A deep dive into the time of Trumpian magical realism |
If you remember, 2015 was a year of horror too. Beheadings, suicide bombings, deadly attacks in central Paris and other cities, the burning to death of a Jordanian pilot in a cage. In Sydney, accountant Curtis Cheng was shot dead outside the NSW Police headquarters by a teenage Islamic State wannabe.
At the end of that awful year, I wrote an opinion piece for this masthead about the imagination of writers in an age of terror, questioning whether novelists were now in a quandary about scenarios they’d dreamt up.
Stop laughing, this is serious ... US President Donald Trump at the Congressional Ball in the grand foyer of the White House on Thursday.Credit: Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg
The French prime minister at the time of the Paris attacks, Manuel Valls, remarked: “The macabre imagination of the masterminds is limitless.” Fourteen years earlier, Ian McEwan, the English novelist, had said the opposite following the 9/11 attacks in the United States. He wrote in The Guardian that “a failure of the imagination” was among the hijackers’ crimes. They wouldn’t have been able to proceed if they’d imagined themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, he argued.
In contrast, America’s 9/11 Commission Report, made public in 2004, concluded that the most important failure leading to the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon “was one of imagination”. The national security adviser at the time, Condoleezza Rice, said that no one could have imagined planes being used as missiles.
As a child, I was constantly told I had a vivid imagination. Perhaps this rankled more than I realised. The result is an ongoing fascination with how often a lack of........