the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt five)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

On March 3, shortly after the Anzoras left for El Salvador, a Black man named Rodney King was hurtling down Interstate 210, drunk and speeding. When the police caught up with him near an apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley, there were more than two dozen officers on hand. King emerged from the car, laid down on the ground, then stood back up. He wobbled a bit, and staggered toward one of them before the beating began. The officers formed a circle, while three of them took turns kicking him and hitting him with batons. They landed fifty-six blows in all—shattering one of King’s eye sockets, fracturing his cheekbone, breaking his leg, and knocking multiple fillings from his teeth. From across the street, a resident with a camcorder captured everything, including the scream of an onlooker: “Oh, my god, they’re beating him to death.”

In the weeks and months after the incident, snippets of the video footage were shown on a loop on local news, and city officials announced charges against the officers. The King beating was the latest in a series of city tragedies. A handful of police brutality cases had left several Black Angelinos injured, dead, or dispossessed. A predictable set of acquittals had followed. One of them was of three officers who faced misdemeanor charges for destroying the apartments of Black and Latino residents at Thirty-ninth Street and Dalton Avenue, during the raids a few years before. They were acquitted in June 1991, three months after the King footage surfaced. The following month, a commission appointed by the mayor, a Black political veteran and former cop named Tom Bradley, released the findings of an extensive investigation into police misconduct. “There is a significant number of officers in the LAPD who repetitively use excessive force against the public,” its authors wrote. By then, Bradley was openly feuding with the white police chief, Daryl Gates, whom he was trying to oust. There were calls for Gates to resign, but there was resistance inside the department. In August, three Korean markets in South Central were firebombed, including one where a Korean grocer had shot and killed a Black teenager she’d accused of shoplifting. In November, a judge granted the grocer probation rather than jail time, which unleashed a wave of street protests.

Bradley and Gates hadn’t spoken for a full year when, on April 29, 1992, a jury reached a verdict on whether the three officers shown on the video beating Rodney King, along with their supervisor, were guilty of violating his civil rights. The acquittal was announced that afternoon, from a courtroom in Simi Valley. It struck like an earthquake. Within hours, rioting had broken out across the city. At six forty-five p.m., a group of Black men pulled a white truck driver out of his vehicle on the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues and beat him, bashing his head with a brick. An hour later, a liquor store nearby went up in flames. The city had become a hotbed of tribalism and racial tension: Blacks against Koreans, Latinos against Blacks, the police against everybody. The king verdict lit the fuse of an all-out war. Store owners armed themselves with pistols. People were attacked at random. Shoplifters ran through streets, clouded with plumes of smoke, carrying whatever they could take. Others drove in to haul their loot in the trunks of their cars or strapped to the roofs.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt four)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

In the spring of 1981, Reagan’s advisers were so divided on immigration policy that they could agree only that the president should avoid the subject altogether. It was a “no win issue,” one of his counselors wrote in a memo. “Given the difficulties that can be expected,” another noted, White House action “may be more detrimental to domestic standing than living with the current situation.”

The current situation was this: There were somewhere between three million and six million people living without legal documentation in the US, and another four hundred thousand to a million migrants crossing the border that year. The budget of the INS was less than half that of the Philadelphia police department. “Nothing short of a Berlin Wall could keep illegals out,” one of Reagan’s advisers confessed. The country was in a recession, which further inflamed the public against immigrants who were seen as competitors for their jobs. The president also had to think about his core political supporters. Growers, industrial farming operations, hotels, restaurants, and manufacturers along the border and in the Sunbelt depended on cheap labor, and already there was a shortage of unskilled workers in the Southwest. In May, a well-connected California farmer sent an angry letter to Willian French Smith, Reagan’s attorney general, complaining about INS activity in Fresno. Arrests by Border Patrol, he claimed, were costing him an average of seventeen hundred workers each month. He was losing crops.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt three)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

There were two powers running Guatemala after the Second World War, and only one of them was the government. The other was an American corporation called the United Fruit Company, known inside the country as the Octopus because it had tentacles everywhere. It was Guatemala’s largest employer and landowner, controlling the country’s only Atlantic port, almost every mile of the railroads, and the nation’s sole telephone and telegraph facilities. US State Department officials had siblings in the upper ranks of the company. Senators held stock. Running United Fruit’s publicity department in New York was a legendary adman who claimed to have a list of twenty-five thousand journalists, editors, and public figures at his beck and call. They formed, in his words, “an invisible government” with “true ruling power” over the US, to say nothing of the countries under American sway.

By 1952, the president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, only the second democratically elected president in the country’s history, was trying to get United Fruit to pay taxes on its vast holdings. Not only had the company been exempt for decades; it had also secured a guarantee to pay its employees no more than fifty cents a day. In response, United Fruit unleashed a relentless lobbying campaign to persuade journalists, lawmakers, and the US government that Árbenz was a Communist sympathizer who needed to be overthrown. It didn’t matter that in a country of some three million people, the Communist Party had only about four thousand members. The start of the Cold War made American officials into easy marks. “We should regard Guatemala as a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism” a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s National Security Council said, in 1953.

