"B" List: John Hersey--A Bell For Adano....................................................132/269
"C" List: Rick Perlstein--The Invisible Bridge...............................................98/810
A trifecta of white male authors this month. That sometimes happens. Perlstein at least is alive and Rousseau is a foreign language author, which I would think rescues the set from absolute irrelevance.
We are up to the point in Rousseau's life where he is continually falling out with his friends and with respectable society in general and one begins to get a sense of where the reputation he had in some quarters as being insane originated. The book gives a very thorough portrait of a true bohemian existence, with its unusual domestic arrangements, deep engagement with, in this case, musical and literary composition, and frankness about sexual matters, including boyhood memories of priests exposing themselves while ejaculating, the five children he fathered with his mistress and (famously in philosophical circles) persuaded her to give up to an orphanage, and, perhaps most peculiarly, a story about an eleven or twelve year old girl that he and a friend "bought" with the idea of nurturing her to become a shared mistress, though he says that when the time came several years later to bring this plan to its fruition, he was unable to follow through with it. I have generally found this book engaging. It has entered a little bit of a lull currently as he has removed himself from Paris to the countryside and is recapping his various disputes with now remote enemies, but there is the possibility it will pick up again.
The very long Perlstein book is concerned with the transition in the Republican party between the downfall of Richard Nixon in the early 1970s and the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan during the 1976 primary campaign, which he very narrowly lost to the sitting president, setting the stage for his epochal triumph four years after that, though the meat of the book appears to leave off after '76. I was a very little child during this period, and have no memory of the Nixon presidency and just a little of the 1976 election, though I do remember people around me talking about how ridiculous it was that anybody thought Ronald Reagan could be president, so that when he was elected in a landslide in 1980 the result was a great shock to my 10 year old self. So far the stuff about Reagan (of whom Perlstein, as a representative, I gather, of the educated urban liberal class, is no admirer), at the point I have reached still the governor of California, is the most interesting part of the book. It sounds like he was a more outwardly genial version of Trump in his ability to say things that were completely nonsensical or outrageous to sophisticates that were great hits with the general public. On one occasion as governor Reagan sent the National Guard to Berkeley or one of the University of California campuses to quell a protest that was getting out of hand, stating that, "If there has to be a bloodbath, let's get it over with. Appeasement is not the answer." The media apparently considered that he had committed political suicide. In truth of course, this sent his poll numbers through the roof.
While the narrative, at least as I understand it, is that Ronald Reagan's policies in the 1980s were the main impetus resulting in the destruction of large swathes of the former American middle class, I do have to wonder in reading this whether that was something he actively wished for, or was an inadvertent result because of changes in the nature of the economy, etc, which precluded bringing back much of the world of his memory/imagination. He was from a very ordinary Midwestern background himself, and it seems that more than any politician I can think of he genuinely loved all of that kitschy Americana stuff--football games, college social life, amateur theatricals, Hollywood, cowboys and Indians. It was reported by his son that when the former leader of the free world descended into dementia, he would (to the incredulity of the author Perlstein), instead of denouncing Brezhnev or even reciting lines from Bedtime for Bonzo, say things like "there's a game today...they're waiting for me" which sounds completely believable to me. Anyway, I do believe his vision of America was one where people who at least shared his vision and positive attitude would infallibly prosper. Maybe he would say that these people actually are still prospering, and all of the failures and junkies and homeless people need to get with the program. Actually he probably would say that.
Running out of time...one more thing...I've always known that conservatives hate "Hanoi" Jane Fonda for her Vietnam era activities, but I didn't realize what she (actually) said on television at the time. Wow. I will say one thing, to be able to say something like that in the environment that existed at the time shows, to me, a level of security in one's citizenship and membership in the polity that I don't see in the same way now, unless, ironically, it is from 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, and black Americans.
No pictures again this month. I ran out of time.
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