I reread these collections of American essays thinking I would discard/donate them afterward. However, I realized how timely and relevant many of the underlying themes of these collections remain. So, I will retain them in the hope of being able to reread them again in another twenty years when, sadly, they will still be relevant.
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1986, edited and with an Introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1986) (From Kai Erikson, "Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters" (originally from The Nation, 1985): "The United States did not become a nuclear power on August 6, with the destruction of Hiroshima. It became a nuclear power on July 16, when the first test device was exploded in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Uncertainties remained, of course, many of them. But from that moment on, the United States knew how to produce a bomb, knew how to deliver it and knew it would work. Stimson said shortly after the war that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 'ended the ghastly specter of a clash of great land armies,' but he could have said, with greater justice, that the ghastly specter ended at Alamogordo. Churchill came close to making exactly that point when he first learned of the New Mexico test: 'To quell the Japanese resistance man by man and conquer the country yard by yard might well require the loss of a million American lives and half that number o British. . . . Now all that nightmare picture vanished.' " "It had vanished. The age of inch-by-inch crawling over enemy territory, the age of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima and Okinawa, was just plain over." "The point is that once we had the bomb and were committed to its use, the terrible weight of invasion no longer hung over our heads. The Japanese were incapable of mounting any kind of offensive, as every observer has agreed, and it was our option when to close with the enemy and thus risk casualties. So we could have easily afforded to hold for a moment, to think it over, to introduce what Dwight Eisenhower called 'that awful thing' to the world on the basis of something closer to mature consideration. We could have afforded to detonate a bomb over some less lethal target and then pause to see what happened. And do it a second time, maybe a third. And if none of those demonstration had made a difference, presumably we would have had to strike harder: Hiroshima and Nagasaki would still have been there a few weeks later for that purpose, silent and untouched--'unspoiled' was the term Gen. H. H Arnold used--for whatever came next. Common lore also has it that there were not bombs enough for such niceties, but that seems not to have been the case. The United States was ready to deliver a third bomb toward the end of August, and Groves had already informed Marshall and Stimson that three or four more bombs would be available in September, a like number in October, at least five in November, and seven in December, with substantial increases to follow in early 1946. Even if we assume that Groves was being too hopeful about the productive machinery he had set in motion, as one expert close to the matter has suggested, a formidable number of bombs would d have been available by the date originally set for invasion." "Which brings us back to the matter of momentum. The best way to tell the story of those days is to say that the 'decision to drop' had become a force of gravity. It had taken life, The fact that it existed supplied its meaning, its reason for being. Elting E. Morison, Stimson's biographer, put it well: 'Any process started by men toward a special end tends, for reason logical, biological, aesthetic or whatever they may be, to carry forward, if other things remain equal, to its climax. [This is] the inertia developed in a human system. . . . In a process where such a general tendency has been set to work it is difficult to separate the moment when men were still free to choose from the moment, if such there was, when they were no longer free to choose.' " Id. at 116, 125-126.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1987, edited and with an Introduction by Gay Talese (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1987) (From Joseph Epstein, "They Said You Was High Class" (originally from The American Scholar, 1986): "Intellectually, the University of Chicago strove much higher, holding four tasks in life to be worthwhile: to be an artist, to be a scientist, to be a statesman, or to be a teacher of artists, scientists, or statesmen. In this regard the University of Chicago was not anti-middle class in the abrasive manner of Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken; it was para-middle class by its tacit implication that there were higher things in life than getting a good job, earning a living, raising a family, and getting on. Chamfort [aka Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, 6 April 1741 – 13 April 1794] once said that society was divided between those who had more dinners than appetite and those who had more appetite than dinners, but at the University of Chicago the division was between those lived loved art and learning and those who did not, and those who loved