A 40,000-book Personal Library

I recently read Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel.
However, I was left with two burning questions after finishing the book: where did his library end up, and how large was the collection that he packed up?
Wikipedia (not Packing My Library) gave me the answers.
Alberto Manguel donated his 40,000-book collection to the Center for Research in the History of Reading, in Lisbon, Portugal.

Alberto Manguel is a novelist, translator, editor, reviewer, and library director.
Over his life, he’s lived in at least eight countries—Argentina, Canada, Israel, France, England, Tahiti, Mexico and the United States (New York City).
I wonder how many times he’s packed up his books, and how long some sections of his collection have been in storage?

The burning of the Library of Alexandria.

I especially enjoyed the ten digressions in Packing My Library.
One digression is about the Library of Alexandria, which some historians say was consumed in a fire started by Julius Caesar’s troops in 48 B.C.
Manguel believes, however, that only the overflow of books (near the port), was actually set aflame.
He considers the great library’s actual fate to be a mystery.
The digression mentions some of the great plays that were lost forever with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria—72 by Euripides, between 63-73 by Aeschylus, and 116 by Sophocles.

Scene from Games of Thrones, showing the vast library of the Citadel.

My husband and I are long-time bibliophiles.

However, our combined libraries aren’t even close to 40,000 books.
One of our brother-in-law’s parents were both librarians, and their joint collection (all left to him after his parents died), was once bigger than ours.
It was never close to 40,000 either.
I think I understand why Mr. Manguel packed up all his books.
He was in his early 70’s when, for various reasons, he had to give up the large space (in France) which had held his spectacular collection.
He needed to make sure that his books had a good home—a home that he could visit, on occasion—but not one that he owned, or paid rent on.

Manga version of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

A few years back, Marie Kondo (Konmari) wrote The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up—all about how we should only have items around us that we truly need.

As a result, I do attempt (periodically), to “prune” my book collection.
(We only have so many walls, and we need room for new books.)
I go through each shelf and follow her advice—deciding if each book “brings me joy.”
Some books bring so much joy, that they’re added to the stack near my bed.
Others don’t, so I place them in a box to be donated.
(I find that I miss certain books years after I’ve donated them.)

Cover of Margareta Magnusson’s The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.

Another book on the subject of possessions—and having enough space for them—is Margareta Magnusson’s The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter.
One point in Magnusson’s book is: “Someone will have to clean up after you.
Whoever it may be will find it a burden.”
Her book made me worry about what would happen to our treasured book collections, if my husband and I died together, not separately.
What would our families do with our valued books?
(None love books quite as much as we do.)
Would our carefully-selected books be donated to a library?
Would they be sold?
Would lovely older editions be tossed in an alley, and only the newer books given good homes?

According to a March 2023 Gallup poll, Americans say that they read less than 13 books a year—the smallest number since 1990.*
Reading among subgroups—like the college-educated—is going down more rapidly.
A few famous people (like Bill Gates) say they read over 50 books a year.
(That’s a number my husband and I are comfortable with.)
However, other well-known people (like Kanye West and Donald Trump), brag that they don’t enjoy books, and have never read for personal pleasure.

My husband and I both realize that to be a lover of books—to the extent of owning a lot of them, or carrying them about—is to be an “oddball.”
The purchaser of our condo, a few years back, refused to buy that apartment unless we first removed the built-in book shelves.
(We were deluded enough to believe that book shelves were a “selling point.”)
Recently, when my husband and I brought books and newspapers to a hospital ER waiting room, a young man warily asked us (as if he was dealing with crazy people) if we really planned to read “all that stuff.”
Yes, we did!

Scene from Twilight Zone's “Time Enough at Last” with Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) enjoying a book, before his eyeglasses are accidentally crushed.

A favorite The Twilight Zone episode deals with a book worm—Time Enough at Last (season one, episode 8).
This episode features Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) as a bank teller who “lives to read,” and cares little for human companionship.
(According to the IMDb trivia for this 1959 episode, of the 92 episodes that creator Rod Serling wrote, this episode was Mr. Serling’s personal favorite.)

