Returning to Normal, or Are We Already Cooked?

Listening with even a half-cocked ear to the opening statements of George Kent and William Taylor, career diplomats and public servants who have done more to advance American interests than all the pundits and commentators on both sides ever will, it was possible to entertain a little schadenfreude: surely people like Hannity and Limbaugh, a couple of overpaid loudmouths, and their fellow fantasists must be feeling at least a little twinge of guilty embarrassment: here in front of a national audience were the kind of button-down, old school, dedicated public servants they were maligning as “deep state” traitors.
    Silly me. My wishful thinking was quickly overtaken by the usual gloom: Democrats were going to misplay this and the whole thing would, somehow, redound once more to Donald Trump. Part of the problem is the immense damage the President has already done to everyone’s sense of what is normal. Under normal circumstances—does anyone remember what a normal circumstance feels like?—Trump’s behavior in this episode around Ukraine would be nearly universally regarded as shocking, apart from whether it was regarded as an impeachable offence. As it is, though, its just another instance of Trump-being-Trump and redundant evidence that the man doesn’t really understand the nature of the office he holds. I don’t doubt that the President is genuinely baffled by why he is not allowed to make foreign aid contingent on help with his own domestic political future—or why, indeed, he is not allowed to do or say any damn thing he pleases. As Andrew Sullivan has observed, his model and ideal is the conduct of a mob boss, and has been ever since his days with Roy Cohn, one of the most twisted and sinister characters to stalk the American stage.
    Then, too, the heart of the charge is a couple of phone calls, a handful of conversations, some of them reported second-hand. What won’t be registered—although it was implicit throughout Kent and Taylor’s testimony and explicit in discrete instances—is an overall pattern of behavior and intention wherever Ukraine is involved (with Russia and Vladimir Putin in the background) that seemed unrelated to American interests, as they had normally been construed, and to transcend normal protocols.
    Norms, normative behaviors and protocols, matter, Their destruction is a hallmark of the collapse of any kind of established order; an established democratic, representative form of government, with its reliance on consent to normative protocols reflecting a set of underlying values, is especially vulnerable. It is a little like that "broken windows" philosophy of crime control: one shattered norm makes it easier to shatter another one, then another, and before you know it the whole neighborhood has gone to seed. The once unthinkable becomes a reality. This is why, by the way, those tanks on the monument grounds on July 4 matter. By itself, it probably wasn’t worth the hyperventilation that ensued, a pointless gesture by a man pathetically enamored of strongmen, and a profound missing of the point of Independence Day—a joke in bad taste with an undertone of menace. But as part of a larger pattern the tanks should be alarming, a signal of the sociopath’s refusal to be bound by norms: See? I will do even this.
    After the election, there was, even among those of us astonished that this appalling human being with the flashing neon sign over his head—I AM A PHONY--had been elevated to the seat once occupied by Lincoln—there was hope that he might govern normally, that “the office might mold the man.”
    Fat chance. He came to town and proceeded to shatter every window in sight. The resulting exhaustion among the people ought to be enough to cost him the election; if Democrats would stop chasing rainbows and unicorns and get real about the center-right country they wish to govern, they could walk away with the election in 2020 by emphasizing three things, day and night, incessantly, like a drumbeat:

Decency.
A return to normal.
Why haven’t you released your tax returns?
   
(Like their comrades who think Trump and Giuliani were just doing the Lord’s work trying to clean up corruption in Burisima Holdings, those who think Trump is going to such lengths to keep his tax returns hidden for any reason other than that he is hiding something, deserve an honorary BS from Trump University.)
    But it may be too late for the return to normal. The disorienting effect of three years of Trump is profound as, one by one, norms have been shattered. The president’s mafia-like behavior with regard to Ukraine, being just one more example. There may be no going back. Like that cliché frog placed in tepid water imperceptibly heated to a boil, we have been, before we know it, already cooked.

At Hillwood, get reacquainted with the iconic images of “Mid-Century Master” photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt

From the Forest Hills Connection

Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt straddled a porous boundary between art and journalism, while bridging the understated, black-and-white aesthetic of the pre- and post-World War II generations, and the super-heated, pop celebrity-photojournalism of the baby boomers. For those over the age of, say, 55, at least a few of the photographs on exhibit at the Adirondack House of The Hillwood Estate will seem warmly familiar, even if Eisenstaedt’s name is a revelation. For younger types, they will offer a glimpse at a post-war America – the America built by “the greatest generation” – rapidly receding.
“Mid-Century Master: The Photography of Alfred Eisenstaedt,” is a dense, compact exhibit – you can absorb it in an hour and-a-few – but it is richly informative, especially for those (like me) unfamiliar with Eisenstaedt’s story. Born into a Jewish family in what is now Poland, Eisenstaedt was given an Eastman Kodak folding camera as a boy; a passion was born. After fighting on the German side in World War I, he found his niche capturing on film many of the most important cultural and athletic events of Weimar Germany for the magazine, Der Spiegel.
He fled Europe and the Nazis in 1935 for New York, where his record earned him the attention of Henry Luce, who hired him to shoot for Life Magazine. Eisenstaedt’s cover photos for the magazine fill an entire wall of the exhibit. Almost all of Eisenstaedt’s photos – at least almost all of those on display – were black and white, taken with a German-made Leica camera. I was pleased to learn that he was responsible for a photograph I remember finding amusing as a child – it depicts a drum major for the University of Michigan Marching Band rehearsing his high-stepping routine while a line of kids behind him are, with obvious hilarity, trying to mimic him. We are informed that Eisenstaedt called it his “ode to joy,” and we can believe it; the photograph is vividly evocative of the pleasure children can take in the ridiculous.

Alfred Eisenstaedt’s favored tool of the trade, a Leica IIIa Rangefinder, is also on display.

who worked with his subjects to render them they way they wanted to be rendered


There is nothing oblique or cunning or coy about Eisenstadt's work, and you have the sense of a photographer who worked with his subjects to render them they way they wanted to be rendered.
But there are a handful of images in which he captured something striking and spontaneous. These include several photos of children watching a puppet show in The Tuileries Garden in France; Eisenstaedt captures the mesmerized or stunned or triumphant faces of the children (there’s one or two of each) at the instant when a dragon is suddenly killed in the performance.
His most famous photo, certainly, is the V-Day image of the sailor in Times Square planting that bend-over-backward kiss on a nurse. It has become iconic of America’s mood at the end of the war, but after so many years it has a stagy, choreographed feel to it. On display at Hillwood though is another, more genuinely intimate image of a soldier and his woman friend in Penn Station: the soldier’s uniform is visible, but they both are wearing overcoats. The picture has a wintry feel to it and they seem to be seeking some solace, some warmth from each other – an image that tells a truer story about where a soldier has been and what he has seen.
Eisenstaedt was chummy with Marjorie Merriweather Post, and visitors to the exhibit will have a chance to sit (that’s always a plus for this museum-goer) and peruse the edition of Life that featured his color photos of Post’s life at Hillwood. Dozens of America’s post-war celebrities shot by Eisenstaedt (almost entirely in black-and-white) are on display: Ernest Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Jackie O, a mustachioed Salvador Dali and his wife. The couple of photos of Marilyn taken in 1953 at her Los Angeles bungalow (including two impromptu color ones) are striking – Eisenstaedt captured something raw about the overflowing sensuality in this doomed woman’s lips and cheekbones and eyes. We are informed that the photo shoot “left the usually even-keeled photographer so flustered and distracted that he mistakenly shot a roll of color film at the speed meant for black-and-white.”
The notation accompanying the photograph of Sophia Loren includes the kind of eyebrow-raising tidbit that pays for the price of admission to the Estate: We are told that “the photographer earned Loren’s trust in part because he resembled and reminded her of her obstetrician.” And we learn that one of Life’s most controversial covers was an Eisenstaedt shot of a scantily clad Loren, who was promoting her film, “Marriage Italian Style.”
Near the exit from the exhibit is an inscription from “Eisenstaedt’s Guide to Photography,” published in 1978: “There are no rules for composition except good judgement and taste.” Beneath the quote is a large black-and-white image of a swimsuit model whose judgement and taste may be debatable. For she is standing with her back to the camera on a beach in Miami, wearing a fur stole that wraps around her torso and ends just where her derriere fills her bathing suit. It was taken in 1940, but it seems to project forward 25 years to the “zany” go-go era of celebrity journalism in the 60s and 70s.
In just this way is it emblematic of this mid-century master, whose images speak of “another era” – one scarcely recognizable anymore – while anticipating and suggesting the new disruptive one that would follow and that would usher us into our own new century.

