The Weekly Screed (#907)

Bob Mueller and me

By David Benjamin

“I think it is a mistake to believe that Trump’s supporters don’t see his lying or corruption. They do. But, to them, it is all part of the show and the lore.”

                                   — Charles M. Blow, New York Times

MADISON, Wis. — This week, I was in DeForest, Wisconsin, shmoozing about fiction with Olivia, Marlene, Michael, Ross, Betty and Betty’s exceptionally quiet husband. Since I became a publisher of my own books, I’ve been holding a lot of these meetings.

 

My purpose in these little excursions is to tapdance awkwardly and make folks curious about my writing, which — when I can get people to read it — does a better job of salesmanship than I can do by shucking and jiving. My wife reminds me after every event that I’m too modest for my own good. She’s right. My weak showmanship derives both from my Catholic-school training in Christlike humility and from literary habit.

For years, as a scrivener of lengthy, intricate tales that take months to gestate, I’ve labored in solitude. From all this lonely concentration, I hope to God that I’ve honed my craft and gotten better at it. But who’s to say except for me, until I get read by others? — which is why I venture to places like DeForest to bandy my words among strangers.

 

Still, it feels unnatural, barnstorming the burgs to do my little oratory soft-shoe. Would that I could just hole up with my keyboard and let my work speak for itself. I know I share this form of stage fright with a lot of fellow authors.

 

Bob Mueller is a prominent example. He had a job — like mine — that was wordy, lengthy, complicated and not always chronological. While he worked, he needed solitude, secrecy and fussbudget research. When he was done, ironically, his product was destined for global broadcast, mass consumption, critical scrutiny and stormy controversy — which is every author’s dream-come-true. Like me, Mueller’s compelling motive was to be read unanimously, then to be judged by the quality, thoroughness and power of his writing. He composed with the presumption — or at least the hope — that his prose would speak for itself.

 

Moreover, his clear intent was that his mission would attract successors. Others more comfortable in the spotlight would step forward and take up where his words left off, turning his message into the sort of decisive ethical action that alters society and might lend his writing a whiff of immortality.

For me, the equivalent would be selling the movie rights to, say, Skulduggery in the Latin Quarter.

Of course, Mueller was taking a risk, not just in writing but in foreseeing a positive response. Indeed, as author of more books than Mueller, I’ve seen my work stolen by strangers and stripped of my byline, after which my words were twisted to purposes completely at odds with my intention. So fared Mueller when Bill Barr upstaged him, reducing his 448 pages to 42 pusillanimous words and mangling his message beyond recognition or redemption.

 

Welcome to the book racket, Bob.

Attorney General Barr’s goal, so much easier than Mueller’s act of creation, was nullification — to make it all go away, as though Bob had never existed, to turn him into an author as obscure as I am.

One measure of Barr’s “re-framing” success was a montage of man-on-the-street interviews conducted by the incompetent TV reporters who get the thankless chore of snagging people on the sidewalk and singling out the most blurt-prone among them for use as national spokespeople. Predictably, these interviewees perceived Bob Mueller as a famous name without substance or personality. They saw him as a cipher somehow nefariously affiliated with anti-Trumpism. None had any idea who Bill Barr might be. What they knew was Trump. They knew Trump is guilty of virtually everything suggested by the Mueller Report — and far worse. And they confirmed what has been true since June 2015, when Trump came down the escalators, cheered by supporters he had paid to cheer for him:

Nothing matters.

These rank-and-file cynics-in-the-street confirmed that Bob Mueller is irrelevant. Nothing he could write, say or do will change anything. Trump remains on top, where we put him, and life, by the way, is still a shit sandwich.

One astute observer said that although “Trump is a despicable human being,” the misty Mueller revelations had affirmed his loyalty to Trump. Here was nihilism disturbingly blunt, but this Trump fan then compounded it with delusion. He averred that he prefers Trump to any other possible leader because he “has done so much for the country.”

In this soundbite, the incompetent reporter stuck to feckless form by failing to elicit one specific example of what the man-in-the-street thinks Trump “has done for the country.” Never has this obvious follow-up been followed up.

Invariably, the Trump believers buttonholed by red-meat reporters convey a despair that explains not only why they prefer a skirt-lifting grifter as their president but why they’re so incongruously smitten. They don’t believe they can ever do better in life than where they are right now — sitting on the ground at a shit-sandwich picnic in the rain, drinking piss-warm Budweiser and watching Kardashians cavort on a three-inch TV screen.

In contacts among the unread and unreading, the incurious reporters rarely squeeze from ordinary folks a note of optimism, or a sense of our democracy’s resilience.

 

For two years, however, optimism thrived in Bob Mueller’s cloister. He stuck quietly to the job. He did his duty so scrupulously that his probity, integrity and stoic discretion drove me just about crazy. He would not be deterred, nor cornered for comment. Nor was he drawn into dubious battle against an antagonist who prodded, hindered and slandered him at every turn.

 

Mueller worked in a cocoon of hope, building his case, biting his tongue, trusting that the rules would still prevail and that honor would somehow fight its way upward through lies, rancor and popular despair to regain its perch as the highest value in public service.

 

Bob Mueller has shown us — although we’re not looking — that we can do better than a leader universally acknowledged as “a despicable human being.” Mueller made it vividly clear that not being an indicted criminal is hardly an acceptable standard for the American presidency.

Bob Mueller has shown us, implied to us and written to us — in 448 pages that precious few of us will bother to read — that we remain a nation of laws and the law-abiding. But he hasn’t told us. He has yet to feel the same sense of urgency that compelled me to conquer my Wisconsin diffidence and thrust myself forth as my own mouthpiece.

 

Mueller’s dignified reserve has left the stage clear for the Twittertroll-in-Chief and his smarmy army of toadies. Like me, Mueller has a book to promote and, unlike me, a vast audience eager to hear him read passages aloud and answer questions about his prose style. On the other hand, his book’s already got a bestseller. He doesn’t really need to associate with Betty and Marlene.

 

So, let Mueller keep his peace already. He’s done his job.

 

Me, I’ve got to keep talking, tapping, making the rounds. As I’ve been doing this lately, I’m reassured that most of us have a rich capacity for discourse both both cogent and courteous. We can — if only we will — speak for ourselves, more thoughtfully than the microphone hostage in the street and far more honestly than the slumlord in the White House.