Over the following year, the CIA and the United Fruit Company auditioned figures to lead a “Liberation” force against the government. They eventually landed on Carlos Castillo Armas, a rogue Guatemalan military officer with dark, diminutive features and a toothbrush mustache, who came across as flighty and dim. “He looked like he had been packaged by Bloomingdale’s,” one commentator said at the time. His chief qualification was his willingness to do whatever the Americans told him. In June 1954, after an invasion staged with American bombers and choreographed by the US ambassador, he was rewarded with the presidency. Árbenz was flown into Mexican exile, but not before Castillo Armas forced him to strip to his underwear for the cameras as he boarded the plane. The State Department helped select the members of Castillo Armas’s cabinet.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt two)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

In El Salvador, the political left extended well beyond the Christian Democrats, and included a spectrum of smaller parties ranging from armed guerrilla groups to nonviolent Marxists, socialists, and unionists whose views fell to the left of the governing junta. On November 27, six leaders of the non-guerrilla left—formally called the Frente Democrático Revolucianairo (FDR)—were preparing to deliver a statement at a Jesuit high school in San Salvador. They had decided to negotiate with the junta, which was significant, because the Christian Democrats in the government had been struggling for support from the country’s leftists. Before the leaders could speak, however, two hundred officers from the state’s combined security forces surrounded the school, while two dozen men stormed the building and kidnapped them. Soon afterward, their bodies were found near Lake Ilopango, just east of the capital, showing signs of torture. CIA cables at the time cited intelligence that Garcia and other high-ranking military officials had backed the operation. Ambassador White sent a message to Washington: “The military have explicitly reject dialogue and heralded a policy of extermination.”

On the evening of December 2, Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, and Jean Donovan, a lay missionary, arrived at the San Salvador airport. They were picking up two Maryknoll Sisters in their forties named Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, who were returning from a conference in Nicaragua. The funeral of the murdered FDR leaders was being held the next day. The four women had just merged onto the highway outside the airport when a truck full of National Guardsmen pulled them over and placed them under arrest. They were raped and murdered later that night, their bodies thrown in a ditch by the side of the road.

the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt one)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

The revolt in 1932 sputtered in a matter of days, but the repression it provoked went on for weeks. The military intervened on the side of the landowners. They were joined by members of the National Guard, who had been suppressing labor disputes for years. Together the soldiers slaughtered some thirty thousand people—roughly 2 percent of the Salvadoran population. Anyone who looked vaguely Indigenous or dressed like a peasant was branded a rebel and executed. Corpses were dumped in public or left hanging to instill terror. In one town, troops rounded up prisoners in groups of fifty and brought them before firing squads.

La Matanza froze the country in time for the next four and a half decades. The government replaced the real story of what had happened with lavish propaganda about how the military had fended off bloodthirsty communist hordes. The National Library removed references to the events from its records. Newspaper accounts were destroyed. Government files from the time were hidden or burned. What remained, the American historian Thomas Anderson wrote in 1971, was a “paranoiac fear of communism that has gripped the nation ever since. This fear is expressed in the continual labeling of even the most modest reform movements as communist or communist inspired.” Roque Dalton, the Salvadoran poet and activist, put it more succinctly: “We were all born half dead in 1932.”

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt nine)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

If Credit Suisse is correct, then the tax credits will unleash $ 1.7 trillion in private sector spending on green technologies. Within six years, solar and wind energy produced by the US will be the cheapest in the world. Alternative energies will cross a threshold: it will become financially irresponsible not to use them.

Even though Joe Biden played a negligible role in the final negotiations, the Inflation Reduction Act exudes his preferences. He romanticizes the idea of factories building stuff. It is a vision of the Goliath of American manufacturing, seemingly moribund, sprung back to life. At the same time that the legislation helps to stall climate change, it allows the United States to dominate the industries of the future.

This was a bill that, in the end, climate activists and a broad swath of industry could love. Indeed, strikingly few business lobbies, other than finance and pharma, tried to stymie the bill in its final stages. It was a far cry from the death struggles over energy legislation in the Clinton and Obama administrations, when industry scuppered transformational legislation.

The Inflation Reduction Act will allow the United States to prevent its own decline. And not just economic decline. Without such a meaningful program, the United States would have had no standing to prod other countries to respond more aggressively to climate change. It would have been a marginal player in shaping the response to the planet’s greatest challenge. The bill was an investment in moral authority.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt eight)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

That Alito served as the mouthpiece for the majority was probably all one needed to know. Where Chief Justice John Roberts cuts a genteel figure, Alito wages Kulturkampf with the ferocity of a man who views himself as civilization’s last best hope. He has the zeal of the late Antonin Scalia without the humor or the need to be liked.

The decision, in draft form, wasn’t Solomonic reasoning. It read like a strident essay in National Review, not even bothering with the pretense of persuading the other side. He wrote, “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”

For months, the White House knew there was a possibility a decision like this might land. A small working group, led by Jennifer Klein (director of the White House Gender Policy Council) and Dana Remus (White House counsel), prepared options for the president—a slate of policies and executive orders that he could roll out in the event of a decision like Dobbs. With the Politico leak, the White House was no longer dealing with hypotheticals. It knew roughly what it would confront. The time had arrived to get Biden’s take.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt seven)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

Biden obsessed over gas prices. It sometimes seemed that Biden couldn’t go through a meeting without asking about the price at the pump. He asked that a report on gas prices be included in the binder that he took home with him every evening to peruse.

He was convinced that the fossil fuel industry was using the war in Russia as a pretext for profiteering—and because the oil companies had every incentive to restore Republican majorities in Congress, some of his aides were convinced that they were going to screw Biden by keeping prices high.

Even if his energy policy intended to wean America from fossil fuels, he wasn’t going to let that policy objective get in the way of his party’s political survival, or of blunting inflation’s toll on the consumer. He kept ordering oil released from the government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to drive down prices. Indeed, each time he added a fresh batch of oil to the world’s supply, the cost of the commodity dropped. Over the months, after he released 180 million barrels of oil, the reserve dwindled to its lowest levels since the 1980s.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt six)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

What did Joe Manchin want? The answer was slippery. He clearly didn’t like the size of the Build Back Better proposal, which now totaled $3.5 trillion. There was evidence of rising inflation, and Manchin didn’t want a fresh injection of government spending compounding the problem. But was he bargaining in good faith to create a bill that allayed his substantive concerns? Or was he preparing to grind Biden down with an endless negotiation on behalf of his friends in the fossil fuel industry back in West Virginia?

