March 25, 2016 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Paul Theroux (Malawi) On Donald Trump

Mar 25 2016

Why is Donald Trump popular? Travelling around America’s south for his most recent book Deep South, the writer Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65) got some ideas. “It’s the gun show guys,” he says, sitting in his Hawaii home. “Virtually everything Donald Trump says, you can find on a gun show bumper sticker. Anti-Obama stuff, anti-Muslim stuff, anti-Mexican stuff, anti-immigrant stuff.” The 74-year-old warms to his theme. “Gun shows are about hating and distrusting the government … people who have been oppressed by a bad economy, by outsourcing. They have a lot of legitimate grievances and a lot of imagined grievances. There is this paranoid notion that Washington is trying to take their guns away, take their manhood away, take this symbol of independence away. They feel defeated. They hate the Republican party, too. They feel very isolated.” Alexander Bisley writing in The Guardian interviewed Theroux about his new book. Read the article . . .

Obama is waiting

Mar 25 2016

The current issue of The Atlantic has a long article by Nicholas Dames entitled “The New Fiction of Solitude” where, according to Dames, “For an influential group of writers, the purpose of novels is to bear witness to the spectacle of aloneness.” In this article, Dames refers to a long, long conversation that the novelist Marilynne Robinson had with President Obama last September which was published a few months ago in The New York Review of Books. That “conversation” touched on a number of topics, from troubled relationship between Christianity and democracy to the fragility of public institutions. Dames (as did others) wondered why Obama focused time and attention on a novelist, such as Robinson, and Dames linked the Obama conversation–some of you might remember–that took place at Hyannis Port in 1960 when JFK, then running for president, met with Norman Mailer, according to Dames, “in order to rouse the discouraged liberal elites who were . . .

Archive - March 25, 2016