Source: TomDispatch
by Alfred McCoy
“Writers often try to gild their tawdry times or dignify their flawed leaders with lofty literary analogies — notably, America as the New Jerusalem; Lincoln as Moses leading his people through the wilderness of the Civil War; the Kennedy White House as an incarnation of King Arthur’s ‘Camelot,’ or Lyndon Johnson living his last years as a latter-day King Lear, cast off by his ungrateful children into the moors of south Texas. But what are we going to do with Donald Trump? Wouldn’t his vanity, his vulgarity, and his relentless pursuit of money and minerals in every corner of the globe turn any literary analogies into soggy clichés? Like the showman P.T. Barnum, Trump is an American original, whose true metaphors can be found only in comic books (America’s one true art form), not literature.” (01/20/25)
https://tomdispatch.com/trumps-foreign-policy-the-comic-book-edition/