About the writer: Mark Moran was born and raised in the DC area and has lived in Dupont Circle/Adams Morgan, and later in Cleveland Park. He left for Chicago in 1997, and later moved to the Cleveland area in 2000. There he wrote for the Lakewood Observer, a volunteer hyperlocal news publication. In 2016, he moved back to the DC area and settled into Forest Hills in July 2018. Mark loves the proximity to Rock Creek Park, the lovely neighborhoods east and west of Connecticut Avenue, Bread Furst, Politics and Prose, Little Red Fox, and Comet Pizza. He can often be found in The Den at Politics and Prose. In addition to writing professionally for the American Psychiatric Association, he looks forward to writing for Forest Hills Connection.

Trump and American Authoritarianism: Rationalization and the Destruction of Norms

From the beginning of Donald Trump’s ascent to the deafening, crazy-making presence he has now attained in our lives, there have been voices warning that this was the advent of an American version of fascism or, anyway, of authoritarianism. Robert Kagan was on to this early, as was Madeleine Albright, who wrote, “Fascism: A Warning.”
   As I write this, tanks are being parked on the mall adjacent to the Lincoln Monument and Trump is hijacking what has been for years in Washington an almost thoroughly nonpartisan Fourth of July event; fireworks on the Mall here in DC has actually been something like a home-town affair—traffic congested, invariably oppressively hot and or threatening rain, yet thoroughly celebratory. In light of these events, the arguments by Kagan and Albright and others are worth considering.
    Even among those who loathe Trump, there are reasons to roll one’s eyes. For one thing, Trump is just so pathetically…..pathetic. Silly. There is something clownish and childish about him. “A sad embarrassing wreck of a man,” as George Will put it, one who appears to have stumbled into a job he didn’t really want, in the same way that he lucked into his wealth, then lost it by stumbling into multiple bankruptcies, to be propped up (very probably) by unsavory characters, i.e. Russian mafia, which is said to have enfiladed the Manhattan real estate industry. (Collusion? Who needs collusion? They already own him.) Describing Trump’s thinness of character is a challenge to language—Is it possible to be profoundly shallow?
   (Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, “Nemesis,” describes a man who was early in life, also a silly and unlikely dictator. But Hitler possessed also a ferocious single-mindedness that Trump can’t approximate, and was possessed as well, it has to be said, by a certain genius; a negative kind of genius to be sure—a knack for the long game, a willingness to play nice when it suited his purposes, and an unerring eye for people’s weaknesses. (Trump, I would say, has the last two talents but no sense of the first.))
   It’s also possible to argue that “it can’t happen here” (bearing in mind that in response to Sinclair Lewis’ tract of the same title, Saul Bellow wrote a short story entitled, “The Hell It Can’t”). One of the reassuring strengths of this country—so goes this argument—is the resilience and robustness and independence of its civil society, its extra-governmental institutions. Churches, professional associations, civic organizations, and cultural institutions continue to nurture democratic culture, however much our political structures degenerate. Two hundred years of this culture combined with a governmental architecture that is institutionally resistant to radical change make authoritarianism improbable.
   Those are the contrary responses to Kagan—an aimless, silly man who knows not what he is about, and a durable civil democracy.
   But there are reasons to be scared. Everyone—right, left and center—has become entirely too comfortable with executive privilege and power; arguably, Obama was a prime offender in extending this tendency. It is a trend whose roots, I believe, were in the Cold War: the threat of nuclear confrontation made it necessary to give the executive the power to move more quickly and decisively than the 18th century writers of our Constitution could imagine when they gave Congress the power to make war. It was accelerated again after 9/11, so that there are now influential voices—including Attorney General William Barr—who envision an executive with very nearly unchecked, unlimited authority. Add to this that the Republican party is now thoroughly intellectually degenerate and entirely enthralled to the personality cult that is Trump.
   The form that politics takes anywhere, at any time, is culture bound. German fascism took the form it did—goose-stepping soldiers, torchlight parades, and poisonous anti-semitism—because of German history and German culture and the particular circumstances of Germany in the early part of the 20th century, and it thrived on peculiarly German weaknesses. 
    People who expect an American authoritarianism to look like the German National Socialist Party have their head in a bag, even if all the features of reactionary nationalism are the same everywhere, at all times: evocation of a mythical past of national greatness, exaggeration or wholesale fabrication of national defeats or humiliations, and an appeal to racial and class resentment.
    Question: What are the most glaring American weaknesses?
   Answer: Our love of celebrity and our worship of the wealthy—as if wealth itself were proof of virtue, intelligence, valor and strength. 
   In Trump we have elevated an American cultural protype: a wealthy (or putatively wealthy) celebrity. Even his silliness and thinness of character is emblematic of a popular culture that has grown increasingly frivolous, lacking in the character required for self-government. Fifty years ago, the Moral Majority made its mark saying the culture was in decline. In this they were not wrong, but their criticism was so diminutively focused on personal, private, sexual behavior; Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell Jr. see the fruit of this degradation in abortion and gay men getting married.
    I see it in thousands of Americans braying, like middle school girls at a pep rally, for a wall, to be paid for by Mexico.
    How is it possible with that level of national immaturity to tackle problems like the financing of entitlements when a tsunami of baby boomers retire, or balancing growth and regulation in the face of climate change, or rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, problems that require some measure of self-sacrifice and deferral of immediate gratification—that is to say, that require self-government. Our national helplessness is ripe for a strongman, a peculiarly American one—silly and frivolous and empty-headed, but rich and very, very famous and perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to satisfy an insatiable ego.
   Kershaw’s biography of Hitler conveys two important lessons about how authoritarianism happens and that are relevant in thinking about the Trump phenomenon in 21st century America—these are, first, political rationalization, and secondly, the destruction of norms, of normative national practices and protocols.
   To the first point, it is not so that everyone in Germany immediately loved Hitler. There were in fact a great many people—especially among the military and the cultured elite—who immediately and very early on saw in Hitler a dangerous crackpot, at once menacing and gauche. Yet too many people found a reason to rationalize him, to make excuses, to let things slide. When this was not simple spinelessness, it very often had to do with a fear—a terror, really—of socialism. It can at least be said for Germans at the time that their fear of socialism was not unfounded—there had been a very messy, very violent, short-lived socialist uprising in November 1918 as the first world war ended (this uprising was the source of the infamous, paranoid “stab in the back” accusation—the claim, widely circulated, that Bolshevik Jews had sabotaged the war effort and caused Germany’s defeat; this claim had no basis in truth—Germany’s war command had been lying for years about winning the war and had in the process beggared the country—but it reverberated all the way to Aushwitz.)
   In contrast, the American right’s fear of socialism is a laughable joke. But the rationalization of Trump by people who know better is not. It is an open secret in Washington that many Republicans regard Trump as a buffoon and/or a mental case, yet they are willing to rationalize—either out of political cowardice or because of certain ideological interests (judges, immigration, abortion, lowering taxes).
   The second lesson that stands out from Kershaw’s narrative about Germany in the years between 1933 and 1945 is the steady, accelerating destruction of norms. One by one by one, policies and protocols and practices that had been considered normal or normative were knocked over; the dizzying, destabilizing effect of this cannot be over-estimated. The once unthinkable becomes thinkable and then it becomes the reality.
    This is the effect that Trump’s behavior on the world stage is having on American culture and politics. And this is why the tanks on the lawn of the Lincoln Memorial matter.

