“I think there are two Donald Trumps,” said the Donald, after former rival candidate Ben Carson endorsed him for president. Carson claimed to have seen a new and different Trump beyond the one “on stage.” The second version, said Carson, was “very cerebral, sits there and considers things very carefully.”
We are now beginning to get glimpses of this second Trump. In the most recent Republican debate (March 10), an almost eerie calm descended, quite striking after the no-holds-barred mud wrestling displayed in previous outings. Partly this was the exhaustion of Trump’s rivals, especially poor Marco Rubio, who concluded he had gained little by jumping into the gutter and matching Trump insult for insult. But Trump restrained himself too. He was given plenty of opportunities to stir the pot and didn’t. His new demeanor suggested that pundits were wrong to dismiss him as little more than an unmodulated showman who wore his ego on his sleeve and worshiped the sound of his own voice. To be sure, the Donald’s ego is outsized enough to weigh down any sleeve. “I’m a big thinker,” he maintained, responding to Carson’s compliments. “And I have my ideas and they’re strong, and typically they worked out.” At times, that ego can quite firmly control what appears to be an unconstrained id. Trump has a way of modulating his anger, ramping it up and pulling it back, condemning violence and then excusing it, alternating praise (“I love Ted, I really do”) with slander (“And as for Lying Ted… ”) There is indeed a kind of wild Mr. Hyde and dignified Dr. Jekyll that reflects the two Trumps, if you will. And the candidate can slip easily in and out of both personae. Sometimes the switch seems well controlled, as at the calmer debate—not made in the heat of the political moment. But that control makes it all the more worrisome Bernie Sanders is “lying” that he has not encouraged his supporters to go protest at Trump’s rallies, Donald tweets. “Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!” One begins to imagine a “very cerebral” Trump considering tactics, musing whether to let loose his “disruptors” upon his rivals. Dr. Jekyll wished to believe he had nothing to do with Mr. Hyde, but the two were inescapably connected. Perhaps Trump is entirely calculating in the manipulation of his fans. But the New York Times did a penetrating background piece on events driving the billionaire realtor to launch his political career. A major turning point, the article alleges, occurred at the 2013 White House Correspondents dinner, when President Obama, himself the butt of Trump’s repeated aspersions about an alleged African birth, turned round and mocked Trump at the dinner, who was in the audience. That same night that the president gave the order launching the SEAL raid against Osama bin Laden, which burnished the president’s reputation and prompted jubilant crowds to gather in front of the White House and chant “USA! USA!” America seemed to have been made great not by the man in the red cap but by the very rival who had put him down a day or two earlier. To suppose now that Trump, with cold calculation, cerebrally incites crowds of Americans who feel scorned and left behind, underestimates how much he may have felt scorned himself. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde existed within the confines of a single body, reflecting aspects of a single personality. And when reporters pressed Trump on his supposed twin identities, he concluded, “I don’t think there are two Donald Trumps. I think there’s one Donald Trump.” A sage but frightening conclusion.
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By pure serendipity I received two emails nearly simultaneously from separate correspondents the other day. A friend and colleague spotted A Little History on the "Bestsellers" table (aspirational, surely!) at the Cincinnati airport. And an international rep from Yale Press found it cozied up with Bill O'Reilly in the Eslite Bookstore in Hong Kong.
Terrific opening paragraph to an article in The New York Review of Books by Jacob Weisberg, especially the epigram from Dwight Macdonald, that unremitting critic of middlebrow culture, or "midcult," from the 1950s. Weisberg's piece, "We Are Hopelessly Hooked," currently available with one easy click, is worth a read for the discussion of how the Web inveigles its way into ever-increasing facets of our daily routines. I do find myself skeptical when it comes to books and essays on the sociopsychological effects of the Internet. Writers tend to split into two camps, the sunny optimists about the potential benefits and the gloomy pessimists convinced we are becoming loners incapable of authentic personal interactions. Surely the Web is susceptible to use and misuse, like any tool. It has opened up vast worlds at the click of a mouse, it's been a boon for historians and researchers, I will attest; and undoubtedly it has unleashed a plague of trolls who hurl insults and hide behind anonymity. But Weisberg's most telling points come toward the end of the essay, where he turns to the psychology of interactions that all of us experience. The builders of apps increasingly construct their programs based on techniques pioneered at Stanford University's Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute. (Why is it that every damned think tank seems to be designated an "Advanced Research Institute"? How about a little modesty, Ivy Leaguers? Would it kill you to strike Advanced?) In any case, as Weisberg explains:
Clicking indeed is a pleasure that cuts both ways: leading us into worlds that are fascinating to explore...but also tempting us to surf idly and aimlessly. That intent yet listless gaze into the screen is the reflection we seldom see, from which we would recoil if we did.
