 | American Stutter: 2019-2021If it's true that America has succeeded as a grand idea, then it may be inevitable that the country always has been in a state of civil war. Let's disabuse ourselves of the notion that the last five years were about the president. The last five years are about us. More than any decade since the 1860s, the 2020s will be about who we are. I began this journal at the intersection of manifesto & confession, notwithstanding fearful New York publishers advising that "its ferocity stands in the way of attracting readers." Other testaments bring you facts. I come bearing the W-W-Word, stuttered but not broken. "A howling yawp of a book, a diary that becomes a work of witness and reckoning, and an impassioned argument against the chaos of the Trump presidency and its hateful politics, the collapse of civility and common cause." "As he's always done, Erickson works as a cartographer. He makes a landscape. He sets himself down in it, looks around, tries to get his bearings. Every time he thinks he has, something monumental shifts — a candidate self-destructs, a marriage breaks up, an American Godzilla devours values the way the original destroyed fields and houses, and like an ideological version of COVID-19, cancel culture infects everyone the author thought he trusted. It's close to unbearable, the pain in this work, public and private. His novels have never flagged, but until now the absence of his voice as a political chronicler has a left a huge gap: dedicated prosecutor, hilariously slashing judge and, as a stand-in for the common good, the victim, who may be guilty too."
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