One of the plot points in Time Enough at Last is that Mrs. Bemis (Jacqueline deWit) dislikes her husband’s love of books, and has actually destroyed some of them.
This lack of harmony is not the case in our family.
Both of us have loved libraries and reading since early childhood, and we are in complete agreement about “book love.”
We routinely point out interesting paragraphs to each other, and read them aloud.
We’re fans of book stores, catalogs, sales and festivals.

Hamlet (Lawrence Olivier) holding an open book.

When asked by Polonius what he was reading, Hamlet responded: “Words, words, words.”

My husband is something of an extrovert, and I’m very much an introvert.
Although Henry Bemis was an introvert, I’m sure that’s not a factor in loving books and reading.
For a while—after COVID hit, in 2020—I found it hard to pick up a book.
This change in my behavior made me realize that I was in an emotional crisis.
After a few months, I was back to reading every day again, and I knew that all would be well.
Reading books is one of the things that makes life worth living.

* According to researchers at the Australian National University, Estonians own an average of 128 books per household, with a third of respondents owning 350 books, or more. The average American household only owns about 29 books.

Condemned to Repeat the Past, Part Two

As I pointed in my previous post; there were some similarities between the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and the current COVID-19 pandemic.

In 1964’s Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) faces the embodiment of the Red Death (also Vincent Price).

The world had over one hundred years to prepare for another pandemic, but somehow public health never received the funds it needed (after the 1918 Spanish flu).
Perhaps, the memory of the 1918 pandemic was just too frightening, and the experience had to be buried.
Perhaps, being fully prepared for a pandemic is just impossible.

We've known for a long time how human disease can affect history.
Justinian’s Flea, by William Rosen, explains how the Bubonic Plague (541-549 AD) “killed at least 25 million people; depopulated entire cities, and depressed birth rates for generations,” leading to the Dark Ages.
The 1918 Spanish Flu at least doubled or quadrupled that number, killing an estimated 50 to 100 million people.
However, that flu likely led to the Allied forces beating Germany, and winning WWI,* also shaping history in that sense.
We’re waiting to learn had much COVID-19 will affect this era.
One fact seems obvious.
But for COVID, America would likely be in the middle of a second Trump term.

British actor and political activist, Sir Tony Robinson praised Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918 on the British cover jacket, predicting (in 2018) that “another pandemic could be just around the corner.”

This article is about the differences between the 1918 Spanish Flu and COVID-19.
(Since scientists don’t fully understand either pandemic, a layperson writing this article is an absurd project.)
One difference is in the symptoms.
Both viruses were “shape-shifters,” and each were mistaken (at first) for the common cold.
In Pandemic 1918, British author Catharine Arnold [Note the British spelling of medical terms.] describes symptoms of the Spanish Flu, as the second wave hit, and the disease developed into a more aggressive form:

In the summer of 1918. . . victims collapsed in the streets, haemorrhaging from lungs and nose. Their skin turned dark blue with the characteristic ‘heliotrope cyanosis’ caused by oxygen failure as their lungs filled with pus, and they gasped for breath from ‘air-hunger’, like landed fish. . . Others suffered projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhoea, and died raving as their brains were starved of oxygen.

Catharine Arnold recounts how the Spanish flu starved President Woodrow Wilson’s brain, and he became delusional during his serious bout with the flu (in April of 1919)—during the Paris peace conference.
President Wilson dragged himself out of his sickbed, and rearranged the hotel furniture, saying (perhaps, in a letter or diary):

The greens and the reds are all mixed up here and there is no harmony. Here is a big purple, high-backed covered chair, which is like the Purple Cow, strayed off to itself, and it is placed where the sun shines on it too brightly.

The California State Board of Health advocating that to avoid the 1918 Spanish Flu, people should wear masks.

Essentially, the 1918 Spanish Flu was a bird/avian flu (H1N1 influenza A) and the infected animal (whose virus infected a human) in COVID-19 was (most likely) a bat.
Victims of the 1918 Spanish Flu died from secondary bacterial pneumonia, while victims of COVID-19 usually died from organ failure.
According to the Columbia University Department of Surgery website, hundreds of patients in the U.S. have received double lung transplants, due to COVID-19.

