Feminism, Glenn Close, and the Curse of the Crazy Woman

Essays
June 29, 2017 | 3 books mentioned 15 5 min read

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As we learned from Misery, the story of the woman who holds a man captive can never be a glamorous one. Over the course of Stephen King’s 1987 novel, we’re led to understand that Annie’s insanity—her insecurity, her obsession—is inextricable from that which makes her unlovable, a given long before she ever stumbles across the luckless object of her affections, her favorite writer, in the wreckage of his car. Dowdy and deranged, Annie forces him to rewrite his final novel according to her whims, crooning, “I’m your biggest fan,” over his tortured body.

covercoverAnd indeed, what could be beautiful or romantic about a woman with the violent upper hand, the muse forcing herself on the artist—never mind that the gendered inverse (see: Scheherazade’s dilemma) is the stuff of literature? A story about woman holding a man against his will, especially if she seeks to exploit his creative labor…Well, that’s just crazy. And for women, crazy, as we all know, is not a Good Look.

While Glenn Close boasts a career spanning more than 40 years and dozens of awards, including six Oscar nominations, she’s still best-known for her portrayal of Alex, a woman who attempts to murder her married lover in a fugue of jealousy and rage. The story of Alex—otherwise known as 1987’s Fatal Attraction, the film for which Close received one of those six nominations—is one whose histrionics and gendered ableism have brought with it both critique and dismissal in the three decades since its release. And though Close herself has undoubtedly continued to thrive, she also hasn’t been able to escape its shadow.

coverSuch a legacy may sound like a curse—but then, Close does crazy so well. This spring, she returned to Broadway to reprise the starring role in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s adaptation of Sunset Boulevard, and she’s as captivating onstage as she is in her best movies. Once more, she takes on Norma Desmond, the silent film actress fixated on her past glory from the shadows of obscurity, still ready for her closeup decades after the world has moved on to talkies (and to younger leading ladies). The plot ignites when Desmond hires screenwriter Joe Gillis to doctor the script that she’s convinced will spell out her big comeback, and though his capture isn’t quite as obvious as the one masterminded by Misery’s Annie, his gradual (co-)dependence on his new benefactress proves to be just as deadly.

Since Boulevard’s original film release, the role has become famous for its tragic, hysterical femaleness, and is for that reason vulnerable to one-dimensional renderings of empty, and even harmful, stereotype. But despite this, Close somehow succeeds in recreating a character whose humanity permeates the Palace Theatre, like a furious cloud of gold that envelops audience all the way up to the nosebleeds.

Close is good, almost distractingly so. As an audience member, I spent as much time enjoying the production as I did wondering just how she does it. Is it the suppleness and subtlety of her craft, for which James Lipton once praised her on Inside the Actor’s Studio? Is it the way she injects even the most heartrending of Desmond’s dramatics with narcotic, knowing camp? Is it in the way her presence, as commanding as her voice—its raw power somehow undiminished as the 70-year-old scales countless flights of stairs over the course of the 200-minute show—so masterfully balances bottled panic with profound and searching pain? Whatever the reason, only a seasoned artist could embody the crazy woman, a figure infamous for her unwantedness, without sacrificing an ounce of soul, or a whit of glamour.

Her performance is all the more remarkable considering the fact that humanity is not something the crazy woman is typically afforded, as critics of Fatal Attraction were quick to point out. This archetype, the creation of a society in which a woman who desires (what she doesn’t have; what she shouldn’t want; what is inconvenient or dangerous for male authority) must be institutionalized, silenced, or worse, is deep in the bedrock of our culture. Though Alex and Norma embody slightly different kinds of failed female revolt—the former as a woman professional, the latter as a woman artist—both are in conversation with hysteria, one of the 19th century’s most prevalent (and most gendered) diseases of the West. On film and in subsequent stage adaptations, Boulevard’s subtextual warning that women’s ambition, creativity, and desire for sexual fulfillment are the causes of unhappiness and undoing still comes through loud and clear. After all, the original film, released in 1950, starred a woman who was born in the heyday of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a pioneer in the study of nervous conditions who urged Charlotte Perkins Gilman to treat her hysteria by abstaining from her work as a writer, and to “never touch a pen, brush or pencil,” as long as she lived.

But even in the 21st century, Desmond still exists in the crosshairs of the 20th, an unsettling bridging of contemporary and Victorian gender dynamics. Regardless from which perspective she’s viewed, she’s still forced to star in the spectacle of her own artistic destruction, and as the villain, to boot. Such is her due, for the woman who is too needy (which means she believes she deserves happiness); too self-obsessed (though that same brand of self-obsession is how Boulevard’s Joe aims to fight his way to stardom); or too selfish (another quality that Gillis, played almost dandily by Michael Xavier, can unquestioningly deploy), no success goes unpunished.

More revealing than the spectacle of the crazy woman are the ebbs and flows of her presence in popular culture. At the moment, the cynical rehashing of old classics and dreamscapes for new entertainment is all the rage. One of the most prominent characteristics of the so-called Golden Age of Television is its mobilization of nostalgia, exhuming artists overlooked or misunderstood because of their gender (as well as other identities; nothing, least of all the crazy woman archetype, is untouched by the ravages of white supremacy). Slowly but surely, we’re beginning to revisit geniuses once dismissed as too narcissistic (Nina Simone), mercenary (Joan Crawford and Bette Davis), or selfish (Eartha Kitt) to be taken seriously. Though an incredible boon to the viewers of our time, none of this, of course, does Desmond, and the dead women she represents, any good: After all, it was the unforgivable sin of insanity, and not her own artistry, that garnered her a place in the celluloid pantheon.

The spectacle of female humanity was recently addressed by Jess Zimmerman in her brilliant Role Monsters series with an essay on the rapacious, relentless harpy. “In isolation,” writes Zimmerman, “female ambition is laudable, the kind of thing asset management firms make statues about. In context, it’s considered monstrous.” Even now, at a time when American women can ascribe to feminism with comparatively little fanfare, insisting on one’s own humanity as a woman is still an act of monstrosity—one with which ugliness and craziness, the two things that women are supposed to fear most, is always elided.

