Book review*

I've come to the age when I like doing things I don't know how to do, like painting, playing golf, and reading non-fiction.

 I no longer feel the need to applaud--for anything.

Not applauding I recall the time I decided to support Bernard Sanders for President. It was during Trump's first the State of the Union Address.

The Republicans enthusiastically applauded everything Trump said like trained seals. Some of them could stand up and applaud at the same time. The Democrats were evenly split between applauding mildly and looking mortified, as if someone was breaking wind in Sunday School. 

Behind Trump, second-banana Republican Mike Pence, a strait-laced Grant Wood figurine raised in Indiana, not Iowa, fiddled with his pitchfork and Nancy Pelosi, dressed in the finest Democratic Party machinery--a white pantsuit--sat, thinking private, stoic Democratic thoughts.

The cameras of CNN or MSNBC, or whatever corporate broadcast emmission I was watching at the time, panned the Chamber of the US House of Representatives in order for We The People to see what was being done with our money, besides the money we set aside to pay our monthly cable TV bilsl.

When the camera stopped on Bernard Sanders he was leaning forward in his seat taking notes, with a Bic pen and a reporters notebook. I thought, there's the man for me. Bernard was the only one paying attention with any kind of historical or editorial perspective.

Since no writer of fiction could create these other Reppublican or Democratic characters, I've turned to non-fiction to better understand the political nature of my time. Non-fiction is often not as well written as fiction, it doesn't need to be, the story it tells is of real people who did real things, some they shouldn't have done and a few (does anyone remember Congressman Wright Patman?) who did.

The lesson, yet once again, is that political enlightenment often occurs in the darkest of times. I'm grateful to non-fiction, as difficult as it may be to read, for making this as clear as it can be.

*Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy by Matt Stoller (Simon and Schuster, 2019.) 

 

Chesa Boudin, San Francisco D.A., addressing a Bernard Sanders for President meeting, Tuesday February 5, 2020, San Francisco. Photo by author.