moving their furniture into the Oval Office.

Every single Republican who refuses to condemn Trump deserves to be turned out of office. There is no earthly reason why anybody should trust their judgment on anything ever again. If all of them repented of the evil they have abetted and spent the next 10 years working in soup kitchens, it would not undo the lasting damage they have done to our country in enabling the rise of the single most dangerous person ever to stand as a serious candidate for the presidency. It would be nothing but justice if the entire party fell apart after November, unable to find even a single person stupid enough to give them a dime for any future election. Is it too much to hope for? 

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

His blood-stained hands.

In the moments before Donald Trump announced his choice of running mate, Vox’s Ezra Klein told us, reporters found themselves staring at “an empty podium and the Rolling Stones blasting through the speakers.” What was the song chosen for this momentous occasion? “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The song has been background noise for Trump’s rallies for months, even though the Stones asked the candidate to cease and desist back in February. What is it doing there?

To the kind of people who program event playlists, the song probably seems like just another classic rock joint, with an irresistible joke in the title—you guys may not want Donald Trump, but you need him. And that is probably all the thought that went into it. This song, however, is different. To those of us brought up on Stones lore, the song is inseparable from certain images. Brian Jones drowning in a swimming pool. Mick Jagger declaiming lines from Shelley at his tribute concert as if they were nineteenth century Stones lyrics—“Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep/He hath awakened from the dream of life…” Hell’s Angels beating Stones fans with pool cues and motorcycle chains; Meredith Hunter, a young black man, stabbed to death; Jagger watching the footage of the killing in the film Gimme Shelter, muttering “It’s so horrible.”

All of this is in the song, even if you know about none of it. It’s there in the spooky gorgeousness of the choir, in the way Jagger slows down each line so you can visualize what’s happening—“I was standing in line, with Mister Jimmy”—and in the words themselves. They are so simple, blunt, and mysterious that they can easily get into your life and walk around with you, coming to mind unbidden at the oddest moments. I rarely decide to have a soda without the words “my favorite flavor, cherry red” going through my head. Trump may have more money than you or I, but he will never be able to buy this song and everything it means. He isn’t the singer; he’s the devil, standing in line with the singer, eager to buy up another soul.

If Trump is the devil, this is his season in hell. Rick Perlstein, who has covered a few Republican conventions, says that compared to the outright fascist experiences of 2004, 2008, and 2012, Trump’s convention “feels like a festival.” The festival that jumps to mind is Altamont. People have been beaten, choked, kicked, groped, pepper-sprayed, and hit with rocks at Trump’s events. Keith Richards told the violent hooligans at his concert to knock it off; Donald Trump tells them they’re doing a heckuva job. And there, playing in the background, is “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” with those familiar words—the abused demonstrators, the sold souls, the blood-stained hands—taking on new meaning.

If you’re feeling as despairing as I am about the way things are going, it might help to learn that the Stones had their own altercation with Trump, way back in 1989. Keith flung a knife down on a table, the stage crew picked up some hockey sticks, and when the dust had settled, Trump had fled the building. If Trump and his goons can’t beat the Rolling Stones, they don’t stand a chance against the rest of us.

The question is, what song can the Democrats play in response? The only answer Trump deserves is “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” by the Clash, which ends, in Joe Strummer’s words, thus: “If Adolf Hitler flew in today/They’d send a limousine anyway.”

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

Echoes.

On Thursday night, I sit hunched up on the red couch in my living room with the television on, scrolling through article after article on my smartphone. A siren howls down the street and I open the door to peer out into the dark. A neighborhood cat returns my stare with wide-eyed alarm. All is calm out there, as it never seems to be anywhere else.

The late-night news is full of Dallas, the first reports all the more frightening because this news seems to come so quickly on the heels of the two police-committed murders, awful stories that made me flinch with fury and despair, that made me feel a sort of hopelessness I try never to feel. Now, in the dark, these reports feel overwhelming to read. No longer is the news confined to "the news," a half-hour of your evening; the news now comes at you from all directions, prying into every inch of your private mental space.

And yet these stories have lost much of their capacity to surprise, to shock, to haunt us for months and years and even decades. It is 2016, and we have more access to more sources of news than ever before, more opportunities to learn and understand our lives than any people who lived before us ever had—and the only story that never goes away is Donald Trump. Everything else appears and disappears. I wonder if any historian can convey a sense of how it feels to drift from one awful worldwrecking event to the next, and the strange helplessness that seems to engulf you when you try to comprehend a world in which such things can happen on a regular basis.

