I'm Scared Shitless When a Plan Comes Together

Today was a good day in terms of the book, despite writing a preface that came off like something Marianne Williamson would use to wipe her butt. But getting wrong can carry you a long step toward getting it right, and the mishap ended up greatly illuminating the book’s content and structure, among other things. It also made me realize that, taken on the whole, I actually knew what I was doing. And that serendipity had been strongly asserting itself. For the first time I have a glimmering that I can actually pull this thing off. As someone with bipolar disorder, the thought was both liberating and terrifying.

On “The A-Team” Hannibal Smith invariably grins at some point in the show, cigar clinched in his teeth at a jaunty angle, and declaims, “I love it when a plan comes together.” But an evolving hypomanic episode brings about an irresistible sense that the whole universe is coming together, and a giant sense of possibility emerges that some window of opportunity has come about—but also the sense that the window will close unless you drop everything to dive through it.

Fortunately I felt none of those things today. And when your strongest impulse is merely to crack open a pale ale, and when you’re so tired you have trouble even staying awake, it’s a pretty clear indication that you’re safe.

The Dead Are Never Dead

“Today was busy wall to wall: far too hectic to craft a substantive entry,” I wrote last night. “And yet I feel somehow that I can't just skip a day, whereas just a few days ago I would have had no problem with doing so. That means something. I don't yet know what.”

Well, I now know what. It came to me as soon as I awoke.

I am still my father’s son.

I’m not going to get mushy about this, because Dad never wanted me to get mushy about anything. In the immediate aftermath of my manic episode in September 1986—the one that, among other results, led my employer to immediately fire me lest I axe murder his family—I was destitute and for a few months had to go live with my father and step-mother.

During that time I met a psychiatrist several times. I recall his name but nothing else about him except that he made one of the most astounding statements I ever heard. I was at a session whose purpose was to take a detailed history of me, The task included a lot of questions concerning my childhood which, not to put too fine a point on it, did not much resemble the childhood which Katherine (my daughter’s mother) and I have made it our business in life to provide for our daughter Chloe.

After the psychiatrist had asked questions for about fifteen minutes, he paused to say that my “affect” and the things I was describing did not line up. I seemed out of touch with my feelings.

When I got home after the appointment my father was there. I told him briefly about the appointment—very briefly, because his demeanor suggested that he was not all that interested—and then related with a kind of pride the psychiatrist’s opinion that I seemed out of touch with my feelings. I thought my father would surely approve of that.

Well, not so much.

He said that in his opinion I was morbidly in touch with my feelings already.

That was the beginning of a new wisdom for me. I suppose, in a sense, it was also the day I embarked upon a journey that has sent me many places, shown me many things, had its moments of glory and hardship and emptiness, and finally brought me to this place, on the cusp of writing a manuscript that many people will regard as kind of gonzo. So be it. I am not quite certain how I am going to do this, but I am now quite certain why I am doing this.

I have mentioned before that my first and perhaps only claim to professional fame is my first book, “The Hard Hand of War.” The book received very strong reviews. One critic called it “one of the best books of Civil War military history published in twenty-five years.” Another wrote, “Grimsley’s evaluation of the Union’s evolving policy toward Confederate civilians is detailed, balanced, and persuasive. His prose is taut and polished, his research impressively thorough.” You get the point.

But the best and most perceptive review of the book came from my sister, who said it was an allegory of our parents’ marriage.

In my late 30’s I relayed this to my therapist and she said that my sister was correct, that the book was centrally concerned with finding a balance between justice and power and that, given my childhood history, it was natural for me to have selected a project that allowed me to explore that.

After hearing her explanation its truth seemed obvious. Among historians, out of the endless array of research problems we could choose, what causes us to select one in particular? I suppose it’s possible that an historian could select a project for purely intellectual reasons—I’m certain that it’s possible they might think that’s what they’re doing—but I think we choose research problems that speak to us personally, in some deep way that may forever lie outside our conscious awareness but that nonetheless animates our quest.

In the case of “The Struggle for Peace,” the source of my compulsion is obvious.

