Books

I’ve Served My Time in Hell By John F. Kelly This memoir by Trump’s resigned White House chief of staff takes its title from the Vietnam-era GI mantra: ‘When I die, I’m going straight to heaven because I’ve served my time in hell.’ The former Marine Corps general likens his tenure at the White House to ‘simultaneous waterboarding and colonoscopy.’ At one point he was so depressed that he tried to hang himself from a chandelier in the East Room, but was interrupted by a tour group. He chafes at criticism that he failed to moderate Trump’s wilder impulses.

A silence descended on the Spectator USA library as our writers composed their Books of Year. It was the silence of deep thought, broken only by the clink of ice in tumblers, the gentle whoosh of the Juul pipe, and snoring from the armchair by the fire. At dawn, the editors unlocked the library doors. Our writers stumbled out, blinking in the bright sunshine. We gathered their shoddily written copy, and watched through the library windows as they gamboled in the snow. They looked like children, only with hip flasks and cigars.   Daniel Akst Any gift can be a burden, and no gift is more potentially burdensome than a book. That’s why any books you give ought to be brief, unexpected and absorbing – the opposite, in other words, of homework.

Liberal commentators on American foreign policy used to say that Islamist terrorism was motivated less by ideology than by gender. The thinking went that young men with no prospects will inevitably become violent and anti-social. Liberals may still believe that about Middle Eastern societies, but the consensus on the left in America today is that young men can be safely denied positions of undeserved authority and, moreover, given no meaningful alternative but to atone quietly for the sins of their fathers. Journalist and critic Wesley Yang’s first book, The Souls of Yellow Folk, is about the possibility that this consensus is mistaken.

Camille Paglia is one of the most interesting and explosive thinkers of our time. She transgresses academic boundaries and blows up media forms. She’s brilliant on politics, art, literature, philosophy, and the culture wars. She’s also very keen on the email Q and A format for interviews. So, after reading her new collection of essays, Provocations, Spectator USA sent her some questions. You’ve been a sharp political prognosticator over the years. So can I start by asking for a prediction. What will happen in 2020 in America? Will Hillary Clinton run again? If the economy continues strong, Trump will be reelected. The Democrats (my party) have been in chaos since the 2016 election and have no coherent message except Trump hatred.

Are product plugs on social media really that influential? Opinions on the matter range between Lord of the Rings star Sean Astin, who got ‘pretty ticked off’ at how no one cared about his endorsement of a pro-climate change candidate, to The Good Place actress Jameela Jamil, who recently wished Cardi B would ‘shit her pants in public’ for promoting detox teas. It’s a debate that’s been reignited this week after President Trump offered his suggestions for which books could serve as stocking fillers for his supporters: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1068264306947411968 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1068266944715878402 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1068271965343862785 https://twitter.

Trudging through heavy snow along the perimeter of the Maple Avenue Cemetery, my steps are punctuated irregularly by shotgun blasts from the deer hunters in the nearby woods. Why did I wear this cervine-tawny jacket? I gaze up into the slate sky of a late November twilight and think… well, my first thought is that I hope these guys are good shots, local boys and not city hunters. My second thought is of Aleksandr Solzhenitysn, the long loneliness of exile, and the sustaining dream of repatriation. ‘Away from home in a country far away Even the springtime sun is gray.’ Or so Solzhenitsyn wrote as he dreamed of his return.

‘After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months,’ King George V groused in his last days about his oldest son and heir, David, Prince of Wales. Never a particularly cheery fellow, by 1935 George V was worn down by a lifetime of non-stop smoking. His gloom might have been understandable, but it wasn’t universal, since he had nothing but good things to say about his second son, the stuttering Bertie. In the prescience that kings sometimes display about their successors, George V suspected that he was about to pass the imperial crown into unsteady hands. When the old king died in January of 1936, David, Prince of Wales became King Edward VIII. As Prince of Wales, he had been phenomenally popular, the House of Windsor’s first full-blown celebrity.

When Michelle Obama’s husband left office in 2016, Van Jones summarized eight years of CNN fawning by getting almost teary-eyed when discussing his feelings for her. Every other news outlet save Fox felt the same. The love fest resumes with the publication of her autobiography, Becoming. Given Michelle Obama’s role in Barack Obama’s transformation, and her behavior towards allies and others as First Lady, she does not merit unexamined adulation. Obama emphasizes that her social mobility depended on growing up in an intact working family with parents who prioritized the educational success of their children. Her liberal admirers might apply this insight to their understanding of the persistence of a black underclass.

