By now if you have any interest in American history or Abraham Lincoln, you are aware that 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of his birth, and naturally there is a gush of books adding to the already voluminous Lincoln bibliography. I have already dealt with a few of these tomes earlier, knowing an update would be useful as the year wore on. Rather than wading through more Lincoln titles, I am inclined to focus on the long and the short of recent Lincoln scholarship.

Princeton mentor emeritus James M. McPherson offers a paradigm of concision with his Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press), a 96-page introductory essay with a well-annotated bibliography for the benefit of the curious and the diligent. Historian Michael Burlingame (The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln) has reportedly been working on this two-volume, 2,024-page magnum opus, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Johns Hopkins University Press), for years, using field notes of previous scholarship, neglected newspapers, and mountain ranges of archival material.

Christopher Hitchens writes of this impressive work, “No review could do complete justice to the magnificent two-volume biography that has been so well-wrought by Michael Burlingame,” but it didn’t stop him from trying; Hitchens goes on:

“But one way of paying tribute to it is to say that it introduces the elusive idea of destiny from the very start, and one means of illustrating this is to show how the earlier chapters continually prefigure, or body forth, the more momentous events that are to be dealt with in the later ones.”

 —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 22, 2009

To commemorate the Jan. 21 birthday of Thomas Paine (Common Sense, The Rights of Man), the Center for Inquiry annually hosts the Thomas Paine Memorial Lecture. Paine has languished outside the pantheon of American demigods and the reverential and hagiographic biblio-avalanche that celebrates the white men known as the Founding Fathers, though a number of books do Paine justice—notably Paul Collins’s The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine.

In recent years, journalists such as Victor Navasky and Christopher Hitchens have been celebrants and speakers at the event. This year, Joe Conason, a useful reporter, a conscientious investigator, and a thoughtful analyst who is most recently the author of It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, delivered a low-key and well-reasoned update of the Bush regime’s shredding of the Constitution within the context of Paine’s championing of open and visible government operation. If the past eight years have discouraged you, 48 minutes of Conason will assuage your grief. —Robert Birnbaum, Feb. 18, 2009

I don’t know about others (though the common default explanation is some variation of attention deficit) but my reading habits have seemingly transformed into something unrecognizable to the Me of just a few years ago—perhaps even before the post-millennial chattering class preoccupation with announcing and sifting through the entrails of change, transformation, and what it all meant.

As an exercise in self-understanding/knowledge I decided to keep a list of what I have read in the past week. Now that I look at it, the only thing I can glean from it is that my primary literary preoccupation is no longer the novel, and in fact I don’t feel compelled to finish even the various texts I begin whatever their form or genre. One other thing, I have taken to leaving books in my car and whatever bag I schlep around—so as not to get caught waiting in some queue or traffic jam without some sort of escape appliance.

Here’s the list, in no particular order, and arbitrarily annotated:

“He Just Can’t Quit W” by Frank Rich
Res ipsa loquitur.

“The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama” by Frank Rich
Res ipsa loquitur.

A Strange Commonplace by Gilbert Sorrentino
An overlooked (you know what I mean) author that I had overlooked—I’m going back for more.

“Vote for Obama” by Christopher Hitchens
Even when one thinks he is wrong, Hitchens is interestingly wrong—meaning his reasons and arguments are elegant if not rigorous.

“Verbage” by James Wood
Wood sees, to his great credit, something missed by homegrown pundits.

Serena by Ron Rash
Rash is a wonderful storyteller, whose One Foot in Eden is a masterful tale.

Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik
I read the introduction to this New Yorker staffer’s forthcoming book linking Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, both born on the same day in 1809, with great relish.

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane
So far the best of his oeuvre.

Indignation by Philip Roth
Roth is worth every moment you invest in him.

The King’s Last Song by Geoff Ryman
As far as I got in this story within a story I was riveted.

Hard Man by Allan Guthrie
One of those Scottish crime stories increasingly finding its way into print—I read it based on Thomas Perry’s blurb, which I should have read more carefully—yet I did finish it.

Our Dumb World by The Onion
The claim that this is the funniest ever is hard to argue with especially when you can’t stop laughing.

First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century by David Lida
Meet Mexico City and the brave new world, mi gente.

“Mad Dog Palin” by Matt Taibbi
Oi Veh!!!

The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly
Though I avoid reading series, and I thought Connelly’s standalone The Poet was his best work, I can’t stop myself from continuing to read his Harry Bosch novels. This time Bosch meets the Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller.