it were thought better." Id. at 85, 89-90. From William Pfaff, "The Lay Intellectual (Apologia Pro Vita Sua) (originally from Salugundi, 1986): "The private scholar has all but vanished. . . . By 'intellectual,' of course, I mean the person who deals in ideas primarily for their own sake, for the pleasure they give, and only then for their practical effect and application. There are plenty of intelligent professional people, officials, business and organizational executives, journalists and broadcasters, scientists, engineers, who are not intellectuals. There are people in the university who are not intellectuals; but the university is nonetheless the intellectuals' institution, the community of learned men and women the center of speculation. Why then are there some of us whose lives revolve about ideas but who avoid the university, lack its credentials, and certification, and find only a qualified pleasure in the university community?" Id. at 172, 172-173. Were Pfaff to ask himself that last question today, I think a significant part of the answer would simply be that most colleges and university are no longer "the intellectual's institution." Rather, many universities and colleges), and the departments of which they are comprised, have become profit/cost centers: the emphasis is not on ideas, or even learning; rather the emphasis is on revenue streams, outputs and inputs per unit.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1988, edited and with an Introduction by Anne Dillard (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988) (From Mary Lee Settle, "London--1944" (originally from The Virginia Quarterly Review, 1987): "It has taken me a long time since that night to realize that the war years were not wasted. I have had to face the fact that social change does not change evil people. There is only this difference. Their seduction is no longer official tolerated in democracies. Evil men and evil prejudices are with us still; 'nice' people belong to anti-Semitic country clubs, and their imitators drive pick-up trucks with gun racks and hate 'niggers.' The only thing that saves us is that such beliefs have been unacceptable to decent people since 1945. I know that 'unacceptable' is a small word for this enormity, but the world runs on shallowness for the most part. We are left at least, with a residue of social shame as a weapon." Id. at 1, 20. And here is what, in 2016, seems to be an original thought was previously understood and said in 1987, which underscores how slow society and its policymakers are in learning. From Kimberly Wozencraft, "Notes from the Country Club (originally from Witness, 1987): "Politicians know that an antidrug stance is an easy way to get votes from parents who are terrified that their children might wind up addicts. I do not advocate drug use. Yet, having seen the criminal justice system from serval angles, as a police officer, a court bailiff, a defendant, and a prisoner, I am convinced that prison is not the answer to the drug problem, or for that matter to many other white-collar crimes. If the taxpayers knew how their dollars were being spend inside some prisons, they might actually scream out loud." Id. at 236, 242-243.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1989, edited and with an Introduction by Geoffrey Wolff (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989) (From Joan Didion, "Insider Baseball" (originally from The New York Review of Books, 1988): "What made the 1988 [Jesse] Jackson candidacy a bomb that had to be defused, then, was not that blacks were supporting a black candidate, but that significant numbers of whites were supporting--not only supporting but in my cases overcoming deep emotional and economic conflicts of their own in order to support--a candidate who was attractive to them not because but in spite of the fact that he was black, a candidate whose most potent attraction was that he 'didn't sound like a politician.' 'Character' seemed not to be, among those voters, the point-of-sale issue the narrative made it out to be: a number of white Jackson supporters to whom I talked would quite serenely describe their candidate as a 'con man,' or even as, in George Bush's word, a hustler.' " " 'And yet . . . ' they would say, What 'and yet' turned out to mean, almost without variation, was that they were willing to walk off the edge of the known political map for a candidate who was running against, as he repeatedly said, 'politics as usual,' against what he called 'consensualist centrist politics'; against what had come to be the very premise of the process, the notion that the winning and the maintaining of public office warranted the invention of a public narrative based only tangentially on observable reality." "In other words they were not idealists, these white Jackson voters, but empiricists . . . I recall talking to a rich and politically well-connected Californian who had been, through the primary campaign there, virtually the only prominent Democrat on the famously liberal west side of Los Angeles who was backing Jackson. He said that he could afford 'the luxury of being more interested in issues than in process,' but that he would pay for it: 'When I want something, I'll have a hard time getting people to pick up the phone. I recognize that. I made the choice.' " "On the June night in os Angeles when Michael Dukakis was declared the winner of the California Democratic primary, and the bomb officially defused, there took place in the Crystal Room of the Biltmore Hotel a 'victory party' that was less a celebration than a ratification by the professionals, a ritual convergence of those California Democrats for whom the phones would continue to get picked up. . . ." "In the end the predictable desks was made to go with the process, with predictable, if equivocal, results. . . . " Id. at 44, 66-69.