Having written this blog for some dozen years, by the end
of last year I felt it was time to make it less of “a job” and more focused on
things I enjoy rather than those I obsess over.
That meant less political and current affairs commenting (although I’ll
never say never to those subjects in the future). The present political and economic landscape
invites day to day commentary, but I’ve decided to resist it to preserve my
sanity. It is truly a case of
existential dread and exhaustion.
Nonetheless, I also decided to mostly exit those subjects
by making a declarative statement in the form of a book based on the extensive
entries from the past. Therefore, Waiting for Someone to Explain It; The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense (North Palm Beach, Lacunae Musing, 2019),348 Pages, $13.95 is now available in paperback from Amazon and their extensive distribution network.
It is also ironic that it should be published the same
week as the Mueller Report which to some extent provides some of the answers
I’ve been “waiting for.” Yet Trump is as
much a symptom as a cause. The book reveals the deep roots of our cultural
civil war and the intransigence of political polarization, and one person’s
quest to come to terms with them.
It argues that we’ve become inured to the outrageous and
accommodative of the absurd. It points
to a deep vein of anti-intellectualism in this country, questioning the
veracity of climate change, championing the “right” to open carry weapons, and leading
to the worship of false idols: 24 x 7 streaming entertainment. We’ve become a nation needing immediate
gratification, no matter what the societal consequences of borrowing against
the future or becoming somnambulists in front of liquid crystal display screens.
Who could have imagined the rise of Donald Trump to the
presidency of the United States? As his
candidacy ramped up, so did my commentary, all encapsulated in “Waiting.”
The book documents the election of such an unsuitable
candidate, who has proved to be worse than feared, a “crazy maker” a gas-lighter
of reality, a believer in his own mendacity.
These issues populate the entries.
As Eric Hoffer said in his classic The
True Believer (1951), “We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.” During the period I sought out other expert
journalists, psychologists, bloggers, economists, and even novelists in an attempt
to understand.
The publicity release at the end of this entry explains
the title and more about the rationale.
It is not simply a collection of entries from the blog. There is a narrative tying things together
and the entries themselves have been edited to minimize redundancies and
present them better in print.
As an ex-publisher it’s also been a labor of love, to
write a book, even participate in its design, bringing me back to my start in
publishing in 1964 as a production assistant.
So much has changed since then in the industry. For me, the publication was as much about the
journey. I think of it as an act of professional closure as well as a cry for
the kind of democracy our forefathers envisioned.
