The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself by senior BBC correspondent Nick Bryant is a frigid splash of icy water on the notion of American exceptionalism. It may help us to understand Donald Trump’s enduring, if frightening appeal to a large swathe of Americans voters.

Australian journalist Bryant spent more than a decade living in Washington, covering D.C., New York and the wider geography of United States political history.  Do you think that Donald Trump is a new phenomenon, emerging out of nowhere (or from down the golden escalator) in 2016, creating a host of troublesome problems, including savage internecine divisions in the body politic?  Think again. In identifying the problems we face today, Bryant goes back thematically to the founding of our country, its endemic problems many enshrined in our Constitution and never solved.

As writer William Faulkner wrote nearly 75 years ago, “the past is never dead, it is not even past.”  Bryant documents the fragility of our democracy from its inception, reminding us of Thomas Jefferson’s and Alexander Hamilton’s distrust of democracy.  Bryant’s succinct history reminds us of the many examples of the nation’s resort to violence, the racism written into our Constitution, longstanding culture wars and divisions between urban and rural groups,  the love of guns and moving them out of the hands of the militia to become household items, raging xenophobia despite the centrality of immigrants in building our nation, our intolerance, incivility and periodic intoxication with authoritarian types.

In criticizing MAGA ways and memes, President Biden has always said, “That’s not who we are.” Think again. Far more truthful to say, perhaps, that’s not who we aspire to be.

The author certainly gives the lie to the vision embodied in Make America Great Again. Bryant does write about America’s strengths, but his purpose in doing so is not to reinforce our mythology or make us feel better. It is, I think, to be clear-eyed in recognize the challenge of amending centuries-long problems and to remind us that, to respond to our better angels, to heal our fractious federal system, will require very hard work.

In Consent,  author Jill Ciment gets a redo of the memoir she wrote about her April/September relationship with her art history professor, Arnold Mesches.  The relationship started when the two slept together. She was barely 17 years old; he was 47, married with two children. Her first memoir , Half a Life, written in 1996,  was also about their scandalous relationship. Although their hooking up was in the newly sexually liberated  1970’s, she was underage, and he was guilty of statutory rape even though she had lusted after him before their sexual relationship.  Jill was the daughter of an equally wild single mother (roughly the same age as the art professor) and a mentally disturbed father, who had abandoned his wife and daughter.  Was she just looking for a father figure?  It’s a valid question.  That first memoir ends with the beginning of that ill-considered relationship, a time when Jill’s mother called Mesches a perv, and the couple was relegated to sneaking around.

Ciment revisits the relationship in Consent, in which we learn that Mesches eventually left his wife and kids and that he and Ciment actually got married.  That marriage actually lasted for decades, until he died at the age of 90. She was 60. They supported each other in their careers. Mesches became established as a painter. Ciment abandoned her early aspirations to become an avant-garde artist herself and instead became a published author.

Though always aware of the gap between their ages, their relationship matured into a tender, caring and long-term marriage.  Mesches and Jill’s mother became confidantes (she died several years before he did). In the updated memoir, Ciment now acknowledges the implications of the disproportionate power relationship she and Arnold had when she was so much younger. Consent is a thoughtful reflection on what gives a marriage staying power, and how what started out as an illicit hot sexual relationship matures into a deep, caring, mutually respectful one,  a tender and enduring bond. This book is a thoughtfully written second take on one person’s experience. It raises many questions about how we rationalize our youthful behavior, the decisions we make as we mature, and the uncertain way in which relationships can evolve. A very provocative read.