With Sunset Boulevard, Close returns to the stage at a time in which women and non-cis-male people across demographics are watching a reinvigorated assault on hard-won rights and liberties. While the monstrosities of misogyny and sexism play out in daily life, her embodiment of a woman made monstrous by her desire for better feels a lot like bearing witness. Curse though it may be, it’s also Close’s most beautiful legacy.

writes about culture, sexuality, and genderqueer embodiment. Their first novel, link the earthquake room, is now available through TigerBee Press. They tweet at @k8bushofficial.

Essays

The Transformation and Legacy of Soho Press

Essays
May 30, 2014 | 3 books mentioned 12 min read
For Bronwen, joining Soho has become a way to keep her mother closer than she ever thought she could. A book will come up that she remembers her mother reading or acquiring. She’ll stumble across books or a note with her mother’s handwriting. She’s surrounded by hundreds of thousands of pages of her mother’s work and passion.
Essays
| 3 books mentioned 12 min read
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Essays

Peeling Back the Oprah Seal: Ayana Mathis’s Twelve Tribes of Hattie

Essays
February 1, 2013 | 3 books mentioned 8 7 min read

1.
The office of literary agent Ellen Levine is a sun-struck jewel box of a place overlooking Madison Square Park and lined with shelves of signed first editions by Levine’s many famous clients, including Marilyn Robinson, Russell Banks, and Michael Ondaatje. Despite these trappings of power — that view, that big desk, the young editorial assistant who ushers you in with a hushed reverence that suggests you are being granted an audience with the pope — Levine is herself unpretentious and approachable. She is a small person, bird-like and soft-spoken, and when she settles in at a conference table, her manner suggests not a big-wheel New York literary agent but a college professor taking time out of her day to sit with you in her office and talk about books.

I had invited myself to Levine’s office one sunny April morning last year to interview her for the first in a series of features I was writing for Poets Writers Magazine called “The Aha! Moment.” The idea was that I would talk to writers, editors, and literary agents about the moment the light went on for them about a particular manuscript, the moment when they thought, I have to do this project. I had asked Levine to pick a novel by a new client and show me at what point — where exactly, on what page — she decided she had to take this writer on. Then we would print that manuscript page in the magazine, with Levine’s quotes explaining how the writing had grabbed her and why.

As we sat down to discuss the page in question, midway into the first chapter of a first novel by an unknown African-American writer living in Brooklyn, Levine described the writer’s command of language and storytelling craft, but when she reached a key passage in the scene, in which a young mother is about to lose her twin babies to pneumonia, Levine’s voice caught. When I looked up, her eyes had misted over. If you interview a lot of people, you develop a radar for when people are selling and when they are not, and in this case Ellen Levine was not selling. She was genuinely moved by this scene in an unpublished book by a writer nobody had ever heard of. I left her office that day thinking: Something really, really good is going to happen to that book.

Sure enough, eight months later, I read that the book Levine and I had been discussing that day, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis, had been published in December, six weeks ahead of schedule, and had been picked by Oprah Winfrey for her newly rebooted Book Club. This weekend — on Super Bowl Sunday, of all days — Mathis will sit for an interview with Winfrey to discuss the book.

 

2.
Long before Jonathan Franzen famously dissed her for picking his novel The Corrections for her Book Club and James Frey’s pseudo-memoir A Million Little Pieces blew up into, well, a million little pieces, Oprah and her Book Club were the subject of an unseemly mix of love and hate from the publishing industry as well as from many readers of literary fiction. On the one hand, Oprah clearly moved product. An astonishing amount of product. According to one study by Fordham University marketing professor Al Greco, during the 15 years Winfrey ran the Book Club before she shut it down along with her syndicated show in 2011, the 69 “Oprah Editions” embossed with the signature Book Club seal sold roughly 55 million copies.

So much for the love part. Franzen, thoughtless as his comments may have been, was only saying out loud what many others had been saying when he suggested Winfrey had larded her list with “schmaltzy, one-dimensional” novels, directed primarily at women readers. At the time, the blowback at Franzen was all about him being an elitist, but I always thought there was a gendered element to the knock on Oprah books. Franzen, and many others, said the books were middlebrow and directed at women, but to my ears, anyway, there was a strongly implied causal relationship between the two: the books were middlebrow because they were directed at women, as if serious fiction — the kind written by Hemingway and Faulkner — was for guys while anything written with a female audience in mind was, almost by definition, middlebrow.

After the Franzen dustup, Winfrey started devoting fewer shows to books, and after the James Frey debacle, she pulled back even further, picking only a few books a year and relying more heavily on established classics like Elie Weisel’s Night or novels by guy-friendly authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy that countered the stereotype of an “Oprah book.” By the time she invited Franzen back on her show in 2010 to discuss his novel Freedom, she just seemed weary of the whole thing.

3.
In many ways, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, the second book picked for the rebooted Book Club 2.0 featured on Winfrey’s eponymous Oprah Winfrey Network, neatly fits the stereotype of an “Oprah book.” For one thing, Hattie focuses on a damaged family, as so many previous Oprah picks have, and like a number of earlier picks, it is set in black America. A cynic — and don’t pretend there aren’t a few of them among you — might even go so far as to say that Hattie is a perfect Oprah book because it is the sort of book about black people that white people like to read, meaning one that allows white readers to bear witness to, and passionately decry, America’s long history of racial oppression without feeling personally indicted for playing any role in that oppression.

It is true that much of Hattie is set safely in early and mid-century America, before many contemporary readers were even alive, and the passages that deal with the most straightforward white racism take place in the South, which allows liberal northerners to blame such ugly behavior on those white people, who are of course nothing like themselves. But such calculations, and indeed all the baggage that comes with being an “Oprah book,” are unfair to the novel Mathis has written, which is a dazzling debut, rich in language and psychological insight, steeped in the history of 20th-century black America and black American writing, and yet fully in tune with a 21st-century America capable of twice electing a black man president.

Hattie is being marketed as a novel, but it would be more accurate to say that it is a collection of linked stories revolving around the dysfunctional Shepherd family, starting in 1925 and ending in 1980. There isn’t a truly weak story in the lot, but the book is best when its central figure, the hard-hearted “plow horse” of a matriarch, Hattie Shepherd, is present, and loses some of its vitality when she is not.

