One remarkable difference between Obama and Trump: the latter seems to have absolutely no sense of humor. The clearest sign of a dull mind.
―Stephen King
That thunder-clap sound many of us have heard reverberating in our ears in recent weeks is the sound of a starter’s gun, telling us it’s time to do something. That’s especially true for writers, who have a unique potential to counteract the dumbed-down, twisted-beyond-all-coherence, tweet-fed alternate reality of an impulsive narcissist President doing his best to chop up reality like a rich twentysomething in the men’s room of a Manhattan club chopping up lines bought with daddy’s money.
It’s great to get out and protest and it’s great to pick up the phone and have your voice heard, but at the level of communicating it’s not at all clear that anyone is doing much to hamper the demagogue’s efforts to twist the public discussion his way. Many or most of us are unable to escape the impulse to fight social-media propaganda with social-media facts, and that too is good, but it’s unclear whether it adds up to much if any impact, since we’re mostly just reassuring people who think as we do that we’re right to think the way we do.
We need to learn new ways. We need to invent them. We need to challenge ourselves to be more creative, more committed and more disciplined in using our story-teller’s passel of tools to help those who don’t want to see. Telling the truth in opposition falls above all to writers, who are better equipped than journalists to pivot and adapt and take on the important work of imaginatively conveying the truth of what we are facing.
It took a Scottish newspaper TV writer – Damien Love – to veer wildly from the ordinary to come up with the following deadpan TV listing for BBC One: “After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history. Sci-fi writers have dabbled often with alternative history stories – among the most common is the ‘What If The Nazis Had Won The Second World War’ setting – but this huge interactive virtual reality project, which will unfold on TV, in the press, and on Twitter over the next four years, sets out to build an ongoing alternative present. The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president. It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible. Today’s feature-length opener concentrates on the gaudy inauguration of President Trump, and the stirrings of protest and despair surrounding the ceremony, while pundits speculate gravely on what lies ahead. It’s a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we’re not careful.”
There is a difference between taking your anger and venting it via quick-hit social media posts and using it, like layers of super-heated magma deep underground, to power a scathing satiric vision. Trump is like a computer virus, hitting such a bewildering mix of dissonant notes all at once with self-satirizing demented glee, the satirist is disarmed. Think of it as a massive denial-of-service attack.
It’s not easy to sidestep all of that, but it has to be done: We need writers to take on the long-haul challenge of building fictional worlds that can help people rebuild a sense of sanity about our world and how we perceive that. This is not about Democrat versus Republican, this is about trying to get out the paddles and jolt the body politic so that our collective ability to think and function does not continue to flat-line ominously.
I myself have already since Election Day worked long hours on a novel, one with no Trump figure, but a book that responds to trends I see unfolding and imagines its way forward. I was raised on the idea that a writer’s primary mission was to explain the times in which she or he lives – and to quote Ricky Ricardo, we got a lot of ‘splaining to do.
Here are some key points on what needs to happen:
HUMOR: One problem with taking on the alternate reality of Trump is that in his impish way, he’s funny, and his critics are often morosely self-important and self-righteous. There is no room for anyone to feel superior here. We are all debased. We are all guilty. We are all implicated. So how about we see more self-mocking humor that on one level doesn’t take itself too seriously but on another, deeper level has high purpose and grand vision?
BUILD NEW WORLDS: The clock truly has struck thirteen for us, as it does in the first line of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984. From that amazing first sentence onward, the book explodes with alternate-reality megatonnage of energy. You can’t see the world the same after reading the entire novel. We need haunting works of alternate reality that shine an uncomfortable light on the truths that go with the bizarre developments of late 2016 and 2017.
DIVE RIGHT IN: I haven’t yet read Curtis Sittenfeld’s First Lady novel American Wife, but I love what she was up to with her fictional rumination on a Laura Bush-type character. Fiction can go straight at real people, in real time – I’d love to see a Martin Amis or Stephen King try to imagine one day in the life of the reality TV-star President.
Books just might be able to reach some of the people who have gone ostrich on Trump, saying they don’t care what reality might look like, they’d rather cling to their fantasies of what he means and what he’s about. To regain our country, we need to wake up a few and pull them away from the matrix – and that takes better fantasies, not dull repetition of facts they won’t heed anyway.
– Steve Kettmann
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