It comes from 22 years of observing two people, fruitlessly in the end, struggle to build a love between them that both so desperately needed. The analogy between that dynamic and the toxic hyper partisanship that characterizes contemporary politics is so blatant that no one could miss it.

I said at the beginning of this entry that I had figured the root of my strange compulsion to knock out at least some sort of entry for yesterday. It was simple. My father would have expected it of me.

I don’t think in a million years my father would have approved of this project—or more precisely, of the way I am handling it, which is to say to pursue it in my own way, using my own voice so blatantly, drawing upon my life experiences so heavily, and, for pity’s sake, coming across as so emotional about it (which is a deliberate narrative strategy, in case you’ve been starting to squirm).

But my father would have insisted that, having embarked on this project, I must execute it responsibly and professionally. On countless occasions, seeing him trapped between weariness and tasks still to be done, he always chose to finish the tasks. He was just that kind of man.

The dead are never really dead. Not as long as we remember them. Not as long as they retain the power to touch our lives.

Night of the Weary Prof

Today was busy wall to wall: far too hectic to craft a substantive entry. And yet I feel somehow that I can't just skip a day, whereas just a few days ago I would have no problem with doing so. That means something. I don't yet know what.

The only news of consequence is my creation of a blog to support this project. The Facebook platform is great for feedback: people can easily "like" a particular entry or leave comments. What they can't do is easily go back to previous entries. Hence the blog, imaginatively titled “Struggle for Peace,” which is perfect for the job. You’ll find the link elsewhere on this Page

So far I've only copy/pasted two entries, just to gauge time required to do the whole job. Happily, the answer is that it's a breeze.

I did find time to stop by my campus office to raid it for several books related to this project. If it weren't so cumbersome I could have brought several more.

The visit, brief as it was, put me in no doubt that there's *a lot* of literature that is potentially relevant to the book. And by extension, an urgent need to establish parameters that will make the book both valuable and manageable.

OK: that's all I got for today. I'm wiped out. But tomorrow is another day. Shit: it's now past midnight. *Today* is another day.

Epiphany on the Road Home

This is a long entry—1,741 words—but I have decided that it cannot be divided effectively into two parts. So before embarking upon it, you may want to make yourself a pot of coffee or brew some tea or crack open a beer. Oh: and be forewarned that the entry is unusually personal.

Last night, after an especially good day with especially good friends, I got into the driver’s seat of my 2012 Honda Civic. My daughter Chloe got into the back seat, and for the last time in her life, buckled herself into the booster seat. She is eight years old now, tall enough and weighs enough that she no longer needs it. Her mother has already removed the booster seat from her own car. This morning I’ll remove the booster seat from mine.

We began the 45-minute drive home. I spent the time thinking about my life and this project and the fact that I was enjoying it and the implications that enjoyment might have for what remained of my career, and what had happened to that career, anyway?

My friends live in Lancaster, Ohio, the birthplace of William T. Sherman, a Union commander with whom my professional reputation happens to be closely associated. It was he, together with two other Ohio-born generals, Ulysses S. Grant and Philip H. Sheridan, who delivered the death blow to the Confederacy that rescued American democracy. So there you have the first connection between today's story and “The Struggle for Peace,” which has emerged as my personal attempt to play some small role—at this point surely a minuscule role—in making sure that American democracy will not need rescuing a second time.

The fame of my linkage to Sherman, if I can phrase it that way, tracks back to the success of my first book, “The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865,” published way back in 1995. This year, come to think of it, will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication. It is still in print. Indeed, it is a standard work on its subject for graduate students studying to become Civil War historians. The fact that I have done nothing comparable since, however, makes me feel like Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard.”

In April 1996, a few months after its publication, “The Hard Hand of War” won the Lincoln Prize, arguably the most prestigious award in the field of Civil War history and certainly the most lucrative, for it carried (and still does) a cash award of $50,000. Of that sum, I received $10,000. The other $40,000 went to David H. Donald, one of the heavy-weights in Civil War history and indisputably the greatest authority on Abraham Lincoln. Donald received the prize for “Lincoln,” a major biography—and I lay stress on the word “major—that was the capstone achievement of a distinguished career.

