Back in the Saddle

 When I read Robert Penn Warren's classic political novel, All the King's Men, last summer, I knew going in that it might awaken a certain dangerous longing for my previous life. After all, the novel portrays the life of the minor league political strategist and advisor—expert in the arts of skulduggery—and, like all such accounts, it manages to make its Machiavellian protagonist seem a compelling antihero. I feared the novel might make me wish all over again that I had never left my previous job—as a policy strategist for a human rights organization; because where else would I find such a perfect combination of the dark arts of the political operative with the sense of moral purpose and fulfillment that comes from believing one is acting on behalf of a righteous cause? 

Indeed, I have often thought—in the years since—that I was wrong to ever give up that job. I probably would not have done so, had I been able to see the future and know that Trump would be staging a Napoleon-like comeback for a second round. At the time I left the organization, after all, Biden had been president for two years already. Title 42—the anti-asylum policy that was a hangover from the Trump presidency, and which was my bête noire for the three years of its existence—was finally on its way out. It appeared to me that American politics was settling back into an insipid rut of relative normality. To my mind, this meant that I no longer had to devote my energy to being a campaigner. The next chapter of my life didn't have to be about politics—it could be about anything I wanted. 

Now, of course, that obviously looks like wishful thinking on my part. Trump is back from Elba. And Biden has dreamt up new ways, post-Title 42, to interfere with asylum rights, in a misguided attempt to appease his critics on the right. So, the struggle will have to go on. I know that I need to be a part of it. And yet, I left the job that would have placed me at the heart of the next chapter of that campaign. 

All of this was starting to become clear last summer: I, like so many others, was gradually waking up to the fact that my work was not finished. Trump was not going anywhere. I would have to don my badge and spurs again; I would be forced out of retirement to take on one last big case. And yet—where were my deputies? Where was the place for me in the next round of the struggle? I picked up All the King's Men that summer, partly to get myself excited for my return to the saddle. But I knew—as I say—that it would also awaken powerful longings in me for the steed I once had on which to mount it. I wish I had that job again now, I thought. Perhaps this would be the wrong time in my life to read the novel; perhaps I should have read it while I still had a domain of practical action in which to live out the fantasies that it inspired. 

But no—not so. The rule still holds good in my experience that one only ever picks up a book at exactly the moment when it speaks to one. There had been an angelic voice in my head, just as there was in Augustine's garden, telling me at that moment: pick up and read! pick up and read! For the novel is not just about its protagonist's stint as an operative for the Huey Long–inspired political boss, Willie Stark. After all, this stint does not actually last very long, in the scheme of things—just as my time as a political strategist did not actually last that long; just as any career, no matter the field, is over in the blink of an eye, when compared with cosmic time. Rather, the novel also tells us what befalls the protagonist after he leaves this dream job; and it is just like what happens to all of us after we quit. 

In one episode, long after the protagonist has left his employment on Stark's staff, he calls up his former office. He expects to be feted as a hero, and to have people regale him with memories of the old times. But instead, the person who answers the phone is totally unfamiliar to him. No one there even remembers who he is. They have forgotten him and moved on. And why shouldn't they? Why shouldn't they?

So it was with me, that summer. So it is with everyone who tries to revisit a past chapter of their lives. All the King's Men, then, wasn't just about my past life. It was about my present life too—the life after the dream job is abandoned. The life that we still must live after the rest of the world moves on. What should I do now, the protagonist wonders at one point—spend the rest of my life sipping a cold drink under a beach umbrella? 

But somehow, I will just have to find strength in what remains, as Wordsworth said. I will have to find a new saddle, and a new steed. I just hope I can get one together quickly enough. November is approaching fast—and the odds are looking more desperate by the day...