The Perfect Gift: Books

Once again it’s almost Christmas and you haven’t yet found that perfect gift for a loved on. The gift that will make their heart skip several beats, make them swoon and go weak at the knees, cause them to realize how lucky they are to have you, to end this awful year with the reassurance of love and devotion in their lives. You need to give a book.

This works just as well if you don’t celebrate Christmas. And patronize your local bookstore, for heaven’s sake!

Come to a political science website, you’re going to get a few polisci recommendations. Let’s start with Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Let Them Eat Tweets:  How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. Hacker and Pierson discuss the Conservative Dilemma. In democracies, the conservative party faces the prospect of a public that would benefit from some redistribution of wealth. Conservatives can deal with that by giving in on some desires of the broader public (think post-WWII America). Or, they can activate biases based on race, ethnicity, or religion, and divide the public. Throw in interests like the NRA and evangelicals, not to mention a governing system that permits government by the minority, and you have the recipe for governing in an age of extreme inequality.

I follow money, not education policy, but I wind up paying attention to schools because, as Willie Sutton said, that’s where the money is. Two recent books explain where we are and why in the campaign to privatize America’s public schools. Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy by Derek W. Black situates the significance of public education into the constitutional fabric of America’s democratic tradition. A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School shows just how corporations and a few wealthy privatizers are going about stealing public education away from American democracy. Read them both.

Diane Ravitch published Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools this year. Who knew, but regular people can take on big money and win! You’ll meet a bunch of them in Slaying Goliath. (Trigger warning: I’m in it).

One of the great public intellectuals of 2020 has been historian Heather Cox Richardson. Please pick up her 2020 volume, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. (Let me emphasize, “Continuing”). While you’re at it pick up Richardson’s To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party too.

I didn’t get to much fiction. Well, I did reread John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces, because did I ever need a few laughs this year. But for a this-year novel, you can’t beat James McBride’s Deacon King Kong. Deacon Cuffy Lambkin (aka “Sportcoat) of Five Ends Baptist Church shoots the ear off the local drug dealer then goes about his bumbling routine, including downing plenty of King Kong moonshine, as if nothing had ever happened. Sportcoat regularly converses with his deeply religious wife, even though she passed away years ago. His sad early life in South Carolina, featuring a litany of maladies, is told in hilarious detail. Sportcoat eventually finds his way, so does the drug dealer, as well as the church ladies of the Five Ends and a local gangster.

2020 sucked, there’s no getting around that. I often dove in to a random page in RFK: His Words for Our Times, edited by Edwin O. Guthman and C. Richard Allen. Kennedy repeatedly spoke of love and commitment in a manner we don’t hear from American leaders much anymore. It fell to Robert F. Kennedy to inform a largely African American audience in Indianapolis, Indiana, of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. In part, he said this:

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding—and that compassion of which I spoke.

Love, wisdom, compassion, and justice. America is in great need of these qualities right now, as well as basic good health. May you all enjoy these blessings over the holidays and into 2021.