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Living in a Sci-fi World
How the American Dream Became the American Scream
Honestly, if you had described this America to me more than half a century ago, I would have laughed in your face.
Donald Trump becoming president? You must be kidding!
If you want a bizarre image, just imagine him in the company of Abraham Lincoln. I mean, really, what's happened to us?
Not, of course, that we haven't had bizarre politicians in Washington before. I still remember watching the mad, red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy on our new black-and-white television set in April 1953. He was a brute and looked it (though, to my nine-year-old mind, he also seemed like every belligerent dad I knew). Still, whatever he was, he wasn't president of the United States. At the time, that was former World War II military commander Dwight D. Eisenhower.
And whatever McCarthy might have been, he wasn't a sign of American (or planetary) decline. The Donald? Well, he's something else again. In some ways, he could be considered the strangest marker of decline in our history. After all, when he entered the Oval Office, he took over a country whose leaders had long considered it the greatest, most powerful, most influential nation ever.
Think of him, if you will, as the weirdest seer of our times. To put him in the context of the science fiction I was reading in the previous century, he might be considered a genuine Philip K. Dick(head).
As I wrote in April 2016 in the midst of Trump's initial run for the presidency, he was exceptional among our political class and not for any of the obvious reasons either. No, what caught my attention was that slogan of his, the one he had trademarked in the wake of Mitt Romney's loss to Barack Obama in 2012: Make America Great Again, or MAGA. The key word in it, I realized then, was that again. As I noted at the time, he was unique in a presidential race not just as a bizarre former TV personality or even a successful multiple bankruptee, but as "the first person to run openly and without apology on a platform of American decline." In his own way, he had his eye " and what an eye it was! " on a reality no other politician in Washington even dared consider, not when it came to the "sole superpower" of planet Earth. He was, after all, insisting then that this country was no longer great.
Trump proved to be a one-of-a-kind candidate (not that he wouldn't have been without that MAGA slogan). And as we now know, his message, which rang so few bells among the political class in Washington, rang all too many in the (white) American heartland. In other words, Donald Trump became the prexy of decline and what a decline it would be! According to one recent survey, half of all Americans, in this increasingly over-armed country of ours, have come to believe that an actual civil war is on the way in the near future.
Think of the miracle " if you don't mind my using such a word in this context " of Donald Trump's presidency this way: in some sense, he managed to turn not just Republicans but all of us into his apprentices. And those years of our apprenticeship occurred not just in an increasingly crazed and violent America, but on an ever stranger, more disturbed planet.
Yes, once upon a time I read sci-fi novels in a way I no longer do and felt then that I was glimpsing possible futures, however weird. But believe me, what's happening today wouldn't have passed as halfway believable fiction in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
So, let me say it again: honestly, Donald Trump?
Our Liz
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