Let's Not

In the opening moments of the first Gulf War, the US Army dealt with miles of well-manned Iraqi defensive works by attaching bulldozer blades to tanks and filling in the trenches. Plotting strategy, Saddam Hussein had hoped to produce a quagmire at the front end of the war; the quagmire lasted for several extraordinarily horrible minutes, and the tanks rolled on over the newly made mass graves.

Watching that lopsided war as a journalist, Michael Kelly rented a car and drove onto the battlefield — where a group of tired and hungry Iraqi soldiers surrendered to him, glad that what they thought were the advance elements of the American military were just one guy in a Nissan who didn’t want to kill them. Kelly declined their surrender, but left them some juice from the car before he drove on: “When I looked in the rearview mirror, they were all standing in the road, the wind whipping them, sucking on the little straws of the orange juice boxes.” Turned away at a military checkpoint up the road, he drove back and gave them a ride to surrender properly to the real army, just as a favor.

An extraordinarily alert and courageous reporter — killed in 2003 covering the next Gulf War — Kelly saw the war. His book is surprising, over and over again, capturing savagery and ridiculousness in interwoven strands. I’ve remembered those little straws in the rearview mirror since 1994. Kelly wasn’t writing the preferred narrative of the war, passing on the framing of the day in the common practice of contemporary American political journalists; instead, he went to the place where men were killing each other, saw it, and described what he saw, a man on a battlefield taking notes and handing out juice boxes. Incredibly, he was there to write dispatches for the Washington Post and the New Republic, and doesn’t that put some points on the “era of cultural decline” scoreboard.

Since the day several decades ago when a high school English teacher caught me looking bored and started giving me lists of extra books to read, I’ve been making a mental list of the surprises: Sherwood Anderson’s small-town newspaper reporter filling his pockets with twisted apples; Oe’s cancer patient, in his goggles, celebrating the vitality of his cancer; Paul Bowles describing the moment when the sheltering sky rips open and Port sees beyond it. “His cry was a separate thing beside him in the desert. It went on and on.”

Since the day a teacher asked a certain sullen teenager if he’d read Joan Didion, I’ve been impressed by the degree to which it’s possible to write some words on a piece of paper and do something surprising. Looking over at a bookshelf, I remember sitting up all night to read David Bowman’s first novel. I remember discovering Pauline Maier, Elliott West, Patricia Nelson Limerick, historians who showed me things in the past that I hadn’t seen there. Susan Strasser wrote a history of trash, and it turned out to be vivid social history. If you went to law school, you probably remember the first legal scholar you encountered who wrote with extraordinary clarity and insight. If you’re a pilot, you probably read Fate is the Hunter at some early point, and you probably still carry it in your mind.

So.

Writing at The Atlantic this week, Anne Applebaum has a stunning piece of brand-new insight, and my goodness is it a brilliantly fresh idea:

See, Trump is JUST LIKE HITLER! Didn’t see that one coming, right? Imagine how excited she was to have that amazing new thought, living inside such a fresh and original mind.

There are writers who try to see something clearly, and then to show it to other people, and there are writers who are…Anne Applebaum. The prevailing model in American “mainstream” media is to go plow the same row again and again and again, because plowing where everybody else has already plowed is, I don’t know, safe? Consensus journalism, the 9,746th journalist ringing your doorbell to announce that Trump is a lot like Adolf Hitler. Looking wonderfully proud of themselves, like they just shat a cookie. All day, every day, all messages are the same message. Idea for a new movie: Groundhog Minute.

And I’m just done with it. David Brooks, Tom Nichols, William Kristol, and Peggy Noonan have all written the most amazingly refutable piles of nonsense in the last few days, being professionals at the task, and I kept asking out loud if David Brooks hears himself, because every paragraph clashes and refutes all the other paragraphs around it. But no. For me, barring some miraculous act of banality that just can’t be ignored, the election is over. There’s nothing left to say about this…horrible, horrible, horrible thing. It’s road trips and music until November 5, because my patience is all gone for this ludicrous spectacle. I’ll figure out some other things to write about until then. I may spend 2028 in Nunavut. Join me. Bring whiskey. Don’t bring news.