Scratch My Chest, You'll Feel Better

She walked around the room, a little unstable or a little nervous, looking I believe for a way out, for the way back home—back to the predictable life she knew, that’s what she had been waiting for patiently, submissively for more than a month I think—and chanced upon some chimes hanging low to the floor in the far corner. She nudged the chime just a touch and when the small bright room filled with a rich baritone hum like the meditative “Om”, Kristina looked back at us with an expression that told me she knew within the hour she was going to die.
    If I tell you that Kristina was my dog, a nearly constant companion for 11 years since my daughter and I picked her up at the Animal Protection League in Cleveland, a few of you will roll your eyes. I understand the instinct; I grew up with pets, but throughout my early adulthood I was without one for many years and I rolled my eyes a lot at what I considered the flakiness of dog and cat owners who seemed to treat their animals like prescient people.
   Truthfully, of course, I can’t know what my sweet black border collie mix was thinking or feeling when she looked back at us—curiosity about the sound of the chime? fear and confusion at being in a strange place? Or perhaps she was just feeling sick and dizzy and lightheaded because she had a bleeding mass in her stomach that required surgery that night and a catheter injection to keep her hydrated.
   She died three years ago this week, a month before I was to move back to Washington, D.C., where my job was. (I had spent 13 years working for the same outfit but working from home in Cleveland, where I was helping to raise my daughter. When the daughter went off to college, I went off to D.C.) Kristina and I were staying temporarily with a friend in Shaker Heights, after I abandoned my apartment in Cleveland in preparation for the move. She had collapsed on the pavement—just like that, like air going out of a balloon—while on a walk in the neighborhood in the early evening. She had not been well for some time, I believe. For several years, I had noticed her slowing down, becoming more anxiously attached to me. About a month and a half prior to the night when she collapsed on the pavement, a tic had lodged itself in her scalp. I think I managed to get most of it out, but the scar that was left looked to be infected. I took her to a vet, who said she was fine, but in retrospect I am not convinced. After K and I moved into the friend’s house, I came home one night to find her hiding in an upstairs room, apparently delirious with pain from what turned out to be a raging ear infection. I spent a long night at a veterinarian hospital that night before she was treated with an antibiotic and a painkiller. But I don’t believe she was ever the same.
   At the hospital that night she died two or three weeks later, it was after 9 pm. when the nurse came out to talk to me about her condition, informing me that she would need surgery, and that there was no surgeon on call at the time. I would have to drive with her to Akron, 40 minutes away. And there was no real way of knowing what her prognosis might be after surgery, assuming she survived it.
   That’s as far as I’ll go in justifying my decision to euthanize my friend, put her “down.” She was given two shots, a painkiller and one that stopped her heart. She died with her head in my lap.
   What do our dogs and cats think and feel? Does a dog have a “personality” or a soul? Did Kristina know when she rang the chime at the vet’s office that she was dying, that her life with me was over? Or do we simply project onto household pets our own longings?
   The most cursory google search yields a lot research indicating that animals of all kinds display traits of distinct personality, although the science is “bedeviled” by the problem of anthropomorphism, of human bias or projection in the attribution of personality traits, as described by one particularly cogent report from 2013 in Real Clear Science. 
  
All animal personality scientists grapple with how to reduce the human bias embedded in their experiments. “Trying to eliminate research bias is what this field is devoted to,” says biologist and coder Alison Bell from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She says that even with coding, measuring a behavior as simple as two fish biting each other includes some level of judgment. What constitutes biting? Do the fish just need to bump mouths or must the researcher see teeth sinking into flesh?
   Western culture is quick to attribute qualities like “shy” and “brave” to cats and dogs, says animal ethologist Kristina Horback from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. Horback says that when the same traits are observed in an experiment looking at dolphins or elephants, for example, researchers steer clear of using adjectives to describe the behaviors. “Shy” and “brave” are risky words in a scientific setting, she says, because they are reputed as subjective and only ever applied to humans.

Who cares? It might be more useful and interesting to wonder why anyone should doubt that to which virtually everyone who cares for an animal can testify: the almost palpable sense that their companion animals are more human than some of the people they have to deal with at their offices or in their families.

Kristina was almost universally described as “sweet.” Border collies generally are. But she had an inner wolf that came out in certain situations, most vividly when another dog sought affection or recognition from me; that other dog was likely get the what-for, particularly as Kristina grew older and crankier. This inner wolf, by the way, was a trait I found extremely endearing, not because I enjoyed watching her beat up other dogs, but because she expressed it instinctively, without pride, and did not seem to revel in it; after she routed a dog, she went back to business as usual, as if she’d been interrupted while reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette.

I believe animals suffer a lot at our hands—K. spent entirely too much time alone in my care, which is why I cannot tell people who ask me that I will get another dog. (When someone loses a mother, sister or a brother, no one ever asks, “Will you get another?”). I do relish the memories of our many hours walking and exploring in the MetroParks, enjoying the crisp air off Lake Erie in Lakewood Park, walking the path at Stinchcomb Hill, or Edgewood Park in Rocky River.

And we have a lot to learn from them. Sometimes when my daughter was young and still at home and we would argue (sometimes loudly, sometimes toe-to-toe), Kristina would stand between us, wishing us to be nice to each other. She also had a talent for using her paw to prompt you to scratch her chest. Sometimes when Tess was upset, K. would sit up close to her, paw at her hand as if to say, “Scratch my chest, you’ll feel better.”

It always worked.

Rubbernecking Brexit

Like a great many others, it seems, I have become a Brexit rubberneck. It was instantly fascinating when the Brits inflicted this thing on themselves two years ago; it has become all the more so as the deadline approaches and all of the UK’s options for how to move forward are bad or terrible. I have probably read more about Brexit in recent weeks than I have about my own country’s contortions. Everything about the subject—the history out of which the EU grew, the great benefits it has accrued to Europe and individual member countries, the problems and restrictions and cultural displacement that has accompanied those benefits, the politics behind the original referendum, the dynamics of the Leave vote, and the contortions the U.K. is going through in the aftermath—everything, all of it, seems to refract in one national calamity the most urgent questions confronting liberal democracy in the 21st century. The Wall Street Journal came the closest (of anything I have read) to capturing this big picture, stating that Brexit encapsulates the tension between the undoubted economic benefits of “neoliberal” globalism and the irreducible need (for such it now appears to be) for democratic nations to assert a national and cultural identity and sovereignty.

