Members-Only Article
From TPM Reader SR …
In the late summer of 1991, I was at the beach with my best friend from law school and another friend in the midst of an exhausted drunken bender following the bar exam. People who go through any kind of professional licensure or credentialing exam after a course of instruction, or, I suspect, a dissertation defense know the sense of complete mental exhaustion, the feeling of recovering from having one’s mind and body completely drained, that follows weeks and weeks of grueling, high-intensity cramming for a high-stakes, high-pressure, high-difficulty test. What follows isn’t so much celebratory as an almost sullen lassitude and very inward directed focus because the exhaustion is the herald of uncertainty about the immediate fugure (“did I pass?”) and momentous life changes ahead regardless.
Into this stew dropped the news of the coup by old-school Soviet hardliners against Gorbachev.