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1990, edited and with an Introduction by Justin Kaplan (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1990) (From Joseph Epstein, "A Few Kind Words for Envy" (originally from The American Scholar, 1989): ("The only expensive item I continue to envy is a small, well-made house with a fine view of water and of a naturally elegant landscape. For the rest, I envy things on which a price tag cannot be put, many but not all of them fairly trivial. Permit me to list them. I envy anyone who can do a backward somersault in midair air from a standing potion. I envy men who have fought a war and survived it. I envy people who speak foreign languages easily. I envy performing artists who have the power to move and amuse audiences to the point where the audience wants the performance never to end. I envy people who can travel abroad with a single piece of carry-on luggage. I envy people who have good posture. Above all, I envy those few people who truly understand that life is a fragile bargain, rescindable at any time by the other party, and live their lives accordingly." Id. at 83, 97-98.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1991, edited and with an Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991) (From Jane Tompkins, "At the Buffalo Bill Museum--June 1988" (originally from The South Atlantic Quarterly, 1990): "Major historical events like genocide and major acts of destruction are not simply produced by impersonal historical processes or economic imperatives or ecological blunders; human intentionality is involved and human knowledge of the self. Therefore, if you're really interested in not having any more genocide or killing of animals, no matter what else you might do--condemning imperialism or shaking your finger at history--if you don't first, or also, come to recognize the violence in yourself and your own anger and your own destructiveness, whatever else you don won't work. It isn't that genocide doesn't matter, Genocide matters and it starts at home." Id. at 203, 222.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1992, edited and with an Introduction by Susan Sontag (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992) (From Patricia Storace, "Look Away, Dixie Land"(originally from The New York Review of Books, 1992): "Now, with the blessing of the Mitchell estate, we can tote the weary load of a sequel, written by the romance novelist Alexander Ripley." [] "Scarlett, the product of the land of the fee and the home of the slave, is excruciatingly dull." [] "The taboo against interracial sex remains central to white and black racism, partly because interracial sex represents to racists a relinquishing of power, an acceptance of the common humanity of the partners. It is a marvelous irony that being human is the greatest terror of all. Given the treacherous complexities of the history of blacks and whites in relation to each other, and given the pressures exerted on interracial lovers by both whites and blacks, interracial romance is always a matter of emotional intricacy, and at times of heroic love. It is a paradoxical spectacle to see this display of contempt for human love by a writer whose trade is the romance novel. It is also a paradoxical spectacle to see that a novel in which shopping is the principal erotic experience is not considered sexually bizarre. "Alexander Ripley, the Mitchell heirs, and the publishers who cooperated with this agreement are still whistling Dixie, that defunct national anthem whose message to its followers is still 'Look away, look away.'" Id at 268, 295-296.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1993, edited and with an Introduction by Susan Sontag (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993) (From Thomas Palmer, "The Case for HumanBeings" (originally from The Atlantic Monthly): "The difference between life and nonlife, according to the biologists, is a matter of degree. A glass of seawater, for instance, contains many of the same materials as a condor (or a green turtle). What makes one alive and the other not are the varying chemical pathways those materials follow. The glass of water contains few internal boundaries, and gases diffuse freely across its surface. In the condor, in contrast, a much more complex array of reactions is in progress, reactions that maintain certain molecular-energy potentials in an oddly elevated state, even though the bird as a whole shows a net energy loss. In other words, both the condor and the glass of water cycle energy, but in the condor the energy goes to support a level of complexity not present in the water." "Perhaps the condor is more like a candle flame--both burn energy, and that burning keeps certain patterns intact. The condor, like the candle, can burn out. But although one can relight the candle, one cannot relight the condor--it is too delicately tuned, too dependent on various internal continuities." Id. 254, 259.