The thing about Manchin is that he is like a Faulkner novel, a stream of consciousness monologue that could be painfully difficult to read, since the point of view kept shifting. But there was one consistent sentiment that he mouthed in nearly every meeting and that reassured Ron Klain. Even as he expressed his doubts, he kept telling Biden, “Don’t worry, Mr. President, we’re going to get this done.” So instead of constantly reinterpreting Manchin, the White House assumed that most of his outbursts were just noise, which could be largely ignored.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt five)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

But then suddenly, the Taliban boarded a bus and began demanding that the Albania-bound women unveil so that their faces could more thoroughly be checked against their passport photos. For the first time, the Taliban said that the women couldn’t leave without an Albanian visa—but that document had never been issued to them.

A member of the staff of Vital Voices, one of the NGOs that Clinton had cofounded, was already in Tirana, the Albanian capital, to begin securing housing for the White Scarves. She went to the foreign ministry and spent the night creating an electronic visa that could be sent to the White Scarves on their phones. The Albanians felt that a QR code would make the email look more official. Since there was a bag of potato chips sitting around, they took a photo of the QR code on the side of the packaging and appended it to the improvised visa.

When the White Scarves showed the Taliban the visa on their phones, it was good enough. The women on the bus escaped to Albania—and so did more than one thousand other Afghan women and their families who Hillary Clinton and her groups managed to rescue.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt four)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

Afghanistan was a collective trauma for the administration, especially the State Department. When Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, went to check in with members of a task force working on the evacuation, she found grizzled diplomats in tears. She estimated that a quarter of the State Department’s personnel had served in Afghanistan, at one point or another. They felt a connection with the country, an emotional entanglement. Fielding an overwhelming volume of emails describing hardship cases, they had an easy time imaging the faces of refugees. Even in the seat of American power, they felt the shame and anger that comes with the inability to help. To deal with trauma, the State Department brought a therapy dog into the building with the hope that it might help ease the staff’s pain.

In the crisis, the State Department redirected the attention of its sprawling apparatus to Afghanistan. Embassies in Mexico City and New Delhi became call centers. Staff in those distant capitals assumed the role of caseworkers, assigned to stay in touch with the remaining American citizens in Afghanistan. They tracked their flights and helped counsel them through the terrifying weeks.

Sherman sent her Afghan-born chief of staff, Mustafa Popal, to Hamid Karzai International Airport to support John Bass. All day long, she responded to pleas for help: from foreign governments, who joined a daily video conference she hosted; from Yo-Yo Ma, who kept writing on behalf of an orchestra; from members of Congress. There was a moment in the midst of the crush when Sherman felt compelled to travel down to the first floor, to spend fifteen escapist minutes cuddling with the therapy dog.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt three)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

For his primary negotiating partner from the other side of the aisle, Portman worked with Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Even among the small group of moderate Democrats in the gang, there was a sense that Portman outfoxed them with his choice. Sinema could generously be described as mercurial. When she first ran for Senate in Arizona in 2018, she faced accusations that she exaggerated her up-from-poverty biography for dramatic effect. In a short time, she went from being an activist affiliated with the Green Party to the sort of politician that activists hounded. Yes, she transgressed the unspoken sartorial rules of the stodgy chamber with adventurous fashion choices. But she also zealously raised money from business interests, and her voting record reflected that alliance.

Portman and Sinema were fellow moderates, but profoundly different creatures. Portman had spent years preparing budgets and negotiating with foreign governments on behalf of the United States. He fixated on details. His colleagues complained about how tight he held the purse strings. Where Portman traveled with a small army of wonks—he usually brought a war room full of staffers with him to negotiations—Sinema would show up in his office with just her chief of staff. It was asymmetrical warfare, and the Democrats knew it.

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt two)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

As the meeting began, the leaders posed for the requisite photo session, along with Tony Blinken and foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. They sat in the library surrounded by leather-bound volumes, a globe separating the pair, as if harkening back to the day when the world was divided into spheres of influence. Putin posed in the disaffected slouch that he reserved for occasions like this, a technique to distract from his own diminutive stature. Biden once described the pose to a friend as that of an “asshole schoolkid.”

When the press left the room, Putin’s body language changed. He suddenly seemed less diffident. The Russian press had spent months portraying Biden as a fragile old man, a piece of spin that Putin internalized. But when he greeted Biden, he seemed taken aback by his appearance. “You look good,” he exclaimed. It was an observation that he kept repeating. When Putin called Angela Merkel to deliver his postmortem of the meeting, he told her, “President Biden is very fit.”

the last book I ever read (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, excerpt one)

from The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future by Franklin Foer:

On the morning of January 20, Klain might have preferred to attend in person the inaugural ceremony of the man whose political career he worked so hard to advance. But he was missing it, stuck in the building at the behest of Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

Ever since the November election, much of the Trump administration acted as if the Biden people were engaged in a hostile takeover of the government. They refused to share the most basic details that would allow the incoming administration to prepare for the monumental tasks in front of it. A pandemic was raging—and the Trump people withheld access to civil servants and government data that would have provided the Biden White House with a basic sense of the government’s vaccination program. When Biden officials asked Trump’s trade negotiator for details about the state of conversations with China, he refused. Trump appointees at the Office of Management and Budget broke with generations of practice and prevented civil servants from helping Biden aides prepare the budget that they were legally required to submit to Congress in February.

