I'll get back to you, dear reader, in due course regarding my epiphany: the one about the future of non-fiction publishing in America.
In the meantime, though, a word about the opposite of an epiphany: a sinking feeling of déjà vu. A word not about publishing's future, but America's future.
In this weekend's New York Times the columnist Bob Herbert laments the decline in our national aspirations as a great nation. "The United States," he writes, is not just losing its capacity to do great things. It's losing its soul. It's speeding down an increasingly rubble-strewn path to a region where being second rate is good enough."
Tom Friedman wrote similarly, awhile back, lamenting the lack of "vision" in America today -- after traveling the world, and witnessing the march that other rising powers are now stealing on his beloved country. But do we hear of this in the midterm election frenzy exciting the press and news channels?
No. Quite frankly, no! It's as if history -- the history of America's rise to world leadership over the past seven decades has simply gone out the window. Like sheep, the mainstream media remains fixated on trivia, spurred on by the armies of the Republican right, who prey on our economic anxiety in a time of high unemployment. And in that sad scenario, our politicians lose the courage to root for America -- rooting only to save, literally, their seats at the top table.
Is this the end of the American empire I am asked constantly, as I talk about my new book to audiences across the country? Are we doomed to go down, as did ancient Rome?
Well, yes, I respond - eventually. But the pace of our descent will depend on how we manage our affairs, nationally and internationally. Rome's heyday was in the first century A.D. It took another three hundred years before it fell -- and that may well be our mercifully soft landing, if we open our eyes to the danger, and think about the things that made this country great.
I'd like to quote, if I may, from my first chapter, on Franklin D. Roosevelt, who led the modern American empire in World War II -- on both moral and military lines. Hitler had, in declaring war on the U.S. on December 11, 1941, derided Roosevelt as "the candidate of a thoroughly capitalist party, which used him. When I became chancellor," Hitler pointed out to the Reichstag deputies summoned to hear his declaration, "I was the Führer of a popular movement which I myself had created."
Where Roosevelt was guided by a "brain trust" of Jews, he, Adolf Hitler, had fought against such people on behalf of the "fate of my Volk and my sacred inner beliefs." Roosevelt and Churchill's Atlantic Charter - setting out the moral basis for a post-war world -- was, in Hitler's view, "tantamount to a bald hairdresser recommending his unfailing hair restorer. These gentlemen, who live in socially retarded states, should have taken care of their unemployed instead of agitating for war," Hitler proclaimed. As Führer he had given the American charge d'affaires his passport and had told him to leave Berlin. He was declaring war on the United States.
"Just as we were merciless and harsh in our struggle for power," the Führer added, "we will be merciless and harsh in our struggle for the preservation of our Volk." Any German who questioned, criticized, mocked or sabotaged "the efforts of the homeland" would be executed. (Nine months later it was officially announced by the Inter-Allied Information Committee he had executed 207,000; the real number would be many times that.)
Roosevelt, reading his adversary's speech to the Reichstag, was unimpressed. In his own State of the Union address to his own "Reichstag" -- the Congress of the United States - on January 6, 1942, he announced his U.S. output targets for the coming year: "numbers that took Congress' and the world's breath away: six million tons of new ships; 45,000 tanks, 60,000 airplanes in 1942 alone! On this basis there could be no doubt who would win the war, only how long it would take. Churchill, hearing these figures from Roosevelt himself while staying in the White House for three weeks, was reborn. In a fireside chat two days after Pearl Harbor FDR had told listeners that there would be 'bad news and good news', 'defeats and victories', but that these were the fortunes of war' - and would be shared by the nation. The fundamental fact was that 'we are all in it - all the way. Every single man, woman and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking in American history.'" (American Caesars, p27)
Now, I am probably in a dwindling majority of people who consider Barack Obama to be the FDR of the twenty-first century: a thoughtful, visionary President who is bringing us through the worst recession since the Great Depression, and who is dealing with America's global problems with enormous patience and tenacity. But if so, where are the members of Congress who, in 1942, pulled together to support not only the elected president of the United States, but stood collectively behind his vision of America's place in a post-war world? Where are the journalists willing to look beyond the scandals of the day, and communicate the larger picture to the electorate by giving space, reports, interviews and a historical perspective to the situation in which we find ourselves today?
Why is America becoming ridiculed across the world -- a world in which the stature of its president has rarely stood higher -- for its utter public myopia? As one friend, an American, wrote me recently from southern Germany, where the economy is booming, "no media insanity here; the political system works; no vicious talk radio. No one says it over here, but everyone thinks the US is going down the toilet since they heard the GOP may win big in November."
Down the toilet? The country that avoided Nazism, fascism and communism under the sterling leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt -- and his extraordinary successor Caesars? How is it possible? Are there no men and women of moral courage and wisdom left in America? Have we no sense of history?
Nigel Hamilton is President of Biographers International Organization. He is author of American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (Yale, 2010)