Fountain - Beautiful country burn again: democracy, rebellion, and revolution

Contents

BEN FOUNTAIN is the author of Billy Lynns Long Halftime Walk, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, in addition to being made into a feature film directed by Ang Lee. Fountains short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, was a national bestseller and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award for Fiction. Fountain graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University School of Law. A former practicing attorney, Fountain has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and recently completed a two-year appointment as university chair in creative writing at Texas State University.

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BILLY LYNNS LONG HALFTIME WALK

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH CHE GUEVARA

Excerpts from Wichita Vortex Sutra [15 1.], Who Would Take Over the Universe? [14] from Collected Poems 19471980 by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Robinson Jeffers, excerpt from Apology for Bad Dreams from The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Copyright 1925 and renewed 1953 by Robinson Jeffers. Used by permission of Random House, a division and imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Also in The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Volume One: 19201928. Copyright 1988 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Stanford University Press, sup.org.

Cross Road Blues (Crossroads)

Words and Music by Robert Johnson

Copyright (1978), 1990, 1991 Standing Ovation and Encore Music (SESAC)

Under license from The Bicycle Music Company

All Rights Reserved

Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY BURN AGAIN . Copyright 2018 by Ben Fountain. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Cover design by Allison Saltzman

Cover illustration The Heads of State

Photograph used by permission of Getty Images.

FIRST EDITION

Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-268876-7

Version 08042018

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-268884-2

For John Issac Fountain
and Lee Caitlin Fountain
and, as ever,
for Sharie

... Beautiful country burn again, Point Pinos down to the Sur Rivers

Burn as before with bitter wonders, land and ocean and the Carmel water.

ROBINSON JEFFERS, APOLOGY FOR BAD DREAMS

Contents

2016 was the year all the crazy parts of America ran amok over the rest. Screens, memes, fake news, Twitter storms, Russian hackers, pussy grabbers, Hillarys emails, war, the wall, the wolf call of the alt-right, hand size, lies upon lies upon lies and moneymoneymoneythe more money, the more lies, is this politics iron rule?they all combined for a billion-dollar stink of an election. This wasnt Democrats versus Republicans so much as the sad, psychotic, and vengeful in the national life producing a strange mutation, a creature comprised of degenerate political logic. The logic of this politicsthe logic of the Frankensteinrequires ultimately that the monster turn on its maker. The logic doesnt tell us who wins. That has to play out in the slog of daily gains and losses, but it would be hard to devise a more spectacular conflict than this high-functioning creature of American schizophrenia versus the very system that brought him to power.

To call Donald Trump a hypocrite insults the scale of the thing. Move far enough along the hypocritic spectrum and eventually you cross into schizophrenia, and nothing less than psychopathy serves to illustrate the magnitude of Trumps achievement. In him we had a candidate who proffered family values at every turn, a man twice divorced, a tabloid-fodder serial adulterer and sexual trash-talker. The least racist person youll ever meet, he described himself, while animating his campaign with racist appeals so large and livid that neo-Nazis, the KKK, and the alt-right endorsed him in language evocative of second comings. After making his career as one of the most celebrated libertines of our time, he became a Bible quoter and toter on the campaign trail, this self-proclaimed business genius with a complicated history of bankruptcies, bailouts, welched debts, and dealings with mobsters. A draft dodger enamored of the military; macho tough-talker and finicky germophobe; champion of U.S. manufacturing, purveyor of signature-label clothing made overseas; and loud, proud patriot with a mysterious affinity for Vladimir Putin, one of Americas most dedicated foes. Trump the billionaire ran as a fire-breathing populist while offering nothing concrete or even coherent in terms of wages, unions, health care, or taxes that might benefit working people, though his tax plan promised huge benefits for the upper class.

None of this was hidden. The Trump disjunct flamed in plain sight for everyone to see, and he owned it with the coarse, loose-cannon style of the consummate New York asshole. All the stranger, then, that this star and symbol of big-city life should become the hero of the heartland, all those millions of wholesome acres of Bible Belts that truss the nations middle and nether regions. The guy from Sodom and Gomorrah was all right! His insults and earthiness were received as authenticity: here at last was a man who would stick it to the elites after all these years of eating their shit, the sniffy pieties about tolerance and diversity forced down your throat by the pinheads whod figured it out for the rest of us. It was galling. It got you down on yourself. It made you touchy and weak where you used to be strong, then this badass comes along and puts it right out there every time he flaps his mouth, says all the things you wanted to say all these years as you lived in constant apology just for being who you are, diminished, depressed, bottled up, pissed off, a hundred fuck-yous a day muttered at Obama and his crowd, heavy weather from Washington all the days of the year. A miracle, the white man who says what he wants! Free, free at last!

This may be the most powerful medicine in politics, the leader who delivers a man to his natural self. To be acknowledged as you are, affirmed and blessed from above: one can imagine it as a spiritual experience. A profound burden is lifted. No more doubt, no dark loathings, only the certainty that you are good and on Gods side. Ecstasy isnt out of the question. What greater thrill besides sex to be delivered to yourself, liberated from the bad opinion of your enemies? Something of that ecstasy could be heard at Trumps rallies, Build that wall! and Lock her up! bellowed like Romans watching lions sink their teeth into Christian flesh.

He tells it like it is. How often we heard him praised in those terms. He says what a lot of people are thinking. Apparently so; many more than were willing to admit to the pollsters, though one wonders how strong white identity was to begin with, when the basic courtesy thats the face of political correctness is viewed as a monstrous threat. If economic distress is offered as the socially acceptable reason for Trumps election, the fact remains that many millions of his supporters voted against what seems to be their own economic interests. White women voted for him in spite of Hillarys support of equal pay, along with a broad complementary agenda that promised help with the exhausting challengemost of which falls on womenof juggling home life and job. Working- and middle-class whites voted for him despite his conventional enrich-the-rich policies (rants against trade deals aside) that have, among the poor and working class especially, stunted wages, shortened life expectancy, driven up drug addiction and suicide rates, and made upward mobility the exception rather than the rule. Trumps election seemed to be the triumph of identity politicswhite identity politicsover economic interest.