{Yet another listing of yet more books I am pretending/threatening to read…these are all from local libraries, but thank goodness for www.archive.org should the libraries have to close down.}
I recently watched the Amazon Prime show “The Hunters”: a promising premise that, by the end of Season One, had been taken so far over the top that it would need the world’s tallest ladder to get back down. However, the show was based (however loosely) on an historical fact (in the opinion of some, an historical scandal): Project Paperclip was a government program designed, at the end of World War II, to facilitate, openly or covertly, the relocation of Nazi scientists and officials to the United States. Eric Lichtblau’s The Nazis Next Door tells the charming story of How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men. Before all you hemophiliac liberals wax shocked and indignant: should we have let the Russians get hold of German experts and German expertise? Lichtblau estimates that “more than sixteen hundred Nazi scientists and doctors…were eagerly recruited to the United States by the Pentagon,” and those are just the ones who entered legally, “through the front door,” under their own names. As Lichtblau notes, “Whatever moral baggage they brought with them was outweighed, military officials believed, by the promise of technological breakthroughs.” And we did get to the moon, after all, and the Russians didn’t--so, mission accomplished.
Allen Frances is a psychiatrist, which apparently qualifies him to diagnosis an entire society; he does just that in his 2017 book The Twilight of American Sanity, being about The Age of Trump and what sort of widespread clinical disorder(s) in the body politic could have enabled it. Calling Trump’s political rise “absolutely predictable and a mirror on our soul,” Frances scoffs at the popular notion that Trump is a textbook narcissist, when in fact Trump’s narcissistic traits have proven quite advantageous in his life. “[Narcissism’s] defining features fit [Trump] like a glove,” Frances admits; “but being a world-class narcissist doesn’t make Trump mentally ill. Crucial to the diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is the requirement that the behaviors cause [the individual] significant stress or impairment.” Whereas, to the contrary, “Trump shows no signs himself of experiencing great distress,” though he is undoubtedly “a man who causes great distress in others.” Making a moral rather than a psychiatric judgment, Dr. Frances concludes: “Trump is a threat to the United States, and to the world, not because he is clinically mad but because he is very bad.” Frances summarizes here the larger premise of his book: “What does it say about us, that we elected someone so manifestly unfit and unprepared to determine mankind’s future? Blaming Trump for all of our troubles misses the deeper, underlying societal sickness that made possible his unlikely ascent…if we want to get sane, we must first gain insight about ourselves. Simply put: Trump isn’t crazy, but our society is.”
Was Revolution Inevitable? is a collection of essays about Turning Points of the Russian Revolution. The volume is edited by Tony Brenton (Sir Tony Brenton, that is, former British Ambassador to Russia); contributors include the likes of Orlando Figes, Martin Sixsmith, and Richard Pipes, among others, along with Sir Tony himself. Even a quick study of Russian history suggests that the Romanov dynasty’s days were clearly numbered and that tsarism and traditional autocracy were fated soon to end, one way or another; the 1917 revolution, however, and the October coup that followed, were undoubtedly contingent upon a whole series of unpredictable events, fateful decisions, unintended consequences, and—despite the Marxist belief in History as an impersonal force—the rivalries, conflicts, and ego-driven turf battles among the leading personae involved.
Finally: I’m always a sucker for an intellectually respectable right-wing take on politics and/or history, so I was eager to get hold of Christopher Caldwell’s acclaimed The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. Having procured my copy and having begun reading eagerly, I managed about thirty pages before setting the book down in disgust (and washing my hands; always wash your hands). If I could suggest a different title for Caldwell's effort, it should be called “Tendentious Drivel” (which may or may not be the name of a band). His operative thesis is that the Civil Rights movement of the Sixties, well-intentioned as it was, overshot its mark; it threw out the precious baby of the American constitution along with the filthy bathwater of segregation, thanks to which tragedy “Alright then we are two nations now” (not that Caldwell uses that line from John dos Passos). In Caldwell’s own phrasing: “The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible…much of what we have called ‘polarization’ or ‘incivility’ in recent years is something more grave—it is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail…” For those who take this argument seriously, allow me to note that conservatives over the years have also insisted that first Abraham Lincoln and then Franklin Roosevelt put into effect their own illegitimate versions of the hallowed Constitution; which is to say, Caldwell is singing a familiar tune ("Gimme that Old Constitution")—but then, that’s what conservatives do, isn’t it?
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