Finished this devastating book tonight.

I like this line, which is part of an overall theme he develops throughout the book about the nature of democracy:

Mary Lisa, a French teacher in a mill town who always had to go her own way, who now lives in just about the most forgotten corner of America, then managed to summon the transforming question of her culture, a land built on the revolutionary idea that the people are the sovereign, the bosses, captains of their own fate.

She said, simply, “But what do you think?”

I’m not as hopeful as he is, I guess, about the power of daylight, of honest accounting, to change our current course. Too many of the dreadful patterns created over the past eight years will be difficult to undo and politically impossible.

One last thing — I’ve read most of these books, Jane Meyer, Seymour Hirsch, etc. — and I read the Times pretty closely every day. But nearly every book offers another horrifying story I didn’t know about…dark side, indeed.