I've been reading A Promised Land by Barack Obama for the past couple of weeks. I thought it might be a nice thing to read while waiting out the last part of the Trump presidency before starting the Biden one. Sort of a refresher course in what it was like to have a president I might not always agree with but at least believed their intentions were good.
It's really long.
It's taking me forever to get through it.
Part of that is the way he tells a story. He tells one like I do. Instead of going from A to B you get all of the subset in between. The details. The little asides. I like all of that, obviously, I think it makes the experience richer, but it does tend to make a story a little longer. Part of it is it's just a really long book. It's 768 pages long. I'm about half way through which is a good sized book in its own right. And part is that it always seems to take longer to read nonfiction than it does fiction. I am not sure why that is, but for me it seems to be a constant. Maybe I slow down with nonfiction because I'm trying to learn something about someone or some thing or maybe it's just the flow of the writing is different. I'm not sure.
And then there is the last part. The part that I was starting to figure out a few days ago but really hit home yesterday while I was reading. It's all spoiled for me. I know how the story ends. I actually know more about how the story is going than he did while he was writing it. I mean he knew Trump got elected. He knew Trump had been spending years undoing a lot of what the Obama administration had worked so hard to get done. But he didn't know that Trump was going to lead an attack on the Capitol. He didn't know that right now 1 in 5 Republicans support the insurrection. He didn't know what I know.
It was bad enough when I was reading about him meeting with the Majority and Minority leaders of both Houses of Congress before the healthcare debates and knowing that the Minority leaders were stringing him along. That they were not actually interested in listening to him, or in helping him at all. That McConnell at that very moment was vowing to his party to make Obama a one term president. It's like wanting to yell at the movie screen DON'T GO IN THAT ROOM!
I keep having to put the book down and walk away from it. It's too frustrating.
But it is incredibly interesting. I like reading about how the government works, or even doesn't work in a lot of cases. What goes into making things run. And because I have a lot of things that I disagreed with Obama on it's been really interesting to get a look at the reasoning behind some of those decisions. What was the thinking that went on to make those calls? Why was the end result so different than what I had hoped it would be?
If you can understand someone's motives you can understand (or at least get closer to understanding) their decisions.
But it's still like watching a future nightmare taking shape.
Because I know that no matter what good things he gets done there is the orange menace on the horizon ready to undo them. I know no matter how good his intentions are, no matter how much I honestly believe he's incredibly smart and considerate and really weighing things, there are people out there who think he's evil. Like literal evil. I know that right now our country is not better than it was while he was president. I know that the work he did to stop the slide and then start the economic recovery will never get the credit it deserves from Republicans because they somehow don't believe it happened. I know that Trump is still here.
That Trumpism is still here.
That Cult45 is not going away.
Not even in 7 days when Biden takes office.
That the insurrection, the attempted coup, the storming of the Capitol, I know that the more we learn about it the worse it gets. That the more we find out the more we see (or more people see, some of us have been warning about this for awhile) that this is a deep division, a split nation division, a group that actively wants a civil war division. And some of those that want it are elected officials. In the seat of government. Who will work against unifying because it might not get them reelected if people aren't so angry all of the time.
So reading about how Obama would go back to his home office in the evening and read everything he could find on Turkish history while trying to work with our generals in what to do in the region is amazing and also heartbreaking. Because you know it didn't matter. Trump undid so much of what was done with his jagged little sharpie signature. With his sycophants and with his let's burn the fucking place down crew.
It's not the pleasant little palate cleanser read I was hoping for. It's a tragedy because I know how it ends.
Or at least I know how this act is going.
I hate spoilers. I really do.
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