What a time to be alive! Everywhere but especially in America. What I personally appreciate is to see that although the political life is failing on people, voices of intellectuals are raising. And there are so many situations right now when public voices are needed, more than ever.
In her collection of essays Call Them by Their True Names, Rebecca Solnit offers not only an example of engagement, but shares also pieces of well-documented and courageous journalism. Organised as a diary-like, those essays are testimonies of the many American crisis of the last and current century. She documents police brutality in San Franscisco, the resurgence of homelesness, the police brutality - that did not start with George Floyd and has a very long history in the recent American history - the unfinished war of statues and the omnipresence of the confederate flag. Solnit shows new angles of recurrent topics, especially right now in an electoral year in America. For instance, does anyone wander what will happen if all the undocumentend residents of NYC - that, in comparison to Donald Trump, pay taxes regularly therefore do have a valuable contribution to the local budgets - will leave? She also partially explains the conflictual position of the American authorities - not only during Trump administration - about climate change, as a thrive towards a historical isolationism the USA is encouraging.
But there is much to be said and written about the crisis, the American crisis, and I wished that Solnit, as many other public intellectuals, are more critical about the failures of the Democrats as well, including adored people like Clinton and Obama because this is how a public intellectual should be. Courageous to expose the failures wherever they are.
I´m an optimist though, that there are more and more engaged members of the American society ready to raise their voices. Maybe for the first time after the end of the 60s and the Vietnam War, the idealists are back.
Rating: 3 stars
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