Tag: Robinson Jeffers

Something similar is true of “Beautiful Country Burn Again” (Ecco, 433 pages, $27.99), Mr. Fountain’s series of rambling, denunciatory essays on the 2016 presidential campaign. Take a passage on Ted Cruz, for example: “You’d think he gargles twice a day with a cocktail of high-fructose corn syrup and holy-roller snake oil. But whereas Baldwin pleaded for a renewal of thought and understanding, Mr. Fountain thinks that the time for understanding is over and it’s time for fire—although what he means by “fire” is unclear. Each of these was a “redistribution of freedom, a radical reset of the values in the freedom-profits-plunder equation.” The book “may be read as the record of a developing crisis, one drastic enough to raise the possibility of a third reinvention, which, if attempted, will inevitably meet with vigorous, perhaps violent, resistance from stakeholders in the current order.” Mr. Fountain, a Southerner by birth, is an old-school progressive and a revolutionary radical. Thanks largely to Ronald Reagan, both Republicans and Democrats came to realize that an overregulated economy and high marginal tax rates couldn’t create sufficient growth to pay for all the social welfare programs we’d created in the ’50s and ’60s—not if we were to maintain a military capable of countering Soviet aggression. Birtherism was a “dog whistle blown through a megaphone.” I don’t deny that outright racism has had a role in Mr. Trump’s rise and appeal, but a nation as warped by white supremacy as the one described by Mr. Fountain wouldn’t need to express its bigotries through encrypted language. “Naming what politicians and other powerful leaders have done in secret often leads to resignations and shifts in power.” That’s true, but it’s also true, as the physicist Richard Feynman famously pointed out, that to name a thing isn’t to understand it. In an essay on homelessness, she writes that “the young can’t remember (and many of their elders hardly recall) that few people were homeless before the 1980s. There’s a great deal factually wrong with Ms. Solnit’s breezy observation about the homeless. But anticipating counterarguments isn’t Ms. Solnit’s thing.