The Questioning Librarian

Since the week before it was to be published, Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House  has been, by far, the most-talked about book in the country. The furor, prompted by an angry denunciation-by-tweet from the President, a cease and desist letter from his lawyers, and salacious details from the book making their way into the press, immediately catapulted it to bestseller status. Being a political junkie, of course I couldn't resist giving it a read. While the book sold out almost immediately in print, I was lucky enough to borrow the digital audiobook from my local public library. I rushed through it in just a few days - not only because of how engrossing it was, but also knowing that there were a lot of people waiting to read it after I was done. As enjoyable a read as Fire and Fury was, the deep irony of the book is that it would likely have received little attention had it not been for the attacks by the Trump Administration. In attempting to st...

The President-Elect and the President meeting at the White House Like so many others in this country, the results of the Election came as a shock to me, the outcome a possibility so mind-numbingly terrifying that, until the very end, it did not even seem worth thinking about. Yet here we are, watching as lobbyists fill out the transition team , Washington insiders are considered for Cabinet positions , and Trump promises to at least consider keeping parts of the Affordable Care Act that he and other Republicans pledged to repeal and replace immediately. While politicians often don't keep their promises, the speed with which so many of the President-elect's campaign promises have been abandoned is dizzying. My initial shock, and deep sadness, in the first few days have gradually begun to give way to anger instead. I've wondered how something like this could have happened, how a know-nothing charlatan blustered his way into the highest office in the land. Much ink ...

Trump supporters pledging to vote in primary elections  A few years ago, a friend of mine recommended that I read one of Sinclair Lewis' later works, a novel called It Can't Happen Here . Writing in the 1930's, Lewis imagined what a fascist government would look like in the United States, his work rebutting the idea that such an idea was impossible in a nation that took so much pride in democratic principles. From his vantage point, this outcome was not impossible in the slightest. With figures like the pro-fascist radio priest Father Coughlin, and Louisiana governor Huey Long prominent in those years, an American version of fascism in power was all too easy to imagine. In the novel, Senator "Buzz" Windrip wins election to the Presidency after promising a return to American greatness, one that had no place for outsiders, dissenters, and minority groups. While cloaking himself in the rhetoric and symbols of American patriotism, his inauguration ushers in a r...

I thought that I had heard enough hair-brained schemes through that purveyor of nonsense, the random email, to last me a lifetime. As if it wasn't bad enough getting emails telling you to boycott a certain gas company in hopes that they will lower their prices and have the others follow, as if Facebook users saying "Don't buy gas for a day," to hurt the gas companies wasn't utterly stupid enough (there is no other term to describe it), now we have the best advice on lowering gas prices. Ever. From Donald Trump, no less. The Donald seems to think that all we have to do is just "tell" OPEC to lower prices, and they'll do it. But this makes no sense, you say. Ah, but The Donald is here to remind us that it just takes the right messenger, something we all should have learned from The Godfather . His point is that Obama is the wrong messenger, and I assume he wants us to believe that it is he  who would make a good messenger. But if the special pleading...