January is the month when every farmer prays. And they all pray for snow – layer upon layer of snow; dry snow, wet snow, a prayer for each kind of snow Eskimos are said to distinguish and have names for. Without layers of snow, the January ground will freeze harder and deeper, and demand more human and machine energy to turn at the first whiff of spring.
Praying aside, there’s not much to do in January for anyone who works the land. So I pick two books and read to fill all those housebound hours. This year, I’ve chosen two books to reread.
On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, by Timothy Snyder, which I first read during the COVID lock down of 2020. The lessons were frightening, but Trump, who was in his first term, seemed more buffoonish and inept than tyrannical. The most dangerous thing about him then was his mishandling of the pandemic; could anything be more dangerous! The other book was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by the once riverboat pilot Mark Twain. I’ve lost count of how many times I have rafted down the Mississippi, in the company of Huck and Jim, two of the most moral heroes in all American literature. Guided by Twain’s keen eyes and ears, the novel delivers a many-peopled biography of America’s gullible, mob-rule character.
I thought the two books could not be more different, and that the sharp contrast would make good comparative reading. So, I was surprised when they became two sides of the same coin.
Ironically, the correlation begins with a dance lesson.
If you’re old enough to remember early television, you might recall learn-to-dance shows, the most popular being The Arthur and Kathryn Murray Dance Party. In addition to a dance lesson and guests during the hour-long show, you could send for a fold-out chart, with the silhouette of dance steps – chums-chums, fox trot, lindy hop, tango, waltz. When they arrived, you could roll back the carpet and spread them out on the floor. Then, with music from the radio, you and your partner could step along with the pros.
Those dance charts were very much like what the Heritage Foundation had in mind for its Project 2025, which featured the steps to transform a democratic republic (If you can keep it) into an authoritarian state. Its 900 pages offer models for defrauding masses of people and institutions out of the world’s largest pots of money – Social Security, Medicare-Medicaid, state pensions systems, etc. All that money originates from and belongs to the people who contributed from their paychecks.
In sharp contrast, On Tyranny is 126 pages, instructing on the anatomy of tyranny’s malfeasant dances, and how to thwart their felonious footwork. Snyder concludes with Hamlet’s words.
After learning of his father’s murder at his uncle’s hand, the prince says: “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!”
Reading Huck Finn in light of On Tyranny, I was surprised to find, on every page, more and more evidence that perhaps sivilized America has always been only semi-democratic. Certainly Huck, po’ white trash, and Jim, a runaway slave, were victims of American tyranny. Snyder, who explains that “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given,” would surely caution Huck and Jim, as he warns his readers “Don’t obey in advance.”
But our heroes fall prey to two con men. Though Huck and Jim are immediately suspicious of crooks, they invite them on the raft. The grifter’s claim to be of royal descent, and before the day is out, both Huck and Jim are calling them “your highness,” “your excellency,” and “m’lord,” and wait on their every order. I think of how democratic congressmen rubber stamped Trump’s nominees to head federal agencies, after denouncing the candidates as professionally unqualified and morally unfit for those positions. Is that not obeying in advance?
Oligarchs rely on such obedience to authority and curry it by inspiring fear – you can be snatched up off the street; thrown in some dungeon across the world; your life savings can disappear in a few key stroke by authorized young hackers. See it enough on the news and you’ll believe and fear it.
After WWII, Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted experiments to understand why seemingly decent, ordinary people would do horrible things to strangers and neighbors alike, because they were ordered to – specifically by Nazis. He concluded that obedience to authority is a part of human nature, and we succumb to it, even when it goes against our instincts and sense of right and wrong. Watching Republicans travel to Mar-a-lago to bend the knee and kiss the ring of a fraudulent king, is a current events example that the rapscallions hustling their corrupt way along the Mississippi’s current in Huck Finn are very much alive and a dire threat to our democracy.
Just as Huck and Jim come to hate the ersatz king and duke who oppress them in their fictional lives, people in real life come to hate those who subjugate them. And our hate is not only inspired by a leader’s despicable character. It is that we understand that their actions mean we will have to fight, and perhaps kill or die, to win back our freedom. We hate that they make us hate. And the cost of reclaimed freedom, which may take a generation or more to earn back, will haunt and embitter us for the rest of our lives. Ask the Palestinians or the Ukrainians, or Congolese, Libyans or Syrians, or just keep walking down the long, tragic line of history’s warriors who had fights and hate forced upon them.
My January reading, and the current constitutional crisis, sent me to reread and puzzle over the precepts and wording of the U.S. Constitution. In context of national current events, my non law school reading suggested that our founding document – with the exception of its Bills of Rights, the Civil Rights and the 19 th Amendments – is a how-to-dance chart for a government that is intent, above all, to preserving the exclusivity of the wealth-power paradigm. Which begs the question: Did the Founding Fathers ever want We The People to have real freedom or power?
Not even for Arthur and Kathryn Murray, nor farmers praying for snow in January?
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