January 6, 2021, the End of Democracy in America

 

Trump horde ending democracy in America

From the beginning of my military service nearly 50 years ago, until the last my last day in the Army in May 2016, I attended dozens of change of command ceremonies. After the flag is passed the new and out-going commanders often make a speech.  Probably one in three of those speeches made a sincere nod to the American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.  

For the mostly conservative officers taking or relinquishing authority, they linked themselves to a 200-plus year American tradition--a hallmark of American exceptionalism.  

But that ended one year ago today when the 45th President sent a mob to overturn the election he just lost.  The coup d'etat was mere minutes from success.  Hundreds of Trump supporters were screaming to kill Mike Pence.  If they had managed to stop the vote, the election could have been thrown into the House of Representatives. That is the last possible place in which a disputed election can be decided according to the Constitution.  

With one vote per state, Trump would have taken the election.  

All of my adult life I had an implicit belief in progress in America: more rights for more people.  The racist rednecks would recede, I believed.  

With Trump's nomination and election, my belief cracked.  After Charlottesville it was shattered. With January 6, it was gone. The end of democracy was only a matter of when.  

America no longer has a tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.  I voted for Joe Biden and hoped normal order could be restored in America.  One year later, the democratic party is fighting about infrastructure and social programs and has done nothing to fix the electoral count act or secure voting.  The Republicans are running MAGA candidates all over the country to get control of election counting.  How much does voting really matter if the Republicans are in charge of counting.  

In 2016, 63 million Americans voted for a failed casino owner who played a business man on a game show.  In 2020, 74 million Americans watched a lying buffoon for four years and said they would like four more.  The people who claim most publicly to be followers of Jesus (Love your neighbor; Love your enemies; turn the other cheek) worship Trump much more fervently than they follow anything Christ ever said or did. I have read and re-read the New Testament. Few people who have ever lived are less like Jesus than Donald Trump.

January 6, 2021, was a dress rehearsal.  The command performance is three years away. In 2025, there will be no need for a mob to attack.  The criminals will be in the building. They will use the power entrusted to them by the Constitution to end democracy. 

The Roman poet Horace fought to preserve the Republic during the Civil War after Julius Caesar took power and was murdered.  The Republicans lost. Horace was wounded and lost everything.  When he recovered, he knew the Republic was gone, so he made peace with his circumstances and became a poet, living the best life he could. 

I hope to be like Horace, to do my best to preserve the Republic, and when that fails, to protect my family and live as well as possible. 

Books of 2022: The Big Picture of What I Hope to Read in the Year Ahead

 

Here is a picture of 61 books I hope to read, have already started reading, or plan to re-read in the year ahead.  

Some are already in progress:

Game of Thrones Book 5.

Jon Meacham's biography of Thomas Jefferson.

Civilization by Niall Ferguson.

The Decameron.

And at least three books by Hannah Arendt.

Happy New Year!

Books of 2021: Fiction

In 2021 I read fourteen books under the vast category of fiction. The oldest of the books was written in the 14th Century.  The newest were published this year.  The authors as close as my own family and as far away as Russia. The setting of one novel is more than two thousand years ago, another is in the near future.  

In an earlier post I listed the non-fiction books I read in 2021.

In another post I said that my favorite book of 2021 was a work of fiction I did not finish: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. But having a favorite does not mean there were any books on the list I did not like. They are so different. But The Decameron was very much in my mind in our pandemic world.

Amelia's Journey to Find Family by Lauren Auster-Gussman.

My oldest daughter Lauren wrote this about a rescue dog she adopted and cared for in the last year of her life.  It's a lovely children's book both in the sense of a nice story and that her co-author made lovely illustrations for the story.

La Veritable Histoire de Trois Cochons by Erik Blegvad. I read children's books in French to practice that lovely language. This book is a traditional and gruesome retelling of the story fo the three pigs.

The Quick and the Dead and What Dark Days Seen by Alison Joseph. I met Alison Joseph in 2018 and read three of her mystery novels. She wrote a new one this year set in the pandemic reviving her Sister Agnes character. I read the new novel and the first Sister Agnes novel this year and plan to read more of Sister Agnes in 2022.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I read and re-read everything Kazuo Ishiguro has written. The new novel is a chilling story of a future world in which Artificial Intelligence develops to the point that kids can have AFs, Artificial Friends. 

