![]() It’s much harder to get ahead and achieve some measure of financial security and psychological security. Working people and middle-class people in America are feeling more beleaguered than they have since the Great Depression. The partisan divide has become so stark, you can imagine a conflagration is coming. What made you think of fire as a metaphor for America today? I felt that if America wasn’t yet literally burning, we might be on the cusp of its burning. Those words captured my mood, my feeling about what was happening in 2016. …Beautiful country burn again, Point Pinos down to theīurn as before with bitter wonders, land and ocean and the And I thought, Oh, that’s it - that seems like the right title for a book about our current situation.Later I found out Didion had borrowed it from her fellow Californian Robinson Jeffers, from his poem “Apology for Bad Dreams”: I was reading excerpts from Joan Didion’s very fine book South and West and came across the line “Beautiful country burn again,” which I think she wrote in reference to that season’s wildfires in California, and it struck me as a kind of lament. Why the title - Beautiful Country Burn Again? The millions - I mean, billions - of dollars. But like everything else now, politics on a national level has been blown up to cartoon proportions. And the role of money - especially money under the table, dark money. The role played by religion in 2016 - the way it was used and abused to manipulate the electorate. Was there anything about national politics in 2016 that made you think of the politics you remembered in North Carolina? So politics was in the air I breathed growing up. Their wives were political wives, and they were at least as savvy as the men. One of my cousins was in Congress for 30 years, and others were judges, county commissioners, and the like. My grandfather was in the state legislature. I come from a family that’s been involved in politics in North Carolina for several generations. In a way, you’re digging into your own past, your own memories, your own experience. When you launch into a book, you discover that you know things you didn’t know you knew. Were you entirely on unfamiliar ground as you started tracking the candidates? Well, I’ve just done what I’ve always tried to do in writing, and that is to be as disciplined and rigorous as I can in seeing the situation for what it is and finding the language to portray accurately what I’ve seen. ![]() With this book you have reality reading like a good novel. I knew your work as a writer of fiction but was not aware of your interest in real-time politics. Is this an aberration in American history and culture? Or is it the logical culmination of certain veins of American life? Now I had the excuse to dive as deeply as I could into the why of all this. PLUTOCRACY TRUMP SERIESAnd when The Guardian invited me to do a series on the election, I jumped at the opportunity. ![]() Donald Trump was doing and saying things no conventional candidate would have been able to get away with. Why were things happening the way they were? How did we get to this point? We were in uncharted waters. ![]() ![]() I have edited our exchanges for continuity and clarity.īill Moyers: There’s an emotional current running through your book that makes me want to know what you were feeling as you followed the candidates across the country in 2016.īen Fountain: I was feeling what I think a lot of Americans were feeling - equal parts confusion, frustration and anger, and at times hopefulness. He came up to New York from his home in Dallas recently, and I talked with him about Beautiful Country Burn Again. Fountain has given us an original, informed and deeply felt take on the forces and stresses bearing down on America. But here, too, is a finely spun analysis of how the two major parties lost their way, opening for an outlier like Trump the opportunity of a lifetime. Here is a feast of sparkling prose, picturesque profiles, historical perspective, sharp insights, and eureka moments - Donald Trump taking down Senator Ted Cruz for the latter’s smarmy dismissal of “New York values,” for example. From the roadkill express of the Iowa caucuses to the spectacle of Donald Trump’s victory, he tracked the strange mutation of American politics that surely has George Orwell turning in his grave and our founding fathers wishing for a second chance. In 2016 The Guardian asked him to cover the presidential election, a new experience for him. Both his novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk - which received the National Book Critics Circle Award - and his collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, were best-sellers. Fountain has a solid following for his fiction. It’s the boldest, bravest and most bracing book about politics that I have read this year. If you only have time for one political book this season, I have just the one for you: Ben Fountain’s Beautiful Country Burn Again. ![]()
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