Sen. Tom Cotton has a new book coming out next week, and while it will almost certainly be bad, I’m tempted to scan it and highlight the steamy parts for you.
His first book, “Sacred Duty,” came out in 2019, and sold pretty well. It even garnered a complimentary tweet from Donald Trump himself. Still, I hear it wasn’t very good.
Thank you, @realDonaldTrump … The Old Guard have served at Arlington National Cemetery & been the official escort to the president since 1948. Learn more about these remarkable soldiers in my new book, Sacred Duty! https://t.co/ALlwac9c7d
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) May 14, 2019
This gorgeous essay about “Sacred Duty” by Arkansas native Caleb Smith, however, is a worthy piece of literature. Like Cotton, Smith was born in Arkansas in 1977. Unlike Cotton, Smith chose to escape the South’s resentments rather than capitalize on them.
I admired the fierceness of the men and women I grew up around, their independence and their practical skill, but I feared the resentments that seemed to haunt them. In time, I came to harbor my own shame about Arkansas’s provincialism and its old-fashioned ways. The forces of secularism and racial integration and the more polite forms of civilization, even the law, seemed not to have taken hold, at least not all the way, at least not yet.
Now an author and Yale professor, Smith said he couldn’t stop thinking about Cotton’s book and the wildly different courses the two men plotted despite similar backgrounds. It was a “bad book,” Smith wrote, but it was a good jumping-off point to consider the role of place in creating an Ivy League neocon senator who accepts Arkansans’ ticket to D.C. but rarely deigns to come home for a visit.
Arkansas Times writer David Ramsey shouted Smith’s “American Death Cult: A Love Story” essay when it first appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books in July 2019. On the eve of another missive from our humanoid soldier senator, the essay is worth revisiting.
Admittedly I never read “Sacred Duty,” but I think about the essay it inspired a lot. With physical distance and the security that comes with living in a blue state, Smith accomplished the seemingly impossible: He found the one tendril of tenderness in Cotton’s entire being, reserved, of course, for his fellow soldiers.
Bonus: Smith highlighted the saucy parts, like this excerpt about an intimate ritual between soldiers that’s extremely fun to read aloud to your book club:
Putting on our ceremonial belts — or “blousing up” — was a two-person operation. The guidon bearer pulled the pleats of my blouse tight in the back, I buckled my belt, and then he smoothed the fabric under the belt and tucked away excess material. I did the same for him, as the other soldiers did for each other.
(Am I the only one who wants to know what happened next?!?)
Smith has his own book coming out soon and probably some classes to teach; he said he doesn’t currently have plans to review “Only the Strong: Reversing the Left’s Plot to Sabotage American Power.”
So far, not many reviews are out. Rightwing commentator Hugh Hewitt blurbed, “Maybe the most significant national security book ever written by a sitting elected official.” The Guardian reports “Only the Strong” teems with tough guy bluster and snide barbs at reporters and Democrats. Max Brantley put it on his list of things to ignore.
