The agony of what it means to be living American politics today is captured beautifully,hauntingly,tellingly by David Finkel,a staff writer atThe Washington Post,winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Yemen,and author of two books from his coverage of the war in Iraq,The Good Soldiers andThank You for Your Service.
An American Dreamer reads like a novel,which makes the stories he relates so intimate and compelling. But this is non-fiction journalism “about being an American in a country becoming ever more divided and combative”,with a focus on a small group of people in Georgia who are grasping at the decaying threads of America’s democracy and “united in the belief that their beloved country was fracturing”.
David Finkel when he was reporting from Iraq. His new book sees the US through the eyes of a 28-year veteran of the army.
All the people and scenes course through Brent Cummings,who spent 14 months in Iraq and 28 years in the army,“all in the name of defending democracy,and now he wasn’t just defending it,he was in it,just in time to feel it unravel” as the narrative spans Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and Trump’s defeat in 2020.
What is established early,and makes Finkel’s stories so interesting,is that Cummings is a classic patriot,where service means commitment to the Constitution and democracy,and to preserving the legacy of union – the United States of America – after the Civil War. It is easy to draw a line from Cummings,emblematic of millions of veterans and the values they uphold,to General Mark Milley who,as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,refused Trump’s orders to send troops into America’s cities to put down civil protest and rights protected by the Constitution.
Cummings knew in 2016 that Trump was “a buffoon. But we all knew it was a gag. We were all in on the gag.” But Trump won and got the presidency and its perks. “How do you look at that and say that’s OK.”
There are small scenes throughout that capture the tension and the edginess. The clerk in the grocery taunting an immigrant shopper over “White American cheese”. A white woman spewing the worst epithets on social media to a black soldier under investigation. Black people being tracked by store clerks as they shop. Cummings’ wife uneasy about what she saw Trump “unleashing” on the cities and suburbs. A boating incident on a lake,where one man hits another with an oar and says,“That rage is in all of us. It’s in me,and it’s in you too.”
Anyone travelling in America can feel the rage.
Finkel is also prescient about geopolitics today. A late military career assignment takes Cummings to Jerusalem,where he ran a program that trained the Palestinian Authority security forces on the West Bank to improve security but with “crowd control tactics based on the rule of law and human rights”. That experience helped Cummings land a job to improve community policing in an exchange program with Israeli police. A petition leads to protests claiming it teaches police “how to kill black and brown bodies”. Years later,we see – and feel – the same protests regarding Israel at rallies across the world.
Cummings has extended conversations with his neighbour Michael,a quadriplegic,who is emphatically pro-Trump and warns that if Biden won in 2016,he would take the guns away. “You’re going to have civil unrest. That’s where the shooting starts … Biden’s not going to be running the country. It’s the radicals.”
Cummings is haunted by his combat in Iraq,with several traumatic episodes. They are in his dreams. The revulsion,fear and anxiety over Trump and whether he will succeed again brings his nightmares closer. The insurrection and attack on the Capitol on January 6,2021 made Cummings see that his war “was not over. It was just that it was here and now,not there,and the enemy was no longer them. It was becoming the American next door. His neighbour,Michael. Michael’s neighbour. Him. Anyone’s neighbour.”
The wars are being fought again today. The relief felt in 2020 that Biden won and Trump was defeated,done and gone was false. The abyss was not closed. It’s staring at us right now.
Bruce Wolpe is author of (Allen&Unwin).
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger..