Dr. Edwin Jenner of the CDC (Noah Emmerich) whispers to Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) in The Walking Dead (“TS-19,” season 1, episode 6) that “Everyone is infected.”

The zombie is an allegory for infectious disease.

Besides the difference in symptoms, the two viruses hit different population groups.
COVID-19 mainly kills people older than 65, as well as people with comorbidities (like diabetes and obesity) and impaired immunity responses.
However, the 1918 Spanish Flu tended to strike people between 20-40, enjoying the prime of their lives—fit vigorous soldiers, and young women of child-bearing age.
Young Walt Disney caught the Spanish flu at the age of 17.
James Thurber was 24 when he became ill.
Georgia O’Keefe was 31.
All of their lives could have cut short if they had died from the flu.
(What we need to remember is that this was just a tendency, and NOT a rule. All types and ages of people caught the Spanish Flu, and all types and ages of people are catching COVID-19.)

Dr. Kimberly Shiroma (center, Tamilyn Tomita) in the 1990s American TV series about fighting biological disasters and conspiracies—The Burning Zone.

While the German DVD packaging is on the web, we're unable to locate an English language version. The series also doesn’t seem to be currently-available on streaming services. 

Wonder why???

While there’s little evidence that there was asymptomatic spread with the Spanish Flu, it’s evident that there was asymptomatic spread with COVID-19.
In Dr. Deborah Birx’s book, Silent Invasion, she comments that “asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic, and even mildly symptomatic spread are particularly insidious, because, with these, many people don’t know they are infected.”
She comments that it was a “huge miscalculation” for the CDC to expect “the new coronavirus to behave like seasonal or pandemic flu.”
Dr. Birx determined that there was asymptomatic spread with COVID-19, and she used math to accurately predict the number of cases.

COVID-19 is reaching double the number of countries on the globe as the 1918 Spanish Flu did—likely, as a result of greater air travel, and the greater intertwining of economies in this century.
In 1918, communities in Alaska could protect themselves with armed guards, and South Pacific islands could bar visitors from landing.
Today, few places are remote enough to prevent contagion.

It’s also interesting that while I can’t find any indication that people caught the Spanish Flu more than once, people are coming down with different strains of COVID-19 multiple times.
Sometimes, patients even have two strains of the COVID virus at the same time!
Public health officials urge those over 65 to make sure that their vaccinations are up to date.

*According to Pandemic 1918, by Catharine Arnold: “By May, influenza had crossed effortlessly over ‘No Man’s Land’ to hit the German army. . . the disease affected 139,000 men during June and peaked in early July.
Influenza had brought the all-conquering German army to its’ knees, while the Allies, stricken too, took advantage of their enemy’s weakness to regroup.”

Condemned to Repeat the Past, Part One

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—George Santayana, The Life of Reason (1905)

Edvard Munch did a series of self-portraits as he was recovering from the 1918 Spanish Flu.

Famous painters who died of the flu included Egon Schiele and Gustave Klimt.

I think of George Santayana’s aphorism often when I think of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 (the “forgotten pandemic”).
When the office I worked in shut down (in March of 2020) because of COVID, and higher-ups asked employees to all work from home, I also recalled John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza, Gina Kolata’s Flu, and Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague—all books that I’ve read over the years. 

Conspiracy theorist Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) wears his homemade hazmat suit, and places an anti-vaccine flyer on a car, in 2011’s Contagion.

Those books were all in my “disease library” because I’m “somewhat obsessed” with epidemics, pandemics, viruses, plagues, and diseases.
Part of this obsession is due to my Sicilian grandmother (Maria) dying, at the age of 22, in October of 1918 from the Spanish Flu.
She died in a tiny Chicago apartment with my eleven-month-old father, and his 27-month-old toddler brother, nearby in a crib.
No one is sure where my grandfather had wandered; but (according to family lore) my great-uncle (Sam), discovered his dying, pregnant sister-in-law during a wellness check.
In doing so, he likely saved his two nephews from starvation and death.

The 1996-1997 TV show The Burning Zone , which combined epidemics with X-Files-style conspiracies, only lasted 19 episodes, but I was riveted by every episode.

