Thank God for Novels

While I was rereading For Whom the Bell Tolls John McCain died and I found out that it was his favorite book. That was a bit discombobulating, but understandable within the context of war and heroism and all that good stuff Hemingway writes about. But Jesus, all the other stuff that Hemingway writes about in that book blew me away: love, loyalty, the longing for freedom and liberty, betrayal, courage, friendship, women, politics, Communism, socialism, fascism, anarchism, terrorism, idealism suicide, and death.

Listening to just the stuff about war and heroism as applied to McCain for almost two solid weeks was a good lesson in reductive thinking. Because McCain, a hawk, war monger, misogynist, and neoconservative, was also one of the few Republicans who expressed any opposition to Trump, in death he became the untainted hero. Obama delivered one of the eulogies. All the Democrats spewed laudatory sound bites. All the mainstream news outlets ran patriotic story after story documenting his years as a tortured prisoner of war in Vietnam and his distinguished career in the Senate where he manufactured a reputation as a maverick—he had a contrarian streak that sometimes played out against his own team—despite never seeing a war he didn't like.

But I digress. For anyone who hasn't read Hemingway's book, or those of you who don't remember it that well, it's the story of the Spanish Civil War and a band of partizans assigned the task of blowing up a bridge as part of a larger offensive against the fascists. The story is told through the eyes of Robert Jordan, an American (the Spaniards refer to him as Inglés) who had been studying in Spain before joining the Republicans to fight the fascists. Hemingway takes 471 pages to tell what happens over the course of three days. That is what makes this novel so wonderful. While I digressed about John McCain, he digressed about everything possible pertaining to a small band of guerrillas living in a cave in the mountains caught up in a war that presaged an even more horrific fight against fascism that would engulf the world just a few years later.

Roberto (as he is lovingly called by Maria, the young woman rescued by the guerillas after her family is shot by the fascists) questions everything in his stream of consciousness and flashbacks: why is he here, who are these people, can they be trusted, who is he to question their trust, how has this war come to be, will the communists, anarchists, and Trotskyites destroy the movement with their internecine bickering, will he and Maria live to walk the fascist free streets of Madrid as husband and wife? Yet minute by minute, hour by hour he must focus on how he is going to blow up a bridge when the Republican offensive begins and then figure out how the hell they're all going to get down from the mountains to safety.

It was such a pleasure to read as a distraction from John McCain's death and Trump's rants and Brett Kavanaugh's hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee as the Republicans push through his nomination to the Supreme Court. This appointment is not made by Congress anymore; it's made by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, which draws up the list of potential conservative nominees to present to the president who then chooses the one he thinks will fulfill all his promises made to his base: overturn or severely limit Roe v. Wade, protect the president from prosecution, limit government agencies from enacting environmental and safety regulation, etc. etc.

But again I digress. I guess it just goes to show that our attention is riveted by this unbelievably strange vortex that sucks us deeper into a world we never thought we'd witness, but upon analysis was barrelling along all the time setting us up for the Trumpster. But wait! Another bomb. Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual assault by a professor in California back when they were in high school. Another disgusting Republican conservative who not only wants to control women's bodies by policy but apparently by physical force as well. Good thing I started rereading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: about as different as you can get in so many ways from For Whom the Bell Tolls but so beautifully written and actually just as incisive a look into the human condition. No, Virginia, there's no Santa Claus, but there's still beauty in the world and I'm going to stay out of the vortex for two hours a day with the another Virginia who's even better than Santa.