The School Of Public Life: Fred Dewey's Indispensable Book

What to make of the ‘news’ that Orwell’s 1984 is being checked out from the San Francisco Public Library at a record pace?

Or that Judy Woodruff, anchorwoman for PBS’ Newshour, permittted Kellyanne Conway, the spokeswoman for the new POTUS, a woman whose elongated eyelashes and face bathed in Republican mascara convey at least as much if not more actual actual information than do her answers to honest questions, to slither off every conceivable hook in her exclusive interview last night, never mind asking Conway the question the media should be relentlessly asking on behalf of the American public it purports to serve, “why hasn’t the President disclosed his tax returns?”

Clarity, to the point of magic, was provided yesterday by the President’s chief White House strategist, Steve Bannon who said in an interview with The New York Times that the media should “keep its mouth shut.” Bannon’s line of thinking goes like this: the media ought to be ashamed by the unanticipated election of Trump; shocked by the result, the media has become the “opposition party”; the new press secretary for the POTUS earned a “badge of honor” for presenting false information to the press corps; the media has “zero integrity, zero intelligence and no hard work.”

Fred Dewey’s new book, The School of Public Life (Errant Bodies Press, Doormats4, 2016) is political analysis as high art, the clearest record I’ve ever read of this country’s intellectual underpinnings and the manifestations thereof, as penetrating, though in a different way, as Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History. Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, also comes to mind though Dewey’s presentation is pitched on a more philosophical plane. For all its historical erudition, The School of Public Life is also ultra-compelling screed, a stand- up-andscream text that ought to be read by all those who believe they’re living in dangerous times, to not just warn others but to show them precisely why the times are dangerous.

The book is also a most thoughtful prescription for a way forward based on the notion of we the people. I keep reading and re-reading passages from Dewey’s book for the perspective it provides, challenged and soothed by the force of real thinking being brought to bear on our political, or should I say, our cultural situation. It’s the kind of book that a reader can look into almost anywhere and glean some actual information applicable to his or her condition as a citizen, and be made to feel that there’s yet still a chance for wholeness, health, well-being, intellligence in the political realm of, we the people.