To Assuage My Despair For America: Two History Books My Family Gave Me for Christmas.
One I requested on my extended family's "Secret Santa" list: Jon Meacham's And Then There Was Light, Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle.
I have at home a significant Library of Lincoln biographies, but could not be tired of reading yet another. I have only read the prologue and the first chapter so far, and was startled to learn things that I did not know, particularly relating to the backwoods religious origins of Lincoln's anti-slavery views, insights to his youth that struck me as original. It promises to be an interesting read.
My youngest son, who knows how I despair for the future of our country under King Musk and his light brained sock puppet, Deluded Don, gave me an interesting book delineating, apparently, how the founders of the United States despaired for its future, Dennis Rasmussen's Fears of a Setting Sun, The Disillusionment of America's Founders.
The title refers to the remark of Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the United States, who on the closing of the Constitutional Convention, is said to have remarked on the sun engraved in the back (then) Chairman, George Washington, "“I have often looked at that sun behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”
Asked on leaving the convention what kind of government the conventioneers had given the people, he said "A republic, if you can keep it."
I haven't opened it yet, but look forward to reading it, perhaps to find a shred of waning hope.
From the promotional literature:
As Dennis Rasmussen shows, the founders’ pessimism had a variety of sources: Washington lost his faith in America’s political system above all because of the rise of partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was too weak, Adams because he believed that the people lacked civic virtue, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions laid bare by the spread of slavery. The one major founder who retained his faith in America’s constitutional order to the end was James Madison, and the book also explores why he remained relatively optimistic when so many of his compatriots did not. As much as Americans today may worry about their country’s future, Rasmussen reveals, the founders faced even graver problems and harbored even deeper misgivings.
It is terrifying to think of that senile old badly educated, ignorant, sybaritic narcissistic freak, Trump, once again ensconced in the highest office in the land, appointing cranks and morons and traitors to high office, and I have come to see this as the end of the Republic which we kept long but is now dying by suicide, but if there's any solace, we can see in history - not that we should expect it to repeat - that threats to our national state are not new, and they have been overcome.
I don't think we will overcome this one, but neither is it impossible that we will.
= new reply since forum marked as read
