"My literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut, didn't live long enough to see Trump barnstorm through the Rust Belt swing states ... but foresaw the underlying dynamics at those events .... 'It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor,' he observed in 'Slaughterhouse Five.' 'Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters .... This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.'
"And I think, too, about guys like Robert Mercer (candidate Trump's patron) who used a talent for financial computation to amass billions and has chosen to invest in an ideology that sanctifies his fortune, and depicts those in poverty as worthless. This mindset, a precise repudiation of the Beatitudes, proudly displays the moral logic of eugenics. It is the wet dream of capitalism tumbling into the nightmare of fascism.
"It is also the inexhaustible story of class, of Gatsby, 'the colossal vitality of his illusion,' and of the man who vanquishes him, Tom Buchanan. 'I couldn't forgive him or like him,' Nick Carraway tells us, 'but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness ... and let other people clean up the mess.'"
Steve Almond, "Bad Stories, What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country"
Speaking of the Mercers, I'm rereading Christopher Wylie's "Mindf*ck, Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America" where he describes convincing the Mercers to invest in CA. At first they all thought the only reason for Mercer to invest 20 million in a company without any real results yet, was that he must be planning to use their research to benefit his financial dealings. But it wasn't about money, it was purely ideology, creating an alt-right insurgency, changing the world to the way they want it. Assuming everything's about money isn't true. True believers and ideologues are terrifying.
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