Tomgram: Engelhardt, History, Memory, and Donald Trump
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The other day, out of the blue, I got an email from the remarkable Bill Moyers about a new book I’ve been urging TomDispatch readers to get their hands on. Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, published by Dispatch Books, shouldn’t be missed. But instead of listening to me, since I’m obviously an interested party, consider what Moyers has to say: “I read Every Body Has a Story over the past few summer weeks — sitting on a bench in Central Park — and was engulfed in memories of what happened to ordinary Americans 10 years ago when Lehman Brothers folded, the market crashed, recession drilled deep into the marrow of the country, and tens of millions of lives were thrown into turmoil from which many have yet to recover (a factor in Trump’s election). I was on PBS then with my weekly series and caught some of the drama and trauma. Beverly Gologorsky has made real the experience of falling… falling… and landing, like those Thai kids trapped at the bottom of the drop. I grew up with people like that who had been felled by the Great Depression and I kept seeing some of them in the characters in her story. I’ve also been working on a series about what happened to the families of farmers and workers during the first Gilded Age and, while reading this book, couldn’t get them out of my head. All I’m saying is that Every Body Has a Story may be fiction, but I’ve not seen more reality in a novel in a long, long time.” Tom]
What Will Donald Trump Be Remembered For?
The World According to The Don(ald)
By Tom Engelhardt
I know you won’t believe me. Not now, not when everything Donald Trump does — any tweet, any insult at any rally — is the news of the day, any day. But he won’t be remembered for any of the things now in our headlines. No human being, it’s true, has ever been covered the way he has, so what an overwhelming record there should be. News about him and his associates fills front pages daily in a way that only something like a presidential assassination once did and he has the talking heads of cable TV yakking about him as no one has ever talked about anyone. And don’t even get me started on social media and The Donald.
In a sense, like it or not, we are all now his apprentices and his transformational powers are little short of magical. Simply by revoking the security clearance of John Brennan — who even knew that America’s deep-staters could keep such clearances long after they left government — he managed to make the former Obama counterterrorism czar and CIA head, a once-upon-a-time “enhanced interrogation techniques” advocateand drone-meister, into a liberal hero; by attacking former FBI head James Comey, he turned the first national security state official ever to intervene in and alter an American presidential election (and not in Hillary Clinton’s favor either) into a bestselling, well-reviewed, much-lauded author; by his dismissive taunts and enmity in life and death, he helped ensure that Senator John McCain would have a New York Times obituary of such laudatory length that, in the past, it might only have been appropriate for someone who had actually won the presidency; with his charges and passing insults, he even proved capable — miracle of all miracles — of turning Attorney General Jeff Sessions into a warrior for justice.
Donald Trump is, in the most bizarre sense possible, a transformational figure, not to speak of the man who makes the “fake news” fake, or at least grotesquely overblown and over-focused. He has the uncanny ability to draw every camera in the house, all attention, blocking out everything but himself. Still, omnipresent as he is — or He is — take my word for it, he won’t be remembered for any of this. It will all go down the media drain with him one of these days. Don’t be fooled by newspapers or the Internet. They are not history. They are anything but what will someday be remembered.
Still, don’t for a second imagine that Donald Trump won’t be remembered. He will — into the distant future in a way that no other American president is likely to be.
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