It starred from left to right, Agent Michael Hailey (James Black), Dr. Kimberly Shiroma (Tamlyn Tomita), Dr. Daniel Cassian (Michael Harris) and Dr. Edward Marcase (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). 

I just finished other, more recent, books on this macabre subject—Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918, and Jaime Breitnauer’s The Spanish Flu Epidemic and its Influence on History.

These two books come at the subject from a more personal angle than the scientific perspectives of the books mentioned above—emphasizing the lives, and deaths, of the victims.

Until I read these books, I didn’t realize how much my Dad and Anthony Burgess (the famed British author of the novel A Clockwork Orange), had in common.
His young mother (Elizabeth) was found dead of the Spanish Flu, with her dead eight-year-old daughter in her arms, and her 21-month-year-old son (Anthony Burgess) playing nearby.
(The Spanish Flu, and COVID-19, have in common that they produced a high number of orphans.) 

The Spanish Flu and COVID-19 have several other issues in common.
Both caused death all over the globe, and had significant impacts on the global economy.
The commonly-held belief is that the 2018 Spanish Flu killed 50 million people, but according to Pandemic 1918, “Spanish Flu killed upwards of 100 million souls during 1918-19,” and the true figures are unrecorded.

According to the World Health Organization, there have been nearly seven million deaths, so far, due to COVID-19. 

Elegant mask-wearers in 1918 London. 

Both pandemics ignited public debates over the wearing of masks, and the “mask lesson” was ignored in 2020.
In 1918-19, countries and states created mask laws, so that people could make this minor sacrifice for the collective good.

A streetcar conductor refuses to allow an unmasked rider on board in 1918 San Francisco.

San Francisco, California, was a hotbed of debate in this regard.
According to Pandemic 1918, a San Francisco attorney fought the strict mask ordinance, arguing that it was “absolutely unconstitutional.”
(Enthusiastic policemen had filled the San Francisco city jails with unmasked scofflaws, and arrested 110 people on October 27th, 1918 alone!)
According to Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History (by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta), Trump, and his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “were adamantly opposed to actively promoting the use of masks, and face coverings began turning into a partisan Rorschach test of whether you were with Trump or against him.”
While some people refused to wear masks in 1918, it was never politicalized as it was in 2020-2023.

President Woodrow, the president in 1918, and President Trump were both flu victims, and they both came very close to death.
However, both presidents also downplayed their respective pandemics, and politicized their responses.
According to Nightmare Scenario, Wilson’s “dishonesty about the scope of the outbreak led to more sickness and more death.”
According to Abutaleb and Paletta, Trump’s lack of empathy,* worry about his “tough guy” image, and thinking mainly about economics also led to unnecessary deaths.
Although the U.S. developed superior vaccines—and produced them more quickly—the U.S. had a higher death rate than Britain, Germany, Canada, Japan, and many other industrialized nations.

Americans were encouraged to “Eat More Onions” to keep Spanish Flu at bay.

During both pandemics, there was confusion as to possible treatments.
When New York doctors placed children with Spanish Flu on the Roosevelt hospital roof (to get the benefit of fresh air), the general public called it “outrageous.”
In 1918, British doctors used potassium permanganate (a general disinfectant) on public schoolboys to treat flu.
In 2020, Trump grasped at straws, and touted the old anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, and the Ebola drug Remdesivir, as “magic” cures, before either drug could be vetted for the new off-brand use.
Hydroxychloroquine turned out to be not useful at all!

We’ve all heard of “long COVID.”
While people can get “long COVID” after having either mild COVID symptoms, or severe COVID symptoms, people who recovered from a bad case of the Spanish Flu (like President Woodrow Wilson) “were sometimes left with a lifetime’s legacy of nervous conditions, heart problems, lethargy and depression.”
(Pandemic 2018, by Catharine Arnold.)
“Long Spanish Flu” and “long COVID” sound very similar to laymen ears.

