The link above leads to a PowerPoint from an old lesson plan from the AP European History course I taught for nineteen years. The music, by the way, is from Thomas Newman’s incredible score for the film American Beauty.

As if you haven’t noticed, the current state of the nation worries me greatly, and daily, in my sleep and with my first coffee.

I haven’t got a handle on it yet.

Emotions today are as high as they were on the eve of the Civil War, when Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina nearly beat the abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts  to death on the Senate floor. (Sumner was a bit of a prig, by the way. Spielberg treats him with justifiable unkindness in Lincoln.)

But we aren’t as neatly divided geographically as we were in the Election of 1860. If you look at the electoral map for 2016, we’re two coasts interrupted by a continent, with Oklahoma its epicenter. We’re as isolated as what we used to call “Pakistan” and “East Pakistan” on the maps I studied in high school.

So the division isn’t conveniently geographic, as it was in Lincoln’s time. (Nothing else about Lincoln’s time was “convenient”.)

It’s instead deep inside our national spirit, and deep among ourselves.

The nearest comparison I could come up with, one similarly marked by fear of outsiders, of The Other—and, to be discussed some other time, by a deep fear of change— was not American. It was French.

It came from a conflict deferred from the Revolution, between tradition and modernity, between church and state, between advocates of  Blood and Soil and unaccepted national communities who were, ironically, passionately French.

There was no civil war in France. They’d already had revolutions in 1789. 1830, 1848 and 1870, so they subsumed their passions until 1894, when The Dreyfus Affair set them aflame again.

The Affair revealed a spiritual sickness, like ours, that tore the French nation apart. It tore Renoir and Monet apart. The cartoon about a French family dinner struck me as especially relevant to America today.

What I learned about the destruction of French comity has been made fresh again in my time, in the exploitation of a “caravan” of refugees fleeing from nations in Central America that have become nightmares. These are refugees funded, “many people say,” by nefarious Zionists. Like George Soros.

In reality, they’re fleeing from homes made strange and deadly by gangs, fat ticks engorged by our appetite for drugs, and from death squads directed by Central American officer-graduates from the old School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.

For my Trump-supporting friends: Do the research.

Somehow, thanks to presidential innuendo and sanctuary walls perforated by .223 rounds, we have woven anti-Semitism into what was already a story tragic enough to fill yards of dusty and unexplored library shelves at Cal or Princeton.

Our story, like the one in Dreyfus’s France, has a similar element: we’re blissfully unaware of history and of our own historical power. We haven’t read the books.

We exert, for example, an immense gravitational pull on Central America. I’m  reminded of Titanic’s screws turning for the first time inside the harbor at Southampton; the powerful current they generated nearly sucked harbor boats to their destruction beneath the great, and doomed, ocean liner.

The Mexican poet Octavio Paz got this idea precisely once:

“Poor Mexico,” he said. “So far from God, so close to the United States.”

So our current fear of refugees and the implicit but insistent rumors about the Jewish plot to fund them reminded me of the old fear of The Other, and of the Dreyfus Affair, which I’ll never understand completely.

The closest anyone can come to understanding the Dreyfus Affair, I think, is to read Barbara Tuchman’s treatment of the case in her masterful book The Proud Tower.

Even after reading Tuchman, my favorite historian, when I taught this lesson about The Affair, I thought it peculiarly and quaintly French.

I stand corrected.