Untraceable by Sergei Lebedev. This very darkly funny novel imagines a Russia in which political dissidents would be poisoned by incompetent government secret agents. The attacks would be ordered by a former spy who became the President for Life of the Russian Federation and who wants the old Soviet Union back!  Crazy right?! 

Till We Have Faces Lewis by C.S. Lewis. I re-read this wonderful book for a discussion with the New York CS Lewis Society.  It is a re-telling of the Cupid and Psyche myth (which means it is also a retelling of Cinderella) from the perspective of the oldest stepsister.  The book is her complaint against the gods and her side of the story.  I read this book aloud to my daughters when they were in middle school as an example of a tough woman who becomes a great leader. The queen wears a mask her whole life as queen, so there's that connection to our world right now. The difference between appearance and reality is the best I have read in any novel.

The Mandrake by Niccolo Machiavelli. A very funny short play by a guy with a reputation for political advice. 

A Game of Thrones, A Feast for Crows, #4 and A Game of Thrones, A Storm of Swords, #3 by George R. R. Martin.  I watched the entire series on HBO. It was wonderful except for the ending.  The books are better.  I am currently reading book five and hoping the author lives to finish book 6!

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht. An strange and mysterious story set vaguely in the former Yugoslavia.  A fascinating story.  

Selections from Canzonieri and Other Works by Francesco Petrarch. I started reading Petrarch to round out my reading of the Three Crowns of Florence:  Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.  The Decameron became my book of the year. Petrarch's sonnets led me to put more poetry in my reading, although this book is the only one I finished in 2021.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. I had never read Stoppard. This play is full of twists and fun and playful language and is a wonderful story.  I will read more or him in 2022. 

Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin. I love this book.  I read it in 2016 and re-read it this year.  Set in the late 1,400s in Russia and across the world. 

Books of 2021: Non-Fiction

Non-fiction books of 2021

Just the list for now.  The highlighted links connect to my reviews of the book. 

My Favorite:

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman.

My least favorite:

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck

Biography, Memoir:

Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel by Francine Klagsburn.

Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne by David Starkey.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.

Faith:

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristen Du Mez

Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

The Neglected C.S. Lewis by Mark Neal and Jerry Root.

History:

Red Sea Spies: The True Story of the Mossad's Fake Holiday Resort by Raffi Berg

The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan

The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton

The Roman Way by by Edith Hamilton

A Higher Call: An incredible story of chivalry in the skies above war-torn Europe by Adam Makos.

Spearhead: An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives in World War II by Adam Makos.

The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham.

Philosophy:

Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt.

The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt.

The Promise of Politics by Hannah Arendt.

Paradox by Margaret Cuonzo.

Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus by Karl Jaspers.

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill.

Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper.

Technopoly by Neil Postman.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

Social Science:

Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

Science:

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Maphead by Ken Jennings

Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA by Neil Shubin

Books of 2021: First, My Favorite Book

 

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, 

translated by Wayne Rebhorn

In 2021, I read fifty books. But the first and best book of the year for me is the book I have not yet finished. It's a book I first read in 2015 and went back to last year: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Also known as The Human Comedy in contrast to Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy, The Decameron inspired Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales among hundreds of other writers and their works over the past eight hundred yers.  

For me and many others, these tales written and published during the worst years of the Black Death in Florence have been a source of fun and inspiration during the current pandemic.  

I have loved the Divine Comedy for decades, but had not read Boccaccio nor Francesco Petrarch.  The lives of these three Florentines overlapped in the early thirteen hundreds.  Dante died in 1321 when Petrarch was 17 years old and Boccaccio was eight.  The two younger poets became friends after Boccaccio published The Decameron in 1352.  Together the three poets are known as The Three Crowns of Florence.  

After reading and re-reading Dante for 35 years, I read Boccaccio and Petrarch in 2015 in class on Medieval Italian Literature taught by Chelsea Pomponio at Franklin and Marshall College.  I was delighted by Boccaccio, less so by Petrarch. In 2020 as the pandemic sent the world into crisis, I went back to Boccaccio and to the sonnets of Petrarch.  Now I read both regularly, thinking about how they survived the terrible plague of their time and created stories and poems that inspired and delighted people ever since.  