It was the practice in those days for the name of the winner to be kept secret until revealed at a banquet hosted by two well-known and fabulously successful Wall Street investors. It was assumed that year by one and all that Donald would receive the entire $50,000. I mean, the guy was interviewed on NBC’s “Today Show,” for Christ’s sake, if that helps you understand what a big deal “Lincoln” was.

But of course he didn’t get the entire $50,000, and I suppose by some reckonings that means I robbed David H. Donald of $10,000.

Donald did receive the splendid reproduction of the famous St. Gaudens bust of Lincoln that accompanied the prize. A few days after returning from Manhattan (the Lincoln Prize reception had been held at the J. Pierpont Morgan Library, the dinner in a banquet hall in the New York Public Library), I received a certificate that looked like it came out of an oversized box of Cracker Jacks. It was so pathetic—my graduation diploma from basic training is fifty times more impressive—that it seemed almost a veiled insult. I never bothered to frame it.

Still, those were heady days, days which I assumed were just the beginning of a career that would carry me to ever greater heights. But for reasons that still elude me, by 2000 I felt myself start to falter. My rate of productivity plummeted, and by 2005, three years after the publication of my second book, I began to acquire the dreaded reputation of being a Stalled Associate Professor. If there is a prize somewhere for stalled associates, I have a good claim to it, because 2020, in addition to being the twenty-fifth anniversary of “The Hard Hand of War,” will also mark the twenty-third year in which I have remained in rank as an associate professor. I’m now 60 years old. And although no one has said it to my face, it is widely assumed that I will retire as an associate professor and will never publish another book. And frankly I shared those assumptions as well—until the drive home from Lancaster in the darkness.

I now questioned the second assumption—the first I think remains correct—because I had to concede to myself that, whether or not I was comfortable with the fact, I was headlong into the task of writing a book. “The Struggle for Peace” feels like a book, and in any event I have not been so absorbed by a project since my work on the doctoral dissertation that became “The Hard Hand of War.”

You might think that realization elated me. You would be dead wrong.

I have bipolar disorder, and any time I’m in an unusually good mood or feel an unusual degree of optimism, I have to entertain the possibility that I may be “decompensating;” that is to say, tipping from what passes for a normal life into a hypomanic episode. As I drove along I mentally reviewed the symptoms of a hypomanic episode and compared them to my current condition.

I will ask you to imagine what it is like to have to seriously ask yourself if enjoying a good mood or feeling optimistic about life just might mean that you are in big trouble.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1986—thirty-four years ago, more than half of my lifetime, and over the years I have developed techniques to answer that question.

One tool I used, in this instance, was to abandon this project for several hours and do things like answer email, honor a colleague’s request to review a new reading list, write up the documentation required needed to receive reimbursement from my research fund for some work-related books, and fine-tune the syllabi for my Spring Semester courses. I have thereby reached the conclusion that if I’m hypomanic, the hypomania is manifesting itself in the form of an unusually close focus on ordinary workaday responsibilities. Which is pretty damn sneaky of it.

After attending to these chores, I took time to dump all of my entries to date from this project into a single Word file. The word count came to 26,120. For the uninitiated, 60,000 words is the usual threshold at which a publisher will consider publication of a book, which means that I’m already 43.5 percent of the way to a book—if of course I want the book to be published by a vanity press.

The reality is that, sure, I’ve made a good start on an enjoyable project (which is wonderful), but writing a book requires me to get serious about adhering to the canons of my profession. Mentally telling my department to go fuck itself was a useful device to reacquire a sense of intellectual freedom—a highly distinguished colleague of mine, since retired, once suggested using the same device in precisely the same language. (But that did not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that she produced anything less than solid scholarship.)

