We have early Christmas at our house and I got "Grant" which I have been eager to read. Ron Chernow has chosen well in looking at U.S. Grant in this time of Trump, because we often forget how tumultuous and unglued our country has actually been.
For all his inanity and volume, Trump is a footnote, to use one of the Dotard's own favorite words, a "lightweight."
Grant, of course, guided us through the most serious threat to our nation's life. Today's phrase du jour is "existential threat," which is such a bastardization of the word, existential, I could scream. People use existential when they mean, "serious" or "potentially lethal" or something ultimately important, critical, decisive. What Grant presided over was all that.
What he faced as President was no flaccid "alt right" but out and out racist cleansing, the Ku Klux Klan in full revolt against the outcome of the Civil War and the legal outcome of that war, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.
Reading Twitter is a discouraging experience: It undermines one's estimate of people you might have otherwise admired. David Simon, the creator of the "The Wire"--a man whose work demands respect-- tweets relentlessly in a vain attempt to assert what a blue collar, tough and profane guy he is. He protests too much, of course, and winds up sounding like a blowhard wimp.
Grant is just the opposite. Simple, direct, understated.
And his friends are an indication of the man: Sherman was an admirer. Like most important, pivotal figures of that era, Sherman was racist by our current day standards, and he did not suffer irritants gladly. He hated newspaper reporters in his camps. "If I could kill them all, I would," he said. "But then we would be having reports from Hell by breakfast."
What we have now in Trump is simply a man who is too small for the office, which is what Grant was thought to be in his time. But his detractors were wrong in Grant's case.
He was small of stature and ordinary looking, had no bluster about him. No show, no bling. His qualities could not be seen so easily, but they ran deep, and they carried the day where mere marketing could not. Grant was preceded by a great showman, George McCellan, who rode his charger down the ranks of wildly cheering soldiers, who arranged for grand parades, great rallies, whose men loved him for a couple of years, but he could not fight, would not fight, blamed every reversal and failure on the unwillingness of others to understand his own greatness.
Eventually, enough people figured it out. They understood the showman is fun to watch, but the show is not enough.
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| U.S. Grant |
For all his inanity and volume, Trump is a footnote, to use one of the Dotard's own favorite words, a "lightweight."
Grant, of course, guided us through the most serious threat to our nation's life. Today's phrase du jour is "existential threat," which is such a bastardization of the word, existential, I could scream. People use existential when they mean, "serious" or "potentially lethal" or something ultimately important, critical, decisive. What Grant presided over was all that.
What he faced as President was no flaccid "alt right" but out and out racist cleansing, the Ku Klux Klan in full revolt against the outcome of the Civil War and the legal outcome of that war, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.
Reading Twitter is a discouraging experience: It undermines one's estimate of people you might have otherwise admired. David Simon, the creator of the "The Wire"--a man whose work demands respect-- tweets relentlessly in a vain attempt to assert what a blue collar, tough and profane guy he is. He protests too much, of course, and winds up sounding like a blowhard wimp.
Grant is just the opposite. Simple, direct, understated.
 |
| "Cump" --Obadiah Youngblood |
And his friends are an indication of the man: Sherman was an admirer. Like most important, pivotal figures of that era, Sherman was racist by our current day standards, and he did not suffer irritants gladly. He hated newspaper reporters in his camps. "If I could kill them all, I would," he said. "But then we would be having reports from Hell by breakfast."
What we have now in Trump is simply a man who is too small for the office, which is what Grant was thought to be in his time. But his detractors were wrong in Grant's case.
He was small of stature and ordinary looking, had no bluster about him. No show, no bling. His qualities could not be seen so easily, but they ran deep, and they carried the day where mere marketing could not. Grant was preceded by a great showman, George McCellan, who rode his charger down the ranks of wildly cheering soldiers, who arranged for grand parades, great rallies, whose men loved him for a couple of years, but he could not fight, would not fight, blamed every reversal and failure on the unwillingness of others to understand his own greatness.
Eventually, enough people figured it out. They understood the showman is fun to watch, but the show is not enough.
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