And yet, I am also plagued by a kind of disappointment, which I felt as well when paging back through those Clinton novels or recalling Newt Gingrich’s mid-2010s Brooke Grant trilogy (completely absurd but, I am forced to admit, perfectly serviceable), Duplicity , Treason , and Vengeance . A sinking feeling: Is this all?
Because we do live in a golden age of conspiracy, an age of stories, and it is a bit disappointing to get from a former top G-man little more than the interagency rivalries that 75 years of TV cops, courts, Feds, and spooks have already burned into our brains. The most powerful people in the real world jet off to private sex islands. Justices of the Supreme Court hobnob at the Bohemian Grove with weird billionaires who collect Nazi memorabilia the way others accumulate rare stamps or unopened Star Wars action figures. The Deep State. Pizzagate. QAnon. Discord leaks. Reality Winner. Chinese spy balloons. Drones. A.I. Robot police dogs. A pervasive sense that beyond the veil lies another veil, and beyond that, a realm of decadent secret perversion and lies, a stygian realm of occult amorality, vast unaccountable agencies of secrets and death and war directing the vast energies of history toward some Luciferian end, while we poor proles labor under the illusions of free will, of self-determination, of democracy, or agency.
How sorry it is to discover that after eight years as president, or years as secretary of state or director of the FBI, the tales they produce are the same fantasies as any schlub watching Air Force One.
How deflating, then, to discover that the most these semiretired potentates of the great secret machinery of government can imagine amounts to a rip-off of more professionally written TV shows and mid-tier Hollywood action properties! How sorry it is to discover that after eight years as president, or after being the most powerful man in Congress, or years as secretary of state or director of the FBI, the tales they produce—the fantasies of those who actually held such power, who knew all the secrets—are the same fantasies as any schlub watching Air Force One while he irons shirts in an airport Sheraton on his way to a sales conference. It is as if Dan Brown rushed his wild investigators into the heart of the Vatican to discover only that the pope eats Cheerios for breakfast and enjoys reruns of Friends.
Of course, it might all be a feint: the dullness, the limited stories, the banality . It could all be a form of camouflage, to render the romanced dream lives of our rulers so utterly quotidian that we cease to wonder about the actual reality that must lie beneath. But somehow I don’t think so. They are all as depressingly ordinary as they appear; they have the same pop-culture-saturated ideas about terrorism, the Mafia, the cops, the spies, the operators, as the rest of us, chatbots endlessly recombining the same familiar stories in slightly different order. “He was one of us,” the poet Robert Lowell said of Mussolini, “Only, pure prose, and less miraculous.” Isn’t that sad? That at the end of the day, none of our great and powerful have much to reveal, and they are all exactly, depressingly, precisely what they appear to be.