Now blink several times, go off and take a walk! There is a strange out-of-body sort of experience an author can have with his own publications. When writing something, particularly a book-length project, you have immersed yourself in the subject so deeply that it becomes an inseparable part of you. But eventually it goes out into the world and you turn to new ventures...and as the years go by, it attains a certain separation. Wait long enough and it becomes almost a being of its own, that has little to do with you.
My dissertation, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England, was published nearly forty years ago by Yale Press and, like most dissertations, experienced modest sales before going out of print. I moved on. Years went by without my having an occasion to take it off the shelf. I did go back briefly while writing A Little History of the United States to look at what Jonathan Edwards said about the millennium of peace and plenty foretold in Biblical prophecies, and was pleased to discover that Edwards' calculations led him to believe that in the year 2016 "whole nations" would be awakened as revivals spread around the world and the end times approached. As usual, the dissertation went back on the shelf to gather more dust. Then a week or two ago, I was browsing through the Goodreads website and discovered, much to my surprise, that they had dug up a photo of the book cover and added it to their list of my published works. More astonishing, I discovered that some reader had left a review. How far back did Goodreads go, I wondered—and then saw that the item had posted only a few weeks earlier: January 1, 2016. "This is one of those books that I bought mostly because it was there," the reviewer began, and went on to write an appreciative, funny account that made clear she had actually read the book. The author, she said, has "a dry, snarky sense of humor that I enjoyed immensely (certainly the last thing I expected when I started this book was to be giggling over it)..." How much that review pleased me! When writing the thesis, people were always asking whether I was planning to publish it, and I would always say yes, my philosophy was, why suffer alone? Now, forty years later I felt like Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral—total wish fulfillment. Here was a book that to me had felt entirely dead and gone; then inexplicably, miraculously, it came back to life when someone stumbled across it on a used bookshelf. I record these feelings not with the purpose of boosting sales—this volume will stay out of print, make no mistake! But scattered out there in the great beyond are copies of what was once a part of me, ready to be resurrected at various odd and unforeseeable moments. For an author, it's giddy confirmation of an afterlife. I never knew candy corn grew on trees until I ran across these bushes on a recent hike. Nonetheless, I tend to be somewhat of a curmudgeon about Halloween. Its level of commercialization seems nearly to have caught up with that of Christmas. The neighborhood is now littered with plastic skeletons, spider webs from a can, and limp hanging ghosts. The worst look all too much like the lynchings of yore. And the underlying message is seems a lot less uplifting than that of Christmas. More about death and the dead than about life and the living. If I'm forced to meditate on the spirits of Halloween, I prefer the woods and nature to plastic skulls and alien ghouls. The season is appropriate, with its foretastes of winter. As the leaves are swept away, their susurration inevitably yields to the hollow howls of January, blowing down off the mountains. Only the skeletons remain. Death, after all, is a part of life too. Gave a talk at a great independent bookstore last weekend, the Concord Book Shop in Concord, Massachusetts. Very enthusiastic and engaged audience...the folks in Concord know their history, as you might expect. Hat tip to Dawn Rennert for the photo and for her hospitality.
Patti and David Peach report Little History has made the long portage to Anchorage, Alaska, where it was spotted in Barnes & Noble. David was one of my three companions making the trek down the Moisie River in 1972 (see The Complete Wilderness Paddler) and has been practicing medicine there for many years.
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James West Davidson
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May 2019
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