Tthe decision to treat this as a book will now require change; for example, taking an entry such as “Ask Your Physician If Rage Is Right For You?” and tracking down the clinical studies of addiction to anger (not the pop psychology stuff), and posing such questions as when those studies emerged, what prompted their emergence, and what work has been done, if any, to extend that research into the question of addictions being fueled by politics. I have to acquire competence regarding a number of other subjects. I have to place all of this in a larger historical context—what is similar about this era of hyper partisanship with the hyper partisanship of the 1850’s and what is different. I have to figure out the degree to which the deliberately casual style of these entries will work(or not) in a book.

In short, I suddenly have a lot to do. But that “lot to do” will still include having fun. I will not again break faith with the kid I once was, who decided to sacrifice a substantial income in favor of pursuing a career that would involve less income but more fulfillment.

I don’t want to close this entry without thanking the many readers who responded to the entry entitled, “If Dad Could See Me Now”, published on December 27, 2019. (The specificity is for the benefit of future readers who might want to see it.) I was overwhelmed—everyone was so supportive and affirming. I had no idea at all that so many and such positive responses were even in the cards.

I think I have crossed this particular Rubicon primarily because I became convinced that a book like “The Struggle for Peace” could bring a historian’s eye to what is clearly a major problem in American life—and would be even in the absence of fears that we might lose our democracy (fears shared by some Republicans as well as Democrats, albeit obviously for different reasons.) At the heart of the book will be a questioning of the inability of most Americans to successfully navigate a basic task for the political health of the republic: the ability to share ideas and perspectives in a way that would enhance rather than corrode the civic virtue on which the Founders pinned such heavy hopes.

Bu perhaps a more accurate way to put it is that I came to desire to cross it—but your support gave me the courage and sense of possibility to actually do it.

Guilt-Gems - Part 2

At the reception station we received our haircuts, immunizations, uniforms, etc. But after three days or so, trucks arrived to take us to our assigned training units. Basic training began in earnest.

Boy, did it ever begin in earnest.

“That’s your ride, dickhead” said a helpful NCO, pointing toward an olive drab pickup truck. I clambered into its bed. The trip to my destination took about fifteen minutes: the last fifteen minutes of relative peace I would experience for the next several weeks, until the conclusion of Phase Fucking One of basic training, strictly speaking one station unit training (OSUT), because my fellow recruits and I would be together for a total of fifteen weeks, combining together both our basic and advanced individual training.

As soon as the pickup truck arrived, its passengers were greeted by several screaming drill sergeants who gave every indication that they would love nothing better than to beat the living shit out of us.

At some point I learned that I was now in C Battery of the7th Training Battalion, specifically in its 4th Platoon. The platoon’s ultimate task would be to learn the skills of a field artillery forward observer. The immediate task involved mastery of such skills as making the blanket of your cot so taut that you could bounce a quarter off it.

A second critical task involved sorting out who would steal your stuff from who wouldn’t. Imagine a pigeon hole desk whose pigeon holes grew steadily more numerous. I started off with two pigeon holes. I wound up with 50, because the platoon contained 50 men and by the end of OSUT I knew the strengths, weaknesses, and personality of each one.

At age 23 I was the second oldest member of the 4th Platoon—henceforth the “Fawth Platoon” because of the way a guy from Harlem pronounced it and his pronunciation has stayed with me. Most of the guys were 18, and they behaved like 18-year olds, with numerous squabbles and occasionally knock down drag out fights, the prohibition against physical violence notwithstanding. It was not the weaker members who got drubbings; it was the more obnoxious members. The single most obnoxious guy got beat up so thoroughly and his face was so bruised and swollen, that he was dubbed “the Elephant Man,” to whom in the wake of his drubbing he did indeed bear an uncanny resemblance.

Just about everybody got nicknames. There was, for example, “Volkswagen,” who had ears so big they made his head look like a Volkswagen with both doors open. There was also a guy from New York named Neidecker, whose surname won him not one but two nicknames: “Needle Dick” and “My Pecker.”

The guys could not quite figure out what to make of me, but taken on the whole they accorded me an unusual degree of respect, at least by the coarse standards of the Fawth Platoon, and I went by three nicknames: “Grims,” “Lieutenant,” and “Senator.” I was proud of the fact that I had such dignified nicknames, and crestfallen when one drill sergeant, who evidently thought I should be taken down a peg, eventually christened me “Poindexter.”

