“Fear,” “Less,” and “Ulysses Found”

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Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” epitomizes his strengths and weaknesses. He doggedly pursues a story and works sources, aided by the fact that he no longer needs to meet a daily deadline, and produces fly-on-the-wall peeps inside ordinarily closed worlds.

His sources are unnamed, but often the same people keep popping up, so you suspect you know who’s doing the talking. In this narrative of the first 18 months in the Trump White House, it looks likely some of the loose lips belong to Rob Porter, Gary Cohn, and perhaps Jared Kushner and John Dowd. Not surprisingly, they come across as islands of sanity in sea of crazy. Or like little Dutch boys with their fingers in the dike.

The headline crazy actions are known to all by now, but there is a kind of grim horror to be had from the sheer accumulation of instances of a president prepared to act recklessly despite knowing nothing and refusing to learn about foreign policy, economics, science, military matters, law, history or government.

Woodward’s flaws include his lack of style and analysis. Joan Didion once called him a stenographer, and there’s a kind of rude truth to that. Yes, reporters are supposed to furnish facts not opinions, but putting facts in a larger context is needed to demonstrate their significance. When Trump uses disparaging language, hyperbole, insults to a subordinate, it is impolite, to a nuclear-armed adversary something else.

The book is also clumsily organized. It is chronological, but tells no unified story. Each chapter is just another scene that has been described to Woodward, another day at the White House, another meeting in which bizarre presidential behavior flummoxes his aides or on a whim trashes plans laboriously prepared by cabinet secretaries, Senators and experienced professionals.

The final pages seem hastily added, and the end point arbitrary — the resignation of Trump attorney John Dowd when he concludes his client will never follow his advice. This slapdash termination suggests Woodward wrapped up the manuscript more to meet a publication date than to produce a rounded narrative.

Readers seeking a book focused on the Mueller investigation will be disappointed. Most of the pages are devoted to Trump’s incompetence as manager of the government he heads, particularly in regard to economic and foreign policy. But if the sources who haven’t yet been fired keep leaking, we may get a sequel someday which can be named, as was his second Nixon book, “The Final Days.”

If “Fear” is a kind of tragic horror show, the winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, “Less,” belongs to the realm of comedy or romance. The book is named for its hapless, fiftyish protagonist, Arthur Less, a minor novelist from California, “too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered.” We meet him at the low point of his life and career.

His lover, Freddy, has dumped him and is now engaged to marry, and Less is invited to the wedding. He can’t face that and flees, impulsively accepting a slew of absurd invitations he has previously ignored.

They will take him around the world on a picaresque journey — to interview a best-selling science-fiction writer whose works he has never read in New York, to attend an awards ceremony in Italy because one of his books is on the shortlist, to Germany to teach a course though his long ago high school German will prove hopeless, to India to a writer’s retreat in an Ashram.

Along the way he learns his latest novel has been rejected by his publisher, endures other heartbreaks and farcical complications, suddenly sees how to repair his book if not his life, and is interrupted before he can reach Japan by a summons from home. His first love, the aging poet Robert Brownburn, has had a stroke and is dying. But when Less arrives at the deathbed, it turns out the dying man is recovering nicely, which leads to an unexpected twist on the last page when the identity of the narrator of Arthur’s adventures is revealed.

The book is beautifully constructed, melancholy and hilarious, and a rare case of a comic novel being awarded a major literary prize. In literature, as in the world of film, comedy gets far less respect that it deserves. But “Less” is more than just laughs. It is a sweet meditation on the absurdity of the human condition. And after all the travails to which it subjects poor Arthur, himself the author of a book called “Kalipso,” it manages to bestow a happy ending on the hero returning to where his journey began.

And speaking of the voyaging hero, I have recently reread a book from about fifty years ago in anticipation of a trip to the Mediterranean. It is “Ulysses Found” by Ernle Bradford. He served in the Royal Navy during World War II, and passed his time when not on duty reading the Odyssey again and again while passing through the scenery it describes.

A few years after the war, he and his wife bought a boat and spent several years sailing the wine dark sea. He came to believe, as Schliemann had in reading the Iliad, that the works of Homer could be trusted to depict a real world, not a fantasy realm. “Ulysses Found,” sails the reader to the land of the Lotus Eaters, the Laistrygonians, the isles of Circe and Calypso and the haunts of the Cyclopes, the Sirens and Helios. It is the next best thing to setting sail yourself in search of the way home from Troy to Ithaca.

