The Cruelty is the Point: The past, present and future of Trump's America, by Adam Serwer (Random House Books, 2021, 358 pp, $28)
A series of timely topics, told in essay pairs, a before and after, of sorts. At first, I thought the first one in the pair was the essay (about 3-5 pages) followed by a much longer update but actually it is the other way around: a short introduction/update followed by the longer original essay.
Author Adam Serwer is a long-time Atlantic Monthly* writer on politics who combined a baker's dozen of Atlantic essays of his into the book, The Cruelty is the Point: The past, present and future of Trump's America.
This reviewer chose three topics (sections) to highlight: COVID, Stephen Miller, and Robert E. Lee.
COVID, Chapter 11, The Cruelty of the COVID Contract and The Coronavirus was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who was Dying
In an eye-opener of an essay, author Serwer brings in many aspects of living in America today, one of which is "A crime does not occur when white men stalk and kill a black stranger. A crime does occur when black people vote." (p. 232) Starting with this 'racial contract' of white innocence and black guilt, and going on to the people most affected by the pandemic - those who earn the least and who can't work from home because they are in service occupations like grocery store employees and meat packers, and many of whom happen to be illegal immigrants or the most recently arrived and those who don't yet know English fluently, Serwer provides new-to-us facts plus quotes from articles we may not have seen that make us think more seriously and perhaps change our mind. (If you can read that sentence easily, you will have no problem with Serwer's writing style.) The Trump Administration did not consider the lives of people dying worth the effort or money required to save them while the upper classes can remain safely at home and have their food delivered by those whose jobs put them in peril, and primarily in blue states.
Those people are a dime a dozen and the Administration said we had to accept the deaths of many of them if we were to re-open the economy.
Stephen Miller, Chapter 7, The Cruelty of the Stephen Millers, and Not The Right Way
A recent history of immigration in the US shows us that the Obama Administration was actually more stringent with regards to immigrants and refugees than the Trump Administration. Both Miller and Trump are second-generation Americans and the reader follows the Miller family from their homeland to America through most of the chapter. We learn how changing laws protect Western European immigrants over Hispanics: legislation is changed when the current immigration wave is composed of people from another country or region.
Robert E. Lee, Chapter 2, The Cruelty of the Lost Cause, and The Myth of the Kindly General Lee
The title says it all. Lee wrote that ". . . slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and, most important, better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention." (p. 22) (What? Twisted logic? Read on.)
Other writings and actions of Lee will shock you.
All in All
Cruelty is a book for our times: essays on life in America today. You will keep this book and reread it in 10 years to compare how we fared as a culture in the interim. That is, if you can read through Serwer's convoluted sentence structure. But you can always skim over parts and still get the gist.
*simply the best magazine on current life I have seen since the now defunct FEER - The Far Eastern Economic Review
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