For more than 30 years until retiring last year, Michiko Kakutani wrote book reviews for the New York Times that were smart, informed, sometimes brutal and always feared.
I'll never forget the trepidation in the voice of the New York publishing house editor who called in 1994 to say that Kakutani had asked that my forthcoming book on Bill Clinton be sent to her for review.
The woman had just trashed John Updike, I was told. The implication--or at least my inference--was that there was no telling what she'd do to a yokel from Arkansas.
Last week, Kakutani's own new book came out. I didn't pre-order it simply because it was hers. I was more drawn by the title--The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump.
It's a short book, about 300 pocket-size pages, about 25 of which are meticulous source notes.
Its premise is that a democratic republic relies for efficient functioning on general acceptance of facts and a baseline of common truth; that reason and decency and humanity have historically been tragically lost when fact and truth have gone missing, and that America has been on a post-truth path since the 1960s, influenced by government's lies about Vietnam, Watergate and Wall Street, as well as by liberal academic advancement of postmodernism theories that true objectivity can't exist because all events occur through necessarily subjective prisms.
The book's ultimate point, though, is that Donald Trump has stomped truth to extinction and is dancing on its grave.
Yes, Bill Clinton lied about sex. Yes, George W. Bush lied us into war, or got played by Dick Cheney's lies. But Trump lies by talking, unless he lies by tweeting.
To review the book of the heralded reviewer, the Times picked Chris Hayes. You might know him as an MSNBC evening host. But he's also an editor at large of The Nation and a man of top-tier academic and journalistic credentials. He's a liberal, like Kakutani--just as the Times itself, fact-denying critics will surely rush to say.
It is a well-established pattern that liberals don't stick together. The liberal Kakutani's book blames, in part, liberal academia. And the liberal Hayes' review says the liberal Kakutani's book is not all that.
Hayes writes that the book at times reads like a series of anti-Trump tweets bearing the hashtag #resist.
He is sympathetic, admitting that it proves difficult night after night to find something to say about Trump beyond the fact that is he an utter disgrace.
Hayes writes that Kakutani, being uncommonly well-read, delivers such a barrage of prescient quotations from others that she seems at times to compete with her own points.
But he did not call her book "discursive" and "incoherent" in its narrative.
(Forgive me. That was a sentence only for me. I should excise it but probably won't. I'm over it, mostly.)
What Hayes is saying is that sometimes Kakutani so engages the reader with a relevant observation from someone such as Hannah Arendt that the reader wants to put the book down and read more by Hannah Arendt.
For me, I wanted to put the book down and read more from Alexander Hamilton, who apparently lives still, not only on Broadway but a few blocks northeast at Trump Tower. By that I mean the late-18th century Hamilton seems to possess an intimacy with the current American president.
This passage from Kakutani's book explains: "The constitutional system [the founders] created was based on a rational system of checks and balances to guard against the possibility, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, of a man 'unprincipled in his private life' and 'bold in his temper' one day arising who might 'flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day' in order to embarrass the government and 'throw things into confusion that he may ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'"
In 1792, Alexander Hamilton looked squarely into the hairdo of Donald Trump in 2018.
He was writing mostly to defend himself against charges that he was a monarchist. He was saying the case for a monarchy would most likely arise only from the anarchy resulting from the threat to the republic of the above-described leader.
In fact, in his other writings, Hamilton favored a strong executive and worried more about restraining the legislative branch.
Even so, he didn't foresee that, in 2018, the checks would no longer check, and the balances would no longer balance--that the Supreme Court would be more partisan than judicious, and that Congress would be controlled by cowed minions.
The only way left to attack the death of truth is to beat Trump by a Goldwater-ish margin.
That would not restore truth. But it would signal a vital first step to respect it again.
It would announce the beginning of the hard work required for its resurrection.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 07/22/2018