I Think One Thing Writers

How Many Really Great Writers Are There Who Are Totally Non-political? You Can Hear The French Revolution In The Poetry Of [percy Bysshe] Shelly And [john] Wordsworth; You Can Sense The Vast Inequalities Of Tsarist Russia In [anton] Chekhov And [lev] Tolstoy.

Ronald Reagan Perfected The Subtler Version Long Ago By Talking About "welfare Mothers" - A Code Phrase For People Of Colour.

You Know, By 1936, Hitler Was Already Talking Very Loudly About His Desire To Expand To The East. Mussolini, In 1935, Went And Then In The Next Year, Conquered Ethiopia, Acquiring Himself A Colony. So People At The Time Really Saw Fascism Not Just As An Evil But As An Aggressive Evil That Seemed To Be Spreading.

One Of My Favourite Contemporary Fiction Writers Is A Texan, Ben Fountain. His Extraordinary Novel, Billy Lynn's Long Half-time Walk, All Takes Place Within The Half-time Show At A Dallas Cowboys Football Game. No One Has Better Summed Up The American Appetite For Spectacle, The Link Between Sports And Politics, And The Absolute Madness Of George W. Bush's Iraq War.

Things Have Gotten Openly More Extreme In The Last Few Years. I Was Lecturing In Hungary, Whose Prime Minister, Victor Orban, Is An Example Of This Trend. All Over Budapest, Statues Have Been Replaced, Museum Exhibits Have Been Redone, To Turn Ethnic Hungarians, Not Jews, Into The Prime Victims Of The Germans During World War Ii. Five Years Ago, Who Would Have Thought This Possible?