For a political junkie, there’s just a lot to think and talk about. The fascination is akin, of course, to rubbernecking a roadside accident, with that regrettable human affinity for watching someone else’s disaster (or what seems like someone else’s disaster, because Brexit is really every Western country’s problem, in more ways than one). I should say up front: although I think a great many Britons (including at least some Leave supporters with buyers remorse) must be wishing to God that David Cameron had never held that referendum, and although I continue to believe, in a general way, in what the EU represents, and that when all is tallied up, "Remaining" was the better choice--despite all of that, one of the things one learns after diving deeply into the subject is that there was a powerful and legitimate impulse behind the Leave vote that should not be dismissed only as reactionary nationalist obstinancy; that there are substantive grievances about political disenfranchisement and unaccountable decision-makers in Brussels, and about cultural dissolution through borderless migration that have been seized upon (and taken advantage of) by those more retrograde instincts. For believers in liberal democracy, this makes countering the reactionary nationalist tide more difficult, and a matter of close-range strategy as well as long-range planning and philosophy.   

For instance....if Brexit has demonstrated one thing for American politics, it is that liberal Democrats who want to contain and ultimately defeat the reactionary nationalist-populist movement need to get serious about immigration, even if we may think that the problem here is entirely different—and far, far, far less existentially threatening than it is in Europe—and that American fears about the southern border are stoked by an enormous amount of horseshit on the political right. The problem on the southern border is just that—a problem; Democrats should make it a priority to solve it and banish all talk of “open borders”.

It's worth noting, there’s quite a few highly interesting articles arguing for Leave from the liberal-left perspective. The most important point in the best of these, as I understand the argument, is that a nation is the vessel through which social democracy can thrive; and there is none other. “Democracy needs a demos, a people for whom government is of, by and for,” writes Alan Johnson in the New York Times . “Without one, all you have is inter-elite management, treaty law and money grubbing….It has been a colossal error…to think of nation-states as embarrassing anachronisms hostile to democracy. Far from being a threat to democracy, the nation-state is the only stable underpinning we have yet devised to sustain the commitments, sacrifices and levels of social trust that a democracy and a welfare state require.”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Between now and the deadline in March 2019 for the final exit, the U.K. is in a truly weird place. As of this writing (on Monday, December 17), Theresa May’s exit deal with the E.U. is expected to be rejected in the British House of Commons. Andrew Sullivan wrote a penetrating piece on the next-to-impossible task May has had. She has had to beg Europe’s leaders for concessions to make an exit as painless as possible; Europe has driven a hard bargain—and why shouldn’t it? If leaving the Union can be seen as painless, other nations will follow suit. So the deal May brought back satisfies no one at home—it returns sovereignty over the border to the U.K., but that’s about the only real chit for hardline Brexiteers. Her agreement would keep the U.K. within a single customs market, which allows for commonly agreed upon import charge duties—but that’s not the same as the single market that E.U. member countries enjoy, in which goods move unimpeded across borders. And despite this reduced status as a trade partner, the U.K. would still be subject to rules and regulations from Brussels (which Brexiteers regard as a fundamental betrayal of the Leave vote). Meanwhile, Remain-ers still see the whole thing as a defeat with almost certainly disastrous economic consequences for Britain (every economic analysis, so I have read, expects Brexit to be a net loss, possibly a very bad one, to the U.K.’s economy), and debilitating to young people who will likely face real obstacles to moving to and working in E.U. countries. The best thing that can be said of the agreement is that co-opts the reactionary nationalist movement on its most inflammatory point—immigration—while honoring the Leave vote but containing, to the extent possible, the damage from this very bad decision.

As Sullivan points out, May’s gamble is that the other alternatives to her exit bargain will be revealed, “in the cold light of day”, to be worse. Those other options include what’s called a “hard exit”—no deal at all with Europe, the U.K. simply out in the cold on March 18, 2019, facing enormous new tariffs on every imaginable product, hard barriers to travel across European borders, and the need for the U.K. to renegotiate its own bilateral trade deals with every single country in the world that the E.U. trades with now. This option has been described, entertainingly, by one British politician as turning England into a “1950s museum floating in the Atlantic.”   

The other alternative is a re-vote on the referendum, an option that is gaining some traction (Tony Blair is campaigning for it). There’s a lot of freight behind this idea but it carries enormous risks, and not just because the outcome of the vote would be uncertain. Adding to Theresa May’s problems, so I gather, is that she is generally regarded as, well, not very good at her job—which is sad because there is a great deal of courage and principle and patriotism in what she is doing. She voted Remain, but she is committed to honoring the vote of a democratic state, and to getting an exit that will keep the U.K. from being harmed as much as possible. And she has ruled out a second vote. Can a democratic nation really just call the equivalent of a mulligan—oops, sorry, we fucked up—and re-do a vote? It would be exceptionally divisive and would convince many Leave voters that they are as disregarded and disrespected as they have always felt themselves to be, pouring gasoline on the populist fire. As one Leave supporter put it, “The establishment can’t just keep re-doing the election until they get the result they want.” 

There is a retort to this and part of it has to do with the shameful conduct of some prominent Brexiteers who floated a lot of bullshit in the campaign leading up to the 2016 referendum—not just about, for example, the millions or billions of pounds that could be reinvested into the British National Health Service, but more generally that leaving the E.U. might be painless, that the U.K. could easily renegotiate its own trade deals as if it were still a global empire. In a routine campaign for political office, this kind of flim-flam might be regarded as standard operating procedure. In a vote as a fateful as Brexit, it amounts to something like political malpractice, for which the guilty parties should be ashamed, if anyone anywhere these days were ashamed of anything, ever.

On top of this, there were also reports of people who voted Leave but didn’t really understand what they were voting for, and some who voted Leave for the hell of it, thinking it had no real chance of passing. And then there are the suspicions that Russian misinformation may have played a part. All of this, in a an enormously fateful vote decided by four percentage points, does lend some weight to the idea that the first referendum was a botched and skewered exercise. 

But the stronger argument against Brexit has to do with the E.U. itself, and where it came from. The European Economic Community, which would later become the E.U., was first forged by the exhausted combatants of World War II out of a kind of cultural despair about whether European countries would ever stop slaughtering each other, which they had been doing since Medieval times, culminating in the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of the second war; it rested on the slim hope that they might, just possibly, do so if they were economically dependent on each other. 

Here is the thing: Of the great many idealistic visions that fell by the wayside in the bloody 20th century, this idea cannot be said to be one of them. Is it not, in fact, an unqualified success? Can it not be said that this idea is, in fact, one of the very, very few instances of the human race collectively acting with something approaching common sense?

Perhaps the thing the EEC eventually evolved into is a perversion of the original vision. But was it really impossible to reform and liberalize the E.U. from within, or to register some kind of British protest that was less self-defeating? Was it not possible to formulate a referendum that might have offered more choices or less stark choices, or rules that raised the bar for success so that so radical and far-reaching a decision could not be rendered by the slim majority that carried the day in June 2016? 