I have dealt with the nicknames at such length for two reasons: first to convey a sense of the coarseness that was a staple of Fawth Platoon; and second to indicate the limited insight of my comrades: for by all rights I should have been called “Gandhi.”

That was because I consciously modeled my behavior on Gandhi, for two reasons. The first was that I frequently used my knowledge of Gandhi’s principled convictions and techniques to de-escalate conflict, which won me respect for my skill in that area. The second was that a Gandhi-like persona reduced the chance that someone would elect to beat the shit out of me.

Then one day an event occurred in which I behaved in a way totally unlike my usual persona. The platoon included a young recruit who especially looked up to me. That particular day the recruit said something—I forget what—and for some reason I replied with the same casual brutality as anyone else. A look of hurt flashed across the recruit’s face that I will never forget.

John Updike once wrote a story entitled “Guilt-Gems.” It describes a middle-aged man named Ferris who discovers in his memory “certain bright moments that never failed to make him feel terrible.” In one of several vignettes, Ferris leaves home despite his youngest son’s desperate attempts to prevent this. He recalls the moment of his departure and of the expression on his son’s face. “Had Ferris imagined his son’s tears of despairing fury? He thought not; there has to be some shine of the extreme, to make a guilt-gem.”

Updike describes several other such episodes, each of which yields its own guilt-gem. None involve major wrongs. They consist instead of swipes at people that might seem minor but cut deeply. Updike ultimately says that “a guilt-gem is a piece of the world that has volunteered for compression.” That is how Ferris recalls these various episodes in which he has wounded others. And by reducing them “to a few baubles that he could, as it were, put in his pocket and jingle, he was, doubly, guilty.”

Unlike Ferris, I have a number of major regrets. So perhaps I have collected fewer guilt-gems. But I do have the guilt-gem of that casual cruelty at Fort Sill.

Because if you’re going to play Gandhi you have to go all out. You have to live your life in such a way that, although you will undoubtedly make mistakes that hurt others, you will not reduce those mistakes to mere baubles. It is not the mistakes but the trivialization of those mistakes, the people you have hurt, and the harm you have done, to mere baubles, that betrays your real nature.

The theme of this project, which I have decided to entitle “The Struggle for Peace,” is that the best and probably only chance to save this country lies in our willingness to change our behavior. The power of the supposed villains of our contemporary crisis rests upon the fact that we have willingly given them that power. And having relinquished power for so long and so lustily, we have created a situation that can only be defused by a massive effort to change ourselves.

In its way, this struggle will be as difficult and will involve as much sacrifice as in the Civil War, but unlike that struggle, this one can be won on no battlefield save the one in our own hearts. And what of the guilt-gems? By the way that we chronically conduct, day after day, seemingly minor partisan political squabbles with one another that nonetheless trivialize the humanity of our "opponents," we are amassing guilt-gems of sufficient weight that, taken in aggregate, will crush our republic as surely as condemned convicts were once crushed with stones.

Guilt-Gems - Part 1

Although I expect to publish entries at the rate of one per day (and may find that pace too ambitious), today I plan on three. Of them, this one, divided into two parts, is the most important. Indeed, it may well be the most important entry I write during the whole year ahead.

This coming August—August 29, to be exact—will mark the 36th anniversary of the day I boarded the plane that carried me on the first leg of my flight to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where I was about to embark upon my initial active duty training—just call it basic training—in the Army. I changed planes in Atlanta and again in Dallas. This last plane was a mere two-engine puddle jumper. Most of the other passengers had the same reason for being on board: we were all about to embark upon the unknown experience of basic training. Some of the guys may have talked to each other, probably did talk to each other. But I did not, and in memory the trip is made complete silence save for the droning engines.