We first meet Hattie in that heartbreaking opening chapter when she is a joy-filled 16-year-old escapee from the Jim Crow South imagining how when her newborn twins, Philadelphia and Jubilee, begin to walk they will “totter around the porch like sweet bumbling old men.” This moment of dreamy bliss lasts barely a page before the twins come down with pneumonia, and Hattie, crippled by her  inexperience and pride, fails to save them. Hattie goes on to have nine more children — far more than she and her sweet, but feckless husband August can support in Depression-era black Philadelphia — but the twins’ deaths mark her, turning her into a cold, rage-filled woman capable of beating a child until he wets himself in terror for having left a window open in the rain.

But Hattie isn’t a villain, nor is she a helpless victim of her circumstances. She comes alive on the page in all her complexity as a woman fiercely determined to never let another child slip away, but neither strong nor resourceful enough to keep them alive without terrorizing them within an inch of their lives. “Hattie knew her children did not think her a kind woman,” Mathis writes late in the book.
She had failed them in vital ways, but what good would it have done to spend the days hugging and kissing them if there hadn’t been anything to put in their bellies? They didn’t understand that all the love she had was used up in feeding them and clothing them and preparing them to meet the world.
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie has its share of stock figures — child preachers whose touch can heal the sick, good-time men who live for the gambling table, and loose-living women who shack up with criminals — but it is Mathis’s gift to breathe life into these characters, render them in three dimensions as ordinary people striving to be decent but lacking the strength of character or willpower to get there. They are often very destructive and Mathis is too clear-eyed a writer to turn away from the wreckage they leave behind or to pass off their recklessness as a mere product of racism and poverty. But she doesn’t pass judgment on them, either. Mathis’s characters are those rarest of fictional creations: real living, breathing people.

4.
A central element of the Oprah Book Club narrative has always been the sudden reversal of fortune experienced by those lucky few Oprah authors. The poor wretched scribe, the tale goes, was toiling away in obscurity in the backwaters of American literary culture until one day the phone rings, and — Oh, my God! — “Hi, this is Oprah.”

Whether this narrative was ever really true of the earlier Oprah picks is debatable, but it is certainly not true in the case of Mathis who is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a client of Ellen Levine, one of the top literary agents in New York. I have exactly zero knowledge of what levers Levine pulled, but it is hard to imagine that an agent as well-connected as Levine, sitting on a book as good as Mathis’s, could have resisted at least suggesting to one of Winfrey’s show bookers that they might want to give this book a read.

But if this plucked-from-obscurity narrative is partly a media fiction, it does point up a fact Oprah’s detractors would do well to keep in mind: while Winfrey has occasionally leaned on books by Nobel laureates like Faulkner and Toni Morrison, the bread and butter of the Book Club was always new books by little-known authors. Try this at home sometime. Tell yourself you need to pick a book that will appeal to millions of readers, by an unknown author who will be interesting to talk to for an hour on national television, but who has also written a serious work of literary fiction. And then tell yourself you need to do this once a month while running the highest-rated talk show in the history of television. Let me know how that works out for you.

It is high time defenders of American literary fiction cut Oprah Winfrey a break. These days, even Oprah is no longer Oprah, and while Mathis’s novel has shot up into the bestseller lists, it is unlikely stay there for months the way books did in the Book Club’s 1990s heyday. Still, imagine what would have happened if Winfrey hadn’t picked it. It still would have garnered raves from reviewers in print and online, and over time booksellers would have begun quietly putting it in the hands of favored customers. In other words, it would have remained a well-kept secret among a bookish few. Instead, thanks to Oprah Winfrey, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie will be read by hundreds of thousands of people and Mathis will sit down for a well-publicized interview on the high holiest day in the American television calendar, Super Bowl Sunday. With any luck, this gritty, tough-minded work of literary fiction that also happens to be a mesmerizing read will enter into the cultural mainstream. Who else but Oprah could pull that off?

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 8 7 min read
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Essays

Rare Book Crime Capers: Forgery, Theft, Murder and the Holy Grail of American Printing

Essays
January 7, 2014 | 3 books mentioned 1 9 min read

A photograph of Mark Hofmann’s the Oath of a Freeman (from Maine Antique Digest, December 1985, p. 26-A)
1.
It has been a busy winter for talking about rare book crime, mostly thanks to one man: Massimo De Caro. The dismantling of his short-lived theft empire has been fodder for news outlets the world over, while the story of his excellent forgery of a Galileo book was just the subject of a long New Yorker piece. Separately, the United States was recently treated to its own rare book news-making event, though not of the illicit sort: the crown jewel of American printing, the Bay Psalm Book, earned some $14 million at a November auction. This all put me in the mind of an earlier tale that combined forgery, theft, and the earliest American imprint in one stranger-than-fiction saga.

On March 14, 1985, Mark Hofmann, a Utah man just starting to make a name for himself in East Coast book collecting circles, phoned Justin Schiller, a New York rare book dealer with whom he had a relationship. Hofmann confided that he may have accidentally purchased “The Oath of a Freeman” on a recent trip to New York, a claim akin to that of finding the winning Powerball ticket on the sidewalk. “The Oath of a Freeman” is the Holy Grail of United States printing. A small broadside (a single sheet of paper, not much bigger than a greeting card) it was created at the same Cambridge Press as the Bay Psalm Book, around a year earlier. Unlike that psalter, of which eleven known copies exist, the “Oath” has long been thought extinct. The Bay Psalm Book was printed in a run of some 1,700, and many of its copies were preserved on the shelves of institutions likely to keep them – the one recently up for sale was owned by Boston’s Old South Church. But the “Oath” was printed in a much more humble number, and there was no natural constituency for its preservation.

Most people who have studied the matter think the “Oath” is gone forever, so Schiller could be forgiven for reacting to Hofmann’s pronouncement with something closer to a yawn than a gasp. Anyway, with tidy regularity, people get their hands on what they assume to be valuable printed relics and bring them to rare book dealers and librarians with the hope that gold can be spun for brittle beige paper. Mostly what they find is that they own old junk. But in this case, Schiller had an established financial relationship with Hofmann – he was also getting ready to bid on his behalf at an upcoming Sotheby’s auction – and so he was obliged to take the claim more seriously than he otherwise might. Still, expectations were low; Schiller told Hofmann he would have to see the thing in person before they proceeded.

