Elections Are Good...
…good for something other than generating advertising revenue by promoting the exaggerations, pontifications, chest-beatings, hair-tearings, moral-high-ground-claimings, insults—and downright mendacity of the campaigners?
No. Elections are good for publishing. Part of that industry’s success, of course, is its vast audience. Publishers can safely depend on ravenous readers, hungry for falsehoods and fake news, no matter how formulaic. As H.L. Mencken wrote, “No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”
But that’s not what this is about (well, maybe a little…).
Think about it. Before candidates for public office declare themselves to be in the running, before currently-seated politicians announce their intent to move up the pecking order, before the first rubber-chicken bounces across a fund-raising dinner table, books must be written.
Long before Trump took his famous golden escalator ride, he wrote—or rather had written for him—the allegedly autobiographical The Art of the Deal. His opponent’s unsuccessful run was foreshadowed by It Takes a Village.
Barack Obama published The Audacity of Hope, and won. Long before him, another youthful sitting Senator, itching to take a seat behind the Resolute Desk, first sat down to write Profiles in Courage.
It certainly worked for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote a book on naval history (The Naval War of 1812) after dropping out of college to concentrate on his intention “to be one of the governing class.” That 1882 book was published while he was junior member of New York’s state assembly. A year later, he was living out west—and publishing books about the experience (Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, and The Wilderness Hunter). A nation of readers, hungry for tales of the wild west, gobbled them up, along with dime novels about the fictional Dead-eye Dick, and tales of real-life Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill. After returning to New York, Roosevelt built on his successes with The Winning of the West.
They all worked for Teddy.
In the 1880s, Woodrow Wilson (our most academic president—more than Bill Clinton who was merely a Rhodes Scholar) published Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics and Congressional Government. The books left little doubt about what his intentions were…
…and they were effective.
Political advancement has been the primary incentive for some writers—it has had a long, and efficacious, history. One popular general, a war hero, driven by political ambition, published the ten volumes of The Gallic Wars as stepping stones to becoming emperor. Unfortunately, literary success does not always guarantee an equally-successful political career.
“A funny thing” (the assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar) did not “happen on the way to The Forum”—but in Largo di Torre Argentina, near the Pantheon. Today, the spot is a refuge for Rome’s beloved feral cats, with every surface covered with open tins of cat food.
It’s something of a cliché, but writers—even writers of political books—are expected to be feline fanciers. One can almost hear the doomed tyrant demanding—in resonant Shakespearean tones, echoing across the centuries—“Let me have cats about me that are fat!”
Paid subscribers to these substack pages get access to a complete edition of my novella: Noirvella is a modern story of revenge, told in the style of film noir. They can also read the first part of Unbelievable, a kind of rom-com that forms around a pompous guy who is conceited, misinformed, and undeservedly successful. Both books are sold by Amazon, but paid subscribers get them for free!
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