Among the best and the worst of us, our Presidents function as authorized national identities and as symbols and figures of the American soul. Beyond the power to reshape us and our future through electoral politics and legislative action, those we choose as our leaders always have this more primary role in our society, and we may study their biographies as maps of our interior histories and the dynamics of our public and private selves.
Elected leaders in a democracy are unique in that the people have chosen them as representatives of themselves, and have entrusted them with the power of executive decision as the moral compass of a nation. Our representatives are also signs and representations of ourselves as individuals personally, and like our friends have been chosen to help us become who we want to be. As with the Hobgoblin’s broken mirror, we may read both our past and our future in their myriad images, and as role models and figures of historical forces they bear transformative power.
Like the gods of our dreams and the demons of our nightmares, one conjures and invokes a President with fascination and with terror.
To paraphrase the lines spoken by the incomparable Peter O’Toole in King Ralph, “To be the President of the United States is a responsibility like no other on Earth. You must become a symbol of all that is best about America. An embodiment of our history, our culture, our morality, our pride of achievement. In short, our ideal of civilization.”
“I’m afraid it’s a god’s burden to bear. Unfortunately, it must be borne by a human being.”
As we move forward with the Restoration of America in the Biden Presidency and the triumph of love over hate, let us remember the lessons of our past lest we be doomed to endless repetitions of our mistakes, but also to celebrate and treasure our successes and victories as maps of our future possibilities.
In this context I think of America as represented in Edward Albee’s iconic play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. My father directed some of his plays, and from the age of four I listened intently to their conversations during rehearsals beside them from a center front seat in the theatre, which interrogated Albee’s direct influences and references among his fellow Absurdists Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter.
The line of transmission of Absurdist elements in literature originates with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Nikolai Gogol, and Franz Kafka, diverges from the limits of Humanism with Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Witold Gombrowicz, Albert Camus, Albee and his ilk as previously cited, diverged from the main tradition as Nihilism in Samuel Beckett, Thomas Ligotti, and Kobo Abe, and continues today in the works of Haruki Murakami, Kurt Vonnegut, and Elif Shafak.
With a title taken from the song Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? in the 1933 Disney short film Three Little Pigs, where two of the pigs are convinced they’re safe from the wolf in their straw and twig houses, you know that threatening truths will undo the house of illusions George and Martha, emblematic founders of America, have built around themselves.
In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Edward Albee has given us the Great American Play, a mirror in which we see ourselves as we are rather than the illusions we have spun around and through ourselves as a defensive mask. It is about the historical and political consequences of a lie we told at our founding about freedom and equality in a government designed to leave systemic power asymmetries of wealth, race, and gender untouched and possibly to enforce them; about the human cost of unequal power and falsification as dysfunctional relationships, and about the implications for meaning and being when the personal and political realms of action collide and change each other.
Here also Albee leads us through a labyrinth of mirrors, a funhouse of distorted images, both comical and grotesque, images which capture and reflect, assimilating or robbing us of our uniqueness in infinite regress to steal our souls, which through his magic of seeing our true selves becomes a Hobgoblin’s Broken Mirror as in in Anderson’s The Snow Queen, fragmented images which multiply our possibilities of becoming human.
I particularly like the following lines, laden with satire of our falsification through invented histories and authorized identities, and influential to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra;
“Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don’t know the difference.
George: No, but we must carry on as though we did.
Martha: Amen.”
Do see the iconic 1966 film adaptation starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; I used to show it to high school students on day one of American History.
And I would say in preface to the class; Here we see images of the history from which must emerge to become human as self-created and self-owned beings; histories which we drag behind us like invisible reptilian tails, with legacies of unequal power and multigenerational epigenetic trauma.
I want you to seize these images and reclaim them for your own. Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
We are gathered here to study history and our place in it, and to interrogate our informing, motivating, and shaping sources as stories, to perform the four primary duties of a citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority, and to be what Foucault called truth tellers.
So, I have a film for you which models how to perform these roles, and this is where we will begin our study of American History, with the Original Lie which founded our nation. This is who we are, and it falls to each of us to make a better future than we have the past; to become a fulcrum, and change the balance of power in the world.
Here is a reading list of some of our President’s biographies as exemplars of our national identity and character as it unfolds over time, bearing in mind the relationship between memory, history, and identity as narratives:
Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, The American Revolution: A History, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, by Gordon S. Wood
His Excellency: George Washington, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, First Family: Abigail and John Adams, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us, by Joseph J. Ellis
Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution, Apostles of Revolution: Jefferson, Paine, Monroe and the Struggle Against the Old Order in America and Europe, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic, Independence: The Struggle to Set America Free, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, by John Ferling
Washington: A Life, Alexander Hamilton, Grant, by Ron Chernow
Valley Forge, by Bob Drury, Tom Clavin
Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer
Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution, In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown, Bunker Hill, by Nathaniel Philbrick
1776, John Adams, Truman, David McCullough
The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, Daniel J. Boorstin
Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty, by John B. Boles
The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington: A Life in Books, by Kevin J. Hayes
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, by Jon Meacham
The Virginia Dynasty: Four Presidents and the Creation of the American Nation,
The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President, by Noah Feldman
The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution, Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America, Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy, by David O. Stewart
The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness, John Quincy Adams, by Harlow Giles Unger
Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Reagan: The Life, by H.W. Brands
A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent, by Robert W. Merry
Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald
Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, Harry V. Jaffa
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Leadership: In Turbulent Times, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Lincoln Lessons: Reflections on America’s Greatest Leader, by Frank J. Williams (Editor)
A, Lincoln, The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant, by Ronald C. White Jr.