Perhaps you have to be here to understand it. I have spent much of my life trying to imagine what it was like to live in a different time, to learn about something as it was happening, to experience another world the way long-forgotten people experienced it. Perhaps we will always talk about this strange week the way people still talk about certain weeks in 1968. Perhaps future historians will be scrolling through these same stories, these same Facebook posts and frantic Tweets, trying to convey a sense of what it felt like to be here.

Why is it important to know that? After all, history is, by definition, about a world that is not ours. It gives us the chance to stand outside of ourselves, to understand the hurts and fears and hopes of people who were not us. It does not give us anything new, nothing that can be made into hot takes and thinkpieces and "must-see" video clips. It cannot sing us any new songs. It can give us only echoes.

As I scroll through one article about the Dallas shooting, sitting there on my red couch, a map of the area stops me short. Can the names of the streets—Elm, Main—really be the same? Initial reports suggest multiple gunmen, firing down into a crowd; the Dallas police chief speaks at one point of four different snipers nested in different positions. There are conflicting reports about where the shots came from...

Eight months ago, I went to Dallas and spent many hours walking around the downtown area. I walked past that Bank of America and that parking garage; they were not then what they are now. They were ordinary. I spent at least three or four hours a few blocks away from the site of last week's shooting, in Dealey Plaza. That, too, was once ordinary—a freeway overpass, two sloping hills of green grass, a fence, a parking lot, and a rather nondescript red-brick building. You'd drive through it without thinking twice if you didn't know what it was.

"We live in a banana republic now," a fellow said to me as we stood on the overpass watching the cars go by. He shook his head, as if he still could not believe it. We spoke openly to each other, with no introductions needed. We were there for the same reason. "I think someone could make that shot," a woman remarked to me, squinting at the masking-tape X that somebody had placed, rather distastefully, in the middle of the street. She had made the vigil from Vermont to see this place, so much did it mean to her. "I think this would be a very different country today if he had lived." There was quiet conviction behind those words.

Sitting on the plane to Dallas all those months ago, I had moments where I thought I was crazy. What was I doing, going to a city where I knew nobody, had no practical reason to be? Only when I got there did I understand. I felt that conviction, too. Coming to that place was an act of solidarity with your fellow citizens, a statement that you understood the enormity of what had happened here. You understood that it had happened to all of us, including those of us not yet born. You understood that it was not a joke. 

If you stand at the corner of Elm and Houston for a long time, as I did, you inevitably begin to listen to what people are saying as they walk by. All of them look up, up at that window. All of them glance over at the fence, standing atop what a frantic reporter, way back on the first day, fatefully dubbed a "grassy knoll." All of them are talking about it. Nobody is talking about anything else. This place sucks all of the world out of you as you walk by, and you can't think about anything else until you leave.

I have spent many hours over the last three years trying to imagine what it must have felt like to stand there at that moment, as if that would unlock the puzzle. So much eyewitness testimony exists, so many details; a person could spend a lifetime sifting through it all, putting one piece of evidence against another, and wondering what it means. People who claim they know exactly what happened, end of story, are trying to fool you. Nobody knows what happened.

Even so, there has been a concerted effort to deny that mystery. As blogger Joe Cannon put it: "Twenty years ago, all major newspapers routinely referred to Oswald as the 'accused assassin' or the 'presumed assassin.' Now he is called the assassin, with no caveats." They did that in The New York Times this week, and they do it on Wikipedia. This is not an evidence-based change in editorial policy; there has been no new investigation in the last 20 years. (The last official one, in 1979, said that there had been more than one shooter.) It is an ideological change. It simply won't do to discuss certain things in front of the children—that is, in front of the American people.

This decision had consequences for us all. Because we never found out what happened, the trauma was never resolved. The more it nagged at us, the more frantically the government and the media tried to hush us, wave us away from the scene of the crime, insist that there was nothing to see here. We could not recover from it.

For many Americans, history stopped making sense to them after Dallas—the first Dallas. The echoes of those gunshots are with us today, poisoning our public life. An angry and cynical public, distrust of government, apathy toward voting, a willingness to buy into the most absurd conspiracy theories, a sense that we have all been cheated out of something. Imagine our country without that poison.

