Stranger than Fiction

BOB GARFIELD:  In a piece titled, “An Open Letter to the American People,” Stephen King, Amy Tan, Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers and scores of other American authors count the ways in which Trump is unfit for the presidency, to wit, “The rise of a political candidate who deliberately appeals to the basest and most violent elements in society, who encourages aggression among his followers, shouts down opponents, intimidates dissenters and denigrates women and minorities demands from each of us an immediate and forceful response.” Circulated on social media, the open letter has garnered more than 23,000 signatures.

But Aleksandar Hemon, Bosnian-American author and MacArthur genius, did not to sign it, and not because he’s a Trump supporter, it’s because, Hemon says, the letter implies Trump is an aberration, whereas, he believes Trump is just the manifestation of something that’s been brewing for a long time, during which time his author colleagues kept silent.

ALEKSANDAR HEMON:  With all his rhetoric, he hasn’t really done anything. The objection is, to some extent, rhetorical, whereas, well, I don’t know, the eight years of the Bush regime and then many things that followed were filled with things that were done, things that were abominable and criminal and violated any number of moral and legal tenets, and I do not remember, with all due respect, a letter signed by 500 or so writers opposing that.

BOB GARFIELD:  So, in essence, you're saying, oh now, you’re complaining. The Iraq war and various other aspects of American adventurism have created untold damage, all under false pretenses, but now a reality show star is making a buffoon of himself and you've decided to band together?

ALEKSANDAR HEMON:  There is a clear continuity. The traditional opposition to immigration and casual racism that was coded in various ways by the Republican Party is very much connected to Trump’s rhetoric now. He just took off the coat. And that Republican Party was born and raised, as it were, during the Bush years. I do not oppose the letter. Far be it for me to suggest that this should not have been done. But once it’s done, a can of worms is open. Now, I’m picking through the worms.

BOB GARFIELD:  You did get a little bit petulant with your colleagues when you said, you know, petitions are all well and good but where is your political righteousness in your own writing? Where are the novels, where are the stories that get to the heart of what is wrong in the society and with the political culture, as it stands in 2016?

ALEKSANDAR HEMON:  There is a, a lack of presence of the iniquities of the Bush years in American literature. Now, American literature is a vast project; 10,000 books a year are  published that could be called literary fiction, so there are books like that somewhere. But if we take the pulse of American literature, based on the awards and the reactions and reviews and the best-selling lists, you would be hard pressed to find a talked-about book that was dealing with what happened during the Bush years, the undoings of the body politic, the diminishment of public space, the lies, the propaganda, the illegal actions, the mainstreaming of torture and eavesdropping, and so on. If you look at the list of the Pulitzer Prize winners in the past  15 years, you would not be able to see what happened in this country in the past 15 years.

BOB GARFIELD:  Point taken, and no literary critic am I but one could make the argument that if, if you want a formula for writing a crappy novel, make it explicitly political. Society may be served by political fiction, but I’m not sure fiction is served by it.

ALEKSANDAR HEMON:  I agree. I grew up in socialism. I was exposed in my education, up to a time when I came to the United States, to propaganda of various kinds. This is not what I'm proposing. There are other models. The French, after not dealing with what happened in World War II and in colonial times, started dealing with that in movies and in books. The history of British colonialism was brought back to the island, as it were, by the descendants of the colonized people. Describing the situation, Salman Rushdie said, “Empire Writes Back.” So we can write back, not to correct or to pontificate, but rather to create a space to understand what happened to us, not what happened in the elections in 2016 but what happened to us as a communion of equal citizens.

BOB GARFIELD:  Can you give me an example or - of a literary model for taking on the question of what has happened in the American psyche to lead us to this place?

ALEKSANDAR HEMON:  Well, one of the books I've really liked is Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn's [Long] Half-Time Walk. It addressed the spectacle of war and the fallacy of worshiping the images of heroes, without addressing the calamity that war is, and it’s funny and thoughtful. But it's not one or two books. It has to be a collective effort. The problem with propaganda is that it always speaks with one voice. Fiction allows for a conversation that cannot quite be had in a public space defined by the media or social media.

I grew up reading the great German writers of the ‘70s - Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll and Siegfried Lenz. After the ‘60s and terrorism in Germany and the fact that children asked their  parents, what did you do in World War II, many writers came out with these books, and they were translated because they were a big deal all over Europe. What a novel can do, what literature can do is create a world to understand the issues that the public is deliberately ignoring.

BOB GARFIELD:  You came here in, in ‘92 from Sarajevo, which was under siege by Bosnian Serbs egged on by Slobodan Milošević whose playbook sounded exactly like what Trump has embraced now, the same kinds of calls to national character, the same kind of calls to a dangerous “other.”

ALEKSANDAR HEMON:  In fact, I’ve written a piece for Rolling Stone Online, comparing Trump and a Serbian fascist called Vojislav Šešelj, who used to say outrageous things before the war started, and many of us laughed it up, thinking just, you know, how bizarre it all is. And then it turns out that this was an introduction to his military methodology.

So I take Trump very seriously, and I do commend the writers’ desire to oppose Trump. But the stakes are so high that we ought to think very carefully how we oppose something like that and what it is that we oppose, because Milošević would have been nothing without taking over a military and a political structure that allowed him to perform all those operations. In other words, Milošević had more than rhetoric. Rhetoric was a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Some other conditions had to be met.

And those conditions are in place in this country, and those states and military and political mechanisms could be taken over by someone else. So to eliminate Trump would not settle things. I would not want to think that somehow if Trump vanishes or if he loses the election that we will be back to normal. The normal is no longer available.

BOB GARFIELD:  Sasha, thank you very much.

ALEKSANDAR HEMON:  My pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD:  Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American author of several books, including, The Making of Zombie Wars and The Lazarus Project.

It is possible, of course, that these times are not so extraordinary, that Trump’s ravings are not all that different in substance from that which has been dog whistled for decades. Maybe all the public needs is a genuinely tough and responsible media, not a truculent one. The media can just wield their sweet hammers and methodically tap-tap away.

But what if something different is going on, something scary that puts our freedom of religion and of the press at risk, something fundamentally unconstitutional and un-American? How then would you have our media watchdogs conduct themselves, politely, neutrally? I only ask because watchdogs are supposed to be scary, not just because they bark but because they bite.

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That’s it for this week’s show. On the Media is produced by Meara Sharma, Alana Casanova-Burgess, Jesse Brenneman and Dasha Lisitsina. We had more help from Jack D'isidoro, Emma Stelter and Isabel Cristo. And our show was edited – by Executive Producer Katya Rogers and – Brooke. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer this week was Casey Holford. Jim Schachter is WNYC's vice president for news. Bassist composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Brooke Gladstone will be back next week. I’m Bob Garfield.

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