To Hofmann this was a mixed blessing. It was definitely a potential windfall, something he badly needed. On the other hand, it meant that he would have to figure out how to create something that had not existed for three and a half centuries.

2.
There is a formal aspect to authenticating works of recently discovered art. Because provenance, one of the three pillars upon which authenticity rests, is usually lacking in found items, connoisseurship and scientific analysis have to bear most of the load. But there is also another, less formal test with found art: the nature of the finder. The person who discovered the item, or, in this case, created it, has to convince potential buyers to believe in him. The meet-cute that supposedly put him together with this great catch has to be both incredible and believable; it has to at once explain not only how he discovered it, but why no one else before him did.

All things considered, Hofmann’s story was not bad. He said he bought the “Oath” along with several other old broadsides, at the Argosy Bookstore – a Manhattan institution that had handled its fair share of bibliographic gems. A more believable Oath-find story would likely involve an estate library in hinterland South of England, but if you’re going to find the Holy Grail of American printing in the United States, the Argosy is as good a place as any. In the event, it also allowed him to create a receipt from the bookstore to show he had purchased, for $25, something with that title.

Not quite two weeks after he told Schiller of its existence, Hofmann flew to New York with his “Oath.” The book dealer examined the document and, satisfied that it was not obviously wrong, called on Michael Zinman – the country’s most important private collector of early North American imprints. Zinman looked carefully at Hofmann’s “Oath” and, though he could not point to any particular thing that was amiss, said he felt the item was too good to be true. In particular, the color of the paper looked a shade too light. Still, this could be legitimately explained in a number of ways and was far from disqualifying. Zinman’s overall pronouncement, while not positive, was at least not negative – and in the long game of authenticating a 17th century document, a chain of “not negative” is as good as one “absolutely positive.”

The next day, Schiller took the “Oath” to the New York Public Library, met with its curator of rare books, and compared the broadside with the NYPL’s Bay Psalm Book – the closest extant item from the Cambridge Press. In general, two items from the same press, printed by the same man within a year or so of one another, could be expected to have a lot of things in common. But of early Cambridge Press works, this is not necessarily true. The ink, the paper, the type – even the printer’s skill – all could have changed over the course of a matter of months. In fact, given the resources of the tiny press in the just-founded colony, inconsistency was expected. So, once again, there was nothing obviously disqualifying about Hofmann’s creation.

It was at this point that Schiller, his bookselling partner, and Hofmann discussed the next steps – and figures. Instead of the standard commission, Hofmann insisted that Schiller and his partner become part owners of the document. “That,” Schiller later recalled, “is a way to get someone committed to a project!” Indeed.

On March 28, Schiller called James Gilreath, the Americana specialist at the Library of Congress, and told him what he had. Gilreath was sent a photocopy of the “Oath” and, once he had a chance to examine it, decided it was good enough for him to go to New York to see the real thing in person. On April 5, Gilreath was put alone in a room with the document, which he scrutinized with a skeptic’s eye – also, a magnifying glass and ultraviolet light. Like the others who had looked at it, the document for the most part passed Gilreath’s muster. In fact, like Zinman before him, one of the only things Gilreath found disquieting was the shade of the paper, which he felt was not dark enough to match that of the Bay Psalm Book. As it happened, the lightness of the paper would later suggest its authenticity. The only known way to artificially age iron gall ink was to heat it, a process whose byproduct was darkening paper. So when the ink of the “Oath” appeared to be the right age, and the paper not unnaturally browned, what Gilreath and Zinman had thought was a liability looked very much like an asset.

By that point, connoisseurship had not exposed the broadside as an obvious fake, so science was up to bat. Three days after Gilreath saw it in New York, the document was sent to the Conservation and Testing Offices of the Library of Congress. Among other things, a fiber analysis of the paper and x-ray fluorescence spectrometry of the ink were conducted. Again, while it was impossible to confirm the authenticity of the “Oath,” these scientific tests ultimately “revealed no evidence that would contravene a mid-seventeenth century date for the broadside.”

It was difficult not to be optimistic. Aside from the scientific testing, other experts on 17th century documents had looked at the “Oath” while it was in Washington and come away impressed. No one could seem to put a dent in the thing. On May 8, less than two months since Hofmann “found” it at the Argosy, a representative of the Library of Congress phoned Schiller to ask after the terms of sale, and provenance. And that’s when the trouble started. There was no provenance to speak of because Hofmann’s “Oath” was about as old as a ripe banana. Worse yet, Hofmann had given Schiller orders not to reveal his name to potential buyers. Couple this with a $1.5 million price tag and the Library of Congress was spooked. As it happens, the provenance issue is not one that is meant to guard against forgery as much as it is against bad title. The 20th century saw a lot of transactions of works of art between parties neither of which owned the item, so public institutions are leery of buying things without knowing for sure who the rightful owner is. The Library of Congress passed.

Mark Hofmann, for his part, was smart to insist his name be kept out of the discussion, even if his anonymity is what partially kept the Library of Congress from buying the document. Salt Lake City was far away from the East Coast, but it had telephone lines – and a few well-placed calls to Utah would reveal the fact that Hofmann had made something of a cottage industry of “finding” previously unknown documents and exchanging them, for many dollars, to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints.

Undaunted, Schiller next offered the “Oath” to the American Antiquarian Society – the next logical place to go. Aware of the Library of Congress’s scientific evaluation, the AAS had its own experts examine the document. They ultimately came to a similar conclusion: it could not be proven to be a fraud. But like the LOC, the society had its reservations, and so lowered the offer considerably, to $250,000 (with the assumption that they might be able to go as high as $750,000). That ended the discussion. And though no one yet knew it, it also ended the life of Hofmann’s creation as a salable property – not because the “Oath” was exposed as a forgery, but because events in Utah overtook the authenticity discussions.

On October 15, 1985, seven months after he first phoned Schiller with his news, Hofmann murdered, with homemade bombs, Kathleen Sheets and Steve Christenson. Up to his neck in debt, he had decided the best way to keep Salt Lake City creditors off his tail while he waited on a financial windfall was to stall and distract them with mayhem. Alas, the next day another of his bombs, meant for someone else, blew up his car. While he was in the hospital, police searched his house and discovered not only the equipment necessary to make the bombs, but also what he had used to construct so many of the forgeries he had sold, or was planning to sell, to collectors, dealers, and institutions.

