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202 pages

English

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As Ben Fountain sees it, the United States is facing its third existential crisis. The first was the struggle over slavery, culminating in the Civil War. The second was the Great Depression, the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialised world, which brought about the New Deal. The third, is Donald Trump. But how will it end?Taking in America's love affair with firearms, celebrity culture, Russia, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Trump himself, Beautiful Country Burn Again explores how the United States reached a new crisis point and asks how America really can be great again.

Sujets

Histoire

USA

History of the Americas

États-Unis

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	01 novembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786892010
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0520€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Ben Fountain is the author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Flaherty-Dunna First Novel Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, in addition to being made into a feature film directed by Ang Lee. Fountain’s short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara , was a national bestseller and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award for Fiction. Fountain graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University School of Law. A former practicing attorney, Fountain has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and recently completed a two-year appointment as university chair in creative writing at Texas State University.
ALSO BY BEN FOUNTAIN
BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH CHE GUEVARA

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in the US in 2018 by HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Ben Fountain, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
Robinson Jeffers, excerpt from ‘Apology for Bad Dreams’ from The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Copyright © 1925 and renewed 1953 by Robinson Jeffers. Used by permission of Random House, a division and imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Also in The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Volume One: 1920–1928 . Copyright © 1988 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Stanford University Press, sup.org
‘Cross Road Blues’ (Crossroads), Words and Music by Robert Johnson. Copyright © (1978), 1990, 1991 Standing Ovation and Encore Music (SESAC). Under license from The Bicycle Music Company. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.
Photographs here and here used by kind permission of David Taylor. Photograph here used by permission of Associated Press. Photograph here used by permission of Getty Images.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 200 3 eISBN 978 1 78689 201 0
Designed by Renata De Oliveria
For John Issac Fountain and Lee Caitlin Fountain and, as ever, for Sharie
. . . Beautiful country burn again, Point Pinos down to the Sur Rivers Burn as before with bitter wonders, land and ocean and the Carmel water.
ROBINSON JEFFERS, “APOLOGY FOR BAD DREAMS”
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: THE THIRD REINVENTION
BOOK OF DAYS: JANUARY
IOWA 2016: RIDING THE ROADKILL EXPRESS
BOOK OF DAYS: FEBRUARY
THE PHONY IN AMERICAN POLITICS
BOOK OF DAYS: MARCH
AMERICAN CROSSROADS: REAGAN, TRUMP, AND THE DEVIL DOWN SOUTH
BOOK OF DAYS: APRIL
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND THE GREAT GAME: AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD
BOOK OF DAYS: MAY
DOING THE CHICKENHAWK WITH TRUMP: TALKING FAST AND LOOSE IN THE TIME OF ENDLESS WAR
BOOK OF DAYS: JUNE
CHEERLEADERS OF THE STAR-SPANGLED APOCALYPSE: FEAR AND LOATHING WITH THE NRA IN LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
BOOK OF DAYS: JULY
CLEVELAND FEAR FACTORY
BOOK OF DAYS: AUGUST
HILLARY DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
BOOK OF DAYS: SEPTEMBER
TWO AMERICAN DREAMS
BOOK OF DAYS: OCTOBER
THE LONG GOOD DEAL
BOOK OF DAYS: NOVEMBER
TRUMP RISING: KING DONALD SADDLES UP WITH THE WRECKING CREW
BOOK OF DAYS: DECEMBER
A FAMILIAR SPIRIT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CREDITS
INDEX

