Summer reading

It is time to catch up on this project where we try to do a better job of keeping track of what we've been reading in case anyone is interested in some recommendations.  Anyway here's what we've got this month.

• The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the dream of a just nation by Brenda Wineapple (2019)
  
  Following upon President Trump's latest episode of being a horrifying racist grandma, U.S. Rep Al Green (D-Texas) filed articles of impeachment this week. 137 Democrats voted it down. Throughout the course of the administration there has been no shortage of possible causes for impeachment but Democratic party leadership continues to #resist the impulse. First, they wanted to wait for Robert Mueller to finish whatever he was up to.  Then they got bogged down in arguments over who they could or could not compel to testify.  At one point we were told they were waiting for the President to impeach himself.  This week Pelosi says they're waiting on.. some facts or something.
  

  We have six committees that are working on following the facts in terms of any abuse of power, obstruction of justice and the rest that the president may have engaged in.

  But there's no need for any of that. You really can just impeach the President whenever you are ready. Pick a thing, draw up the articles, and go with it.  Al Green just showed you how.  What Pelosi et al are really trying to do here is run out the clock.  Already there is talk of just waiting for the 2020 election to take care of the problem.  And, since we're getting set for the second round of Democratic Primary debates next week, it might feel as though we're already there.  But there is plenty time left. While it only manifests as a hint in the mind of the reader, Brenda Wineapple's study of the Johnson impeachment is clearly conscious of its relevance to our present day politics. Not every circumstance is analogous but there are comparisons we are invited to consider.
  
  Impeachment happened very late in Johnson's term. Congressional radicals brought articles against Johnson in late February of 1868, several months later than where we currently are in our election cycle. Of course, ours is a much different (and longer) process from what was in practice at the time but even then its implications were beginning to loom.  In any case the Radicals weren't expecting an election to solve this problem for them.
  
  The specific offense named in the impeachment wasn't all that important. Most of the articles centered on a violation of the Tenure of Office Act. It had been passed only a year prior specifically to prevent Johnson from firing cabinet members. Nobody liked the law. It was probably unconstitutional and was repealed within a decade. Its only real purpose was to serve as a line in the sand for Johnson to cross.  In other words it was a technicality, a manufactured technicality, even.  They found a thing and ran with it. But the House's constitutional power of impeachment is much broader than that. And the actual reasons for bringing the impeachment were deeper and more serious.
  
  Johnson, both through policy and rhetoric, was undermining congressional reconstruction and restoring the antebellum status quo in the south. He pardoned scores of ex-Confederate leaders. He countermanded the military reconstruction acts and set overly generous terms for readmission of states to the union in defiance of congressional policy. He was deliberately negligent and permissive of  white supremacist violence. The New Orleans massacre of 1866 that broke out at the Louisiana Constitutional Convention plays a pivotal role in Wineapple's account of Johnson's failures. Special attention is given also to Johnson's "Swing Around The Circle" whistle-stop tour of increasingly unhinged, resentful, off-the-cuff speeches. The reader is obviously intended to pick up on its current resonance as well.
  
  Is impeachment a legal matter? Is it political? Is it a mechanism to punish a President just for being an asshole? In Federalist 65, Hamilton suggests the answer is yes.
  

  The subjects of its jurisdiction are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.

  The scope of the matter is broad and the House's power to bring it to bear comes with a great deal of discretion. And this is not the first time it will have grappled with that.



• Revolutionaries by Joshua Furst (2019)
  
  This is a fictionalized version of the life and times of a fictionalized version of Abbie Hoffman. The story is told to us through the point of view of his neglected and disillusioned son.  So this is really a story about the disintegration and failure of the radical movements of the 1960s. Several real life celebrities of the era appear; Bobby Seale, Allen Ginsberg, and most important to the story, Phil Ochs, whose self-destruction Furst suggests is the result of a fatal lack of cynicism. Furst's narrator explains a bit in this passage. 
  

  The problem with causes, though, is that they derive their meaning from what they achieve. The foot soldiers, those people whose aggregate passion fuels the change, might find satisfaction -- or regret -- after the fact in the roles they played affecting this change, but they'd be wise to beware building their identities around the communal spirit in which the cause thrives. They might find themselves trapped, alone, in a movement that's vanished, wondering where everyone else has gone. Some people recognize this danger from the start. They ride the spirit of the age for all it's worth, taking what they can for their own gain.  And by the time everybody else realizes it's over, they're already done and gone.

  Inevitably everything breaks down. Solidarity gives way to isolation and suspicion as splintered interests prefer to seek power rather than equality.  Ultimately power can only be gained through selfishness. And only the selfish survive.
  
  It's a fatalistic view of things, to be sure. But, like The Impeachers, it's a book to consider as echoes of the era it describes manifest in our present politics. I'm not entirely sure Furst understands this, however.  In the acknowledgements, he says of Hoffman, “We need your spirit in the world more than ever.”  Do we?  Everything in this book suggests perhaps not.



• Road Tripped by Pete Hautman (2019)
  
  In this YA novel, a high school senior in Minnesota has difficulty coping after his father's suicide. So he steals his mom's credit card and takes off in his dad's old Mustang down the Great River Road.  Along the way he interacts with strippers in diners, hitchhiking drifters, a couple of meth heads who make him buy Sudafed for them, and some rail kids "taking a gap year" from art school. So it's not exactly a glamorous experience. The structure here is your basic brooding-kid-learns-to-be-more-human type plot. But Hautman makes some choices that keep that from feeling rote and his main character is a compelling and witty narrator. So it all works quite well. The book is recommended for ages 12 and up which sounds right to me although some of the situations and topics (sexual assault, abortion, the aforementioned suicide, among others) might be on the heavy side for some.



• Halal If You Hear Me: The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 3 Edited by Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo Contributors... too many to name. (2019)
  
  The BreakBeat Poets is a Haymarket series that describes itself as an, "anthology and publishing series exploring the innovation of hip-hop generation(s) poets."  Volume 3 in the series, Halal If You Hear Me,  explores notions of Muslim identity. Elhillo writes in her foreword about growing up shy and isolated from any sense of what her own identity, let alone community might actually be like. For her, this collection could provide a remedy for that.
  
  "The poems and essays in this anthology are the Muslim community I didn't know I was allowed to dream of. The Muslim community in which my child-self could have blossomed - proof of the fact that there are as many ways to be Muslim as there are Muslims. That my way was one of those ways, was a way of being Muslim that did count."

And that's where we are at the moment.  Next month's summary could be considerably shorter. This just arrived the other day and I might want to take a little more time with it.