Beautiful Country Burn Again by Ben Fountain
I n August 1969, Jimi Hendrix played the Col Ballroom in Davenport, Iowa, just earlier heading off to Woodstock and immortality. On a snowy Jan day in 2016, Hillary Clinton was headlining, "hawking the politics of grind-it-out incrementalism" to an older crowd who seemed subdued but mostly satisfied.
"She was not blah," a small, elderly woman said.
Later that Sat nighttime, Bernie Sanders was onstage at the campus of the University of Iowa with Vampire Weekend, by and large ruining This Land Is Your Land in front of a shining-eyed audience of young believers.
Earlier that morning, in a schoolhouse basement in the tiny grain town of Hubbard, sleep-deprived children at a rally for Ted Cruz – a soft, smooth Texan with "the pare of an avid indoorsman" – held up signs declaring: "Don't Believe The Liberal Media!"
But the meridian depict was Donald Trump, performing a lunchtime set in the gymnasium at Clinton centre school, making his fashion to the phase "as ceremonial and stately as fat Elvis", promising a packed crowd: "You're gonna love me as president!"
That was the introduction to America's year of presidential ballot madness for Ben Fountain: a xiv-hour, 500-mile tour of the Iowa conclave frontrunners.
In his novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, Fountain put his thumb on the rawest nerve as he identified the precise moment American confidence in the Iraq state of war began to drain away. Football game, cheerleaders, capitalism, family unit, sex, death and the full general insanity of American life were all in the story of the returning soldiers of Bravo squad.
His eye for the absurd and ability to draw attention to the sheer strangeness of America fabricated him a perfect observer of 2016: when politics met reality Television, where penis size briefly became a measure of suitability for high office and where a candidate for the White House was revealed weeks before polling day as a self-declared sexual predator, and still won.
Fountain's essays for the Guardian, which I deputed, saw him motion from the snows of Iowa through Dallas for the opening day of the baseball season and on to the National Rifle Association convention in Louisville, Kentucky. In Cleveland, Ohio, his coverage of the Republican convention drew a directly line to Norman Mailer's view of the 1968 race, Miami and the Siege of Chicago. His yr ended with an examination of the benefits of large government in rural Texas, merely every bit Trump's anti-Washington bulldozer was accelerating.
Two years on, in the whirling anarchy of the Trumpian news bike, his election-year commentaries could have seemed faded, most quaint mementos. But in volume form, expanded, they live up to his own description: they are both a diagnosis of America's symptoms of stress and a record of developing crisis.
Fountain urged voters to "hang on to their brains" in the face of the phony. In that respect, he failed. He succeeded, though, in mapping America's convulsions as politicians played on fear, exaggerated virtue and traded in fantasy.
Funny and also horrifying, Fountain has spectacular historical reach. He draws upon the wisdom of a cast including Walt Whitman, the Who, Muhammad Ali and Hunter S Thompson.
He does not really intendance for politicians – readers volition leave the volume antisocial Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, Marco Rubio and both of the Clintons a little more than they did before. But he is also fix to telephone call out the sheer susceptibility of desperately educated and propagandized voters who fall for the cliches of political soapbox.
"In the arsenal of the phony, the politics of God is i of the deadliest punches to the sweetness spot of the American mind," he writes.
"What is it about the American graphic symbol that allows the long con of our politics to proceed and on, electing crooks, racists, bullies, hate-mongering preachers, corporate bagmen and baldheaded-faced liars? Not always, but often. The history is damning. Nosotros must on some level, want what they are offering."
He is unsparing in contemptuousness for the amped-up patriotism used to create the myth of American exceptionalism, the idea of a called country specially blessed and purposed with a earth-irresolute mission.
"It's the I-Love-America-More-Than-You smackdown: America is and e'er has been the greatest, always, at everything, and anyone who disagrees but doesn't dearest America enough. Which is political discourse as fairy tale, a made-up story for children.
"Instead of fantasy, how nigh this for a more adult and more than useful, formulation: America has washed very many great and noble things. America has also done many shocking and terrible things, always – always – in the name of doing practiced. Am I about to be disquisitional of my country? I am, and by the way the United states of america was founded on dissent, contrariness, critical thinking; if not for independent thought, nosotros might still be carrying water for the Brits."
After all the flags, fighter jets, AR-15s, baseball caps and patriotic tractors accept passed, Fountain reaches the end of 2016 with a couple of conclusions.
At that place is a demagogue in the White Business firm and Democrats helped put him there by becoming "not so much the champion of the working and middle classes as the party that made things worse a little more slowly than the Republicans".
And Trump, consummate salesman, "consummate New York asshole", won because he sold a racist fantasy of a dandy America based on white supremacy. The bad news for his hardcore supporters? The evidence of racial inequality will non close upwardly; it has been raised to critical mass and cannot be stuffed back in the box.
America had to remake itself twice to survive as a plausible constitutional democracy – get-go due to the crisis of slavery, then with the Keen Depression. At present, Fountain warns, America is again in danger of condign a democracy in name only.
"I wonders how close to hell we'll accept to come up in our own fourth dimension before a similarly desperate deed of reinvention is attempted."
bracewellcoved1963.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/16/beautiful-country-burn-again-review-ben-fountain-trump-2016
0 Response to "Beautiful Country Burn Again by Ben Fountain"
Post a Comment