Stephen King on Donald Trump: How do such men rise? First as a joke (Guardian)
This is very creative and clever; the master story teller at work:
Stephen King on Donald Trump: ‘How do such men rise? First as a joke’
He’s written novels with eerily similar plotlines – but how did Trump become president? The only way to find out: inject a panel of fictional voters with truth serum...
by Stephen King
Saturday 1 April 2017 05.00 EDT
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I had written about such men before. In The Dead Zone, Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins. He is laughed at when he runs for the House of Representatives (part of his platform is a promise to rocket America’s trash into outer space), but he wins again. When Johnny Smith, the novel’s precognitive hero, shakes his hand, he realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.
Big Jim Rennie in Under The Dome is cut from the same cloth. He’s a car salesman (selling being a key requirement for the successful politician), who is the head selectman in the small town of Chester’s Mill, when a dome comes down and cuts the community off from the world. He’s a crook, a cozener and a sociopath, the worst possible choice in a time of crisis, but he’s got a folksy, straight-from-the-shoulder delivery that people relate to. The fact that he’s incompetent at best and downright malevolent at worst doesn’t matter.
None of these people was stupid or evil. Potent truth serum forced them to say what they actually believe
Both these stories were written years ago, but Stillson and Rennie bear enough of a resemblance to the current resident of the White House for me to flatter myself I have a country-fair understanding of how such men rise: first as a joke, then as a viable alternative to the status quo, and finally as elected officials who are headstrong, self-centered and inexperienced. Such men do not succeed to high office often, but when they do, the times are always troubled, the candidates in question charismatic, their proposed solutions to complex problems simple, straightforward and impractical. The baggage that should weigh these hucksters down becomes magically light, lifting them over the competition like Carl Fredricksen in the Pixar film Up. Trump’s negatives didn’t drag him down; on the contrary, they helped get him elected.
I decided to convene six Trump voters to discover how and why all this happened. Because I selected them from the scores of make-believe people always bouncing around in my head (sometimes their chatter is enough to drive me bugshit), I felt perfectly OK feeding them powerful truth serum before officially convening the round table. And because they are fictional – my creatures – they all agreed to this. They gulped the serum down in Snapple iced tea, and half an hour later we began. My panelists were:
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/01/stephen-king-on-donald-trump-fictional-voters-truth-about-us-election?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=220079&subid=20993289&CMP=GT_US_collection
= new reply since forum marked as read
...but he's not addressing 2 major facts:
1. Donald Trump didn't win the election. It was all a sham and Hillary would have won a fair election (which we didn't have.)
2. The American news media insisted on giving Trump's candidacy a false equivalence that simply did not exist. There was never an equivalence between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The news media refused to do their job and call out the lies and inadequacies of Donald Trump, since DAY ONE. And why was that? Because they wanted the ad money, because Donald Trump was "good for business" - THEIR network's business.
Stephen King could not have foreseen in his novels the impact of "fake news" which was another aspect of the Russian intervention. So let's enjoy Mr. King's horror novels for what they are, and let's turn to smarter people like Rachel Maddow and her colleagues for the political analysis.