After all that petty obstruction, Meadows’s invitation to meet felt like an act of comity that shouldn’t be shirked.

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt sixteen)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

There is nothing to reclaim. This country—a drop in the bucket, like all the nations—was never God’s to begin with, because “God does not show favoritism,” as Peter said, “but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right.” Attempts to devise some divine conception of the United States often end up demonstrating exactly the opposite. Take, for example, an Independence Day 2023 tweet from Josh Hawley, the disgraced Missouri senator whose lies and deceptive parliamentary maneuverings helped set in motion the violence of January 6. Celebrating the holiday with a “quote” from Patrick Henry, the senator tweeted: “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” It might have been humiliating enough for Hawley to learn that the found father never spoke or wrote those words; what should have been downright mortifying was to realize, as the historian Seth Cotlar documented, that these words actually originated in a notoriously antisemitic and white-nationalist publication, the Virginian, 150 years after Henry’s death.

Hawley never bothered to apologize for the error. And why would he? The way many of his constituents see it, secular progressives, in their quest to destroy America’s Christian heritage, stopped playing by the rules a long time ago. Fire must be fought with fire. Standards must be suspended. A winner-takes-all mentality must be embraced. When the conservative activist (and future Trump administration official), Michael Anton wrote his 2016 essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” he argued that leftists had hijacked America; the only chance for its survival was if conservatives rushed the cockpit, knowing full well that they might just crash the plane themselves. Notably absent from that essay was any reference to Christ, or to Christianity, or even to God. And yet the argument Anton makes—that imminent destruction justifies the unthinkable acts that may themselves lead to imminent destruction—has come to define the modern religious right.

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt fifteen)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

The pro-life movement has not won the public argument—and, arguably, it hasn’t really tried. The message of abortion as a moral evil, as an affront to the loving God who made humanity in His own image, has proven curiously ineffective. Why?

For one thing, that message seems wildly inconsistent with the politics otherwise practiced by those who claim the “pro-life” mantle. If one is driven to electoral advocacy by the conviction that mankind bears the image of God, why stop at opposing abortion? What about the shunning of refugees? What about the forced separation of babies from their mothers? What about the hollowing out of programs that feed hungry kids? What about the lifelong incarceration of nonviolent offenders and the wrongful execution of the innocent? What about the Darwinist health-care system that prices out sick people and denies treatment to poor people and produces the developed world’s highest maternal mortality rate? What about the fact that, in 2020, guns had become the number one cause of death for children in the United States? Surely even the most devoted anti-abortion advocate could spot the problem when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Trump press secretary who was running for governor of Arkansas, declared, “We will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they’re as safe as they are in a classroom.” Indeed, America set another new record for school shootings in 2022, and the evangelical movement was silent.

The other problem with the pro-life message: the messengers. Can we really expect Americans to take lessons on virtue from a president who brags about grabbing women by their vaginas? Can we really expect voters to entertain the argument of unborn lives having inherent dignity coming from a man who lies about having ended unborn life himself? Evangelicals can rationalize all this—going on about “binary decisions” and “the lesser of two evils” until they convince themselves it’s true—but the unwillingness to demand and enforce a higher standard has sapped their arguments of moral urgency.

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt fourteen)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

‘We’ve always been marginalized. We’re marginalized today,” Reed said. “The challenge was, could we ever change it? And we did. I mean, it took forty or fifty years. But we’ve changed it.”

Changed what, exactly? The public’s perception of evangelical Christianity is worse than at any point in recorded history. Church attendance is steadily eroding and will nosedive as Baby Boomers die off in greater numbers. Meanwhile, the rhetoric around their supposed persecution—Reed told Stephen Strang, on his podcast in 2019, that it would be “open season” on Christians if Trump lost reelection—hasn’t been updated since the heyday of Jerry Falwell Sr. The only think that seems changed, I observed to Reed, is disposition. Whereas the evangelical movement once downplayed its alliances with those who might undermine its moral credibility, today it openly champions the likes of Donald Trump and Herschel Walker.

Reed set his jaw. “I believe as a theological matter that someone can find redemption in Christ and become a new person,” he replied. “And I believe that Herschel Walker is a new person.”

Maybe he was. I didn’t know the man’s heart. If the allegations against Walker were true, then it would be consistent with scripture for him, as a new person who found redemption in Christ, to take responsibility for his actions, to admit his deceptions, to ask for the forgiveness that accompanies being a new person, and to radiate the transformative mercy he had been shown. But Walker wasn’t doing any of that. Instead, he was asking for cheap grace. He was promoting a surface-level sanctification. He was using Christianity as a lowest common denominator—a way to gloss over the mistakes of his past, to explain his persecution at present, and to guarantee voters a political reward in the future.

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt thirteen)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

Once upon a time, Reed might have been right in observing that Christianity was getting a raw deal from the culture. But not today. Just as with the unraveling of the Republican Party, the Church had been destabilized from within, its fringe infiltrating the mainstream in ways that warranted systemic criticism. There was a reason Christian views writ large were now summarily dismissed as “inherently intolerant and undemocratic.” For generations, white evangelicals had been overwhelmingly supportive of both immigrants and refugees entering the United States; by 2020 they were, far and away, the least likely of any religious subgroup to advocate for either one. And this was not some outlying development. In the year after Trump left office, polling repeatedly showed there was one demographic group most likely to believe that the election had been stolen, that vaccines were dangerous, that globalists were controlling the U.S. population, that liberal celebrities were feasting on the blood of infants, that resorting to violence might be necessary to save the country: white evangelicals.

