Ben Fountain

We, America, elected Trump. Putin didn't do it, nor the trolls in St. Petersburg with their zillions of busy bots. They may well have plucked certain strings in the national psyche - played us like a dimestore ukulele - but we were keen to be plucked. ”

Democracy's premise rests on the notion that the collective wisdom of the majority will prove right more often than it's wrong; that given sufficient opportunity in the pursuit of happiness, your population will develop its talents, its intellect, its better judgment; that over time its capacity for discernment and self-correction will be enlarged. ”

In true demagogic fashion, Trump bypassed the head and spoke directly to the gut, to the biles and bubbling acids of raw emotion. ”

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life. ”

The New Deal saved capitalism - saved it from the big-time capitalists - though many of the big-timers didn't see it that way. ”

Surely it's no coincidence that the Era of the AUMF, the Era of Endless War, is also the Golden Era of the Chickenhawk. We keep electing leaders who, on the most basic experiential level, literally have no idea what they're doing. ”

My first visit to Haiti was in May 1991, four months into the initial term of Haiti's first democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. At the time, it seemed that Haiti was on the cusp of a new era. ”

The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work. ”

I'm ashamed and embarrassed to say that I've read very little of David Foster Wallace's work. It's a huge gap in my education, one of many. ”

The national framework of social insurance - social security, unemployment and disability benefits, work programs, and workers' compensation - protected citizens from the kinds of risks that private markets couldn't or wouldn't insure. ”