It is interesting to speculate about what would have happened if either the Library of Congress or the American Antiquarian Society had agreed to a purchase. Hoffman later said it would not then have been necessary for him to kill anyone, but that’s the hindsight of a sociopath – and one who, it should be noted, had a naïve understanding of the pace at which money is paid out by large institutions. As it turns out, making even a near-perfect copy of the most important item in American bibliographic history is not a good way to get quick cash. Still, as testament to how well-made it was, the question of authenticity outlasted even these events. Hofmann’s “Oath” was still being tested a year after it was clear not only that Hofmann was a bombmaker but, more damning still, that he claimed to have found yet another copy of the “Oath.”

3.
Much of the information in this piece came from the efforts of James Gilreath. As an Americana specialist at the Library of Congress, he was not only one of the first folks to examine the broadside in 1985, but he wrote about his experience, and encouraged others to do so, in a 1991 collection he edited called The Judgment of Experts. I sometimes assign parts of this work for a class I teach on rare book crime. But what is never made clear in this otherwise excellent book is whether Gilreath, who had worked at the Library of Congress since 1974, was already stealing rare books from that library’s collection when he went to New York to help authenticate Hofmann’s “Oath.”

The fiction writer in me likes to imagine it so: a rare book thief, called upon to authenticate what he has reason to believe is a genuine “Oath,” is left alone in a room with the document and exchanges it for another version he made from the photocopy. The rest of the story writes itself. The nonfiction writer in me will note only that the federal criminal indictment of Gilreath  – issued almost exactly eleven years after Hofmann started serving his life sentence in a Utah prison – suggests that the Americana specialist’s thefts began only in the early 1990s. Of course, my experience with federal indictments is that they are fairly conservative on such things.

Whenever Gilreath began stealing from the Library of Congress, we can be sure he only stopped in 1997 when he tried to sell a stolen French translation of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to a Boston bookseller. Later indicted for stealing five items valued at more than $1,000, and another seventeen valued at less than that, he pleaded guilty to two federal counts. In 1998, one of the last years of the fairly permissive era of punishing people who steal our cultural heritage, Gilreath was given five years probation and fined $20,000 – a debt not due to be fully paid until 2018.

For the sake of a story, it is tempting to say that this was an episode when one of America’s greatest print forgers crossed paths with one of America’s greatest rare book thieves – but only part of that statement is true. Gilreath was not much of a thief, even by the standards of insiders. And this, as it happens, coincides nicely with the story of Massimo De Caro, a man who pulled off a good forgery but who is, by any standard, a mediocre thief. But that is the way it often goes with rare book thieves, especially those with inside access, who too often confuse having keys to the place with being clever. They don’t realize that stealing the books is easy; turning them into money and not getting caught is hard.

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 1 9 min read
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Essays

The Savage Detectives Machete

Essays
June 4, 2010 | 3 books mentioned 9 6 min read
Traditionally Spanish publishers stuff their books with introductions and notes. You have to skip the fifty pages of critical essays to read the twelve pages of poems. Although I don't think this novel needs all of that, an answer key, a cheat sheet, what in Argentina they call a machete, might do.
Essays
| 3 books mentioned 9 6 min read
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15 comments:

  1. Serendipitous that this essay appears today, so soon after yet another deflection from the issues via attack on a woman”s mental state by #45.

    I an not the only one who has made this observation, but this very website’s comment section is rife with a slew of such attacks against women with the temerity to disagree with certain prolific commenters’ opinions. Among other terms that have been used to describe me, that can think of off the top of my head:

    Obsessive-compulsive, hysterical, determined to find offense, humorless, and the good old all-purpose medical term: “Nuts.”

    We see you.

    Moe

  2. My understanding was that Close derided the portrayal of a women unhinged in Fatal Attraction, as she recognized years later the ramping up or exaggeration of a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder (or hysteria long ago), a severe non psychotic illness which causes great suffering and is engendered by early neglect and abandonment, and often sexual assault. This neediness caused by abandonment is scorned – to be deemed needy is the worst and yet to need is to be human. A reminder: women with borderline personality disorder are capable of great compassion and empathy, despite what Harvard proffesor Dr. Baron Cohen states in his book (can’t remember title) where he lumps women with BPD in with anti-social personality disorder and incapable of empathy. Excellent essay though.

  3. Well, change comes slow. Misogyny and sexism are monstrous, certainly, but where is the data about just HOW prevalent they are? If anything, the world of 2017 is vastly improved over the world of 1917, or 1947, or 1977, and we’re moving in the right direction on gender equality. Is it perfect yet? No, far from it, but I just wish the ID politics crowd could step out of the vacuum of the now and add a little historical context, or to show me some evidence that this problem is doing anything but getting better. It’s almost like they want women to continue be oppressed (or be perceived as every bit as oppressed as they were a hundred years ago) in order to validate their own worldview.
    As for Glenn Close, her legacy isn’t determined just by a showy role in Fatal Attraction. Damages continues to grow in regard as a critically acclaimed moment in the development of prestige TV, and her reputation as a film actress with over 50 credits, including fine work in Nine Lives, Cookie’s Fortune, Reversal of Fortune, The Natural, and The World According to Garp, is far closer to the hearts of cineastes than boiling rabbits (though I do think Adrian Lyne is a provocative European-style filmmaker whose body of work is impressive in its own right). Close also stops mid-play and tells people to put their damn phones away, so kudos to her for preserving the sanctity of the theatrical experience.

  4. @SeanH @SwogHolllow

    Just going to recycle a little Swog Hollow from an earlier piece on Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. I am confident you will deem Swog one of that fine cohort of “clear-headed white male empiricists.”

    I believe this pretty much covers the waterfront.

    [Sean,

    Still “I refuse to think that somehow by mere dint of one’s status as a woman or a POC, they are somehow more fit to judge the objective reality of a situation than an objective, clear-headed white male empiricist”

    Is something you should think hard about. Women and POC probably know more than you about what it’s like to be a woman or POC. Try listening a little more and being turned off by the messaging a little less.]