None of this justified the sweeping censure of tens of millions of people. Having spent Trump’s presidency traveling the country, meeting religious voters in small towns and big cities alike, I knew how many serious, sane evangelicals were still out there. These people have no place in the left-wing fever dreams that inform cable news punditry and op-ed pages. They are reasonable and realistic, making prudential political judgments that often reflect something quite limited about their core values, their commitment to others, their complex set of religious convictions. They are dismayed by the hysteria and hyperbole that has captured their movement and want nothing more than to reclaim it. Their character deserves respect and the crackup of the evangelical Church is not their doing.

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt twelve)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

A conspiracist luminary, Posobiec rose to fame on the far right in 2016 by championing #Pizzagate, the internet rumor that alleged Hillary Clinton and a cabal of top-ranking Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring from the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a trendy pizza joint in Washington, D.C. Posobiec was no casual participant in #Pizzagate; he personally visited the restaurant to investigate, surreptitiously livestreaming footage of what he later described on Alex Jones’s Infowars channel as “demonic artwork” and “a secret door” that seemed suspicious, given the presence of so many “little kids.” The video exploded on social media after being uploaded to YouTube. Two weeks later, a man drove to D.C. from North Carolina, walked into Comet Ping Pong, and opened fire with his AR-15 rifle. (The man told police that he’d come to save the children, only to realize the restaurant had no basement; thankfully, nobody was hurt.) Posobiec never apologized for his starring role in fomenting what law enforcement agencies declared to be a brazen, dangerous falsehood. Indeed, he was just getting started.

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt eleven)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

The narrative arc of the Bible tells of an aspirational evolution in mankind’s thinking, Volf said. What began in Exodus—the story of God’s chosen people escaping bondage and eventually coming into the covenant state of Israel—was finished by the arrival of Jesus, who taught His disciples to take His message to all the nations. The transformational effect of this cannot be overstated. Immediately, almost overnight, a people who had refused to associate with anyone outside their ethnic tribe began calling them brothers and sisters. “There is neither Jew nor Gentle, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians.

The Bible’s final book, Revelation, paints a utopic vision of Christ living among His followers in a New Jerusalem. This is the believer’s pluralistic destiny, a heavenly melting pot where descendants of every nation, ethnicity, and race are unified, forevermore, in the body of Christ. That vision can be difficult to see, Volf said, when professing Christians are engaged in a “twisting of the religious landscape” that rationalizes social antagonism, clannish nihilism, and even physical violence.

None of this is unprecedented. Religion and politics are natural enemies; both provide a sense of belonging and self-actualization to the masses. Tension between the two is healthy and necessary. When one appropriates the other, history shows that oppression—leading to death and human suffering at a woeful scale—is the inevitable result.

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt ten)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

Bolin didn’t seem burdened knowing that so many people were relying upon him to do the heavy lifting of discernment of their behalf. Many of the backwater websites and podcasts to which the pastor attributed his commentaries were the same ones cited to me by people from his church. FloodGate had become a circular food chain of misinformation. In a sense, Christians have always lived a different epistemological existence than nonbelievers. But this was something new. Something decidedly nonessential.

At one point, I showed Bolin a Facebook post he had written months earlier: “I’m still wondering how 154,000,000 votes were counted in a country where there are only 133,000,000 registered voters.” This was posted to his page, I told him, well after the U.S. Census Bureau had published data showing that more than 168 million Americans were registered to vote in 202. A quick Google search would have given Bolin the accurate numbers.

“Yeah, that’s one I regret,” he said, explaining that he subsequently learned that the numbers he’d posted were incorrect. (The post was still active. Bolin texted me the following day saying he’d deleted it.)

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt nine)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

Schneider had come to speak and sing. There was such energy inside the tent that even some very serious-looking men—dressed in paramilitary gear, firearms strapped to their sides—bounced on their toes and clapped along. Between songs, Schneider offered a different catalog of greatest hits. He talked about the flu shot making people sick. He decried the Christian elites who look down on believers like him. He referred to Biden as “Brandon” and suggested that Christians should prepare to join a violent uprising.

“We are born for such a time as this. God is calling you to do something,” Schneider said. “We have a country to take back. And if that fails, we have a country—yes, I’ll say it—to take back.”

Not that one might expect theology from a guy whose claim to fame was portraying a bootlegger who named his Confederate-themed car “General Lee,” but this was a curious take on scripture. The notion that God was “calling” on Christians to “take back” their country—especially by force—is laughably incompatible with the teachings of Christ. It was Jesus who subverted the authorities with teachings of obedience and edicts of nonviolence; it was Jesus who mocked His captors for brandishing weapons as they arrested Him. “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me?” He asked.

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt eight)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

These themes—of patriotism and divine commission, of nationalism and savage conquest—were ubiquitous in the hall. I saw one flag, black adorned with white revolvers, that read “God, Guns & Trump.” They were sold next to decorative license plates that showed soaring eagles and cocked pistols: “God, Guns & Guts Made America,” it read. “Let’s Keep All Three.”

One table over from where copies of The First American Bible were being sold (for a discounted price of $149.99), Road to Majority attendees crowded around a rack of T-shirts that carried slogans such as “Faith Over Fear” and “This Means War.” The top seller, offered in at least seven different colors, was “Let’s Go Brandon,” a bowdlerized euphemism that conservatives chant as a substitute for “Fuck Joe Biden.” The shirts even included a hashtag--#FJB—that jettisoned any plausible deniability.

When I asked Dave Klucken, the booth’s proprietor, what brought him all the way from Loganville, Georgia, to peddle these goods, he replied, “We’ve taken God out of America.”

Did he really think #FJB was an appropriate way to bring God back? Klucken shrugged. “People keep on asking for it,” he told me. “You’ve got to give the people what they want.”