My strongest feeling about this matter, when all is said and done, is that the bitter, reactionary nationalist germ at the heart of Brexit—the same germ that has infected politics in my country—needs to be co-opted, smothered, contained and ultimately defeated, whatever it takes. Leftist supporters of Brexit, on either side of the Atlantic, are being enormously naïve if they underestimate the danger of this infection, this faction with which tyhey are making league. We have seen before where it leads, and however it dresses itself up, and whatever advantage it takes of legitimate grievances, it is, I believe, an enemy of civilization. Believers in liberal democracy need to be wise and crafty and resourceful in figuring out how to contain it. If a re-do of the referendum is impossible—and it may be that that a new vote would only inflame the infection---then it may be that Theresa May’s not-so-very-good deal with Europe may be the next best thing.

Liberals Should Let Go of Roe v. Wade

   The painful Capitol Hill spectacle of the last two weeks must surely have made clear, to anyone on either side of the partisan divide, what has been in plain sight for a long time: the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the fate of which lay behind the brutal machinations of both parties, is the poison pill at the heart of all that has gone wrong in American politics in the last forty years.
   It has also, I believe, been a disaster for the liberal left, permanently alienating a segment of the population from legitimate liberal-left causes: livable wages, a fair tax structure, a strong public education system, and universal healthcare.
    I think the procedure should be legal, and if the court had kept its nose out of this subject many states, if not most, might have ratified abortion by now. But I have never been able to understand how the Court construed this to be a constitutional right, or how “due process,” as protected by the 14th amendment, can be extended to include a medical procedure. I wonder how many of the ruling’s defenders can explain it.
   It’s a deal that many liberals, wanting to defend the liberation and empowerment of women, have made, I believe, with a bad conscience (I say so because for years I did so). The obstinacy with which Democrats have clung to this tortured reading over the years, has convinced the approximately one-third of Americans who regard abortion as a profoundly moral issue that the left simply does not negotiate in good faith. Roe v. Wade was the primer for a politics that was all about saying what you need to say to satisfy your “base,” regardless of facts, Constitutional principles, or anything else more enduring than winning the day.
   Let us stipulate that the other side has learned to play the game. God knows. The Republican party is thoroughly captive to a President who is a fluent liar and who has gone the final logical step and entirely discarded facts or truth as a governing principle. The devolution hardly began with Trump, however; there has been a steady corrosive drip of insincerity. Does anyone even remember the shameless Republican posturing around a private domestic tragedy in the case of Terri Schiavo?
   In the long slide to our current depths, Sarah Palin’s “death panels” lie must be regarded as the really, really deep dive. You might remember that “death panels” referred to a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would have established a funding stream and a reimbursement code within the Medicare program to pay doctors to have a conversation with patients about completing an advance directive, living will and other aspects of end-of-life planning. Congress killed the provision in the wake of Palin’s lie. (Six years later, in 2015, Medicare did indeed begin paying physicians to have these discussions with their patients).
   Palin’s lie has had legs. Almost a decade later, I know of an individual on Facebook who has posted that Ezekiel Emanuel, the Harvard medical ethicist who was an author and proponent of the provision, did so for the purposes of being able to “euthanize political opponents.” Give that some thought: there is an American out there, and he is not alone, so distrustful of “coastal elites” that he believes (or pretends to believe, in the safe space of social media where fantasies flourish) that they want to kill him.
   This is an individual who should be on our side. A decade ago the housing collapse and financial services industry scandal demonstrated that Wall Street can screw over the average American before Washington politicians can get their shoes on; both of those industries are now being de-regulated. Our elected politicians rely on ungodly amounts of money to get elected, much of it coming by hook or by crook, from Wall Street. The Supreme Court has ruled that a corporation is a “person” and the lavishing of extravagant amounts of money on a candidate is a form of free speech. A multi-billion-dollar, investor-driven pharmaceutical industry bears a very large share of responsibility for an opioid epidemic that has exacted extraordinary suffering on every segment of American society. We have the only healthcare system in the developed world where the first question you get asked when you go to the hospital is, “How is this getting paid for?” Private equity firms are buying up cash starved medical practices; by what logic does anyone think they will not dictate the limits of medical care according to their profit demands? For profit colleges. For profit prisons. For profit detention centers for detained immigrants.
   But go on any right-wing website, or tune into Hannity or Limbaugh, or look up your Trump-loving Facebook friend (if you have one) and you would think the United States was menaced by……socialism. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration practices the real thing, handing out $12 billion in subsidies to farmers damaged by protectionist policies that run counter to traditional conservative free trade policy, perfectly closing a perfect loop of perfect hypocrisy.
   Such is the measure of how badly we have lost the audience we should have. When the issue of abortion is returned to the states, where it should have been all along, at least some of the passion on the pro-life side will have been leaked out, and the political dynamics will favor a measure of choice: voters (including men) will have to live with the prohibitions they impose upon themselves. Then perhaps the liberal left can return to principles and policies aimed at securing the economic ground beneath Americans’ feet so they can thrive and prosper—policies like a publicly funded, single-payer national health insurance system that would be, I believe, restorative of American health in more ways than one. 
   It should have happened years ago. The passage of Medicaid in 1965, a kind of afterthought to the Medicare program, was believed to presage what would be the next logical step—universal healthcare coverage for every American citizen.
   In the interval, the Democratic Party and the liberal-left fatefully lashed itself to the electrified cage of a legal reading that some 30 percent of Americans believe to be morally reprehensible. The shockwaves from that ruling, and the cascade of escalating lies, dissembling, and demagoguery on both sides over the years, have seared our cultural and political fabric and warped our regard for each other. It has also, I believe, done serious damage to much that is good and true and unassailable in the American liberal tradition.

Rewriting History: Five Historical Novels

Every story is a form of history, no? “Once upon a time…..”

Five of my favorite novels, described below, are historical fiction, a form that inhabits a continuum from the telling of known historical events using real historical characters but with a fiction writer’s omniscient consciousness; to the creation of fictional characters inhabiting an historical period that is front and center (almost, one might say, where the historical period is the story itself); to the inversion or scrambling of known historical events to create an “alternative history.”

(One could, I suppose, spool out the concept of historical fiction to encompass just about any story; after all, anything that happens and that can be told as a story must have taken place at some point in time. But at that same point, if the historical aspect of a story disappears into the mists of a writer’s invention, then it is no longer historical. Historical fiction is, if nothing else, about history, even when what is being offered up is “alternative” to the known facts.)

Three of these books are by the same author who has made the retelling of American history in fiction his vocation. Thomas Mallon has a great gift for getting the inside story. And by that I very much do not mean the Washington journo’s version of the “inside scoop,” though he resides in Washington and the city is the setting for the novels of his I will attempt to celebrate below. I mean, instead, that he understands how events on the public record are driven by the private passions of the men and women who make the history. This is preeminently on display in Watergate which is rendered, in Mallon’s telling, as a story of many private intentions gone haywire. (Okay, Finale does include quite a lot of “insider-y” stuff, the sort of narrative gets traded around among D.C. people-in-the-know in that gossamer middle zone between gossips and news. But it’s there as atmosphere; the real story he tells of the Reagan years is on even deeper-background, where only talented novelists tread.)

The other two, the best of them, my favorites, share something else. Libra, by Don Delillo, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon, are masterpieces of sentence writing. One brilliant, wickedly funny or penetrating sentence builds upon another, each one all alone seeming to tell a whole story, each and every sentence wholly original and unspoiled by cliché. I have read both of them over and over, sometimes just picking them up and opening anywhere to begin reading sentences. I should add that they share something else: both of them are, in very, very different ways (to steal Christopher Hitchen’s description of the novels of Wodehouse), incandescently funny: very darkly so in Libra and antically, hilariously in Yiddish Policeman, But the dark is never far away in Chabon’s story either.