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1994, edited and with an Introduction by Tracy Kidder (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994) (From the "Introduction": "We live in an autobiographical age. An unusually large number of poets and novelists are writing their memoirs, Almost everyone who reports for magazines and journals uses the first person, Even academics and book reviewers begin essays with personal anecdotes, like waiters introducing themselves before getting down to business." Id. at xi. Unfortunately, the '"autobiographical age' has, in the early twentieth century, become the self-congratulatory age. It is rare that a writer or speaker is not, at his or her core, saying look at me, see what I have done, am I not special. Even groups cannot resist engaging in mutual admiration. Look what we have done! We may have come in last in a competition, but we desire kudos for the effort. I am so proud of us. We are one big, continuous, Special Olympics. Is that progress? But, then again, have things really changed? "The thoroughgoing first person is a demanding mode, It asks for the literary equivalent of perfect pitch, Even good writers occasionally lose control of their tone and let a self0congratulatory quality slip in. Eager to explain that their heart is in the right place, they baldly state that they care deeply about matters with which they appear to be only marginally acquainted, Pretending to confess to their bad behavior, they revel in their colorfulness. Insistently describing their own biases, they make it all to obvious that they wish to appear uncommonly reliable Obviously, the first person doesn't guarantee honesty. Just because they are committing words to paper does not mean that writers stop telling themselves the lies that they've invented, for getting through the night. Not everyone has Montaigne's gift foot candor. Certainly some people are less likely to write honestly about themselves than about anyone else on earth." Id. at xii. Today where we are encouraged to brand ourselves, sadly, we believe our own, self-written, marketing material. We may fool others, but the biggest rube is ourselves.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1995, edited and with an Introduction by Tracy Kidder (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995) (From William H. Gass, "The Art of Self" (originally from Harper's Magazine, 1994): "But now for a little history of the corruption of a form. Once upon a time, history concerned itself only with what it considered important, along with the agents of these actions, the contrivers of significant events, and the forces that such happenings enlisted or expressed. Historians had difficulty deciding whether history was the result of the remarkable actions of remarkable men or the significant consequences, or of social structures, diet, geography, and the secret entelechies of Being, but whatever was the boss, the boss was big, massive, all-powerful, and hogged the center of the state; however, as machines began to replicate objects, and little people began to multiply faster than wars or famines could reduce their numbers, and democracy arrived to flatter the multitude and tell them they ruled, and commerce flourished, sales grew, and money became the really risen god, then numbers replaced significant individuals, the trivial assumed the throne that was a camp chair on a movie set, and history looked about for gossip, not for laws, preferring lies about secret lives to the intentions of Fate." Id. at 100, 107.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1996, edited and with an Introduction by Geoffrey C. Ward (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996) (From Bruce Shapiro, "One Violent Crime" (originally from The Nation) 1995): ""One the evening of August 7, 1994, I was among seven people stabbed and seriously wounded in a coffee bar a few blocks form my house. . . ." Id. at 319, 319. "While I lay in the hospital, the big story on CNN was the Clinton administration's 1994 crime bill, then being debated in Congress. Even fogged by morphine I was aware of the irony. I was flat on my back, the result of a particularly violent assault, while Congress eventually passed the anti-crime package I had editorialized against in The Nation just a few week earlier. Night after night in the hospital, unable to sleep, I watched the crime-bill debate replayed and heard Republicans and Democrats (who had sponsored the bill in the fill place) fall over each other to prove who could be the toughest on crime." "The bill passed on August 21, a few days after I returned home. In early autumn I read the entire text of the crime bill--all 312 pages, What I found was perhaps obvious, yet under the circumstances compelling: not a single one of those 312 pages would have protected me or Ann or Martin or any of the others form our assent, Not the enhanced prison terms, not the forty-four new health-penalty offense, not the