PROLOGUE
THE THIRD REINVENTION
2016 was the year all the crazy parts of America ran amok over the rest. Screens, memes, fake news, Twitter storms, Russian hackers, pussy grabbers, Hillary’s emails, war, the wall, the wolf call of the alt-right, “hand” size, lies upon lies upon lies and moneymoneymoney—the more money, the more lies, is this politics’ iron rule?—they all combined for a billion-dollar stink of an election. This wasn’t Democrats versus Republicans so much as the sad, psychotic, and vengeful in the national life producing a strange mutation, a creature comprised of degenerate political logic. The logic of this politics—the logic of the Frankenstein—requires ultimately that the monster turn on its maker. The logic doesn’t tell us who wins. That has to play out in the slog of daily gains and losses, but it would be hard to devise a more spectacular conflict than this high-functioning creature of American schizophrenia versus the very system that brought him to power.
To call Donald Trump a hypocrite insults the scale of the thing. Move far enough along the hypocritic spectrum and eventually you cross into schizophrenia, and nothing less than psychopathy serves to illustrate the magnitude of Trump’s achievement. In him we had a candidate who proffered family values at every turn, a man twice divorced, a tabloid-fodder serial adulterer and sexual trash-talker. “The least racist person you’ll ever meet,” he described himself, while animating his campaign with racist appeals so large and livid that neo-Nazis, the KKK, and the alt-right endorsed him in language evocative of second comings. After making his career as one of the most celebrated libertines of our time, he became a Bible quoter and toter on the campaign trail, this self-proclaimed business genius with a complicated history of bankruptcies, bailouts, welched debts, and dealings with mobsters. A draft dodger enamored of the military; macho tough-talker and finicky germophobe; champion of U.S. manufacturing, purveyor of signature-label clothing made overseas; and loud, proud patriot with a mysterious affinity for Vladimir Putin, one of America’s most dedicated foes. Trump the billionaire ran as a fire-breathing populist while offering nothing concrete or even coherent in terms of wages, unions, health care, or taxes that might benefit working people, though his tax plan promised huge benefits for the upper class.
None of this was hidden. The Trump disjunct flamed in plain sight for everyone to see, and he owned it with the coarse, loose-cannon style of the consummate New York asshole. All the stranger, then, that this star and symbol of big-city life should become the hero of the heartland, all those millions of wholesome acres of Bible Belts that truss the nation’s middle and nether regions. The guy from Sodom and Gomorrah was all right! His insults and earthiness were received as authenticity: here at last was a man who would stick it to the elites after all these years of eating their shit, the sniffy pieties about tolerance and diversity forced down your throat by the pinheads who’d figured it out for the rest of us. It was galling. It got you down on yourself. It made you touchy and weak where you used to be strong, then this badass comes along and puts it right out there every time he flaps his mouth, says all the things you wanted to say all these years as you lived in constant apology just for being who you are, diminished, depressed, bottled up, pissed off, a hundred fuck-yous a day muttered at Obama and his crowd, heavy weather from Washington all the days of the year. A miracle, the white man who says what he wants! Free, free at last!
This may be the most powerful medicine in politics, the leader who delivers a man to his natural self. To be acknowledged as you are, affirmed and blessed from above: one can imagine it as a spiritual experience. A profound burden is lifted. No more doubt, no dark loathings, only the certainty that you are good and on God’s side. Ecstasy isn’t out of the question. What greater thrill besides sex to be delivered to yourself, liberated from the bad opinion of your enemies? Something of that ecstasy could be heard at Trump’s rallies, “Build that wall!” and “Lock her up!” bellowed like Romans watching lions sink their teeth into Christian flesh.
“He tells it like it is.” How often we heard him praised in those terms. “He says what a lot of people are thinking.” Apparently so; many more than were willing to admit to the pollsters, though one wonders how strong white identity was to begin with, when the basic courtesy that’s the face of political correctness is viewed as a monstrous threat. If economic distress is offered as the socially acceptable reason for Trump’s election, the fact remains that many millions of his supporters voted against what seems to be their own economic interests. White women voted for him in spite of Hillary’s support of equal pay, along with a broad complementary agenda that promised help with the exhausting challenge—most of which falls on women—of juggling home life and job. Working-and middle-class whites voted for him despite his conventional enrich-the-rich policies (rants against trade deals aside) that have, among the poor and working class especially, stunted wages, shortened life expectancy, driven up drug addiction and suicide rates, and made upward mobility the exception rather than the rule. Trump’s election seemed to be the triumph of identity politics—white identity politics—over economic interest.
Then again, maybe identity politics is economic. Maybe nothing less than hard-core economic realism explains Trump’s victory, a well-honed popular instinct for how money and race have always worked in America. It must be said that many millions of Americans implicitly, and not unreasonably, regard freedom as a finite thing: to the extent that any group, tribe, cohort has greater freedom, others must necessarily have less. Then there’s the corollary, which gets us clos