As recently as five or six years earlier, even as the evangelical-political brand was becoming more disputatious, it would have been scandalous to see such vile and violent symbolism at an event associated with Christianity. But Ralph Reed didn’t really care. He was giving the people what they wanted. He was giving them Donald J. Trump.

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt seven)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

After speaking the word evil, Bunker looked up from her Bible. Then she gazed upward.

“My God,” she said. “If the evil comes from us, what shall we do?”

Bunker’s message dovetailed with Dicken’s earlier theory about the world’s vanishing confidence in the Church. The public hasn’t turned against Christians because they act better than the rest of the world, she said. The public has turned against Christians because they act worse than the rest of the world. Bunker argued that much of this bad behavior can be traced back to the Christian victimhood complex, which causes some believers to lash out against enemies real and imagined. Such behavior defies the words of Peter, and the very instruction of Jesus, who famously stated: “You have heard that it was said, ’Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt six)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

Might Jeffress at least entertain other explanations? Was there no truth to the idea that evangelicals had taken their eye off the ball? Could he not see how the fixation on this world had created a barrier to entry for those seeking knowledge about the next? Jeffress shook his head. Most of the work he does, he insisted, has nothing to do with societal skirmishes or upcoming elections or anything else found outside the Bible. He said the caricature of him doesn’t align with reality.

Glancing to my right, his left, I took note of the irony. The corner of Jeffress’s office was a shrine—his secretary used that specific word to describe it—to President Donald J. Trump. There was an eight-foot-tall poster memorializing the “Celebrate Freedom” concert in D.C. (the one where the choir sang “Make America Great Again”). There were boxes of Trump cuff links and a golden Trump commemorative coin. There were dozens—dozens—of framed photos of Jeffress and Trump: praying over him, talking with him, shaking hands with him, giving thumbs-up with him, walking alongside him, speaking in front of him, standing dutifully behind him. (There were also a few photos of Jeffress with Mike Pence, and one, seemingly misplaced, of him with right-wing pundit Ann Coulter.) In the sweep of my reporting on the former president and his many sycophants, I had never seen such a temple to Trumpism. Anything that carried the man’s distinctive Shapie signature was framed: news articles, White House proclamations, email correspondences, even printed-out tweets.

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt five)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

The latter years of Falwell’s life had been forgettable. He still preached to a large congregation and reached a sizable audience with his TV and radio programs. Yet his influence was dwindling. Ever since he disbanded the Moral Majority in 1989—sensing, rightly, that he’d lost sight of his responsibilities as a pastor—Falwell had been eclipsed by a new generation of Christian culture warriors. He launched the “God Save America” campaign in 1996, and a new radio program, Listen America, in 1998, but neither one did much to move the needle. Republican leaders would still make the pilgrimage to Lynchburg, but it was proving more an obligatory photo op than a kissing of the ring. Falwell didn’t take well to the diminished role.

Clinging to relevance in increasingly transparent and pitiful fashion, Falwell had, by the turn of the century, reduced himself to a caricature, more a punch line than a provocateur. He reacted to actress Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out by calling her “Ellen Degenerate.” He ranted about Tinky Winky, an animated purple creature on the toddler-aged TV show Teletubbies who was supposedly homosexual despite a lack of reproductive organs. He predicted that the Antichrist would be arriving soon and added: ‘of course he’ll be Jewish.” He said the September 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed three thousand people were “probably deserved” because of how America had turned away from God, and blamed “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians”—as well as the ACLU—for inviting such devastation on the country.

Less visible, but every bit as problematic, was his mismanagement of Liberty University.

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt four)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

That the pro-life cause has become synonymous with Falwell, his Moral Majority, and its successor movements is evidence of careful storytelling and masterful salesmanship. But it does not stand up to factual scrutiny.

In the decades preceding the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in 1973, abortion was considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical publication founded by Graham, convened a symposium of some two dozen theologians who ultimately could not agree whether abortion is sinful. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution affirming the procedure under a generous range of circumstances. (W.A. Criswell, the SBC ex-president and legendary pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, one of America’s leading megachurches, approved: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person.”) In 1973, Barry Garrett, the D.C. bureau chief for Baptist Press, reacted to the Roe decision by writing that the Supreme Court had “advanced the cause of religious liberty, human equality and justice.”

Falwell was no stranger to opining on court rulings. Yet the first time he mentioned abortion from the pulpit was 1978—five years after the Roe decision. Ed Dobson (no relation to James), one of Falwell’s closest friends and an original dean at Lynchburg Baptist College, sat at his side during that fateful 1979 meeting with Weyrich. Years later, commenting on the notion that Roe v. Wade had ignited the religious right, Dobson said, “I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt three)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

Falwell was not flashy in the pulpit, nor was he especially eloquent. Substantively, his sermons emphasized what he called “the fundamentals of the faith”—the virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ, the inerrancy of scripture—and mostly avoided extrabiblical commentary. In keeping with the fundamentalist doctrine of his independent Baptist tradition, Falwell preached “separatism.” The idea that followers of Christ are distinct, set apart, called to a citizenship in heaven that takes precedence over earthly identities. He frowned upon civic activism and expressly denounced political entanglements. In 1965, at the climax of the civil rights movement, Falwell delivered a sermon scolding his colleague, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., for sullying their profession. The goal of the Church, Falwell decreed, is “not reformation but transformation,” a fact that certain clergy would do well to recognize. “As a God-called preacher, I find that there is no time left after I give the proper time and attention to winning people to Christ,” Falwell said. “Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners.”

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt two)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

“The scary thing now,” Torres interjected, “is that the enemy is inside the Church.”