What is the answer? I'm sure I don't know, but I think the best way to begin might be to listen to each other. There is a moment, brief and precious, after every national catastrophe in which everybody is talking at once, all about the same thing. That moment is gone before you know it, and nothing you say later feels quite the same. If we can listen to each other now, before the echoes of this dreadful event have faded away, perhaps we can move a step closer to making a world in which things like this don’t happen. 

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

Something did change.

This has to stop. It can't continue to happen like this. Never again. But it never stops. It does continue to happen. And the real answer is not never again, but "always again."

Of course, there is no longer any "we," and that is part of the problem. There is an ever-stronger consensus from the people of America that real gun control is necessary—and an equally strong consensus that real gun control can never happen. Neither of these voices is winning, but neither of them is losing. They are caught in a conversational loop that never ends.

That loop has tightened around us all. None of us can venture into the conversation without being greeted with the same old platitudes, as dense and immovable as boulders. Gun control won't stop criminals. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. I don't know about you, but I won't feel safer if the government has a monopoly on weapons. These are empty words and empty sentiments. Gun control would indeed help prevent criminal massacres of innocents. Guns make it much easier to kill people. And the federal government has long possessed weapons that could wipe out the entire population of the Earth many times over.

These facts make no dent on the real world. Right-wing Republicans have eagerly fed their constituents' most unlikely illusions for years. They have shamelessly encouraged their loyal voters to believe that the federal government, which provides them with pensions and free health care in their dotage, is their bitterest enemy, and to believe that tyrannical Washington bureaucrats are forever scheming to pick their pockets and swipe their handguns. Most unforgivably, they have idly encouraged their listeners to indulge in the horrible fantasy that, one day, they will get to shoot it out with their hated enemies.

The radical right has drummed out this insidious message day after day, month after month, year after year. On talk radio, on television, on Twitter, on every vehicle they can get their hands on. They have backed it up with suggestions that their political foes are not really American, are not worthy of even the most basic consideration as fellow human beings. I have lost track of the number of occasions when I thought that Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly or Sarah Palin had finally gone too far, and that now public opinion would begin to turn against them. That will never happen. Going too far is what they do. It is all they do. They are paid to go too far.

This hideous propaganda campaign has changed the temper of the country. It has injected a new and terrible bitterness into countless people who feel themselves left behind by a changing world, who feel themselves excluded from whatever happiness it is that others enjoy. It has created a world in which people walk around shaking with blind, unquenchable rage at everything they are not and everything they cannot have. And it has given them ways to express that bitterness and rage.

Don't read the comments, all my sensible friends say. Don't read the anonymous comments that litter every single article on the Internet, filled with every unspeakable sentiment it is possible to have. But I do read them, sometimes. They tell us what is happening to us and to our country in a way that no calm, objective analysis ever could. They tell us what we are fast becoming.

For not all of us feel that same rage and bitterness. Some of us are the objects of it. Ever since Barack Obama was elected president eight years ago, cynics have been telling us that nothing has changed. Nothing could change, and only suckers could believe otherwise. We have been hearing that for eight years. Either Obama has done nothing at all, or he is just as bad as George W. Bush. ("Worse," according to Noam Chomsky, and probably plenty of people on your Twitter feed.)

But something did change. The very fact of Obama as president, as the face of the country, as its moral conscience, as its most prominent person, shook the country to its core. It drove some people mad with anxiety and resentment. But it released some of us. America has changed profoundly since 2008, in ways that may never be counted. Racist and sexist words and actions that would once have been tacitly ignored have been powerfully exposed. Mainstream journalists used to speak of "tolerance" toward the LGBTQ community, as if they were perpetual outsiders who would have to be put up with; now that community feels like the real America that mainstream journalism is struggling to catch up to. All of us who were once outsiders are now at home here in a way that we were not before. It is our country that we are fighting for, against a backlash that threatens to wipe out everything we have achieved.

President Obama has not been primarily responsible for these changes, but he has been, in a deep and mysterious way, at the center of them. Presidents set the tone for the entire country; think of how Kennedy affected his era, or Roosevelt his. As a man of tremendous grace and compassion, who always seems to speak the words the country needs to hear, and as a man who has carefully avoided demonizing the people who hate him, Obama has subtly and almost intangibly changed the atmosphere around us. Think, for example, of how easily Obama has sidestepped the casual sexism that comes so easily to so many other prominent men. We did not get the kind of changes that some people thought they voted for in 2008, but we may have gotten something greater.