three-strikes-you're-out requirements; not the summary deportations of criminal aliens. And the new tougher-than-tough anticrime provisions of the Contract with America, like the proposed abolition of the Fourth Amendment's search and seizure protections, offer no more practical protections." "On he other hand, the mental-health and social-welfare safety net shredded by Reaganomics and conservatives of both parties might have made a difference in the life of someone like my assailant--and thus in the life of someone like me. My assailant's growing distress in the days before August 7 was obvious to his neighbors, He had muttered darkly about relatives planning to burn down his house, A better-funded, more comprehensive safety net misstate just have saved me and six others for untold pain and trouble." "From my perspective--the perspective of a crime victim--the Contract with America and its conservative Democratic analogs are really blueprints for making the streets even less safe. Want to take away that socialist income subsidy called welfare? Fine. Connecticut Governor John Rowland proposes cutting off all benefits after either months, So more people in New Haven and other cities will turn to the violence-breeding economy of crack, or emotionally implode from sheer desperation. Cut funding for those softheaded social workers? Fine; let more children be beaten without the prospect of outside intervention, more Daniel Silvas carrying their own traumatic scars into violent adulthood Get rid of the few amenities prisoners enjoy, like sports equipment, musical instruments, and the i=right to get college degrees, as proposed by the congressional right? Fine, we'll make sure that those inmates are released to their own neighborhoods tormented with unhealed rage." Id. at 323-324.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1997, edited with an introduction by Ian Frazier (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) (From Verlyn Klinkenborg, "We Are Still Only Human" (originally from The New York Times Magazine, 1996): "For in reality this is a brutally impolite world where bad intentions frequently prevail, and nothing is going to change that, certainly not the passing of another hundred years. It is common to talk about the twentieth century as though it were an aberration in human history, unique in the suffering it has created. It is common to cite the Armenian massacres in the early century, the world wars, the Holocaust, to adduce Stalin's crimes and to name Bosnia and Rwanda as evidence of this century's peculiar offenses against humanity. But only the tools have changed. All of human history has been an offense, of one kind or another, against humanity. What's shocking about this century isn't the evil or the unusal efficiency of its most malevolent actors. It is the collaboration in indifference, the spiritual profiteering of the intentionless masses who are paving a road to hell with politieness." "Looking back over this century, you realize that humanity is capable of being governed but incapable of governing itself. Most visions of the future I have come across, utopian and dystopian alike, have tended to look like pure projections of will, of self-governance, not projections of drift. But any vision of the future that depends in the collective interdependent self-governance of this species is essentially a delusion, for what most people contribute to their own governance is resignation. Humanity is the occasion of its own suffering. It suffers far more capably than it reasons. It endures more readily than it acts. It seems to abide without changing. The illusion of the future is that it will contain things no one has ever seen before instead of the very things we have chosen not to notice or remember, But the future will be erected from the same raw materials as the past, and whether that prospest depresses you or not depends on how you assess our native substance." Id. at 67, 67-68.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1998, edited and with an Introduction by Cynthia Ozick (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998) (From Joseph Epstein, "Will You Still Feed Me?" (originally from The American Scholar, 1997): "I am, I fear, a sucker for the notion, first formulated by Novalis, that character is destiny. I feel reassured when people of strong character win out and people of poor character go down the drink. Evidence of a clean cause-and-effect relation clears the intellectual sinuses. Unfortunately, too often people of good character also go down the drink--for want of energy or because of bad breaks and crucially mistaken decisions--while the shoddy, the dreary, and the miscreants flourish, as the Greeks said, like the green bay tree. Naturally, I ascribe my own little successes in life to good character, though such character as I have is owing to my wish to avoid guilt and shame and to the loss, family early in life, of my taste for serious delinquency." Id. at 102, 113.).