“Right. And they’ll say it’s because the stakes have gotten so high,” Sanders said. “That’s what you saw on January 6. That’s why, if you’re an evangelical, you think it was okay to club the cops or break the windows. And it wasn’t Nancy Pelosi they were after; it was Mike Pence. A fellow believer. This is the biggest change I’ve observed in the last few years. The enemies aren’t those outside of the Church; it’s people in your church who don’t think exactly the way you do.”

Just the other day, Sanders told us, a friend who pastors a large congregation in Cleveland called him to vent. A longtime member of the church had asked for a meeting and broken some difficult news. “I’m afraid we have to leave the church after all these decades,” the man said, “because you’re not interpreting the Bible in light of the Constitution.”

the last book I ever read (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta, excerpt one)

from The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta:

For much of American history, white Christians had all of those things. Given that reality—and given the miraculous nature of America’s defeat of Great Britain, its rise to superpower status. And its legacy of spreading freedom and democracy (and yes, Christianity) across the globe—it’s easy to see why so many evangelicals believe that our country is divinely blessed. The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.

“At its root, we’re talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people,” Winans said. “If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel. You believe the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be.”

This can happen anywhere, Winans explained, but the conditions in American are especially ripe for national idolatry. “The freedoms in our Bill of Rights, we like to call them ‘God-given.’ Now, think about what that means in the context of gun control,” he said. “If someone’s trying to take away something God has given you, well, shoot, that’s pretty upsetting! But is there a God-given right to bear arms? Or is it a cultural right? If I went to the U.K., or most other places in the world, they would say it’s a cultural right. In America, many Christians believe it’s a God-given right. So, you can see how, even in that one small example, we start running into problems.”

the last book I ever read (The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham, excerpt nine)

from The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham:

Yes, Clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada’s we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep—it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

the last book I ever read (The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham, excerpt eight)

from The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham:

“I guess I’ll see you tonight,” Walter says.

“Mm-hm,” Sally answers. Who invited Walter?

“How is Richard,” Walter asks. He ducks his head awkwardly, reverently, pointing the bill of his cap down toward the cigarette butts and gray circles of chewing gum, the wadded wrapper which, Sally can’t help noticing, is from a Quarter Pounder. She’s never had a Quarter Pounder.

The light changes. They cross.

the last book I ever read (The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham, excerpt seven)

from The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham:

What Laura regrets, what she can hardly bear, is the cake. It embarrasses her, but she can’t deny it. It’s only sugar, flour, and eggs—part of a cake’s charm is its inevitable imperfections. She knows that; of course she does. Still she had hoped to create something finer, something more significant, than what she’s produced, even with its smooth surface and its centered message. She wants (she admits to herself) a dream of a cake manifested as an actual cake; a cake invested with an undeniable and profound sense of comfort, of bounty. She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while. She wants to have produced something marvelous; something that would be marvelous even to those who do not love her.

She has failed. She wishes she didn’t mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.

the last book I ever read (The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham, excerpt six)

from The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham:

A key turns in the front door. “It’s Julia,” Clarissa says.

“Shit.”

“Don’t worry. She’s seen men cry.”

It’s her goddamn daughter. Louis straightens his shoulders, steps sideways from under Clarissa’s arm. He continues looking out at the garden, trying to bring his face under control. He thinks about moss. He thinks about fountains. He is suddenly, genuinely interested in moss and fountains.

the last book I ever read (The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham, excerpt five)

from The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham:

“I will have lunch,” she says, impatiently but without true anger. She stands tall, haggard, marvelous in her housecoat, the coffee steaming in her hand. He is still, at times, astonished by her. She may be the most intelligent woman in England, he thinks. Her book may be read for centuries. He believes this more ardently than does anyone else. And she is his wife. She is Virginia Stephen, pale and tall, startling as a Rembrandt or a Velazquez, appearing twenty years ago at her brother’s room in Cambridge in a white dress, and she is Virginia Woolf, standing before him right now. She has aged dramatically, just this year, as if a layer of air has leaked out from under her skin. She’s grown craggy and worn. She’s begun to look as if she’s carved from very porous, gray-white marble. She is still regal, still exquisitely formed, still possessed of her formidable lunar radiance, but she is suddenly no longer beautiful.

the last book I ever read (The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham, excerpt four)

from The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham:

Barbara offers a blank expression that Clarissa understands is meant as a smile. Barbara is forty or so, a pale, ample woman who came to New York to sing opera. Something about her face—the square jaw or the stern, inexpressive eyes—reminds you that people looked essentially the same a hundred years ago.

the last book I ever read (The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham, excerpt three)

from The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham:

Clarissa crosses Houston Street and thinks she might pick up a little something for Evan, to acknowledge his tentatively returning health. Not flowers; if flowers are subtly wrong for the deceased they’re disastrous for the ill. But what? The shops of SoHo are full of party dresses and jewelry and Biedermeier; nothing to take to an imperious, clever young man who might or might not, with the help of a battery of drugs, lives out his normal span. What does anyone want? Clarissa passes a shop and thinks of buying a dress for Julia, she’d look stunning in that little black one with the Anna Magnani straps, but Julia doesn’t wear dresses, she insists on spending her youth, the brief period in which one can wear anything at all, stomping around in men’s undershirts and leather lace-ups the size of cinder blocks. (Why does her daughter tell her so little? What happened to the ring Clarissa gave her for her eighteenth birthday?) Here’s that good little bookstore on Spring Street. Maybe Evan would like a book. Displayed in the window is one (only one!) of Clarissa’s, the English one (criminal, how she’d had to battle for a printing of ten thousand copies and, worse, how it looks as if they’ll be lucky to sell five), alongside the South American family saga she lost to a bigger house, which will clearly fail to earn out because, for mysterious reasons, it is respected but not loved. There is the new biography of Robert Mapplethorpe, the poems of Louise Glück, but nothing seems right. They are all, at once, too general and too specific. You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes. You can’t show up with celebrity gossip, can you? You can’t bring the story of an embittered English novelist or the fates of seven sisters in Chile, however beautifully written, and Evan is about as likely to read poetry as he is to take up painting on china plates.