The Rule Of Five

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Once again, those hoping the hearings to vet a Supreme Court nominee would be a grand demonstration of democratic deliberation find themselves doomed to disappointment. The majority has used their power to limit access to part of the nominee’s paper trail. It may or may not contain information harmful to his case, but we’ll never know.

The majority is ramming through Kavanaugh as fast as possible so that, even if Democrats take the Senate in November, a five-seat Republican majority on the court will be a done deal. Even the eleventh hour appearance of a witness claiming Kavanaugh, as a drunken high school preppie, sexually assaulted her is unlikely to slow down the juggernaut.

The juxtaposition of Kavanaugh’s official bio — family man, girl’s basketball coach, Catholic altar boy — with the picture of 1000-keg Kavanaugh, the high school senior and attempted molester is creepy, but not impossible to imagine in an era that includes pedophile priests, coaches, and Judge Roy Moore.

The defense of his nominee’s purity by our ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ president is also bizarre. But even if these charges were to derail this far right jurist, there would be another waiting in the wings. The composition of the court will end the same. Partisan advantage is now all that matters.

Once deference was paid to the nominees of the president in power on the understanding that the next president would receive similar treatment, regardless of party. Once the filibuster rule meant a nominee had to be able to attract more that a simple majority, helping to reduce the likelihood of seating an unqualified or excessively partisan character.

No more. A bipartisan modus vivendi is as outmoded as whalebone corsets. Indeed, President Trump’s first nominee, Justice Gorsuch, now occupies a seat stolen from President Obama, and Trump’s second nominee, like all Republican jurists for many years, is a product of the Federalist Society’s originalist farm team, a school of ideology that has steadily yanked jurisprudence to the right.

But all of that is subtext. The hearings themselves are a charade in which senators posture and the nominee does his best to reveal nothing. It is a version of rope-a-dope. Let the questioners wear themselves out until the bell rings, ending the round.

It’s a brilliant strategy, given the vanity of most senators and their enthusiasm for the sound of their own voices. At least three Democratic inquisitors — Booker, Harris, and Klobuchar — are contemplating a run for president in 2020, so they are using this forum as free airtime with which they can show they are warriors for the Constitution.

Other senators simply want to posture, trying to show they haven’t forgotten what they learned in their one class in Constitutional Law, forty or fifty years ago. The nominee can invariably run rings around them citing obscure cases and precedents since they have been steeped for decades in the Greater and Lesser Arcana of the law. But nominees usually feign respect for the dotards who have the power to elevate them.

Senators of the president’s party spend all their time fawning over the nominee and swaddling him in downy rhetoric as if he were a newborn, except when they are hysterically protesting questioning by the other party, as if the nominee was being brutalized by torturers subjecting him to waterboarding. The senators of the minority party spend most of their time, when not up to bat, shooting death rays with their eyes in the nominee’s direction, as if he were Darth Vader.

The majority party’s Chairman of the Judiciary Committee is Chuck Grassley, an 83-year-old Iowa farmer who does not have a law degree, but does have a gavel, and often behaves with the waspish temperament of a cartoon grandpa telling the kids to keep off the lawn.

By contrast, a few questioners, like Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, have actually seemed interested in substance and have appeared troubled by the way the court now operates, how nominees are selected and how special interests control its docket, decide which cases are heard and how they are decided. Not that it matters.

Like Gorsuch before him, Kavanaugh has promised to observe precedent, to decide every case on the merits, and to not force every case to fit a procrustean bed of conservative orthodoxy. But he will not keep his word. The cases he says not to worry about because they are “settled law” will be unsettled soon enough. Ideology will trump blind justice, and it will be too late to have second thoughts because High Court appointments are for life.

A story told about the much admired Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan is all you need to know about what will happen next. Law professor Adam Winkler describes how “Brennan used to ask his new law clerks what the most important rule in constitutional law was. They would ponder the question and respond, ‘freedom of speech,’ ‘separation church and state,’ or ‘separation of powers.’ No, Brennan would respond with a wry smile. And then he would hold out one hand with his fingers outstretched. ‘Five,’ he would say. A justice needs five votes to make a majority on the nine-member court. With five votes, a justice could do anything.”

