Jeff Sharlet, _The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War_

 I DIDN'T READ all of this, but I did read its longest chapter, also titled "The Undertow," which at 120 pages amounts to a substantial portion of the book.

In this chapter, Sharlet goes to Sacramento to attend and report on a memorial rally for Ashli Babbitt, the military veteran and Q-Anon enthusiast who was among those attacking the Capitol on January 6 and was shot and killed by a member of the Capitol Police. Sharlet collects some straight biographical information on Babbitt but is perhaps more interested in how MAGA forces went about shaping her into a martyr, even though the raw material was not that promising. This part of the chapter kept making me think of Horst Wessel.

The larger part of the chapter, though, is about Sharlet's drive back to the East Coast, a long highway journey with frequent stops to talk to people about our deepening national polarization, cultural and political. As a journalist, Sharlet is automatically suspect in the eyes of most of the people he talks to, but he seems genuinely to want to know where they are coming from and to report of them fairly--even those that seem definitely around the bend, like  the preacher who is convinced Hillary Clinton was put to death years ago.

The most compelling aspect of the  chapter, I'd say, is its "road movie" quality. The highway system is rendered as a region of its own--inside the United States, part of the United States, but semi-autonomous, a republic within the republic, deeply American but ticking to its own clock, living by its own code. To be on the highways for days on end is to become unmoored, and that unmooring becomes part of Sharlet's account. We no longer have our familiar bearings, no longer have much certainty about what the truth is. We're tethered to reality still--Sharlet needs to get back to Boston to get his heart medicine prescription refilled--but lightly tethered, and a gust of wind might slip the cord and land us in an America where everyone we meet is a Flannery O'Connor character in a Trump t-shirt...and they are in charge.