the last book I ever read (The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham, excerpt two)

from The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham:

Clarissa’s shoes make their soft sandpaper sounds as she descends the stairs on her way to buy flowers. Why doesn’t she feel more somber about Richard’s perversely simultaneous good fortune (“an anguished, prophetic voice in American letters”) and his decline (“You have no T-cells at all, none that we can detect”)? What is wrong with her? She loves Richard, she thinks of him constantly, but she perhaps loves the day slightly more. She loves West Tenth Street on an ordinary summer morning. She feels like a sluttish widow, freshly peroxided under her black veil, with her eye on the eligible men at her husband’s wake. Of the three of them—Louis, Richard, and Clarissa—Clarissa has always been the most hard-hearted, and the one most prone to romance. She’s endured teasing on the subject for more than thirty years; she decided long ago to give in and enjoy her own voluptuous, undisciplined responses, which, as Richard put it, tend to be as unkind and adoring as those of a particularly irritating, precocious child. She knows that a poet like Richard would move sternly through the same morning, editing it, dismissing incidental beauty, seeking the economic and historical truth behind these old brick town houses, the austere stone complications of the Episcopal church and the thin middle-aged man walking his Jack Russell terrier (they are suddenly ubiquitous along Fifth Avenue, these feisty, bowlegged little dogs), while she, Clarissa, simply enjoys without reason the houses, the church, the man, and the dog. It’s childish, she knows. It lacks edge. If she were to express it publicly (now, at her age), this love of hers would consign her to the realm of the duped and the simpleminded, Christians with acoustic guitars or wives who’ve agreed to be harmless in exchange for their keep. Still, this indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself. This determined, abiding fascination is what she thinks of as her soul (an embarrassing, sentimental word, but what else to call it?); the part that might be conceivably survive the death of the body. Clarissa never speaks to anyone about any of that. She doesn’t gush or chirp. She exclaims only over the obvious manifestations of beauty, and even then managed a certain aspect of adult restraint. Beauty is a whore, she sometimes says. I like money better.

the last book I ever read (The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham, excerpt one)

from The Hours: A Novel by Michael Cunningham:

She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa. She walks purposefully toward the river, certain of what she’ll do, but even now she is almost distracted by the sight of the downs, the church, and a scattering of sheep, incandescent, tinged with a faint hint of sulfur, grazing under a darkening sky. She pauses, watching the sheep and the sky, then walks on. The voices murmur behind her; bombers drone in the sky, though she looks for the planes and can’t see them. She walks past one of the farm workers (is his name John?), a robust, small-headed man wearing a potato-colored vest, cleaning the ditch that runs through the osier bed. He looks up at her, nods, looks down again into the brown water. As she passes him on her way to the river she thinks of how successful he is, how fortunate, to be cleaning a ditch in an osier bed. She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric. Patches of sky shine in puddles left over from last night’s rain. Her shoes sink slightly into the soft earth. She has failed, and now the voices are back, muttering indistinctly just beyond the range of her vision, behind her, here, no, turn and they’ve gone somewhere else. The voices are back and the headache is approaching as surely as rain, the headache that will crush whatever is she and replace her with itself. The headache is approaching and it seems (is she or is she not conjuring them herself?) that the bombers have appeared again in the sky. She reaches the embankment, climbs over and down to the river. There’s a fisherman upriver, far and away, he won’t notice her, will he? She begins searching for a stone. She works quickly but methodically, as if she were following a recipe that must be obeyed scrupulously if it’s to succeed at all. She selects one roughly the size and shape of a pig’s skull. Even as she lifts it and forces it into one of the pockets of her coat (the fur collar tickles her neck), she can’t help noticing the stone’s cold chalkiness and its color, a milky brown with spots of green. She stands close to the edge of the river, which laps against the bank, filling the small irregularities in the mud with clear water that might be a different substance altogether from the yellow-brown, dappled stuff, solid-looking as a road, that extends so steadily from bank to bank. She steps forward. She does not remove her shoes. The water is cold, but no unbearably so. She pauses, standing in cold water up to her knees. She thinks of Leonard. She thinks of his hands and his beard, the deep lines around his mouth. She thinks of Vanessa, of the children, of Vita and Ethel: So many. They have all failed, haven’t they? She is suddenly, immensely sorry for them. She imagines turning around, taking the stone out of her pocket, going back to the house. She could probably return in time to destroy the notes. She could live on; she could perform that final kindness. Standing knee-deep in the moving water, she decides against it. The voices are here, the headache is coming, and if she restores herself to the care of Leonard and Vanessa they won’t let her go again, will they? She decides to insist that they let her go. She wades awkwardly (the bottom is mucky) out until she is up to her waist. She glances upriver at the fisherman, who is wearing a red jacket and who does not see her. The yellow surface of the river (more yellow than brown when seen this close) murkily reflects the sky. Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water. Almost involuntarily (it feels involuntary, to her) she steps or stumbles forward, and the stone pulls her in. For a moment, still, it seems like nothing; it seems like another failure; just chill water she can easily swim back out of; but then the current wraps itself around her and takes her with such sudden, muscular force it feels as if a strong man has risen from the bottom, grabbed her legs and held them to her chest. It feels personal.