Great novelists come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they all share is a status of half-belonging. If they had no foot in the world at all, they could hardly understand it; if they completely belonged, they could hardly understand what was distinctive. One of the pleasures of this excellent biography is fully appreciating the peculiar, liminal, not-quite-successful position Powell wrote from, and described with great exactness. In half a dozen social and professional milieux, he was a tolerated, perhaps useful minor presence, like a spare man at dinner. From the standpoint of a rather failed editor, screenwriter, soldier, socialite, he stood by and watched the world. In each case, one suspects, the subjects hardly realized they were being observed.

A liberal order is not natural. Robert Kagan admits as much in his new book, The Jungle Grows Back, when he writes that the ‘the creation of the liberal order has been an act of defiance against both history and human nature’. Nor is a liberal order an ‘order’, or liberal in nature. It is a sort of hegemonic or imperial peace. Nothing wrong with that, of course; peace, any peace, is important. Unfortunately, it is the liberal part, which causes the problem. An internationalist, utopian worldview, liberalism is full of crusaderly zeal, constantly ‘going abroad in search of monsters to destroy’. Liberal internationalists badly want to shape the world. When given the chance, they do manage to shape the world, very badly indeed.

The socialists behind the immensely successful podcast ‘Chapo Trap House’ have now released a book, The Chapo Guide to Revolution. A satirical attack on liberals and conservatives, as well as a sincere case for democratic socialism, it is often funny and sometimes instructive. The book has good jibes about the foaming rage of right-wing keyboard warriors and the affectations of conservative intellectuals. Chapo satire often flounders on its contradictions, though. The Chapo crew enjoy mocking the appearances of liberal and conservative figures, for example, yet their photographs suggest that if they want such jokes to be effective they should confine themselves to non-visual forms of media.

Stephanie Clifford, better known as ‘Stormy Daniels’, is famous on account of three hours spent in a hotel suite with Donald Trump 12 years ago. She says they did, he says they didn’t, and since everything that Donald Trump does or doesn’t do makes the geographical center of America ecstatic with praise while the edges explode with uncontrollable indignation, Ms Clifford has fairly earned her place as the starlet of series 220, episode 394 in this exhilarating, and never ending sitcom.

At 6 in the morning on December 13, 1981, Poland’s prime minister Wojciech Jaruzelski appeared on Polish television and described in sonorous tones a looming Apocalypse. ‘Our homeland is at the edge of an abyss,’ he said. ‘State structures are ceasing to function. Each day delivers new blows to the waning economy… There are more and more examples of terror, threats, mob trials and direct coercion. Crimes, robberies, and break-ins are spreading like a wave through the country.’ Jaruzelski then took a step directly into that abyss. He declared martial law. Soldiers went door-to-door arresting members and suspected sympathisers of the populist labour movement Solidarity, including its leader, Lech Walesa.

Reihan Salam has written a timely and important book, urging centrists of left and right to accept reduced immigration in order to improve social cohesion and integrate the children of immigrants. As a prominent Bangladeshi-Muslim American conservative, he brings a highly distinctive perspective to this vexed question – a second-generation immigrant’s case for immigration reform. Immigration was the defining issue of Donald Trump’s primary bid, and analyses of survey data show that non-voters and Obama voters who wanted lower immigration were decisive for Trump’s election. Yet the rise of the post-1960s New Left, with its focus on disadvantaged cultural groups, has made inroads into the Democratic Party, rendering it allergic to immigration control.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 many writers spoke of feeling immobilised. The scale of the attacks and the world’s shared experience of the media event seemed to demand a response; but simultaneously writers such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Jay McInerney described a sense that the tools at their disposal were inadequate — that the reality of what had taken place exceeded fictional representation. These three all recovered from their shock reasonably quickly, contributing to the flood of 9/11 fiction that poured into bookshops during the 2000s. In recent years this torrent of novels and stories has slowed, but as Christopher Priest’s eerily powerful An American Story demonstrates, it most certainly has not stopped.