It was nearly midnight when we landed. We were greeted by the Specialist Fourth Class detailed to transport us to the reception station. As with every Spec4 I would encountered during my time at Fort Sill, when in the presence of trainees this one could not refrain from behaving as if he were … well, it could vary somewhat, depending upon the specific Spec4: Clint Eastwood in “High Plains Drifter,” John Wayne in “Sands of Iwo Jima”, Youngblood Priest in “Super Fly.” I would later become a Spec4 myself, but of the variety accorded respect, in most cases, and simple human dignity at the very least. At a training installation like Fort Sill, however, a Spec4 is a menial; a pathetic soul excluded from the drama of basic training unfolding around him (for drama it most certainly is). If you have ever seen a pubic hair glued to a toilet rim by dried urine, you have seen this variety of Spec4. No wonder they threw their weight around on the rare opportunities when they could.

But Spec4’s never fooled anyone, even tired civilians like us, nervous about what awaited us in the minutes just ahead. When the Spec4 pulled his “I’m in charge and you guys better shape up” routine, we didn’t even bother to roll our eyes.

We reached the reception center and met our NCO, probably a Staff Sergeant, but that’s just a guess. Like most NCOs he approached his duties matter of factly. Even the drill sergeants we would soon encounter went about their duties matter of factly (as we would eventually discover) when not obliged to assume the drill sergeant persona, which was performance art, albeit performance art at which most of them excelled.

The Staff Sergeant gave us a brief orientation, chief among them instructions about the Amnesty Box. The Amnesty Box looked vaguely like a postal mail box, although in point of fact it lay behind a barrier and we saw what it looked like only when each of us, one at a time, obeyed the order to go to the Amnesty Box, use it if necessary to get rid of any contraband, and then give its pulldown slat a loud slam, so that no one could tell who had actually deposited contraband. We were then issued regulation olive drab boxers or briefs, depending upon preference, and taken to the sleeping bay in which we would spend our first night. The bay had rows of bunk beds. We selected our berths==I chose an upper one—and then the lights went out.

In the darkness beneath me, it transpired, was a burly African American who somehow had already acquired the sobriquet “New York,” probably because New York could not shut up about having come from New York nor, for that matter, anything else. Basic training has any number of inexplicable moments and New York formed my introduction to this reality. He found it entertaining to carry on a loud, unfocused monologue, to which the other recruits responded with ever more insistent demands that New York shut the fuck up, which pleased New York no end. Soon New York owed his continued existence only to the fact that we had strict orders against using any physical force whatsoever.

The situation was clearly hopeless. But finally I mustered the courage to look down from my bunk to confront New York—or rather the darkness that contained New York: we could see each other, but just barely. I explained, calmly and respectfully, that we had all had a long day, faced another long day in the morning, and that it was important that he be quiet so that we could get the sleep we needed.

But New York just continued his act. I could think of nothing to do to stop him and, for lack of any better idea, simply peered down at him in silence.

After a moment New York said, “Damn. He mean it.”

New York subsided and was soon asleep. Within a minute or two all I could hear was the breathing of the men around me. I then fell asleep myself, but not before reflecting with wonder that Gandhi’s philosophy, of which I had only read, could actually work in real life.

A Father, A Daughter, and Politics

As this fledgling project has begun to evolve, I have come to understand that it cannot be linear in structure, that while its entries must certainly display a coherent relationship to each other, a non-linear approach is, within limits, actually the best organizational strategy.

So today’s entry shifts direction a bit.

To be sure, I had already decided to publish the present entry, but in a week or two rather than now. My reason for accelerating the timing of publication stems from my respect for a reader who offered a comment below the link to the latest installment of NBC’s “Meet the Press;” a comment demonstrating that he had actually followed my strong suggestion that all my readers should watch that installment in its entirety.

As I have already said in my introduction to the installment, it departed from the program’s usual format to focus exclusively on exploring “our post truth society, and how a changing media landscape has created chaos out of order.” In my introduction I endorsed the show as having been “superbly well done—I would even venture to say stunningly well done—and absolutely worth the investment of time required to watch it.”

The reader, as far as I was concerned, had honored me by following my suggestion.

