John Le Carre

Once again trying to understand the time I live in, I'm trying to read a book by John Le Carre, a sort-of-memoir recommended by a woman who's written a real memoir herself and knows good writing from not-so-good, but I can't stick with it. The level of distraction it provides isn't commensurate with the urgent need I have for distraction at the present time. There's far too much writing in it for me, a writer who believes a writer must resist writing lest it take over his or her life; there's also a little too much of the hot sauce of self-satisfaction for me at the present time, the lineaments of the kind of ego that comes, I suppose, with being a professional writer. 

I've turned instead to Graham Greene, a professional writer who famously remarked that there was no reason for writing other than for money but who leaves space for spiritual matters in his writing. When we are not sure, we are alive, Greene writes, something I can't imagine Le Carre writing, though maybe I'm misreading either one or the other.

Reading, once again, Greene's The Quiet American (1955), seeking both information and solace (distraction and engagement) to understand the troubled time I'm now living in, and finding it confirms the unprovable suspicion I've had for some time now that our current leader Donald Trump is really nothing new at all, is in fact a throwback to the Cold War of big cars, bombshelters and the strange sense of security that comes from being the city on the hill constantly nibbled at by named and unnamed foreign forces and hoping against hope to keep generating power from that illusion. Nothing's really changed at all from the mid-1950's, just a few enemies have been shifted around to continue what is essentially the Cold War narrative.

It was tempting to laugh when hearing Trump say on Fox News the other night, in response to a question about his supposed relationship with the Russian V. Putin and the crimes of state Putin's inflicted on citizens in his own country and abroad, O, you think America's so innocent? It almost had the ring of truth. Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism Greene wrote, a statment which has the ring of truth that can cause one to either laugh or cry.

Sometimes, distraction is as necessary to reading as engagement, especially in a time when reading the daily newspaper is like reading a novel written by a man who claims he doesn't read books.