    “End Swog Hollow”

  5. Sean – good point re Close’s legacy not determined by one film.
    Moe – fight the good fight. xo

  6. Hey Moe,
    I’m all for taking criticism as well as dishing it out, but what’s wrong with being a clear-headed empiricist? I simply do not think that “women and POC probably know more than you about what it’s like to be a woman or POC” because THERE IS NO SUCH THING as “what it’s like to be a woman or POC.” There is no such thing as what it’s like to be a woman. There is no such thing as what it’s like to be gay. There is no such thing as what it’s like to be black. Etc, etc. This universalizing is the basis of racism, sexism, bigotry, and discrimination. To say that because someone is a member of a group that they INHERENTLY are a certain way, that’s racism. To say women are more emotional. To say blacks like fried chicken. To say that whites can’t dance. There is no universal experience of what it’s like to be ANYTHING.

  7. “There is no such thing as what it’s like to be a woman.”

    Well, bless your heart.

    Moe Murph
    Over and out on this thread

  8. @Sean

    Much of what you’ve written up there (against Essentialism) is Spot On… BUT (there’s always a but): look to the definition of “Empirical”. Doesn’t it privilege direct experience over observation-at-a-remove and hearsay? In other words, in discussions of Sexism/ Racism, wouldn’t Women and POC function as better “Empiricists” on the topics than Het White Fellers? Which is not to say that Women or POC *own* these conversations, but their (our) contributions, empirically speaking, are going to be more relevant than yours.

    As a Het male POC, I wouldn’t dare to presume to relativize the suffering/ Othering/second-classing of Women… for two reasons: 1) the Relative intensity of a pain is meaningless to anyone in Pain (ie, being drawn-and-quartered has got to hurt worse than a serious tooth ache, but tell that to someone with a serious tooth ache, in lieu of giving them morphine) 2) how would I know, from direct experience, how bad Sexism is now, compared to “then”, and should anyone be grateful that an absolutely unnecessary (but convenient) Evil has eased somewhat in a century? Surely there will be an urgency about making *all* of the Evil disappear? Especially if the Evil impacts one directly.

    But (again): it doesn’t impact *you* directly; from your distance, things appear to have gotten so much better that you feel people with complaints are exaggerating. You aren’t in possession of enough Empirical Evidence to judge; as a good Empiricist, you should be able to admit that.

    In ’95, I came back to America after a long absence and stayed with married friends in a lovely house by the lake. My old (White) friend had her own dog-walking/ sitting business and asked me, one morning, to check on dogs in two different houses (masters away on vacation). Doing this for her would have entailed letting myself into nice big houses in largely-White neighborhoods at the crack of dawn. Hilarious, right? I’m a Black guy of six feet tall… even wearing white tie and tails wouldn’t have helped. I had to beg off the request. My old friend thought I was being paranoid. She lectured me that there had been lots of “changes” in the US since I had left (remember, this lecture came to me in ’95) and that I had to “face these changes” and “move on”. Racism, she told me, was becoming a thing of the past. Nothing I could say could convince her otherwise.

    Don’t be like *that*, Sean! laugh.

    PS “There is no such thing as what it’s like to be black. Etc, etc.”

    But there is definitely such a thing as what it’s like to be persecuted/ degraded for being “black etc. etc”.

  9. I mostly hear where you’re coming from, Steven (and thanks as always for an articulate response), but there is such a thing as letting one’s life be too muhc governed by fear. If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?
    Also, empiricism can cut both ways. I understand and fully agree with your point about direct observation (in a Masters & Johnson sort of way; you can’t just ASK people what they do in the bedroom, you have to literally observe and record stuff). But that said, certain experiences bias people. Are people who have lost children to drunk drivers really capable of being empirical about DWI laws? Should the widows of people who were killed on 9/11 be in charge of anti-terrorism policies? Too little experience is bad for empiricism, but so is too much.

  10. Sean!

    Ugh, as they say. Seriously: ugh. This is borderline loony (and a new kind of magical thinking, possibly):

    “If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?”

    Sean, how will we put an end to Nigerian email scammers if *you’re* too risk-averse (and cowardly, even), to engage with them? More importantly, how will women put an end to domestic abuse if they keep selfishly leaving abusive households instead of sticking with it and taking beatings in the name of eventual progress that will come, after all the abusive husbands and “lovers” are simply worn out from beating them, posthumously?

    Well, I tried.

    Signed,

    Articulate Black Guy Steven

    PS And no, I will not “hijack” this thread with an off-piste cluster of responses to more and possibly equally absurd rejoinders. I have to mow the lawn, or something, instead. But, yeah: ugh.

  11. Come on man! You’re better than that, Augustine. You’re totally distorting what I say with limp analogies. If you’re going to use domestic abuse as an analogy, what you’re saying by refusing to water plants for a white family in a rich neighborhood is: “Because some women get beaten by their spouses or boyfriends, why bother dating at all.” Show a little gumption, man.
    Or look at it from the other side; what you are saying is that, by your logic of irrational fear, you would encourage a white person to reject a black friend who lived in “the ghetto” who asked the white guy to dogsit/be in such a neighborhood at a perceived “dangerous” time. How is that not furthering the problem? America (and the first-world west in general) is WAY safer than it’s ever been, and even taking into account that the request you received was 20 years ago, it still was recent enough to be a pretty safe activity. People live in fear because of the media. Crime is a fraction of what it was in the 70s. America is safe as hell and there’s very little violent street crime.
    Do black people sometimes get harassed by the cops in wealthy, largely white neighborhoods where there are hardly any black people? Sure. And on super super rare occasions they even get assaulted, and on even rarer occasions they get killed. Do white people sometimes get harassed by the natives in lower class urban neighborhoods where there are very few white people? Sure. And on super super rare occasions they even get assaulted, and on even rarer occasions they get killed. But to give up on interraciality or to just assume you will be the victim of violence if you “cross lines” is too fearful for me to support as being anything remotely approaching a logical or empirical approach to living one’s life.

  12. Sean

    Steve didn’t distort what you said. You said:

    “If no black people take the job of dogwalker/dogsitter because of a fear of being perceived as a robber and shot by the cops, then progress never comes, right? Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists, no?”

    This is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. I have no words for this stupidity.
    Congratulations.

  13. This line is just classic. I can’t get over it. You have to break your brain in order to process the logic in this.

    “Is it more dangerous for a woman to walk alone at night? Yes, but the women who do so in spite of the risk are the real feminists.”

