Ben Fountainã¢â‚¬â„¢s Beautiful Country Burn Again
I north Baronial 1969, Jimi Hendrix played the Col Ballroom in Davenport, Iowa, simply before 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 only more often than not satisfied.
"She was not blah," a pocket-size, elderly woman said.
Afterwards that Saturday night, Bernie Sanders was onstage at the campus of the University of Iowa with Vampire Weekend, mostly ruining This State Is Your Land in front of a shining-eyed audition of young believers.
Earlier that morning, in a school basement in the tiny grain town of Hubbard, sleep-deprived children at a rally for Ted Cruz – a soft, smooth Texan with "the peel of an gorging indoorsman" – held up signs declaring: "Don't Believe The Liberal Media!"
But the acme describe was Donald Trump, performing a lunchtime gear up in the gymnasium at Clinton centre schoolhouse, making his fashion to the stage "as ceremonial and stately every bit fat Elvis", promising a packed oversupply: "You lot're gonna love me as president!"
That was the introduction to America'south year of presidential election madness for Ben Fountain: a 14-hour, 500-mile tour of the Iowa caucus frontrunners.
In his novel Billy Lynn'south Long Halftime Walk, Fountain put his pollex on the rawest nerve as he identified the precise moment American conviction in the Iraq state of war began to drain away. Football, cheerleaders, capitalism, family, sex activity, death and the 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 describe attention to the sheer strangeness of America made him a perfect observer of 2016: when politics met reality TV, 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 cocky-declared sexual predator, and still won.
Fountain's essays for the Guardian, which I deputed, saw him motility from the snows of Iowa through Dallas for the opening mean solar day of the baseball season and on to the National Burglarize Association convention in Louisville, Kentucky. In Cleveland, Ohio, his coverage of the Republican convention drew a direct line to Norman Mailer's view of the 1968 race, Miami and the Siege of Chicago. His year ended with an examination of the benefits of big government in rural Texas, just as Trump's anti-Washington bulldozer was accelerating.
Ii years on, in the whirling chaos of the Trumpian news cycle, his election-year commentaries could have seemed faded, well-nigh quaint mementos. But in book grade, expanded, they live upwards to his ain description: they are both a diagnosis of America's symptoms of stress and a record of developing crunch.
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 equally politicians played on fear, exaggerated virtue and traded in fantasy.
Funny and also horrifying, Fountain has spectacular historical accomplish. He draws upon the wisdom of a bandage including Walt Whitman, the Who, Muhammad Ali and Hunter S Thompson.
He does not really care for politicians – readers will leave the book antisocial Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, Marco Rubio and both of the Clintons a little more than than they did before. But he is besides ready to telephone call out the sheer susceptibility of badly educated and propagandized voters who fall for the cliches of political discourse.
"In the arsenal of the phony, the politics of God is one of the deadliest punches to the sweet spot of the American heed," he writes.
"What is it well-nigh the American character that allows the long con of our politics to go along and on, electing crooks, racists, bullies, hate-mongering preachers, corporate bagmen and bald-faced liars? Not always, merely often. The history is damning. We must on some level, want what they are offering."
He is unsparing in contemptuousness for the amped-upward patriotism used to create the myth of American exceptionalism, the thought of a called land particularly blessed and purposed with a world-changing mission.
"It's the I-Love-America-More than-Than-You smackdown: America is and e'er has been the greatest, ever, at everything, and anyone who disagrees just doesn't love America plenty. Which is political soapbox as fairy tale, a fabricated-up story for children.
"Instead of fantasy, how about this for a more than adult and more than useful, conception: America has done very many swell and noble things. America has besides washed many shocking and terrible things, always – always – in the name of doing good. Am I about to be critical of my country? I am, and by the way the United States was founded on dissent, contrariness, disquisitional thinking; if not for independent thought, we might still be carrying water for the Brits."
After all the flags, fighter jets, AR-15s, baseball caps and patriotic tractors have passed, Fountain reaches the end of 2022 with a couple of conclusions.
In that location is a demagogue in the White House and Democrats helped put him there by becoming "not so much the champion of the working and middle classes equally the political party that made things worse a little more than slowly than the Republicans".
And Trump, consummate salesman, "consummate New York asshole", won because he sold a racist fantasy of a great America based on white supremacy. The bad news for his hardcore supporters? The testify of racial inequality will non shut up; it has been raised to disquisitional mass and cannot be stuffed back in the box.
America had to remake itself twice to survive equally a plausible ramble democracy – first due to the crisis of slavery, then with the Great Low. Now, Fountain warns, America is again in danger of becoming a democracy in proper name only.
"One wonders how close to hell we'll accept to come up in our ain time before a similarly drastic human action of reinvention is attempted."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/16/beautiful-country-burn-again-review-ben-fountain-trump-2016
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