The premise for this selection from about a decade of essays is here.
Today I’m pushing this collection out of 2014 and into 2015, with two briefer pieces, thus putting off, as long as possible, arriving to that fateful year of ’16, when two things I was unknowingly poking at, in these essays on bad American history’s weird impact on American civics, exploded into life.
When I posted these two essays in ’15, still to come was the unimaginable ascendency of Donald Trump. And even as I posted them, “Hamilton: an American Musical” was transferring to Broadway, and to the universe. Those two events would make me feel like an inarticulate version of Cassandra and leave me nearly speechless (well, nearly nearly). That’s a Cassandra who, instead of saying, “I advise against taking this large wooden horse into our city” can only say “I don’t know, man, I just get a bad feeling there’s something kinda weird going on out there somewhere.”
Only a few more essays left in this collection. They will come from the years ’16-18, climactically strange ones for me, given my subject in these essays.
But back in those ignorant days of ’15, I posted one of my rare sideswipes at right-wing history idiocy (I usually reserve critical intelligence for what matters, the liberal consensus): “Ted Cruz and Patrick Henry.” (Remember Ted Cruz?) And I got into the goofball public debate about who should be on the currency with “Hamilton and the Tenner.”
Next up is 2016, and a certain founding father is starring on the Great White Way.
William Hogeland 