But every action, as we learned in physics class, unleashes an equal and opposite reaction. Nobody can know, really, what was going on in the head of the maniac who was responsible for this latest massacre, just as nobody knows what is really going on in the heads of the people who beat up demonstrators at Donald Trump rallies, or the people who spew hatred and venom out of every corner of the Internet. But we know what they are trying to destroy. They cannot abide the community of openness and tolerance that is blossoming in our troubled country.

Five years ago, a madman shot several people at a Safeway in my town. Some of them were people I had known and worked with; one of them was my congressional representative who, miraculously, survived. I have tried to write about it numerous times, but I have always abandoned the effort; it was too painful. Everything I wrote seemed inadequate; the words were hollow and meaningless next to the raw, horrible facts of what had happened.

That is why I hesitate to lecture anyone about what happened this week. The world we live in is too complex and fragile and precious to be turned into anybody’s opinion piece. But one thought is inescapable to me: The changes we have fought for in the past eight years are real and precious, and they must never be lost. We must nurture and appreciate them. And we must never give up. 

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

What she wore.

When I was 22, I listened to "Raspberry Beret" almost every day. I don't remember ever turning it on, deciding I was sick of it, and turning it off. None of it ever got old: The lightly dancing drums that opened the song on a slippery, off-balance note; the surprisingly gentle shout of "One! Two! One, two, three, four!", with the singer holding back after each word as if he's got all the time in the world to tell his story; then straight into that wonderful, spacey, swoony theme, which sways up and down the way doo-wop songs used to sway back and forth. The song, in some mysterious way, helped me understand myself; it took many listens before I really tried to understand the song. 

The song is about more than the story it tells: The singer works at a lousy diner with a boss who pushes him around, and one day a girl walks in "through the out door" and they end up going on a bike ride on an overcast day and taking shelter from the storm in a barn. It is about the mystery of the beret itself -- the raspberry-colored beret she wears, the article of clothing that catches his eye, that pushes him to talk to her, that changes the color of his day. If he hadn't noticed the beret, nothing would have happened. One little detail can change everything, shove you down an unexpected corridor, leave you wondering what just happened to you. All of it was there, not in the words, but in the way he sang them. 

As it happens, "Raspberry Beret" is one of the few Prince videos you can actually find online today. It's a self-directed masterpiece, complete with wacky animation, beautiful costumes, and the artist himself fixing the camera with that unforgettable stare. It explains nothing; it's simply a colorful wrapping-paper for this inexplicable sweet orange of a song. 

Prince's catalog is as vast as the ocean, and it contains treasures upon unfathomable treasures. Subtle, tricky melodies that enter your bloodstream and stay there. Unexpected words that flip up in the middle of a song like a flung playing card. Sound that seems to warp like space itself. I remember first hearing a snatch of "Little Red Corvette" when I was young and sort of veering back in alarm: What the heck was that? The song seemed to flicker on and off like a loopy light switch, with Prince appearing and disappearing, whispering and cooing, haunting his own song like a ghost. But sheer joy shone through all the weirdness, brighter than the sun. You felt warm as you listened. 

That was Prince's legacy; like no one else since his idol Little Richard, his music captured the occasional pure joy of being alive, and translated it into a sound strong enough to blow almost anyone else off the stage. Yet his persona wasn't macho and overwhelming like some stars; he wasn't there to prove his superiority to you. It was as if he'd materialized out of nowhere, dazzled you, then disappeared. 

With precious few exceptions, most of the real-life parties I've been to in my life have been a letdown. But the parties Prince threw in his music were always wonderful, and everyone was always welcome. 

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

A century of Ramona.

Some people daydream about moving to Paris, but my utopia was always Klickitat Street, the street where Ramona Quimby lived. I don't think it ever occurred to me that it might be a real street, and that you could really go there. Like most readers, I unconsciously superimposed my own neighborhood onto the world of Beverly Cleary's books; when Henry Huggins found forty-nine boxes of bubble gum abandoned in an alley, I thought of my own neighborhood's alleys, which never seemed to have anything other than crabgrass and discarded soda cups.