“Make-Believe Maverick” by Tim Dickinson
If even a portion of this article is true then American corporate media, of which Rolling Stone is a part, is worse than we all suspect. If not, one wonders how this stuff got published. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 24, 2008

Apparently we are heading to an important election and many citizens and various aliens of all stripes, eyes, and ears are being besieged by the various soothsayers, talking heads, and comedians who make their living mediating American and world politics for the rest of us. Personally, I find our leap-year elections fascinating, though I am disconsolate that we no longer have commentators up to the task of vividly narrating these quadrennial jousts. Forget the workmanlike compendium of Theodore White (The Making of the President 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972), we have no Hunter Thompson (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72) or Timothy Crouse (The Boys on the Bus) or Norman Mailer (Miami and the Siege of Chicago)—at the least, someone needs to attend to the infelicitous gibberish coming out of the senator from Arizona’s mouth.

If you remember last week’s Obama/McCain tête-à-tête, much—all right, some—was made of who correctly quoted Herr Doktor Kissinger on whether the next president should have preconditions for meeting with leaders of nations we don’t like. Christopher Hitchens who, thankfully, pays attention to such things, was prepared to set the record straight (Obama accurately quoted Kissinger). And, of course, as one would accurately surmise from Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger, continued hectoring the unindicted war criminal:

Finally, of course, there is Kissinger’s habitual fondness for any form of dictatorship. To have been the friend of Pinochet, Videla, and Suharto, while almost simultaneously fawning on Brezhnev and especially on Mao, is to have been a secretary of state who was soft on fascism—and soft on communism, too! Unconditional talks with Ahmadinejad and Assad? Why not? They are the sort of people with whom he (and Kissinger Associates, the firm that introduces despots to corporations) prefers to do business.

Hitchens, I might add, may be one of the few American writers whose grasp of the sectarian politics of, for instance, France—of which Bernard-Henri Lévy (known as B.H.L. and apparently possessed of film-star-type celebrity in his home country) fulminates in Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism—allows for some Yankee understanding (B.H.L.’s American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville is more relevant and accessible for Americans). Hitchens sums up:

This blending of a relatively modern prejudice with the oldest prejudice of them all [anti-semitism] is what sickens Lévy enough to give it the appellation “Red-Brown.” It is the “new barbarism” of his subtitle. Against it, he counterposes the values of the Enlightenment, the France of the Dreyfusards, of Camus rather than Sartre, of Jean Moulin and Pierre Mendès-France rather than Maurice Thorez or—B.H.L.’s true bête noire—that debased Jacobin of today’s French Socialism, Jean-Pierre Chevènement. The left, he insists, must renounce any version of ultimate or apocalyptic history, along with any mad schemes to create heaven on earth. A secular, pragmatic humanism will be quite demanding enough, thank you.

And though it is not his normal beat, writer/bibliophile Paul Collins (The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine) had some smart things leavened with dazzling erudition to say about John McCain’s verbal tic, his ceaseless use of “my friends”:

McCain’s meeting with parishioners at Rick Warren’s Saddleback presidential forum certainly was a friendly one: He referred to “my friends” another 11 times. In the week leading up to Saddleback, the senator also friended, among others, a crowd in York, Pa., (“Two years ago, I traveled to South Ossetia, my friends”); workers at a locomotive factory in Erie, Pa., (“…my friends, look at the events that are transpiring in Georgia”); and Iowa state fairgoers (“My friends, I’m all in favor of inflating our tires, don’t get me wrong…”).

…But as a crowd bludgeon in modern political speechmaking, “my friends” can be laid at the feet of one man: William Jennings Bryan. His famed 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention invoked the phrase a mind-crushing 10 times. Inveighing against “those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below,” Bryan declared, “My friends, the question we are to decide is: Upon which side will the Democratic party fight; upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital or upon the side of the struggling masses?” Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” is historically considered to be among the most viscerally powerful speeches ever made by an American politician, with one New York World journalist reporting the crowd’s reaction as “tumult—hills and valleys of shrieking men and women.” The temptation to bottle that kind of lightning again is alluring.

And if you need to test my assertion of the degraded state of political journalism (Frank Rich and Gail Collins excepted), have a look at the recent New York Review of Books reissue of Mailer’s classic 1968 convention coverage, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with an introduction by Rich). His description and assessment of Chicago’s stature and his asides on Brooklyn are just part of the pleasure of this vital book. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 8, 2008

It is not beyond reason to assert that the small segment of humanity devoted to the written word can be further divided into those who find reading as an escape or departure from the real day-to-day world and those for whom it is, in part, a lens with which to view the festivities.

Somewhere in one of his books, Christopher Hitchens makes a point of expounding on the origin of the word “idiot,” which he asserts was the term in the Greek city-state of Athens, assigned to those who were disinterested in civil affairs—unengaged citizens, if you will. For reasons I should think are obvious, the state of the nation inescapably pervades the public ether and causes one to wonder about citizens in this great nation who fail to vote in political elections. (I haven’t checked but is it possible that more people vote on American Idol?)

