{"id":1438,"date":"2018-12-31T17:14:57","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T17:14:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1438"},"modified":"2018-12-31T17:14:57","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T17:14:57","slug":"fountain-beautiful-country-burn-again_091618","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1438","title":{"rendered":"Fountain, Beautiful Country Burn Again_091618"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/span><\/p>\n

Ben Fountain<\/span> was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina. A former practicing attorney, he is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, <\/span>which won the PEN\/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn\u2019s Long Halftime Walk, <\/span>winner of the National Book Critics\u2019 Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Billy Lynn was adapted into a feature film directed by three-time Oscar winner Ang Lee,<\/span> and Fountain\u2019s work has been translated into over twenty languages. His series of essays published in The Guardian on the 2016 U.S. presidential election was subsequently nominated by the editors of The Guardian<\/span> for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife of thirty-two years, Sharon Fountain.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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POLITICS\/GOVERNMENT<\/p>\n

Ben Fountain<\/span><\/p>\n

Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Ecco Books<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-0-0626-8884-2 (also available as an e-book, audiobook, and large-print paperback), 448 pgs., $27.99<\/p>\n

September 25, 2018<\/p>\n

\u201cNautonomy: the asymmetrical production and distribution of life chances which limit and erode the possibilities of political participation.\u201d \u2014David Held,<\/span> Democracy and the Global Order<\/span><\/p>\n

Ben Fountain pulls no punches.<\/span> \u201cThis wasn\u2019t Democrats versus Republicans so much as the sad, psychotic, and vengeful in the national life producing a strange mutation,\u201d he writes, \u201ca creature comprised of degenerate political logic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Where were you when you heard the news? You remember, don\u2019t you, whether you thought the news was fantastic or catastrophic? I do; I was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on a 787 bound for New Delhi. So, naturally, at 9 p.m. EST I began pestering the cabin crew for election news. The pilot resorted to announcing updates and when it was done, when the result was announced, I cried.<\/p>\n

I write this review on the day Paul Manafort pleads guilty to conspiracy against the United States.<\/p>\n

Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution<\/span> is the first book of nonfiction from Ben Fountain,<\/span> a former attorney, whose fiction is famous. You may not be familiar with Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,<\/span> a collection of short stories which won the PEN\/Hemingway Award in 2007, but you cannot have avoided Fountain\u2019s novel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2013 and became a film directed by Ang Lee \u2014 Billy Lynn\u2019s Long Halftime Walk.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI was having feelings. They weren\u2019t good feelings,\u201d Fountain writes. \u201cBy Thanksgiving, 2015, these feelings had crystalized into a sense that something new and ugly was afoot in the land of the famously free.\u201d So, The Guardian<\/span> newspaper dispatched him to the campaign trail to \u201cfigure out what the hell was going on out there.\u201d The result was a series of essays for the newspaper which eventually became Beautiful Country Burn Again.<\/span><\/p>\n

Much more than a simple expansion of that series of essays, this book is a triumph of reporting \u2014 a synthesis of research, interviews, observation, experience, and analysis producing a vital mix of politics, economics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and history. Fountain contextualizes the result with a \u201cBook of Days,\u201d preceding each chapter, which sets the global stage upon which the events of that chapter played themselves out.<\/p>\n

Fountain explores and explains and distills into what he calls the \u201cAmerican anthropology,\u201d which is basically this: If we believe freedom is a finite thing, then the perception of a loss of freedom necessarily means that someone else has gained more freedom by taking it from us, and the less freedom you have, the more likely you are to be exploited economically. Ergo, \u201cthe American anthropology, the two horns of a bloody dilemma on which the democratic experiment has balanced for 240 years,\u201d Fountain writes. \u201cProfit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation.\u201d If the boot is on my neck now then it must have been removed from someone else\u2019s neck.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwice in its history the United States has had to reinvent itself,\u201d Fountain writes, \u201cin order to survive as a plausibly genuine constitutional democracy.\u201d Those instances were the Civil War and the Great Depression. In the first instance, \u201cthe land literally burned \u2026 either the country would be reinvented as a profoundly different social order \u2014 with a redistribution of freedom \u2026 a resetting of the values in the freedom-profits-plunder equation \u2014 or it would be broken in two.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Great Depression forced a second reckoning: FDR\u2019s New Deal countered what Fountain describes as \u201cthe threat that unbridled industrial capitalism posed for democracy.\u201d In other words, if you are owned by your employer, with no bargaining power and no safety net if you fall, you are a slave in \u201ca new kind of bondage, a shell democracy that maintained the forms of political equality while abetting an economic system that denied the great mass of people meaningful agency over their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fountain believes we are now faced with the choice of a third reinvention or the death of the American Dream, in essence a crisis point of existential threat no less pivotal than the two previous reinventions.<\/p>\n

As Jon Meacham,<\/span> historian and author of Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush<\/span> (and many other books), says, \u201cSometimes it takes a novelist to capture a world gone mad, and it\u2019s difficult to imagine a better match for our times than Ben Fountain.\u201d Agreed. Fountain has examined the symptoms, analyzed the data, and offered a diagnosis of what ails us: \u201cFear is the herpes of American politics: the symptoms bloom and fade, but the virus never dies.\u201d (Thanks for that image.)<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve been paying attention, there is no new information in Beautiful Country Burn Again;<\/span> if you haven\u2019t been paying attention, then brace yourselves. Reminding me of Hunter S. Thompson<\/span> without the \u2019ludes, Fountain writes in a colloquial style, telling unvarnished home-truths with an outraged, acerbic wit. He has a gift for getting at the essence of a thing, recognizing Trump as a combination of J.R. Ewing and Tony Soprano, his presidency a reality-TV program taken to its logical extreme.<\/p>\n

Fountain conducts a consciousness-raising session and a deep-dive of a history lesson in electoral politics. He demonstrates cause and effect in clear, concise, and persuasive prose\u2014no magic here. No one escapes; Fountain takes the Republicans to task as well as Democrats, closing Beautiful Country Burn Again<\/span> in urgent tones with an inspiring moral case for what could be. Don\u2019t skip the footnotes; they include authorial commentary, sometimes in French, as well as the citations.<\/p>\n

The Fire Next Time, The Fire This Time, Beautiful Country Burn Again.<\/span> Possibly the most chilling sentence in Fountain\u2019s new book is, \u201cThis may be the most powerful medicine in politics, the leader who delivers a man to his natural self.\u201d Is the result of the 2016 election a product of our natural selves? I do not want this to be who we are.<\/p>\n

As disturbing and enraging as Fountain\u2019s subject is, it\u2019s a pleasure to read long-form journalism by a gifted fiction writer. I hope he does it again.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ben Fountain was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina. A former practicing attorney, he is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which won the PEN\/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn\u2019s Long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1438\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}