I'm After A Snake And Please God

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.

I Think One Thing Writers Can Do Is Point Out That You Don't Have To Say Openly Racist Things, Like [donald] Trump, To Be A Racist Or A Xenophobe.

Someday, I Have No Doubt, The Dead From Today's Wars Will Be Seen With A Similar Sense Of Sorrow At Needless Loss And Folly As Those Millions Of Men Who Lie In The Cemeteries Of France And Belgium - And Tens Of Millions Of Americans Will Feel A Similar Revulsion For The Politicians And Generals Who Were So Spendthrift With Others' Lives.

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?

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.