The same principle applies to seating Supreme Court justices. It doesn’t matter how biased or unqualified or predatory the nominee is, how much partisans protect him, or foes attack him, how many trick questions they can ask him, or how long they can pore over his paper trail. If you haven’t got 51 votes, he won’t win a seat on the Supreme Court. And if you do, he will. Case closed.

Unhappy Anniversaries

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This week marked two events that changed our country for the worse. Seventeen years ago, Islamist terrorists perpetrated the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. The targets were Washington and Wall Street, symbols of our democratic, military, and capitalist power.

Ten years ago, we suffered a self-inflicted wound as a lunatic housing bubble collapsed and threatened to bring the economic system down with it. The result was a lost decade for tens of millions of innocent bystanders.

in each case, Washington and Wall Street acted in ways that made the catastrophes worse and encouraged citizens to draw the wrong conclusions about what had happened, sowing a legacy of distrust and cynicism.

After 9/11 we went to war on Iraq despite the fact that the perpetrators had nothing to do with that country or its dictator. We won the initial fight quickly, but lost the peace year after year as our misguided policies radicalized whole populations and alienated friends. We also incurred at least $2 trillion in expense, and 6,954 military deaths, 52,679 injured in Iraq, Afghanistan and various ancillary venues.

Are we safer? Perhaps, largely because of an increased emphasis on intelligence and homeland security, but also diminished in important ways. From global leader, we are now distrusted at home and abroad. New modes of attack, especially cyberwar now threaten. And the election of Donald Trump attests to the divisions that linger, since he ran on an anti-government, isolationist, conspiracy theory platform.

As for the great recession, it resulted from individual selfishness at the expense of the larger community, criminality, the invention of toxic financial instruments, and a failure to appreciate how electronically-linked and intertwined markets permitted instantaneous global contagion. This witch’s brew was made possible by an ideological faith that all regulation was bad, though robust safeguards might have prevented the folly in the first place or minimized its scope.

Now the Trump administration is dismantling the guardrails erected in the debacle’s aftermath, though the constituency for such backsliding is the malefactors of great wealth whom he ran against, not the victims whose paladin he was supposed to be.

In the case of both 9/11 and the Great Recession, the cost to ordinary citizens has been huge. Those called upon to fight were ill-served by inadequate equipment, an ill-defined mission and, as veterans, inadequate healthcare, educational benefits, and help transitioning to civilian life. The generation that came of age ten years ago has faced a poor job market from the day they entered the work force or tried to, and difficulty building capital, forming families, affording homes. Many older adults lost their homes, jobs, retirement savings, and the pain was not shared equally.

No Masters of the Universe wound up in prison. All but the most toxic financial firms survived, often bailed out at taxpayer expense. To show their appreciation they foreclosed on the faulty mortgages that helped cause the mess. Again, the result was distrust of institutions, a feeling the game was rigged, and a dangerous willingness to fall for demagogues promising the moon and delivering the same hard cheese.

The country is sadder, but not necessarily wiser. We are less enthusiastic about foreign adventures, yet that may permit plotters from Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin, Assad and the Ayatollahs to get away with mischief because we are fed up with being the cop on the beat.

Trust of capitalist institutions is at an historic low, yet markets still rule, big money still calls the tune to which politicians dance, and the victims are still vulnerable to exploitation as the weakening of Dodd-Frank, the gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other “reforms” demonstrates. And we are continuing to pile debt higher, assuring a day of reckoning will eventually come. What happened in 2008, and worse, can happen again.

And what happened in 2001 may look like a jayvee game if we fail to maintain a robust defense and alliances against failed states, rogue actors, terrorists, malign competitors, and disrupters armed with WMDs, economic and cyber weapons worse that anything Osama bin Laden could command.

It is said that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom (and prosperity, too), but if we have lost hope and no longer believe in either, if we can’t tell truth from fiction or friend from foe, we are in serious trouble.

A century ago, the decline of the west was forecast by Oswald Spengler. He was particularly scornful of the United States which he characterized as “A bunch of dollar grabbers, no past, no future.” Are we now trying to live up to that pessimistic augury? We used to be better than that.