I make no claim to have read or even started anything like all of these or even half (maybe a quarter?)

OK: Here's a potential looooooong class on American Books to trace what they foretold for the present day

The American Revolution/Radicalism in the American Revolution/Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Writings of Ben Franklin/Writings of Thomas Jefferson

Rights of Man/Constitution

Federalist Papers

The Story of Ameriacn Freedom

McCullogh/Ellis

Democracy in America/Emerson Essays

American Genocide/The Spirited Resistance

Walden/Little Women

Poe

Hawthorne

Moby Dick

Leaves of Grass

American Slavery 1619-1877/The Half Has Never Been Told

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass/Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Dickinson

Twain

James

William James/John Dewey

Up From Slavery/The Souls of Black Folk

Civil War Historiography: Shelby Foote

Battle Cry of Freedom/Republic of Suffering

Memoirs of Ulysses Grant

Reconstruction/Slavery by Another Name

Race and Reunion/Confederate Reckoning

The Education of Henry Adams

Varieties of Religious Expreience/Theory of the Leisure Class

The Strange Career of Jim Crow

House of Mirth/The Awakening

Oz

The Jungle

Frost

Eliot

Stevens

To End All Wars/Ten Days that Shook the World

Yid Lit

Winesburg, Ohio/The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Dreiser

USA Trilogy/Studs Lonigan

Cather

Gatsby

Hemingway

Faulkner

O'Neill

Tin Pan Alley

Porter

The Gershwins

Harlem Renaissance

Hank Williams/Robert Johnson

Coming of Age in Samoa/The Good Earth

The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order

Their Eyes Were Watching God/Gone With the Wind

Lubitsch

Studio Hollywood

The Maltese Falcon/The Long Goodbye

Our Town

Steinbeck

Woodie Guthrie

Nathaniel West

Mercury Theater

The Mankiewicz Brothers

Hiroshima/The Making of the Atomic Bomb

All the King's Men/Let us Now Praise Famous Men

The Liberal Imagination/The Vital Center

An American Dilemma/Notes of a Native Son 

Invisible Man/Native Son

Autobiography of Malcolm X/To Kill a Mockingbird

Billy Wilder

Nabokov

Tennessee/Miller

The Beats

Bradbury/Vonnegut

Serling

Dick

Sid Caesar I

Sid Caesar II

Foundation/Dune

The Public Burning

The Double Helix/The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male/My Fight for Birth Control

Charlotte's Web/Catcher in the Rye

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

New York Intellectuals (the liberals)

New York Intellectuals (the conservatives)

Hofstadter

Niebuhr

One Hit Wonders

Rand

A Theory of Justice/Anarchy, State and Utopia

Didion

The Feminine Mystique/The Bell Jar

The Affluent Society/Capitalism and Freedom

Silent Spring/Nature's Metropolis 

The Sixth Extinction/Guns, Germs and Steel

O'Connor

A Confederacy of Dunces 

Bellow

Baldwin

Capote

Chuck Berry/James Brown

The Guns of August/The Vital Center

Contours of American History

The Life and Death of American Cities

The Tragedy of American Diplomacy/US Foreign Policy (Lippmann)

Dylan

Robert Hayden

Paul Simon/Lou Reed

Dispatches/The Things They Carried

Chomsky

Strauss and Bloom

Junky/Naked Lunch

In Cold Blood/The Executioner's Song

The Seven Story Mountain/Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Children of Crisis/The Road Less Travelled

Sondheim

Cosby (you gotta include him)

Tom Wolfe

Gore Vidal

The Goldmans

Altman

Joan Rivers

Edward Said

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee/Bless Me Ultima 

The Killer Angels/The Judas Field

The Woman Warrior/

Orientalism/Hidden from History

A People's History of the United States/Gender and the Politics of History

And the Band Played On/Angels in America

The Emperor of All Maladies/Plagues and Peoples

Springsteen/Randy Newman

Pryor

Cormac McCarthy

Coppola/Scorsese

Stephen King

Roth

Caro

Carlin

Le Guin

Shel Silvestein

Structure of Scientific Revolutions/The Mismeasure of Man

The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

Pynchon

DeLillo

Morrison 

Robinson

Spike Lee

Angels

DFW

Seinfeld

The Simpsons

Tarantino/PT Anderson

Richard Linklater

Coen Brothers

Chris Rock/Dave Chappelle

American Holocaust/The American Age

Seeing Like a State/Why Americans Hate Welfare

Imperial Life in the Emerald City/Assassin's Gate

Demoracy's Discontent/Bowling Alone

The Age of Blogging

Naomi Klein/Jeffrey Sachs

1491/1493

Lawrence Lessig and Internet Freedom

Mary Oliver

The Sopranos

David Simon

The Graphic Novel 

Robin Williams

Franzen/Saunders

Dreams of My Father/The Color of Water

Hillbilly Elegy/The Liar's Club

Intersectional Feminism: Audre Lorde/bellhooks

The Omnivore's Dilemma/Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Kindred/The Fifth Season

The Looming Tower/Falling Man

Reservation Blues/Ceremony

Barbara Ehrenreich/Arlie Hochschild

Michael Lewis

Unequal Democracy

Mad Men

The Warmth of Other Suns

Far From the Tree/Random Family

The New Jim Crow/Evicted

CK

GRRM

Veep

Between the World and Me

Demon Copperhead

Mulaney

The Story of American Freedom/These Truths

Colson Whitehead

I dunno...

 I find myself a blank for what to write lately and haven't written much. My health's been terrible, first mental, then physical shortly after I felt better. I wish I'd done so much more in the leadup to this election, volunteer, knock on doors, make phonecalls, everything I've wished everybody else to do I've done a horrendous job mysef.

But even were I better, it escapes me how one can choose what to write when the world wafts in so many directions that there is no keeping abreast of all its developments. What happens tomorrow is so historic that the mind draws a blank for teasing out all its possibilities. All I can say is that had I the mental effort to think about it lately, I'd be scared. But I don't, so it all just seems up to some higher being, and we're just waiting for a decree out of our control.

Democracy should never be this dramatic.