Word power: not about Trump, but…

…reading Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash (subtitled The 400-year untold history of class in America) will likely give you a whole new perspective on Trump & Trumpism.

(this post’s featured image depicts an absolutely “legitimate” bit of campaigning by an absolutely real Wanker. She was re-elected; all is revealed at this post’s end)

The hardback edition was published in 2016, prior to Trump’s election.

In her preface to the paperback edition, published in 2017, Nancy Eisenberg witheringly dismisses the notion that Trump or “Trumpism” is an unprecedented or remotely new phenomenon in US politics:

The hurling of insults is nineteenth-century political theater revivified.  Trump’s tweeting frenzy resembled nothing so much as Andrew Jackson responding to critics by invoking the code duello.

This is the key sentence in the book-proper:

Historical mythmaking is made possible only by forgetting.

The very next sentence:

We have to begin, then, with the first refusal to face reality: most colonizing schemes that took root in seventeenth and eighteenth century British America were built on privilege and subordination, not on any kind of protodemocracy.

An uncommonly audacious, provocative work, White Trash offers a comprehensive demolition of most of the myths by which the USA “defines” its “self”.

For any of the many more complacent, “mainstream”, triumphalist American historians, his or her worst nightmare ought be to find him or herself on the same stage or forum as Eisenberg.

She writes clearly, with not a little ferocity, but her “assertions” are invariably supported by evidence – prodigious quantities thereof, skilfully assembled.

Footnotes do not interrupt her prose, but you will notice that most paragraphs have a number: the book-proper’s 321 pages are followed by 125 pages of numbered notes, in finer-print, followed by a proper index. (“Parton, Dolly” has 5 entries. “Presley, Elvis” has 14)

White Trash is one of the most illuminating of the many books I have  read about the USA.

 

Footnote:

I took the photo from a bus window in October 2012, in Nye County, Nevada, not far from Death Valley.

Judge Kimberly Wanker’s campaign had many such billboards, punctuating the roadsides.

Kim Wanker was the first rural female District Judge in Nevada, and she was re-elected.

You may be surprised, if you click the hyperlink!

A question you may like to consider:

is the election of judges by a non-compulsory popular vote “a triumph of American democracy” or something much worse than that, especially when you consider what “American democracy” has delivered, more generally, and notions such as “separation of powers” and “judicial independence”?