When Greer and I went to Portland a few years ago, we eagerly sought out the little park near Cleary's childhood home, where statues of Ramona and Henry and Ribsy have frolicked since 1991. (Ramona, of course, is splashing in the fountain, as she must have always wanted to do.) Remember when Henry spent all night trying to dig up nightcrawlers so he could go on that fishing trip with his dad? This is the park where he did it, on his hands and knees in the wet grass, clutching a flashlight. But I couldn't quite believe that—I still thought of it as the little park down the street from my own house.

"I wonder if Klickitat Street is near here," I said as we pulled away from the park, then glanced up at a street sign. We were here.

As it happens, the real Klickitat Street is made up of homes that were built back in the '20s and '30s, so it doesn't resemble my old neighborhood at all. All the same, I can't help but feel that I grew up there anyway.

If you listen to the kind of curmudgeons who think that the world has become an incomprehensibly miserable place, there's no reason anybody should read Beverly Cleary anymore. But they do, and everybody seems to have greeted her one hundredth birthday with genuine warmth and affection. How lovely it is to think that she's lived to be a hundred. Who deserves it more?

Cleary's books about the Klickitat Street characters—Ramona, her sister Beezus, Henry, and his dog Ribsy—unfold in an environment that seems impossibly tranquil and unworried beside our own. These children drift to and from the bus stop, wander into vacant lots, ride their bikes, build clubhouses. Nobody has a smartphone, and television is a novelty. Yet these books last, and do not even feel particularly dated. Why?

Unlike most people, Cleary remembered what it was like to be a child, and she caught that feeling and brought it to life with unpretentious clarity. She remembered that childhood is, among other things, a long series of attempts to understand things that nobody will explain to you. Remember when Ramona names her doll "Chevrolet," and is hurt when nobody shares her opinion that it's a "beautiful" name? She remembered that some adults condescend to children, and that children recognize and learn to avoid those particular adults. Most of all, she remembered that children—unlike adults—are almost always trying to do the right thing.

When Ramona first appears in the Henry Huggins books, she isn't much more than an annoying brat. When Cleary began writing books about Ramona, she went inside Ramona's head and showed us that, in fact, Ramona almost always means well, and that her mischief usually originates in a sincere attempt to impress somebody or follow the rules. And when she didn't exactly mean well, her actions were still understandable. And when she squeezed an entire tube of toothpaste into the bathroom sink—well, who hasn't always wanted to do that?

Cleary's gentle and non-judgmental attitude toward her characters gave these books their only real moral: that everyone means well. It came as no surprise that, eventually, she wrote a book from the point of view of Henry's dog Ribsy, and made Ribsy just as real and sympathetic as any of the human characters. When Ribsy gets in trouble for chasing a squirrel into a classroom, his honest dismay should be recognizable to any kid: Aren't dogs supposed to chase squirrels?

The absence of moral lessons from Cleary's books was one of the most delightful things about them. When Henry Huggins finds those boxes of bubble gum, tries to sell the gum at school, nearly gets in trouble, eventually finds that he and everyone else is sick and tired of chewing gum, and ends up leaving the boxes back where he found them, there was no moral. It was just something funny that happened to Henry. Time passes, and funny things kept happening to him. And that, I imagine, is what his whole life was like.

We got out of the car, walked around Klickitat Street, and took some pictures. Eventually, with some reluctance, we left. Henry and Ramona and Ribsy, I'm happy to report, are still there, and always will be. 

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

The press vs. the president.

When honest scholars come to write the history of the Obama administration, one of the most surprising stories they will have to tell is that President Obama spent much of his two terms in office fighting off the hawks who wanted his administration to be nothing more than a replay of the previous eight years. Despite some serious missteps, Obama has consistently resisted the hawkish and aggressive proposals of his political opponents—which includes not only his opponents in the Republican Party but a number of prominent leaders in the Pentagon and the CIA, many of his former advisers, and the majority of the mainstream press.

To understand how deeply this story has been buried, all one has to do is read this recent NBC News article, which relates how President Obama rejected a CIA-proposed plan to engineer a coup against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The plan was popular among senior CIA officials and, apparently, members of the Congressional intelligence committees who were briefed about it, but the president turned it down.

By any sane standards, this story should paint the president in a positive light, as a prudent and pragmatic leader with the courage to stand up to his own national security institutions and shoot down risky and outright unethical proposals. Instead, NBC News frames the story as an indictment of the president.

