[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [New post] Politics in this country has never felt the way the it does now…

Wed Dec 27 17:12:53 UTC 2017

This needs only a very little updating.

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From: Corey Robin <donotreply at wordpress.com<mailto:donotreply at wordpress.com>>
Subject: [New post] Politics in this country has never felt the way the it does now…
Date: December 25, 2017 at 6:19:58 PM CST
To: mkb3 at mac.com<mailto:mkb3 at mac.com>

New post on Corey Robin
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Politics in this country has never felt the way the it does now…<http://coreyrobin.com/2017/12/25/politics-in-this-country-has-never-felt-the-way-the-it-does-now/>
by Corey Robin<http://coreyrobin.com/?author=1>

"The Vietnam War years were the most 'politicized' of my life. I spent my days during this war writing fiction, none of which on the face of it would appear to connect to politics. But by being 'politicized' I mean something other than writing about politics or even taking direct political action. I mean something akin to what ordinary citizens experience in countries like Czechoslovakia or Chile: a daily awareness of government as a coercive force, its continuous presence in one's thoughts as far more than just an institutionalized system of regulations and controls. In sharp contrast to Chileans or Czechs, we hadn't personally to fear for our safety and could be as outspoken as we liked, but this did not diminish the sense of living in a country with a government out of control and wholly in business for itself. Reading the morning New York Times and the afternoon New York Post, watching the seven and then the eleven o'clock TV news—all of which I did ritualistically—became for me like living on a steady diet of Dostoevsky. Rather than fearing for the well-being of my own kin and country, I now felt toward America's war mission as I had toward the Axis goals in World War II. One even began to use the word 'America' as though it was the name not of the place where one had been raised to which one had a patriotic attachment, but of a foreign invader that had conquered the country and with whom one refused, to the best of one's strength and ability, to collaborate. Suddenly America had turned into 'them'—and with this sense of dispossession came the virulence of feeling and rhetoric that often characterized the anti-war movement.

...Of course there have been others as venal and lawless [as Richard Nixon] in American politics, but even a Joe McCarthy was more identifiable as human clay than this guy is. The wonder of Nixon (and contemporary America) is that a man so transparently fraudulent, if not on the edge of mental disorder, could ever have won the confidence and approval of a people who generally require at least a little something of the 'human touch' in their leaders. It's strange that someone so unlike the types most admired in the average voter...could have passed himself off to this Saturday Evening Post America as, of all things, an American."

—Philip Roth, 1974

Corey Robin<http://coreyrobin.com/?author=1> | December 25, 2017 at 7:19 pm | Tags: Philip Roth<http://coreyrobin.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=philip-roth>, Richard Nixon<http://coreyrobin.com/?taxonomy=post_tag&term=richard-nixon> | Categories: Literature<http://coreyrobin.com/?taxonomy=category&term=literature>, The Right<http://coreyrobin.com/?taxonomy=category&term=the-right> | URL: https://wp.me/p5IQfX-2nV

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