    Somebody should create a meme. The opportunities are endless.

    “Is it more dangerous to drive a car into a brick wall? Yes, but the dudes who do so in spite of the risk are the real car enthusiasts.”

    “Is it more dangerous to inject fentanyl? Yes, but the people who do in spite of the risk are the real daredevils.”

    “Is it more dangerous to eat 12,000 calories per day? Yes, but the people who do in spite of the risk are the real foodies.”

    “Is it more dangerous to jump down a mineshaft? Yes, but the kids who do in spite of the risk are the real athletes.”

  15. Toad,

    You just compared walking alone at night to driving a car into a wall. How am I the one with logical flaws in my rhetoric?

    Really, think about it. All your comparative examples are ridiculously dangerous. A woman walking alone at night is the essence of “take back the night,” it is the absolute essence of feminism–that a woman has every right to walk by herself at night that a man has, and that she should do so with just as much freedom and ease, and without fear of reprisal or harassment.

    You don’t have to break your brain at all to see the difference between my examples and yours.

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Essays

The Germ Has Spread: How America Elected a Reality Show President

Essays
April 7, 2017 | 3 books mentioned 9 10 min read

Back in June, an article titled “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win” (penned by Michael Moore) showed up on my news feed and, because I was tracking the election rather closely, I read it. I then read it again. After the third time, I shared the article around and asked for people’s’ opinions. While this article and his subsequent rounds on talk shows have made Moore one of the many prominent figures that will be forever tied to Donald Trump’s unlikely run to the White House, there is one person who has him beat by roughly 30 years. When Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business back in 1986, he set his sights on what he saw was a change in the way society was being swayed by the spectacle of the visual message in media. Unfortunately, even he could not foresee how his look into the harmful influence of television and media overexposure was completely foreshadowing the rise of Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States, and our first “Reality Show President.”

It is necessary, before we juxtapose the Trump candidacy to Postman’s work, that we fully understand a few of the theories posed in Amusing Ourselves to Death. To rationalize his theory, Postman quotes the philosopher Lewis Mumford who, in his book Technic and Civilization, deconstructs our society’s propensity to become addicts of information. For this, Mumford uses the invention of the clock as an example. He believed that when we created this tool to measure increments of time, we effectively became “time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers.” In other words, we created a tool to measure time, and in doing so, produced a new form of currency that would come to shape our society — we crafted the golden calf and then worshipped at its feet.

Looking at our current relationship with media and what constitutes news in this day and age reveals that we have learned nothing from creating false idols. News and information are now produced in cycles, with hundreds if not thousands of people working to create content for every second of battery life on your cellphone. Postman, writing long before the smart phone, would trace our poisoned, ever-flowing information stream to our fascination with celebrity. He begins Amusing Ourselves to Death by claiming that our society’s unhealthy attraction to polarizing characters in media is reminiscent of the brilliance and spectacle of a city like Las Vegas:
Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into into congenial adjunct of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.
While it stands as a perfect representation of the times, and likewise a great visual, the analogy of Vegas seems almost pedestrian now. Postman was writing in the age before the reality star; a time when MTV was just a channel dedicated to music, and outlandish public spectacle did not equate ratings. Popular TV shows at the time included The Cosby Show, Cheers, and Family Ties — shows that served as reflections of what we told ourselves were American values. Conflict was only just beginning to seep into our TV sets, mostly through trashy talk shows hosted by the likes of Geraldo Rivera and Richard Bey.

While Postman looked to television as the source of our media addiction, the Internet age has amplified this by orders of magnitude. Retweet, Repost, Tag, and Repeat have become embedded into our everyday mantras along with brush your teeth and wash your hands. According to studies like one carried out by ZenithOptMedia, Americans consume almost eight hours of media per day, with that number steadily rising. Postman’s world became reliant on the effectiveness and speed of the televised message; we have grown into a society that gets bombarded by thousands of different messages each day. This has become so ingrained into our society, and we have become so numb to rolling this boulder up the steep precipice, that we have now slipped into a practice of relying on information that is served in small, bite-sized portions in order to consume more. I myself found Amusing Ourselves to Death only after reading the small blurb posted by a friend and clicking a link. Information served to us in this buffet format forces us to be selective. We can’t process everything, so instead we fall for “clickbait” articles, hashtags, and buzzwords. We have become a society hooked on riskier avenues of information, with riskier personalities at the helm.

I always take whatever Moore produces with a grain of salt, but I took notice of his open letter to America in which he detailed why Trump was destined to win in November. Moore likened the American public to a person who, looking at the spectacle of Niagara Falls, “wonders for a moment what it would feel like to go over that thing.” Trump was too much of a magnet, too much of a spectacle, for us to ignore. His supporters, people so dissatisfied with the effectiveness of their government, boldly chose to brave the roaring falls of a Trump presidency. To his opponents, Trump still served as a form of amusement. Both camps were fueled by entertainment we were fed by the sometimes ludicrous missteps of the media.

It’s saying a lot about us when we come to fully accept the deceptive candidate propaganda and attack ads that are built into our political climate. It’s saying even more when any candidate who attempts to take the “high road” and stick to the issues does so at the risk of coming off as human (just ask John Kasich). While some of us groaned and complained about “dirty politics” and the lack of civilized discourse, we also tuned into the presidential debates in droves to see what horrible thing Trump would say next. It became less about policies and more about quotable insults to post and share. As a result, the movement to get Donald Trump elected was fought on two fronts: one of image and one of misinformation. While Trump the candidate scowled into the camera and provided the entertainment value without any actual credible evidence for his claims, others worked to circulate false information online. While this is par for the course in politics, for this election, it proved to be highly effective in reinforcing the Trump base. According to a Florida PPP poll held in October, while 84 percent of Trump supporters believed that Hillary Clinton should have been imprisoned, another 40 percent legitimately claimed to believe that she was an actual living demon. Even to this day, months after Trump’s Inauguration Day speech, there are many fanatics who believe the toxic message spread throughout the campaigns.