The headline alleges that the president shirked his duty to protect Americans: "Obama Nixed CIA Plan That Could Have Stopped ISIS." We hear that Obama "never gave the green light" for the plan, as if the president had simply gone on vacation and forgotten about it, instead of making a decision. We hear that Obama is "feckless," in the words of a former CIA officer; we hear that the plan did not come with any serious risks because, after all, things "couldn't be worse" than they are now in Syria, according to an anonymous "senior U.S. official." We also hear from John McCain, who has never met a violent intervention he didn't approve of.

Missing, except for a brief quote from the president himself, is any semblance of sanity and responsibility. The world is not a box of Tinkertoys which the leader of the free world can twist and snap into any shape he pleases. Any intervention into another country's affairs comes with consequences that nobody can predict. Though Assad is undoubtedly a brutal leader, many of the rebels fighting his regime are even worse. It is the rebellion against Assad, rather than the Syrian government, where al Qaeda and ISIS drew many of their followers. There is no serious reason to believe that pouring an ocean of funds into the anti-Assad movement would have done much more than provide more funding for radical extremists.

Most significantly, there is no acknowledgment that it would be wrong for the CIA to overthrow another country's government. There is a deep and profound immorality in the notion that it is our responsibility to oust and install foreign leaders, to decide which rebellions should succeed and which should be throttled at birth. Yet this arrogant assumption appears to be universally shared by our self-appointed experts on foreign policy, both inside and outside the circles of power, who needle the president for failing to embrace their worst ideas.

The rest of us are not immune. In the terrible months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, I lost track of the number of times I heard someone suggest that it was a shame we couldn't just send someone over to assassinate Saddam Hussein. For many Americans, the question wasn't whether or not the United States should violently interfere in another country's affairs. It was whether the United States should emulate Saddam himself by invading another country or simply emulate the Mafia by sending hired goons to bump off its leader.

No one suggested that both of these options might be wrong, and that it was not our place to get rid of any foreign leader, even a very bad one. Anyone who voiced such an opinion—on television, in any newspaper, even in casual conversation—immediately revealed himself as a profoundly unserious person. Even the total failure of the Iraq War and the subsequent collapse of the entire Middle East into terror and chaos, the direct result of George W. Bush's hubris, did not discredit this sort of thinking. To this day, the press dutifully describes politicians who call for aggressive military action against other countries as "tough" and "muscular," rather than violent and insane.

Only in such an atmosphere could a president be condemned for rejecting a proposal to overthrow a foreign leader. This is the atmosphere, alas, in which we are choosing a new president. 

[thoughtsfrommareincognitum]

A legacy of ashes.

More than four decades ago, a 33-year-old antiwar activist stood before an audience in Vermont and called for the abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It was the autumn of 1974, and the world was a very different place. President Nixon had just resigned, leaving an avalanche of scandal in his wake that reporters were still struggling to pick through. At The New York Times, a tireless young reporter named Seymour Hersh is preparing to publish a landmark story that will reveal that the CIA has been aggressively violating its charter for years by spying on journalists and harassing the antiwar movement. In the White House, Henry Kissinger darkly warns the new president, Gerald Ford, that even worse secrets lie in the agency's office files. During a White House luncheon, Ford tells some of the Times's top editors that the CIA had plotted to assassinate foreign leaders. None of them opt to report the president's statement.

This is the atmosphere in which our young activist, a self-described socialist, is railing against the destructive power of the CIA. The agency is “a dangerous institution that has got to go,” he tells his listeners, citing the agency's history of sabotaging democratic governments around the world in the name of the war on Communism. It is run, he declares, by “right-wing lunatics who use it to prop up fascist dictatorships.”

As you may have guessed, this young activist was Bernie Sanders. Politico broke the “news” of Sanders's long-ago attack on the CIA this week in a sneering and vicious hit piece that reads as if it were commissioned by the Clinton campaign. Sanders's mention, in a recent debate, of the CIA's successful 1953 coup against Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran's one and only elected democratic leader, was dismissed as “an arcane reference” that surely “befuddled” many listeners. The attack on the CIA is described as an example of Sanders's “extreme leftist” views, which are characterized as “extreme even for the standards of that time.”

An adviser to the Clinton campaign and former CIA employee named Jeremy Bash is given space to attack Sanders in words worthy of Dick Cheney: “Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength. If this is a window into Sanders' thinking, it reinforces the conclusion that he's not qualified to be commander in chief.”

