These Dreams of You

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It’s a country that does things in lurches. Born in radicalism, then reluctant for years, decades, the better part of centuries, to do anything crazy, until it does the craziest thing of all. But it’s also a country — inherent in its genes — capable of imagining what cannot be imagined and then, once it’s imagined, doing it.

Six years before, another president, a white privileged Texan, swaggered across the deck of an aircraft carrier in a pilot’s jacket, a banner unfurled behind him proclaiming the end of a war that, in fact, was only beginning. It was an image that the country embraced almost as much as it believed it. Now, a black Hawaiian with a swahili name? It’s science fiction, Zan thinks. Or at least the sort of history that puts novelists out of business.