History I Know All Too Well

The past few weeks also saw me finishing Failed State by Seymour Lachman, a former NYS Senator, his sequel to Three Men in a Room.  Here is local "history" I know almost too well.  Lachman seems to be using this reprise as his best argument for a State constitutional convention, something that goes to the voters as an option to change every twenty years.  2017, I believe, it should be on the ballot.  I can already predict the vested interests of profiting from political positions will do every thing they can to preserve the status quo, where the chance to profit is preserved.  I assume the major argument will be that a convention is too expensive.

Reading this update to Three Men counterpoints Flaubert's claim that had the public understood Sentimental Education, there would not have been the events in the Terrible Year of 1871.  Had the public read Three Men, would New York as a Failed State go on unabated?

Ironically, "another chapter" in history has made even this sequel out of date ... one of the three men had is conviction reversed on appeal, the second is probably finished drafting his appeal on a corruption/kick back scheme.  The third man eludes.

I also read A Man and His Presidents by Alvin Felzenberg, a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.  I found it one to far removed from the man.  I've read God and Man and other books by Buckley and I missed his active presence and voice.  His one liners still zing as opposed to the Dick and Jane doggerel of current leaders.  Buckley was a mandarin (politics need more of them).  He might have been the author of a play who also doubles as the guy holding up the cue cards ... he knew he wanted a strong national voice not for the status quo but for the return to basic universal principles of humanity and governing, but he also was often able to put the right words as ventriloquist to several key elected officers.

I love the persona of "a thorn in the side" people, especially those who can see the good and the humor in a given course of rule.  Felzenberg lets that characteristic seep into the biography.  Such self-deprecation is sorely missing in Lachman, and in politics large.

I think to close the loop on this brief linked series of history, I will switch to Buckley's novels.  I'd like to see his marriage of positive outlook against recent world issues, should that really be evidenced and interpretative in his fiction.  Signing off to reserve a couple.