****

“There’s something they aren’t telling us,” says David Ferrie to Lee Harvey Oswald in a grim New Orleans bar. “Something we don’t know about. There’s more to it. There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.”

To appreciate Don Delillo’s Libra you need only be an American, and to have imbibed the peculiar American political air for any prolonged period as a sentient adult. For then you will be familiar with the odor of paranoia, never very far off in American affairs, that “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” described by Richard Hofstaeder in “The Paranoid Style in America Politics” more than 60 years ago.

It helps, too, to have wasted a fair amount of time reading all sorts of conspiracy junk about the Kennedy assassination, of which there is no shortage. All of the real-life characters who have figured in conspiracy narratives—Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw—stalk the pages of Libra. Shaw, who also makes an appearance in Fellow Travelers, has only a walk-on role here, appearing as a shamanistic confidant of David Ferrie’s, a host of gay sex parties. In real life, he was the lawyer who was slandered and defamed by the megalomaniac Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who was the inspiration for Oliver Stone’s paranoid blockbuster, JFK. Garrison brought Shaw to trial on charges of conspiracy so paper-thin the jury came back with a not guilty verdict in a matter of minutes. (One of Garrison’s delusions, along the way to becoming the hero of Stone’s movie, was that the Kennedy assassination was a gay “thrill killing” perpetrated by a coterie of New Orleans homosexuals.)

Delillo spins a scarily plausible conspiracy involving embittered CIA and Cuban mercenary veterans of the botched Bay of Pigs operation, Mafia types, and assorted right wing lowlifes (Bannister and Ferrie). The plot originates with the aging CIA guys, sidelined now after the Bay of Pigs, who hope to rekindle the nation’s flagging zeal for toppling Castro by staging a false flag operation, an attempt on the President’s life that will fail—the killers are supposed to miss their mark—but will be traced to Castro.

Oswald appears on the scene in Dallas and New Orleans where he is discovered by the conspirators, out of a wretched and dyslexic background in the Bronx, coddled by and bullying his maudlin, self-pitying mother.  To the conspirators he is a convenient cut-out, mercurial, with a dizzyingly strange and eyebrow-raising background—the stint at a U2 base in Atsugi, Japan, the strangely easy entry into the Soviet Union and the even more strangely easy exit—the perfect patsy.

Along the way, Delillo conjures up magically the chilliness of the coldest episodes from the Cold War: his rendering of a fictional interrogation of Oswald by the KGB after the American U2 spy plane is shot down and Francis Gary Powers is arrested is very good.

Delillo’s portrayal of Oswald is exemplary and prescient. He appears both grindingly plain and pitiable in his grinding poverty, an American everyman, and at the same time surpassingly weird. For the weird version, here’s one of those sentences I mentioned: Oswald was taking shape in Kirilenko’s mind as a kind of Chaplinesque figure, skating along the edges of vast and dangerous events.

For the plain version, there is this: After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.

(Sixty years on, looking back again at Oswald after so many mass shootings by lonely, emotionally disturbed, sexually deprived men with access to a gun, would we today, be so quick to assume a political, rather than a personal motive?)

The original plot spins out of control—it is a genius of Delillo’s storytelling to intuit how really impossible it is to keep a conspiracy contained—and the shooters will assume their own agenda. The story draws oxygen from the venomous hatred that Kennedy inspired in certain quarters, a hatred that was nursed into a poison by some of those who felt betrayed by Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs. (That debacle, one of the great cock-ups in American history, was itself born of a kind of paranoid obsession with Castro). But Kennedy hatred took on a life of its own, was ventilated by the man himself and the primitive feeling of inferiority his own privileged and rarified upbringing could evoke in the susceptible. Listen to New Orleans private detective and right-wing gun runner Guy Bannister cursing the man through his teeth:

We’re supposed to believe he’s the hero of the age. Did you ever see a man in such a hurt to be great? He thinks he can make us different kind of society. He’s trying engineer a shift. We’re not smart enough for him. We’re not mature, energetic, Harvard, world traveler, rich, handsome, lucky, witty. Perfect white teeth. It fucking grates on my nerves just to look at him…Do you know what charisma means to me? It means he holds the secrets….All the danger is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down. What’s he plotting with Castro?....There’s not the slightest doubt in my mind but that a movement exists in the executive branch of the government which is totally devoted to furthering the communist cause. 

In just this way is Libra only superficially, or anyway secondarily, a version of the Kennedy assassination.  It is really about paranoia itself, how “the truth” becomes a function not of empirical, testable facts, but of our fears and our wishes. Birthers, truthers, conspiracy theorists of every stripe thrive in this zone. Delillo wrote Libra 25 years before Alex Jones came to prominence and another President of the United States would tell an audience, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” Libra a story for our time.

*************

Casting about for how to introduce The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I find I can only reproduce for you one or two of those matchless sentences I mentioned.

“According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with a crude hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy. But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead.

The problem with this approach is that those are followed by others, only better, only more fun, so I find I have to keep going.  

Meyer Landsman is the most decorated shames in the District of Sitka, the man who solved the murder of the beautiful Froma Lefkowitz by her furrier husband, and caught Podolsky the Hospital Killer. His testimony sent Hyman Tsharny to federal prison for life, the first and last time that criminal charges against a Verbover wiseguy have ever been made to stick. He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It’s like there’s a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets.
If you’re not ready the read the book already, you may be dead to language. But, okay, maybe what you need is a story, a plot, so here’s how it is: Meyer Landsman is a cop, a detective and he is the offspring of a Jewish remnant that settled in Alaska after the Holocaust and after the fledgling state of Israel was defeated in 1948. A precarious “interim state” was declared by the United States Congress for the Jews of Sitka, Alaska—interim because, well, no one wants Jews around permanently—and it is in this interim state that  Landsman chances upon a murdered Jewish kinsman in the flophouse hotel in which he lives, and is driven to solve the mystery in the weeks and days before he and his tribesman will be forced, yet again, to wander the earth in search of a home.

The young dead Jew, it turns out, was—before a heroin addiction “turned his brain into a great lapping tongue”—a man of great promise, the greatest promise actually. The Tzaddik Ha-Dor, the righteous man of his generation, of whom there is never more than one. As Meyer Landsman explains to his supervising officer (who just happens to be his ex-wife):

So the story is that these guys, these tzaddiks, they have been showing up for work, one per generation, for the past couple thousand years, right? Cooling their heels. Waiting for the time to be right, or the world to be right, or, some people say, for the time to be wrong and the world to be as wrong as it can be. Some of them we know about. Most of them kept a pretty low profile. I guess the idea is that the Tzaddik Ha-Dor could be anyone.

The unraveling of the murder of this would-be tzaddik will bring Landsman into contact with a rabbinical Jewish crime family and a gang of militant zealots bent on rescuing the Jews of Alaska before “the Reversion” scatters them to the winds again. Along the way the reader meets chess masters, a husband-wife-and-daughter family famous for baking pies for pilots and passengers at an obscure airport in the frozen north, a midget police officer named Willie Dick, a disgraced Irish journalist with a macroencephalitic head, and a just barely sane dentist who specializes in recreating the tools and utensils of the ancient Temple rituals described in the book of Leviticus.