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 1999, edited and with an Introduction by Edward Hoagland (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999) (From David Quammen, "Planet of Weeds" (originally from Harper's Magazine, 1998): "Some people will tell you that we as a species, Homo sapiens, the savvy ape, all 5.9 billion of us in our collective impact, are destroying the world. Me, I won't tell you that, because 'the world' is so vague, whereas what we are or aren't destroying is quite specific. Some people will tell you that we are rampaging suicidally toward a degree of global wreckage that will result in our own extinction. I won't tell you that either. Some people say that the environment will be the paramount political and social concern of the twenty-first century, but what they mean by 'the environment' is anyone's guess. Polluted air? Polluted water. Acid rain? A frayed skein of ozone over Antarctica? Greenhouse gases emitted by smokestacks and cars? Toxic wastes? None of these concerns is the big one, paleontological in scope, though some are more closely entangled with it than others. If the world's air is clean for humans to breathe but supports no birds or butterflies, if the world's waters are pure for humans to drink but contain no fish or crustaceans or diatoms, have we solved our environmental problems? Well, I suppose so, at least as environmentalism is commonly construed. That clumsy, confused, and presumptuous formulation 'the environment' implies viewing air, water, soil, forests, rivers swamps, desserts, and oceans as merely a milieu within which something important is set: human life, human history. But what's at issue in fact is not an environment; it's a living world." "Here instead is what I'd like to tell you: The consensus among conscientious biologists is that we're headed into another mass extinction, a vale of biological impoverishment commensurate with the big five. Many experts remain hopeful that we can brake that decent but my own view is that we're likely to go all the way down. . . . " Id. at 212,, 214-215. "The concept of mass extinction implies a biological crisis that spanned large parts of the planet and, in a relatively short time, eradicated a sizable number of species from a variety of groups. There's no absolute threshold of magnitude, and dozens of different episodes in geologic history might qualify, but five if ones stand out: Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic Cretaceous, . . . In between these five episodes occurred some lesser mass extinctions, and throughout the intervening lulls extinction continues, too--but at a much slower pace, known as a background rate, claiming only about one species in any major group every million years. At the background rate, extinction is infrequent enough to be counterbalanced by the evolution of new species. zEach of the five major episodes, in contrast, represents a drastic net loss of species diversity, a deep trough of biological impoverishment form which earth only slowly recovered. How long is the lag between a nadir of impoverishment and a recovery to ecological fullness? . . . [R[ough estimates run to 5 to 10 million years. . . . Id. at 213-214. Again, we are likely to be on our way all the way down!!!).
Robert Atwan, ser. ed., The Best American Essays 2000, edited and with an Introduction by Alan Lightman (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000) (From Andrew Sullivan, "What's So Bad About hate?" (originally from The New York Times Magazine, 1999): "I wonder what was going on in John William King's head two years ago when he tied James Byrd, Jr.'s feet to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him three mile down a road in rural Texas. King and two friends had picked up Byrd, who was black, when he was walking home, half drunk, from a party. As part of a bonding ritual in their fledging white supremacists group, the three men took Byrd to a remote part of town, beat him, and chained his legs together before attaching them to the truck. Pathologists at King's trial testified that Byrd was probably alive and conscious until his body finally hit a culvert and spit in two. When King was offered a chance to say something to Byrd's family at the trial, he smirked and uttered an obscenity." "We know all these details now, many months later. We know quite a large amount about what happened before and after. But I am still drawn, again and again, to the flash of ignition, the moment when fear and loathing became hate, the instant of transformation when King became hunter and Byrd became prey." "What was that? And what was it when Buford Furrow, Jr., long-time member of the Aryan Nations, calmly walked up to a Filipino-American mailman he happened to spot, asked him to mail a letter, and then shot him at point-blank range? Or when Russell Henderson beat Matthew Shepard, a young gay man, to a pulp, removed his shoes, and then, with the help of a friend, tied him to a post, like a dead coyote, to warn off others." "For all our documentation of those crimes and others, our political and moral disgust at them, our morbid fascination with them, our sensitivity to their social meaning, we seem at times to have no better idea now than we ever had of what exactly they were about. About what that moment means when, for some reason or other, one human being asserts absolute, immutable superiority over another. About not the violence, but what the violence expresses. About what--exactly--hate is. And what our own part in it may be." Id. at 182, 182-183.).