We still aren’t certain of the identity of “Patient Zero” for the Spanish Flu, or COVID-19.
According to 2004’s The Great Influenza, the 1918 “Patient Zero” was an U.S. army cook who died in Haskell County, Kansas, in early 1918.
However, Pandemic 1918 (published in 2018) places Patient Zero a year earlier, naming Private Harry Underdown—an English soldier who died in France, on February 21st, 1917.
As to the location of COVID-19’s start, our government places COVID’s transmission from animal (a bat?) to a human in Wuhan, China—either in a “wet” market, or in a lab.
However, in April of 2020, the deputy director of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Zhao Lijian) taunted President Trump, alleging that the virus “might have” originated in an American soldier who traveled to Wuhan. 

The comic No Ordinary Flu, produced in 2006 by King County in Seattle, Washington

You can read the entire comic HERE.

Essentially, the U.S. had over one hundred years to prepare for another pandemic and while the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations all wrote playbooks, and published white papers, the threat wasn’t given nearly the budget that it warranted.
The horrors of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic weren’t mentioned in school textbooks, or even covered well in medical textbooks.
The world decided to forget the lessons from the “greatest medical holocaust in modern history”—part of the U.S. edition subtitle for Catharine Arnold’s Pandemic 1918—and paid the price in 2020-2023.

This is Part One of my article comparing the 1918 Spanish Flu to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This part deals with the similarities between the two pandemics.

Part Two, next week, will deal with the differences.

*President Trump seemed to exhibit little empathy for COVID-19 victims. This is odd because his grandfather, Frederick Trump, died of the Spanish Flu in late May of 1918. According to Trump biographer Gwenda Blair, Frederick was out walking with his 12-year-old son Fred (Trump’s father) when he suddenly felt ill and was rushed home to bed. He died soon after.

A Shrine to Nativism or to Democracy?

In high school, in the Midwest, I learned about the concept of Manifest Destiny.
This was the idea that White Americans were ordained, by God, to settle the entire continent “from sea to shining sea.”
The concept of Manifest Destiny was tied in with the idea of “American Exceptionalism,” the genocide of indigenous people, and the rejection of Native American rights.
Since Mount Rushmore was imagined by its’ sculptor (Gutzon Borghum) as about the expansion of America, one way to think about it is as a shrine to Manifest Destiny.

Originally, Red Cloud was going to be immortalized on another North Dakota mountain.

Instead, Mount Rushmore was built by sculptor Gutzon Borghum.

Borghum was a proponent of nativism who believed in strict controls on immigration.

Honoring U.S. presidents was NOT the original concept for building a giant monument in North Dakota.
Moreover, the four presidents weren’t selected based on their thoughts on Democracy.
According to an article “75 Surprising Facts About Mount Rushmore” (by Dylan Mancy), the original idea was to sculpt images of “Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud, explorers Lewis and Clark, and Buffalo Bill Cody.”
This concept would have made it a monument to both Native Americans, and to U.S. expansion—an exceedingly contrary proposal indeed!
However, it would have been more in harmony with what the Lakota (also known as the Teton Sioux) called Mount Rushmore.
The Lakota called Rushmore the “Six Grandfathers.”

As far as I can tell, the main person who selected the four presidents for Mount Rushmore was the sculptor, Gutzon Borghum.
His idea was to pay homage to presidents who had contributed greatly to the “founding, expansion, preservation, and unification of the country.”
George Washington represented the founding.
Thomas Jefferson represented expansion—through the Louisiana Purchase.
Teddy Roosevelt represented preservation and economic growth.
Finally, Abraham Lincoln represented unification.

In Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism, Paula Marantz Cohen, discusses how the chase in 1959’s North by Northwest (starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint) “dramatizes the puny but heroic efforts of individuals to stand up against institutional pressures.”

It’s interesting that President James K. Polk is not immortalized on Mount Rushmore, especially since Polk was the president most closely allied with U.S. expansion.
However, Teddy Roosevelt was associated with the West as a naturalist, hunter, and conservationist; helped build the Panama Canal; as well as a close personal friend of the sculptor.