The hallucinogenic imaginativeness of this set-up allows Landsman to inhabit every single gumshoe stereotype—drunk, cynical, a fuck-up in every aspect except busting bad guys—and yet still seem like no detective you have ever, ever read or heard about. I like to push this novel on people—it’s so much fun, it’s so funny. Yet it is a high, high game that the novelist is playing. It rolls along with every convention of the detective story, but all of those conventions are translated into a higher form of imagination—a story ultimately about that sense of contingency, of living on the lip of an abyss, of ever-waiting and hopefulness leavened by a past of disappointment and disaster that has characterized wanderers of the world everywhere seeking a home, but has been most quintessentially the story of what it means to be a Jew.   

“Landsman has no home, no future, not fate but Bina. The land that he and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy, by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue.”

XXXXXXXXX

The scandal known as “Watergate” that ended 44 years ago this month with the resignation of Richard Nixon has had enormous impact, mainly a bad one, on how all Americans regard politicians, government, and the very calling of public service. Although it brought down a prominent figure of the right and was regarded at the time as a victory of the liberal left, the scandal’s most lasting impact has probably been to implant in millions of American minds a deep distrust of government and of what has been regarded for most of American history as the dignity of public service. The seeds of the Trump phenomenon can be found in Watergate.

Such are the ironies of history.

But the episode has “already” accumulated the dust of a distant episode most, or certainly many, Americans can only dimly recall, a quaint relic in the nation’s attic. To recall the names of the period is like coming upon an old middle school year book inscribed with wishes from long lost classmates to “have a great summer!” John Dean. John Ehrlichman. Bob Haldeman. Howard Hunt. Who remembers Tony Ulasewicz, the bagman who delivered wads of cash as “hush money” to Howard Hunt’s wife and talked like a Damon Runyon character when testifying before the Senate investigative committee?

It is a bittersweet relic for some of us who were just becoming politically aware when the scandal was making headlines.  I was fourteen when Nixon resigned, and I grew up outside of Washington in a family that talked politics at the dinner table. The summer before I had a paper route delivering the Washington Post, where Woodward and Bernstein were regularly taking the President to the cleaners. 

Washington at the time had a lively party circuit, hosted by fashionable Georgetown matrons, that was chronicled in the Post’s “Style” section. But in many other ways it was still striving to outgrow John Kennedy’s description of the nation’s capital as a city of “southern efficiency and northern charm.”  It was a profoundly segregated city and the ruins of riots six years prior to the President’s resignation still rendered vast stretches of real estate east of the Capitol a no-man’s land (at least for white people).

Thomas Mallon’s novel, “Watergate,” brings it all back to life, intelligently and clairvoyantly. They are all there—the burglars Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt and the Cubans, Dean and Haldeman and Jeb Magruder and John and Martha Mitchell. Nixon and Henry Kissinger. His story is a comedy, or a tragi-comedy in which a vast national calamity grows out of a complex history of miscues, crossed signals and half-hearted intentions, a comedy haphazardly propelled by personal (rather than public) motives, misunderstandings and misconnections.

It is a tale of humans in positions of power being hopelessly human, and so his hypothesis--although wildly imaginative--is entirely plausible.  John Mitchell, the attorney general, is hopelessly distracted by his mentally ill and alcoholic wife Martha and is depicted as fatally deferring on a decision about whether to fund the nit-witted Gordon Liddy and his confederates in their plans for subverting the election. Nixon himself is depicted as more of a fumbling neurotic than a paranoid calculator. “I listen to myself on the tapes and hear myself trying to sound like I know more than I really do,” he tells his wife tearfully, when the gig is up.

The central figure in the story is Fred LaRue, a barely recallable figure who nevertheless was at the heart of the scandal. A top fundraiser among southern conservatives that Nixon cultivated for their resentment over civil rights, Larue was the one who scoured up the dough to give to Ulasewicz to give to the burglars to keep them quiet. But LaRue—in Mallon’s telling—also carries a terrible secret from his childhood, one that emerges as central to answering an enduring mystery about the scandal: Why did the burglars wiretap the Democratic National Committee to begin with, and what were they looking for?

This is history from the inside--history written by the random chaos of the human heart--and the proof of the intelligence of his story is the degree to which this tall tale is entirely believable. At the end of the novel, after much chaos has spilled, LaRue ponders the nature of history itself, the fact that each moment, each event, is preceded by other moments, other events; that all of them are linked in a chain of causation, so that searching for the precise origin of any one event becomes an exercise in the absurd.  

No, he wouldn’t do it. Because if he started he would never stop. He would have to wonder whether Watergate had really begun fifteen years before, in that Canadian duck blind, and whether it would have occurred if he’d never made a furtive visit to a lawyer’s office in Jackson, Mississippi; if he’d never met a secretary named Clarine Lander. He would eventually rewind things to the point where he’d be asking if Watergate depended on Fred—or Ike—LaRue’s having been born.

XXXXXX

The paperback cover of Fellow Travelers is a black and white photograph of a young man in a jacket and tie, the tie only barely loosened, hoisting a beer stein with a hearty bonhomie at some happy hour bar with his colleagues. He wears the groomed good look of a stylish young man in the 1950s. The photo might have been taken anywhere, but it somehow perfectly conjures up the kind of young men—combining idealism and ambition—who populated the nation’s capital in the late 1940s and 1950s, the city’s era of enormous postwar expansion.

They sought jobs in the “Situations Wanted” section of the Washington Post, with advertisements like this:

Young man, 27, B.A., Yale, three years experience legislative research. 3 yrs. formal legal training, desires position with trade assoc. or law office. Box 61-V. Star.
Young man, college education desires a responsible position. Wall WO6-8202.
Young man, colored, desires evening or night work of any kind. Phone LI8-5198.

It's those kinds of details and countless other period artifacts by which Mallon recreates an era with nearly photographic precision. This noir story of love and betrayal, secrets and blackmail is everything House of Cards would be if it were set in the 50s and better written. Its a gay love story set  in the era of McCarthy and the “lavender scare” when government officials suspected of being homosexual were outed and dismissed, especially in the State Department where they were deemed to be security risks.

Tim Laughlin, an earnestly Catholic, earnestly anti-communist young Capitol Hill staffer falls in love with Hawkins Fuller, an older, mid-level State Department official who works in the Department’s congressional liaison office. Fuller goes by the name “Hawk,” a bird of prey, and he haunts the city’s gay underground with the casual ease of a man who is never denied, who takes what he wants and discards what he doesn’t. It is an almost painful mismatch—Tim and Hawk. Their affair is played out against the backdrop of the Army McCarthy hearings, and a pervasive atmosphere of suspicion and fear and extortion. McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and David Schine are among the real-life characters brought to life again. We also meet one of Mallon's most inspired creations, Tommy McIntyre, a boisterous Irish Capitol Hill player who, driven by his own rage and vengefulness and sense of betrayal, traffics in a sordid marketplace of secrets, of who has what on whom.

The novel renders, in a way that no one can miss, how the closet worked to reinforce the stigma. Not just in the obvious sense (or the sense that should have been obvious even then) that gay men were only security risks because they could not be openly gay; that a gay man who is not ashamed of being gay, and does not care who knows it, automatically ceases to be a security risk.

