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On the sidelines

27 January 2017

iStock

LIBERAL anger is becoming a bore. Self-reinforcing, all this angst about Donald Trump is so last week. Get over it, and enjoy the ride.

In her interview with Robert McCrum, as part of America Re­­written (Radio 4, weekdays), the novelist Lionel Shriver displayed the classic, preservational instincts of a liberal satirist, standing to the side of the crowd baying with indigna­tion at the turn of American poli­tics, feeling “uncomfortable” at the company of incensed liberals. A sense of humour, she tells us, will be more effective; although to date neither anger nor humour has made any difference.

It was telling that, of all Trump’s manifold inade­quacies, the one that Shriver referred to most in this interview was his inarticu­lacy. The inability to string a sen­tence to­­gether is, for the litterata, an indication of gross moral deficiency.

American novelists cannot help but write state-of-the-nation fiction; so it will have seemed a good idea to interview them after the catastrophe of last year. But neither Shriver nor Richard Ford could reconcile an avowed love of democracy with a distaste for those who are thus empowered to exercise it in ways that are plainly stupid.

Ford says that he is disinterested, and swats away McCrum’s question about his appetite for making good literature out of the ills of the United States with a disdainful “That’s not a very interesting ques­tion.” But the interview wrapped up with a vivid story of everyday ignor­ance of the kind that makes his novels so richly textured. In a small Montana town, he visits a grocery store where he buys some Christmas cookies; he is told by the store owner that, now that Trump is President, they are able again to say “Happy Christmas” rather than “Happy Holidays.”

That sense of a release from the Narnia-like winter of political cor­rect­ness would have resonated with George, one of the contributors to The Response — America’s Story (World Service, Tuesday), who had supported Trump ever since being warned by his boss not to work so hard because he was making the others feel bad. It sounded too like a scene from the 1959 film I’m All Right, Jack to be entirely true; but, as he had only two minutes to explain himself, we did not get the full details.

America’s Story is another of those shows predicated on the assump­tion that authenticity can be captured through the voices of ordinary people talking about their ordinary lives. So, for this show, listeners are invited to send in voice memos recorded on their smart­phones, on current subjects

These snippets can be reveal­ing. Anecdotes are provided by, among others, a spacecraft engineer from Maryland, a postal worker in Montana, and a restaurant owner from West Virginia. But these are not the unpolished flints from the rock face of reality that the producers might have us believe; with the bleak musical inserts reminiscent of Fargo, these vignettes come to us like the disembodied cries of a fractured society.

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