Chris Doyle

People have intellectual and civic obligations to understand the past.

I was living a crisis moment in time like the historical ones I’d found captivating since childhood.

Looking at pictures of Richard “Bigo” Barnett in the U.S. Capitol last week, grinning, his foot resting on a staffer’s desk in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and his arms extended, I recognized a jarringly familiar if initially hard to place tableau. Barnett appeared to be acting, according to Saul Loeb, the Agence France Press photographer who snapped the picture, “just sort of like he owned the place.” Where had I seen this before?

How should educators teach the election of 2020? No doubt it’s essential. Pulitzer-winning historians Eric Foner, Jon Meacham, and Doris Kearns-Goodwin have gone on record saying that this Presidential contest is epochal, that the outcome may well be challenged in historically important ways, that it rates as a high-stakes “crisis election.” The recent presidential debate put students on notice that the contest will be bruising; they’re fascinated — as they might be watching a car wreck on YouTube. They want to talk about it.

Summer began early on the morning of April 8, my 60th birthday. I had slept poorly and it took a few seconds to register where I was. Aside from the single mattress on which I’d tossed and turned, the room was empty. I woke, dressed, went down to the garage, got in the car, and headed for the supermarket.