The episode focused almost entirely on right wing examples illustrating the contours of this “post truth society.” My reader opined that although he accepted the examples as being on target, the show would have been “much stronger if he [host Chuck Todd] had used some examples from other politicians and networks. He presented this as if only Trump uses the tactics in coordination with Fox News.”

If I understand this criticism correctly, the reader was arguing in favor of the position that the mainstream media and left-leaning officials also offered proof, just as much as did Donald Trump and the right wing media, of the existence of this “post truth society.”

In my response to his comment, I said first off that I appreciated the fact that he had watched the show, that I also appreciated his taking time to write a comment, but that I rejected his tacit assertion of an equivalence between the mainstream media (which most conservatives regard as snugly in bed with the political left) and right wing outlets such as Fox News and Breitbart.

But I concluded my response with the statement that he deserved a detailed, evidence-based explanation for my opinion.

Herewith is the first installment of that explanation.

It's possible I may have misapprehended what his comment was actually driving at, but I shall write this essay as if I understood him aright.

I do not know the actual political views of my reader, but for the sake of this essay I will assume that they are conservative. And the conviction of conservatives, by the most charitable view they can muster, is that the mainstream media and the conservative media are equally biased.

This, however, is a minority view. With most conservatives it is an article of faith that the mainstream media is blatantly biased and thus should not be trusted at all: that, as the president insists, the mainstream media is really in the business of manufacturing and distributing “fake news.” Rush Limbaugh calls the mainstream media the drive-by media. My personal choice of tagline would be Fake News, Inc.

I shall devote the next several entries to this phenomenon, because it drives the widespread belief that “objective reporting” is as mythical as a unicorn.

This ever expanding belief is assuredly the main engine driving the hyper partisanship that I fear may be on the verge of pushing the republic straight off a cliff into the abyss below.

The origin of the hyper partisan demon we have conjured, initially innocent of the idea that we were doing so, is generally assumed to track back to the emergence of Rush Limbaugh and his inspired invention of a radio talk show that was fun-filled, compulsively interesting, and unabashedly, fearlessly conservative in its commentary.

As usual, the conventional wisdom is incorrect.

The real origin was a rather obscure political movement, not at all malicious in its intentions, which first emerged in the 1930’s.

To explain what I mean, my account will lean heavily upon a recent, carefully researched, and accessibly written book by Nicole Hemmer, entitled “Messengers on the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” published in 2016 by University of Pennsylvania. That is because, expert though I am on other subjects, on this one I can count myself as merely an intelligent layman.

In fact, the best I can do will be to give you a detailed summary of Hemmer’s book. And since I have already written some 725 words, for today I will limit myself to the vignette with which she opens it….

It is a warm June day in 2004 and a youthful Nicole Hemmer is on a pleasant car trip—pleasant because seated at the wheel of the car is her father, with whom she shares the kind of affectionate relationship I hope to sustain with my 8-year old daughter, now blissfully asleep on the rather tired love seat in our den, a few feet removed from her father, who is tapping away at his laptop at precisely 5:22 in the morning, with gusts of wind buffeting the modest 50-year old split level we call home.

Nicole is old enough to have left the nest, and so the moment is made even more pleasant because it is taking place during her annual visit home.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Nicole’s father announces: “My project this summer is to get you to vote for George Bush.”

Well, seemingly out of nowhere to the aging historian seated, in imagination, in the car’s back seat.

But scarcely out of nowhere to Nicole, because a prominent feature of the relationship with her father are frequent, earnest, but loving exchanges about politics. Her father is staunchly conservative. Once upon a time Nicole had shared his conservatism, but over the years she had slowly shifted to the left, while her father had done just the opposite.

Let the aging historian shut up for a bit, and permit Nicole to speak for herself:

“The divergence of [political] opinion ended up drawing us closer together. Political debate became the secret language of our relationship, the way we conveyed love, respect, disagreement, and admiration. So there was nothing extraordinary about an afternoon spent debating politics.”

Nothing extraordinary, that is, except that on this particular afternoon, as the bland Indiana countryside rolled by, her father did something that would embark Nicole upon a years-long intellectual journey:

He turned on the radio.