Personal Memoirs, by Ulysses S. Grant, Geoffrey Perrett (Introduction)
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, Colonel Roosevelt, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, by Edmund Morris
1920: The Year of the Six Presidents, 1932: The Rise of Hitler and FDR–Two Tales of Politics, Betrayal, and Unlikely Destiny, 1948: Harry Truman’s Improbable Victory and the Year that Transformed America, 1960–LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies, by David Pietrusza
FDR, Eisenhower in War and Peace, Grant, Bush, by Jean Edward Smith
Eleanor and Franklin, by Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor Roosevelt
Eisenhower: The White House Years, by Jim Newton
A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House, The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953, Lyndon B. Johnson: Portrait of a President, by Robert Dallek
Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy,
by Jacqueline Kennedy
America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by Sarah Bradford
All the President’s Men, The Final Days, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein
Richard Nixon: The Life, by John A. Farrel
A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, by Jimmy Carter
President Carter: The White House Years, by Stuart E. Eizenstat
The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter’s Journey to the Nobel Peace Prize,
by Douglas Brinkley
Reagan: An American Journey, by Bob Spitz
41: Inside the Presidency of George H.W. Bush, 42: Inside the Presidency of Bill Clinton, by Michael Nelson (Editor), Barbara A. Perry (Editor)
First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama: The Story, by David Maraniss
The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House, by John F. Harris
Living History, Hard Choices, by Hillary Rodham Clinton
A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, by Carl Bernstein
Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House, by Peter Baker
Words That Changed A Nation: The Most Celebrated and Influential Speeches of Barack Obama, A Promised Land, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by David Remnick
The Promise: President Obama, Year One, by Jonathan Alter
Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, by Joe Biden
Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption, by Jules Witcover
Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now, by Evan Osnos
The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, by Kamala Harris
So, lots of honor, courage, brilliance; even if I don’t agree with all of their ideologies, policies, values, goals and objectives. And, far more important than any relative alignment with conservative or revolutionary forces, unquestionably loyal.
In my world, you stand with those who stand with you; loyalty and the truth and bond of one’s word are the only inviolable principles and laws I honor, and no authentic social relationships or just societies are possible without them.
Glorious, our Presidents as figures of the selves we wish to become, both as ancestors to cherish and as opponents to match ourselves against in defining America and the future possibilities of becoming human.
And now for something completely different.
Peril, Fear: Trump in the White House, Rage, by Bob Woodward
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Siege: Trump Under Fire,
by Michael Wolff
Surviving Autocracy, by Masha Gessen
Fascism: A Warning, by Madeleine K. Albright
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, How Propaganda Works, by Jason Stanley
Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder
Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers, by John W. Dean, Bob Altemeyer
How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future, by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt
What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era,
by Carlos Lozada
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump
Trump on the Couch, Dr Justin Frank
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, by Bandy X. Lee
Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers, Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior, by Jerrold M. Post
The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control, by Steven Hassan
Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, by Rick Reilly
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America, by Philip Rucker
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, by Barry Levine
Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus, by Matt Taibbi
The Mueller Report, by The Washington Post
Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation, by Andrew Weissmann
True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump, by Jeffrey Toobin
A Case for the American People: The United States v. Donald J. Trump, by Norman Eisen
Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America, Proof of Conspiracy: How Trump’s International Collusion Is Threatening American Democracy, Proof of Corruption: Bribery, Impeachment, and Pandemic in the Age of Trump, by Seth Abramson
The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America,
by Jim Acosta
American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, by Tim Alberta
Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President,
by Michael S. Schmidt
Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, by Peter Bergen
The Best People: Trump’s Cabinet and the Siege on Washington, by Alexander Nazaryan
American Nero: The History of the Destruction of the Rule of Law, and Why Trump Is the Worst Offender, by Richard Painter
Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever, by Rick Wilson
Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump, by Michael Cohen
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, by John R. Bolton
Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House, by Omarosa Manigault Newman
It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, by Stuart Stevens
The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story,
by Joy-Ann Reid
Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, by Joshua Green
The Plot to Commit Treason: How Donald Trump Pulled Off the Greatest Act of Treachery in US History, by Malcolm Nance
Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, by Michael Isikoff, David Corn
House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia, by Craig Unger
The Apprentice, by Greg Miller
Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem, and Russia’s Attack on the West, by Luke Harding
The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West, by Malcolm W. Nance
The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency, by Sarah Blaskey
Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction, by David Enrich
The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, by Michiko Kakutani
Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,
by Brian Stelter
Audience of One: Television, Donald Trump, and the Fracturing of America, by James Poniewozik
Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? With Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton
Being There film Anniversary Trailer – the ideal American President, a tabula rasa upon which anyone can inscribe anything as a mirror of themselves
King Ralph film, Good Golly Miss Molly scene
(Just because it’s the most purely fun thing ever filmed. One day I will write a comparison of this and the film Being There as ideals of Plato’s Philosopher-King and the divergent forms of leadership in a monarchy and a democracy)
Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard
How to be an American President, or a man of honor and valor of any kind; go and walk with those who defy tyranny and terror and place your life in the balance with theirs. This is who we must be, regardless of the cost, for only this will reclaim our humanity.
Torch of Liberty 
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