My favorite book of 2021 is the book I have not yet finished: The Decameron.

In 2013, Joan Acocella reviewed the translation of The Decameron by Wayne A. Rebhorn in a long review in the New Yorker. It's a good review and gives a lot of background on the book. Here is the link.

Civilization by Niall Ferguson

Civilization: The West and the Rest is the 10th of the 15 books 

Niall Ferguson has written between 1995 and 2021

 I love one-volume histories of great spans of time.  Historians who step out of the competitive academic environment and say, in effect, "This is how the world we live in came to be" are books I read and re-read with delight.  

My top three in this category are (in publication order)

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says geography is the reason western culture came to dominate the world in the past half millennium.  

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, who charts the history of the species Sapiens including highs like civilization and medicine and lows like all the misery that ensued when we left hunter gatherer lives to settle down and become the servants of wheat. 

These Truths by Jill Lepore traces the history of America from its discovery to the present with a focus on women and minorities. Her stories of the lives of slaves and native Americans and the first abolitionists are amazing.

I am currently becoming a fan of Niall Ferguson. He was a guest on the "Honestly" podcast by Bari Weiss. The discussion was centered on Ferguson's latest book Doom but ranged across his long ouevre. I picked Civilization because it has a half millennial timeline form 1,500AD to the present, tracing the way western civilization came to dominate the world and why. 

The chapters are the reasons why the west dominated the rest. At the beginning of the second chapter, Science, Ferguson quotes Jesus saying "Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and give to God the things that are God's." Ferguson said the separation of Church and state is fundamental to Christian faith. 

It took the Reformation and the Renaissance to break the hold of the Catholic Church on western culture and allow science to flourish freely. Ferguson then lists 29 great innovations in science between 1530 and 1789 that happened after two millennia of relative stagnation.  

He also charts in detail the reasons China and the Ottoman Empire, both much stronger than Europe in the 1,400s, fell under European dominance by the 19th Century.  Tyrants who allowed the suppression of science and innovation are the reason both empires went from dominance to decline.  

I am barely into the second chapter and love the book.  If I get obsessed there are 14 more to go!

Thomas Jefferson and the First Draft of History

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

There is only one actual version of the past, but there are endless interpretations of events that already happened.  

In the past year, when Thomas Jefferson was getting attacked for what he did wrong, and not celebrated for what he did right, I  told myself I had to learn more about the writer of the Declaration of Independence.  

Recently I read about the protesters in Prague reading Jefferson aloud in 1989 as they protested communism.  So I started reading both Jon Meacham's biography of Jefferson and The Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton wrote most of the weekly articles that comprise the case for the Constitution. But I thought it important to read them together to see what Hamilton thought so important about keeping the slave states in the union that he did not propose two Americas in 1787. 

I knew that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at just 32 years old. What I did not know was that the first statesman to make a public declaration for the abolition of slavery was Thomas Jefferson in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.  

Jefferson wrote the first draft of that document, but it had to be approved by the Continental Congress. It was largely approved but about a quarter was struck out, including the anti-slavery passage. The original text is here.  

Before the Declaration of Independence, the divine right of kings was taken for granted. The Declaration of Independence said America would not follow the track nearly all of humanity followed for all of previous history.  

The freedom that Christianity promised and fucked up so badly in state churches began to become real in 1776.  It took nearly 200 years to extend freedom to all even in law, but unless the Trump Republicans throw away democracy and end what Jefferson began, America will continue to be the place the world looks for freedom. 

Without America and the people who risked their lives to found America, freedom would never have become a dream and a goal and a reality for large parts of the world.   

From 1776 to 2016, the trend in America was toward more freedom for more people.  Every other country in the world that in the same period was ruled, at oleast some of the time, by a monarch or a tyrant or totalitarian horror.  America had a peaceful transfer of power from Washington to Obama until the Trump broke the tradition.  No other country has ever done that.  

Jefferson started the 240-year march to more freedom for more people here in America and around the world.