It is also that the closet actually mandated the behavior that confirmed the stigma. Thus: gay men are presumed to be depraved sex fiends; therefore, they must not be allowed to date or be openly affectionate, let alone have a “courtship” and marriage. So, what are gay men to do? Well, as Mallon depicts—as was true in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, as actually happened—they find an abandoned brownstone building in Foggy Bottom, haul a mattress up to the attic, and have heated, surreptitious, late-night trysts there. See? Very depraved.

Most Americans today regard with a mixture of scorn and incredulity the fact that there was in America a time when a restaurant would refuse to serve black people, as if looking back on a people who were slightly out of their minds. But did you know, as Mallon’s novel recounts, that some government officials, suspected of being gay, were required to read a portion of Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” as a test? If he read it with too much ardor—or something, god only knows—then the secret was out. 

Young gay men should read Fellow Travelers, for a sense of what it was like before the world changed. Tim desperately wants to believe his love affair is the real thing, a love on which God could smile. But the times won't allow it. When it's over he tries to explain to an uncomprehending priest that he cannot be truly sorry it had happened.

Without Hawk’s love in return, his own love had become unbearable. He had stopped because what they did together could not be sprung from the world of shame and suppressed terror and blackmail, from Tommy McIntyre’s extortive market of secrets. He’d once believed that he and Hawkins had lifted themselves above the wicked earth by doing what they did in bed, but that sense had been replaced by a realization that joining their bodies only chained them to the electrified cage of who had what on whom.

XXXXXXX

In the thick of Finale, Mallon’s re-telling of the Reagan years, the novelist renders a phone conversation between Richard Nixon and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Nixon was, then, clawing his way back to respectability by playing a deep background advisor and trader of information to the powerful. Kirkpatrick was the ‘80’s era queen of neo-conservativism, staunch defender of Israel, Cold Warrior and anti-communist. They are discussing Reagan’s Reykjavik negotiations with Gorbachev, which form the heart of Mallon’s drama.

    “Well,” said Nixon, “Reagan’s got two sessions to go over there, though only the last one will count. How do you think he’ll do? You’ve seen him face-to-face more than I have in recent years.”

   After a pause, Mrs. Kirkpatrick spoke deliberately. “I told this to my husband when I first met Reagan, all of six years ago: he doesn’t talk like anybody I’m familiar with. He doesn’t sound like a politician, or an academic or a journalist. But I can also tell you that he’s the most impersonally warm man I’ve ever encountered. They won’t know how to figure him out over there.” 

Reykjavik. The Iran-Contra Affair. The AIDS epidemic. Over all of these 80’s era relics hovers the figure of Reagan himself, whom few it seems, outside of his wife, ever really figured out. Mallon captures exactly this astral quality of the man, the impersonal warmth, the sense of a man whom many found to be genuinely there and yet not quite all there.

He captures it through indirection because Reagan, the man himself, only rarely makes an appearance in the book. The story of Reagan’s presidency is told instead through the heated doings of his underlings, the conservative activists who gravitated to Reagan after their long, long winter in the years of liberal Democratic dominance; the hangers on and journalists who tried to keep up; and its told through his ever-anxious, ever watchful wife Nancy.

There’s more than literary purpose in this. Joan Didion has observed that the uncanny calm at the eye of all this activity—the man, Ronald Reagan—created a kind of outward centrifugal force of enormous energy. It made for a lot of interesting drama. There was, for instance, the peculiar convergence on the outer rings of the Reagan presidency of a coterie of closeted gay conservatives, fiercely anti-communist, some of whom raised money that was funneled through various interesting ways to the Contras in Nicaragua to fight against the Sandinistas. A few of these men also would die of AIDS, denying on their death bed that they were gay and only very tepidly condemning the Reagan administration for its lethally dismal response to the epidemic.

One of my favorite writers, the late Christopher Hitchens has a large role in Finale working (as he did in `real life’) as a fiercely socialist journalist for The Nation, the Spectator and other leftist journals in the U.K and the states. Hitchens is pursuing several lines of story—the money to the Contras, that coterie of gay cold war cowboys, and who has the President’s ear at Reykjavik (the hardliners, like Kirkpatrick) or those who want him to make an historic deal to end the threat of nuclear war (Nancy).

Mallon was friends with Hitchens and captures the man’s charm, ferocious wit, and terrifying facility with argument. Here he is interviewing one of those cowboys, a fellow named Terry Dolan who is dying of a disease he swears is not AIDS.

“…[I]t wasn’t my intention, but now that I’ve gotten a look at you, I feel the inclination to ask: What do you think of Mr. Reagan’s AIDS policy?”

                “Well, they need to speed up the AZT approval process. Get it out of the FDA bureaucracy.”

               “Ah, yes,” said Hitchens, “the libertarian view. Let’s assume that AZT proves a bit more effective than, say, laetrile did against cancer. And let’s assume that it’s made available to all. How do `all’ afford it?”

                “Oh, the market will work that out.”

                “I thought it might. You know, it would be a welcome spectacle to see people on their deathbeds crying for socialism instead of God. Tell me, Dolan: you’re expressing this faith in the market as someone who does not have AIDS?”

                “That’s right.”

                “What do you have?”

                “Anemia,” answered Dolan. “Complicated by diabetes.”
                “Type 1? Type 2?”
                “Not sure.”
                “Really? How about whether or not you’re a homosexual? Sure of that?”
                “I’m not. A homosexual, that is. But I have nothing against people who are.”

Hitchens is interviewing him, mind you, in a gay bar.

And that isn’t even remotely the weirdest stuff that was going on as the Cold War wound down—take, for instance, Nancy’s consultations with an astrologer named Joan Quigley. 

                “…in a moment of weakness, ten minutes before boarding the helicopter, she had called Joan Quigley, who’d warned her that Uranus, the planet that had caused Watergate (she’d never mentioned that before!) was now fully in league with Saturn in its operations against Ronnie. Uranus was `a throne toppler,’ said Joan, using this term for the first time, while warning that there wasn’t just impeachment to worry about but new threats to Ronnie safety as well.”  

There’s a lot of satire in Finale, but it is in the end an admiring portrait of a presidency. Mallon is a Republican, of the sort that must be now be considered outmoded. (I met the author once, on a Metro train in D.C. He writes on occasion for The New Yorker where, he told me, he is considered “the house Tory.” But then he rolled his eyes and shook his head. “This stuff”—meaning Trump—“I don’t know.”)

 Approaching forty years after Reagan was first elected, liberals must be wishing now they had not been so dismissive. (Although I think they—we—can be certain that Reagan would be contemptuous of current White House occupant, and his enablers.)

It seems impossible not to recognize now that Reagan was the right man for the moment, when a wicked regime would finally fall. In the epilogue, Reagan does appear, dying of Alzheimer’s.

                “…he begins to touch and examine some of the pictures and souvenirs, all of them laid out so carefully, everything recently dusted….He knows that these things are beautiful, clever. They have been brought to him as gifts, and he has sensed the happiness in the givers. Picture after picture, object after object, all of them infused with good feeling, except for the one thing just past the end of the table, the one object that always displeases and perplexes him: a jagged block of concrete, ripped from something immense, smeared with paint and pocked with hammers, bearing the numbers 1961-1989 and placed on a wooden stand all its own. Whatever it may be, this object, too, has been brought here to make him happy, but it is something cruel, different from everything else in the room, and often, when he stands before it, he feels an impulse to knock it down.”