This is a mash note.

is my invaluable professor.

These days I’m a full-time student. Partly, it’s my temper, partly my duty (if I’m going to talk about what’s going on I need to understand it), a lot my joy. I love my ignorance: it’s so vast, it ignites my days. I write to explore, not explain. Professor Richardson makes me think. Her daily posts – and Professor Krugman’s – are my fire-starter.

Her idea when she began filing her almost daily Letters from an American1 six years ago was disarmingly simple: view the day’s news through an historian’s lens. How does today compare with passages from our past? What might we learn from the similarities and differences?

History, like literature, consoles. It transports us from the fearful present to a harmless elsewhere – harmless, because it’s already occurred. Few have suffered like King Lear; his pain is almost too terrible to witness. But he survives – not with his life, but with something more precious: wisdom and grace. If Lear can, so might we. Likewise with history. Terrible things have happened in our past, many of which we conveniently forget. Professor Richardson revives them. Might we learn from past mistakes?

Her subject is interesting, her approach unusual, her relevance all too current. Her genius, though, is her tone. She writes amazingly. If you’re not in the writing game, you might not realize her skill. Her passionate personality seethes through her paragraphs, yet she never raises her voice. Indeed, the angrier she gets, the quieter, the more clipped. She doesn’t express her disgust, she makes you feel it.

Mine is a more flamboyant approach. I have fun swirling language into whirlwinds. I joke and occasionally big-word it, not to flaunt, but because I figure you and I enjoy the antics of expression. Language is my frequent topic, the art of saying. I have little information to impart, only emotions. When obliged to inform, I assume appropriate sobriety.

Professor Richardson is a professor. She patiently teaches, in language as clear as she can muster. Like any good teacher, she’s attentive to her slower students. Her manner is kind and pleasant, respectful of sensitivities. She aims for no grand effects. She is not, like yours truly, a clown.

Listen to this from a few days ago. (Almost any day’s will do.)

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedToday Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that twenty men who were awarded the Medal of Honor for their participation in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre would keep their medals, despite more than a century of controversy over them. The defense secretary who preceded Hegseth, General Lloyd Austin, had ordered a review of the awarding of those medals to “ensure no awardees were recognized for conduct inconsistent with the nation’s highest military honor.” Hegseth today called the men “brave soldiers” and said: “We’re making it clear that [the soldiers] deserve those medals.”

She does not fulminate at the ignorance and villainy of the Nameless One and his flunkies. She lets the facts speak for themselves. Reach your own conclusions.

Does she array those facts with prejudice? You bet, if truth represents a prejudice. Reason, science, truth, and decency deplore the knuckleheads managing America and the disdain is mutual. The Nameless One hates facts because they incriminate him. He hates the press for noticing his turpitude. He loathes literacy as his rage-tweets demonstrate. I’m quite sure he’s never read a poem.

Professor Richardson does not indict. She shines on today’s events the flashlight of history, so we indict. She’s also funny. The stupidity and mendacity she depicts would be hilarious were they not dire.

P.S. Please, please, please rally this Saturday if you can. The more people, the more potent the message, the more spooked our would-be tyrants. Sage Robert Reich explains why so I don’t have to. Do anything and everything you can to show up – and bring your loved ones and neighbors! In the end, it will be we the people, not politicians or pontificators, who will decide this contest. See you there.