I’ve been watching Trump’s twitter posts with a kind of giddy revulsion. For the last eighteen months I’ve been working on a novel about a renegade CEO trying to overthrow the government in the name of patriotism. Trump’s ascendance is sort of an eerie validation of my writer’s sixth sense.
Of course that kind of thrill only lasts so long … I hate zealots, of every stripe. The more extreme the position, the more difficult it is to negotiate a compromise. Without compromise there can be no progress as a society. And we’re about up to our necks in examples of how this kind of behavior impedes our ability to coexist.
My first two novels WOMAN KING AND DARK HORSE feature a secret group of supernatural beings that fight extremism in politics to try to save humanity from itself. 48 STATES, the novel I’m working on now, uses a mildly dystopian landscape to contemplate how little difference there is in zealots when mass destruction is their goal.
There has been so little distinction between fact and fiction lately that it can be hard to tell what the hell is happening. Are we watching a fiction unfold or the real actions of a man who will hold the office of President? And then came Trump’s New Year’s Eve tweet in which he thanked his friends and reminded his enemies of how badly he’d beaten them…and my finger itched to send out a reply:
@The Real Donald Trump You’re the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.
The quote is from The Manchurian Candidate, a 1962 political thriller featuring the brainwashed son of a prominent senator. Kidnapped during the Korean War, Raymond Shaw is groomed to do the bidding of China and Russia on command. His task: kill off the current presidential candidate to make room for their stooge, who in this case ironically happens to be a rabid, communist hunter intent on naming names, no matter the cost. With their man in the White House, there is no end to the communist’s influence on our policies and politics…
Weird eh?
As I said, it’s getting more difficult everyday to distinguish fact from fiction.
ED