Naturally, as all right-thinking Americans, I am looking to lay blame for the shameful turn from acceptable hardball politics (as it always was) to the current smash-mouth style favored by the self-righteous Right of our divided polity. I nominate Richard Nixon, who among other things brought West Coast advertising apparatchiks like Erlichman and Haldeman into his ‘68 campaign and then into the White House. You grasped that, yes? Advertising executives in the highest reaches of government. A few years ago Charles Baxter, another of our greatly underappreciated American writers, produced a very engaging collection of essays entitled Burning Down the House, which contained “Dysfunctional Narratives, Or ‘Mistakes Were Made.’”

Baxter lucidly opines:

The greatest influence on American fiction for the last twenty years may have been the author of RN, not in his writing but in his public character. He is the inventor, for our purposes and for our time, of the concept of deniability. Deniability is the almost complete disavowal of intention in relation to bad consequences. This is a made-up word, and it reeks of the landfill-scented landscape of lawyers and litigation and high school. Following Richard Nixon in influence on recent fiction would be two runners-up, Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Their administrations put the passive voice, politically, on the rhetorical map. In their efforts to acquire deniability on the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran, their administrations managed to achieve considerable notoriety for self-righteousness, public befuddlement about facts, forgetfulness under oath, and constant disavowals of political error and criminality, culminating in the quasi-confessional, passive voice-mode sentence, “Mistakes were made.”

Well, to make an obvious point, they create a climate in which social narratives are designed to be deliberately incoherent and misleading. Such narratives humiliate the act of storytelling.

And that is not the worst of it, is it? —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 1, 2008

In fits of attempting constructive self-criticism (also known as navel-gazing), I ponder the possibility that my disaffection with mainstream politics and my lifelong drift from left-leaning liberal to socialist to anarchist is mostly a result of my biography. That probably is supposed to matter, especially to people who think that “balance” and “objectivity” are viable constructs or values or whatever. I am drawn to renegades and skeptics and dissidents—Howard Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, the Berrigan Brothers, Staughton Lynd, Eduardo Galeano—and even to the right lurch of Christopher Hitchens. (I have not abandoned a healthy respect for his analytic and rhetorical skills.) For some time now, I have caught glimmers and rays of Joe Bageant at his site and at Mark Woods’s web site/media bonanza.

Among other of my cogitations about Bageant was a puzzlement that his commentary did not have a wider audience. Consider this illumination from his Aug. 27 entry, “What will America look like in two years?”:

It’s going to take what most people outside the US would consider a ridiculous level of disaster before most Americans understand that something is deeply wrong with the trajectory of their nation. Personally, I think we are years away from that realization—decades away if we can steal enough oil and keep printing enough fiat currency to keep the public fooled.

Last year Bageant published a book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War, the title of which tips off why he has not been lapped up by the mainstream. Bageant mentions, and in fact insists, that there are class divisions in America. Which contradicts one of the basic myths of our republic. Here’s Studs Terkel’s take:

This recounting of lost lives—of white have-nots in one of our most have-not states—has the power of an old-time Scottish Border ballad. It is maddening and provocative that the true believers in “American exceptionalism” and ersatz machismo side with those stepping all over them. Bagaent’s writing is as lyrical as Nelson Algren’s, and if there’s a semblance of hope, it’s that he catches on with new readers thanks to the alternative media.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 2, 2008

It’s really noisy out there. “Conservative bloggers jab Obama on foreign languages.” (Huh?) Christie is getting divorced. There is a new cell phone. Angelina had twins. Microsoft cut the price of the Xbox 360. Freddie, Fannie, and Bernie Mac are a mess. Brett Favre wants to un-retire. There’s a new Batman movie.

The chattering classes are bleating and ululating. Except for Lou Dobbs—he’s braying. Iraq? Iran? Afghanistan? Forget about it. Mugabe—bad. Darfur—what’s that? Luckily, American political tradition allows for a lack of attention to the upcoming election until after Labor Day. Good luck figuring it out even then.

The problem as I see it is—given the immense amount of effort it would require for aspirants to good and informed citizenship to personally ascertain and verify the shit-stream of what we still call information—is to find voices and visions that one finds reliable and useful. To indulge the still-popular fetish for full disclosure (and lists), here’s a list of those to whom I pay attention:

• Frank Rich and Gail Collins in The New York Times
• Tom Engelhardt and his various associates at The Nation Institute
• Robert Scheer at Truthdig.com
• Jon Lee Anderson and Alma Guillermoprieto at The New Yorker
• Christopher Hitchens, variously at The Atlantic and Vanity Fair
• Hendrick Hertzberg at The New Yorker

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 21, 2008