The fourth volume of Robert Caro’s immense biographical series, The Years of Lyndon Johnson was just published; it sits at number three on The New York Times non-fiction best-seller list. Entitled The Passage of Power, it joins Caro’s earlier entries The Path to Power, Means of Ascent and Master of the Senate. Such strong, manly titles! Each one is more muscular than the last, what with all that “power”, “ascending” and “mastery”. Without even reading the books (yeah, that’s not gonna happen) you certainly get a sense of Johnson; he seems like a marble statue ever shouldering uphill, a towering force of absolute forward momentum.
Which makes one wonder: what would the title of your biography be? I imagine my (sad, misguided) biographer coming up with Lowering Expectations or So That Happened. If someone wrote a biography of Crasstalk, I think it should be called In the Reply. Or, if we were feeling darkly snarky, A Very Sassy Disaster. So what have you got, Crassworld? What fabulous phrase could sum you up and send books flying off the shelves and onto e-readers?
Photo Credit Jain Basil Aliyas