Postman writes, “American businessmen discovered, long before the rest of us, that the quality and usefulness of their goods are subordinate to the artifice of their display.” During Trump’s run, the media produced several pieces of damning evidence to discredit him. Like the showman that he is, Trump turned the blame back onto the media, describing them as corrupt and “crooked.” In short, when Trump undermined the validity of the mainstream media, he effectively gave agency to fringe news outlets. Maybe during Postman’s time these outliers spreading fanatical misinformation would be nothing more than people handing pamphlets out in subways or having their hateful propaganda relegated to hard-to-find shows on the radio dial. But during our election, the Internet allowed for the sharing and re-sharing of this misinformation. And by the time anyone was ready to strike these claims down, it was 1,000 to 2,000 shares too late — the germ had spread.

Trump rolled through the entire process speaking (and tweeting) whatever he wanted to, knowing full well that, as Postman describes, “It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.”

Trump dominated his own message throughout his run — seemingly alienating women, immigrants, and the Black and Latino vote. But just like a train-wreck of a reality show, he was only rewarded for behaving badly. According to The New York Times, although he ranked the lowest in actual spending on advertising during his run, Trump received close to $2 billion in free publicity by news outlets and social media — yes, the same media he was condemning. As described in this article, the significance of “earned media” (as it’s called) “typically dwarfs paid media in a campaign. The big difference between Mr. Trump and other candidates is that he is far better than any other candidate — maybe than any candidate ever — at earning media.” This, coupled with Trump’s continued mastery of 140 characters to manipulate both his supporters and detractors into keeping his messages in circulation, led to a fundamental change in how we have attached truth to “celebrity” in this country.

By the time Election Day came, the Democratic Party (and eventually the media) had wasted all of their efforts trying to prove that he was unfit for presidency when in actuality, to his supporters, he became legitimized the more popular culture rejected him.  The Left, after finally deciding to take him seriously, tried to attack the man’s character without acknowledging that he was a character. That he was a product of a society that has been groomed, through the popularity of reality television, to reward people whose sole motivation is to rock the boat, even at the detriment of those who can’t swim.

In validating our reality show president, we may have just incited the absolute worst product of any reality show — the spinoffs. In electing Trump based on nothing but his celebrity status alone, this has allowed for the emergence of toxic figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon to be featured on our TV screens.

But Postman didn’t just warn us against the popularization of polarizing figures. In its most telling chapter, entitled “And Now … This,” Postman explains the start of the Reagan era, citing details eerily similar to those we have seen in our 45th President, more than years later. He writes, “President Reagan’s aides used to become visibly alarmed at suggestions that he had given mangled and perhaps misleading accounts of his policies or of current events in general.” Substitute their names in this quote and maybe Trump’s insistence to evoke similarities between himself and Reagan are worth some merit.

What may provide the most revealing mirror of our current culture is what Postman writes about the quality of information circulating at the time. While Reagan was providing dubious claims on specific events throughout the world, the media was faltering in its attempt at properly providing a filter for its audience. He states:
What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information — misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information — information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.
In just this small section, Postman sums up what our news outlets and mainstream media sources have been up against in Trump’s first 30 days in office. In that time, I have yet to find a better definition for what we are now calling “fake news” and “alternative facts” than the one Postman outlines in this chapter.

Postman warns that during the Reagan presidency, this all led to an oversaturation and overexertion by the press and the people who avidly follow politics. Reagan’s “disinformation” eventually became so common that the news outlets and citizen’s seemed to care less about its validity. In other words, they had reached a threshold for the amount of “disinformation” the public could absorb before the abnormal became the norm, regardless of how many articles reporters produced. In other words, while the press continued its stand on fact-checking the president, the audience (the American public) became complacent in the face of the constant bombardment.

This leads to a section of Postman’s which should be outlined and sent to anyone who is already beginning to feel “Trump fatigue.” Our president and his mouthpieces are attempting to use the same tactics Reagan and his administration used to handle things such as White House leaks and unflattering press. As a result, the usual way to engage in critiquing our current presidency is doomed to fail. Simply pointing out inconsistencies and outright fabrications will not be enough to win out in the end. To understand this better, Postman does a fantastic job at describing the two schools of discourse at play here. Explaining his own upbringing, he calls his approach “typographic discourse” which is a linear way of disseminating fact from fiction. To Postman, an essay written by one of his students cannot contain a paragraph with one view posed as “true” and then be directly followed an opposing viewpoint that is then also posed as a truth. Postman writes, “The difference between us is that I assume…one paragraph and the next to be connected, to be continuous, to be part of the same coherent world of thought. That is the way of typographic discourse, and typography is the universe I’m ‘coming from.’” He then explains that the new form of discourse — one that we are facing right now during this presidency — is fragmented discourse, which he describes as “The fundamental assumption that the world is not coherence but discontinuity. And in a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit, because contradiction does not exist.” Trump’s uncanny ability to brush aside full-blown media pieces about his numerous inconsistencies and contradictions proves that this is a coordinated effort to use fractured discourse to demoralize opposing voices.

There are differences between the world we live in and the one Postman is outlining in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman wrote that while the Reagan administration was tactfully adjusting the the quality of information coursing through the country to best suit its needs, it wasn’t actively trying to bend the mainstream media to its whim. He explains, “The President does not have the press under his thumb. The New York Times and The Washington Post are not Pravda; the Associated Press is not Tass. And there is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies.” Aside from the Russian propaganda parallels (which today pick up a whole new meaning), many people wonder whether Trump is in fact trying to do that very thing. His war against the media — going as far to name The New York Times, WaPo, and the AP by name as detriments to society (“enemy of the American People!”) is, for many, a move to control or outright silence media who print dissent. And, many could say, the “lies defined as truth and truth defined as lies” has been part of the Trump mainstay since he announced his candidacy.

For those who did not vote for Trump, it may be assuring to know that Neil Postman survived two terms of the Reagan Presidency. Does Postman offer any advice on avoiding electing another reality show president?  While he admits that he lacks the competence to find a “cure” for America’s addiction to spectacle, he does offer a few ideas. Most notably, Postman believes we should curb the amount of time spent within the media loop to avoid oversaturation. A second, more humorous, piece of advice would be to “require all political commercials to be preceded by a short statement to the effect that common sense has determined that watching political commercials is hazardous to the intellectual health of the community.”

For now, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman is a must-read in the Trump era, both for the public and those covering this presidency — a resource for those of us who aren’t here for the spectacle.

Image Credit: Pixabay.

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 9 10 min read
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