Another interesting fact (that I learned in “75 Surprising Facts About Mount Rushmore”) was that Mount Rushmore was named after Mr. Charles E. Rushmore—an obscure New York lawyer who surveyed gold claims in North Dakota, in 1885.
(His guides incorrectly assumed that the mountain had no name.)
How odd to name such a large mountain after such a minor official!

Sculptor Gutzon Borgham,* the creator of Mount Rushmore, was born in 1867, in the Idaho Territory.
His father immigrated from Denmark and his mother was the child of Danish immigrants.
According to Wikipedia, Borgham was a child of Morman polygamy.
At one time, his father (Jen) was married to both Borgham’s mother (Christina), and to her sister Ida.
(However, Jen Borgham eventually divorced Gutzon’s mother, stayed with Ida, and left the Morman Church.)

In 2004’s Team America: World Police, the counter-terrorism force (Team America) used Mount Rushmore as a home base.

After attending preparatory schools in Kansas and Nebraska, Borgham moved to New York City where he sculpted religious figures for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
By age 40, one of his sculptures was accepted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he was on his way to success and fame.
Over the years, Borgham became more and more fascinated with themes of American patriotism and heroic nationalism.

Now we come to the subjects of nationalism and nativism.
Nativism is a belief system in which “non-natives” are threatening, and only the “true natives” in a country are considered acceptable citizens.
This idea might seem an odd concept in a “melting pot” land in which everyone is an immigrant or descended from immigrants—except, of course, Native Americans.
However, somehow many White Northern European Protestants have come to assume that only they are “true Americans,” and everyone else is an unfit interloper.

Imagining only people of Northern European heritage, as “real” Americans doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Between 3.8 to 7 million Native Americans lived in North America before the arrival of Columbus.
The ancestors of Black Americans were kidnapped, and forcibly kept here as slaves, beginning in 1640.
Their labor made millions for their captors.
Immigrants have toiled on U.S. soil from all over the world.

Chinese men built the railroads.
The ancestors of people of Hispanic descent (like Eva Longoria) raised cattle, and grew crops, on the Northern side of the Rio Grande long before the U.S. was a country.
Yet, somehow indigenous peoples, Black people, Southern European people, Jews, and Catholics are considered “non-natives?”
How does that work?

Front page of the Treasure Chest comic book story “The Shrine of Democracy.”

Instead of portraying Mount Rushmore as a shrine to nativism, this story portrayed the monument as a shrine to Democracy.

Today, Mount Rushmore is known as a monument to a system of government and to great presidents.
On June 14, 2023, a Naturalization ceremony was held in which more than 200 citizens from over 60 countries were welcomed.
The Mount Rushmore site has links for 21 associated Native American tribal nations, and proclaims that the Federal Government consults and coordinates with those tribal nations.
One wonders how Gutzon Borghum would have reacted to this turn around.

* Twelve years before Borgum worked on Mount Rushmore, he created mock-ups for Stone Mountain in Georgia. A 38-minute documentary Monument: the Untold Story of Stone Mountain (by the Atlantic History Museum), covers Borghum being fired from that project, as well as Stone Mountain’s history with the KKK. (You can watch the complete video HERE.)

 

Who’s Drinking the Flavor-Aid?

Jim Jones [Powers Boothe] in 1980’s Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones.

This historical event is where the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” originated. Actually, Jones gave his flock generic Flavor-Aid.

Several years ago, when I worked for a very large company, the company was going through yet another “reorg.”
I remember a meeting in which a Senior Vice President faced over 100 members of her division.
She enumerated the many adjustments we were about to go through, and (making it clear that she disagreed with the changes), commented that we all had to “drink the Kool-Aid.”*
In other words, we all had to pretend that the reorganization was a fine idea, and “go along,” without complaint.

Superman (George Reeves) in Adventures of Superman, which aired 1952-58.
The voiceover ended with the tagline “Truth, justice, and the American way.”
(In 2021, DC Comics updated the Superman tagline to “Truth, justice, and a better tomorrow.”)

In trying to figure out this period of political polarization, I’ve decided that we’ve been drinking different flavors of Kool-Aid.
I had been drinking the fantasy that Democrats and Republicans were basically similar, we were all in a melting pot, and most citizens believed in my family’s interpretation of the slogan associated with Superman: “Truth, justice, and the American way.”
When Donald Trump was elected President via the Electoral College—while losing the popular vote—I finally realized that I’d been drinking some serious Kool-Aid.

