My article “Forget Orwell: No Book Will Prepare You for the Trump Years” was published earlier this week at Medium:
After Donald Trump’s human smokescreen Kellyanne Conway announced that the president was simply presenting the world with “alternative facts,” the connection was quickly made to George Orwell’s 1984. There is good reason for this. (And while one should be happy for any resulting increase in sales of the book, we shouldn’t presume that it will be any guide to the remaining years of the Trump presidency. More on that below.)…
In Brady Corbet’s debut film, an American diplomat in France at the end of World War I and his wife watch their son turn from spoiled brat into something far more sinister.
The Childhood of a Leader is playing now in limited release; check it out. My review is at PopMatters:
What if the greatest conflagration in modern human history was sparked not by grander forces but by the whims of one or more determined psychopaths? That’s the nerve-rattling, if hard-to-swallow, idea advanced by The Childhood of a Leader. The directorial debut of actor Brady Corbet, this tricky, frequently overpowering film is set in 1919, just after the end of the First World War. The weight of history couldn’t be any heavier…
Print and read: Hitler’s speeches as bedtime reading, “an unalloyed joy in bullying,” demonizing the outsider, and other ways that the Donald just might be a good old fashioned fascist.