With its patronizing tone, the Politico article is clearly intended for a readership that is completely unfamiliar with the events of the 1970s, and perhaps such an audience can be forgiven for accepting Bash's cartoonish remarks as an accurate depiction of that time. But they are not. Far from being “the height of the Cold War,” 1974 marked a moment of unprecedented calm in that epic rivalry. The Vietnam War was effectively finished. Fresh from his visit to Mao's China, President Nixon had signed two international arms control treaties with the Soviet Union. Certainties were crumbling, and unease with America’s secrecy-obsessed intelligence institutions was in the air.

Removed from this context, the young Bernie Sanders does indeed sound a little unhinged. After all, no serious presidential candidate would dare, today, to call for the abolition of the CIA. Sanders himself isn’t calling for the outright abolition of the agency anymore—although he stands by his original criticisms.

Still, the very suggestion stings. A quick browse through Twitter, Facebook, and the usual thick goulash of anonymous online comments reveals that quite a few self-described liberals see little difference between such a proposal and the right-wing campaign to abolish the IRS and the Environmental Protection Agency. Another check mark against Bernie Sanders, already considered woefully unserious by the mainstream media because of his strange fixation on income inequality and his habit of bringing up things nobody cares about. What serious person would suppose that something that happened in Iran in 1953—whatever it was, who cares—could possibly be relevant to America today?

Yet there was a time, not very long ago, when it was not crazy to suggest that the CIA was doing more harm than good to American interests.

Harry Truman, who signed the CIA into existence in 1947, imagined that the agency would serve as a sort of “newspaper” for the president's eyes only, using a skillful spy network around the world to collect and compile the information that the leader of the free world—a more meaningful phrase then than now—needed in order to make his decisions. He privately insisted that he had never had any intention of creating “an American Gestapo.” Never, he declared, had he imagined that the CIA would be used to sabotage foreign governments or assassinate anybody.

But Truman did not anticipate the direction in which the CIA would be taken by its most powerful director, Allen Dulles. Under the mild scrutiny of Truman's successor, President Eisenhower, the former Wall Street lawyer brandished the agency as a blunt instrument against democratic movements in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, the Congo, West Germany, France, and the rest of the world. When the Cold War did heat up again as a result of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA poured fuel on the fire of future terrorism by funding Muslim militants.

A full accounting would take an entire book; under the guise of fighting Communist tyranny, the CIA unleashed a host of horrors on a complicated world, and we received a rain of complications in return. In one way or another, CIA meddling gave us the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, the Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and an al-Qaeda that ultimately gave way to ISIS.

President Truman detested what had become of the agency he had created to the end of his life. “Those fellows in the CIA don’t just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own and there is nobody to keep track of what they are up to,” he said to Merle Miller, a writer who later published a book of conversations with the ex-president. “They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they will have something to report on. They don’t have to account to anybody. That’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society and it’s got to be put a stop to. The people have got a right to know what those birds are up to.”

Truman's secretary of state, Dean Acheson, had been wary of the undemocratic potential of the CIA from the start. The gentlemanly Acheson—later a target of Senator McCarthy—wrote in his memoirs: “I had the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it.” But while Truman had rejected calls for the U.S. to intervene in Iran, Eisenhower—after some resistance—gave in to Dulles's demands, believing that covert action was preferable to outright war.

Eisenhower came to regret what he had allowed, believing that the recklessness of the CIA's actions had hurt the international reputation of the United States. In his final meeting with Dulles, the president said bitterly that he had left his country a “legacy of ashes,” not the heritage of peace he had hoped for.

Must this history really be dead and irrelevant? We would not say the same of the Civil War, whose ashes haunt us unto this day. We would not say the same of the rise of Adolf Hitler, against which every foreign policy crisis—or breath of a crisis—is measured. We would not even say the same of the ancient Greeks, whose shattered experiment with democracy hovers over our own.

None of this is obscure, except to those who willfully choose to ignore it. It may be comforting for us to retreat from such knowledge and pretend that it no longer matters, that it is less relevant than the thick tangle of election coverage that hems us in on all sides. Hillary Clinton’s many supporters in the Democratic party establishment and the mainstream media do not seem to be troubled by her vote for the Iraq War or her friendship with Henry Kissinger, so it is unlikely that any of them will be swayed one way or the other by her campaign's quiet but firm defense of Allen Dulles's CIA.

It is the rest of us, who share Bernie Sanders's hope for a more peaceful America and a more stable world, who ought to be concerned about it.