I had completely missed that some people had been traumatized by having President Obama as President for eight years, couldn’t conceive of a woman as their President, and/or cared deeply for a candidate who I perceived as a conman.
I hadn’t paid much attention to Trump (because I had a bad opinion of him after living in New York City in the 1980’s and 1990’s).
However, many Americans had listened to him, and had responded powerfully to his message.

Scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with Peasant 2 (Michael Palin) screaming “Help, help. I’m being repressed,” as he’s being strangled by King Arthur (Graham Chapman).

Some Trump supporters think that they are being supplanted by people of color and immigrants.
They also tend to interpret the “American way of life” in a way I had never considered.
In this world view: White men should be in power, “outgroups” (like LGBT and “non-white” people) should accept a lower status, and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant societal values should be placed on a pedestal.
(It’s true some Catholics, Hispanics and Southern Italians are allied with MAGA, but their own cultures are thereby repressed.)

Furthermore, most Trump supporters are extremely cynical about Government.
They think it’s obvious that elections are stolen, the Federal government is corrupt, and politicians steal.
When I hear MAGA people being interviewed, it seems that their only real goal is to elect politicians who will cut taxes, and stop the tide of “outgroups taking over society.”

In the book The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Lies, by Aja Raden, Raden quotes a 2002 study by Colleen Seifert, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who specializes in complex human cognition.
According to Seifert: “when people are presented with evidence that the information they’ve been exposed to over and over is factually untrue, the attempts to refute it further entrench their belief.”
[Emphasis mine.]
Once someone is convinced of something, and it feels “like truth” to them, convincing them otherwise is close to impossible.

The U.S. seems stuck in a place in which about 60% (?) acknowledge that an unfit criminal held the nation’s highest office for four years, and another 40% (?) seem to believe that he did a good job and it would be fine if he were President again.
Making the situation worse, only half (or less) of U.S. citizens can be persuaded to vote, and it’s unclear which side the non-voters are on.

Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson) in The First Lady—the 2022 TV series.

In 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), then First Lady of the U.S., wrote an essay entitled “The Moral Basis of Democracy,” saying:

We are in truth the melting pot of the earth. Our solidarity and unity can never be a geographical unity or a racial unity. It must be a unity growing out of a common idea and a devotion to that idea.

It seems that few of us are devoted to the ideal of Democracy. She goes on to say:

Moreover, no one can honestly claim that either the Indians or the Negroes of this country are free. [Roosevelt used the accepted terminology of the times.] . . . Few members of the older generation have even attempted to make themselves the kind of people who are truly worthy of the power which is vested in the individual in a Democracy. We must fulfill our duties as citizens, see that our nation is truly represented by its government, see that the government is responsive to the will and desires of the people. . . We must maintain a standard of living which makes it possible for the people really to want justice for all, rather than harbor a secret hope for privileges because they cannot hope for justice.

Do Americans still hope for Justice?
About a year before she wrote this essay, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote another essay called “Keepers of Democracy,” which appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter, 1939).
She says:

There is a growing wave in this country of fear, and of intolerance which stems from fear. . . when we allow one group of people to look down upon another, then we may for a short time bring hardship on some particular group of people, but the real hardship and the real wrong is done to democracy and to our nation as a whole. We are then breeding people who cannot live under a democratic form of government but must be controlled by force.

Have we bred people who cannot live under Democracy?
How many voters no longer hope for justice?
Is the simple difference between the two sides that some are willing to endure an authoritarian government (as long as they are accepted into the group that is “on top”), while others want to live equally with others and make the bargains necessary to live in a Democracy?

*In case anyone is too young to know where the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” originated, it comes from the story of Jim Jones—a cult leader who died in 1978, with around 900 followers (at least 200 of them children). According to Wikipedia, Jones asked his group to ingest grape-flavored Flavor-Aid (misidentified as Kool-Aid) plus cyanide, as an act of “revolutionary suicide.”