Salman Rushdie appeared on The Beat with Ari Melber and he was not kind to the president. Most importantly he pointed out the danger we are living in a time where many have allowed reality to become suspect.
“We do live in this strange moment, not just in America, also in Britain, also in India,” Salman Rushdie said. “In all of them, it is as if the rule of the game has decayed. We don’t know anymore how things work. Why things work. Why things happen the way do. The unexpected happens every day. Things that you would have thought impossible a couple of years ago are now an everyday reality. You can have a president who wants to bomb hurricanes with nuclear weapons.”
Then Rushdie said something that makes one realize it is now fiction mimicking reality.
“That is something that if I had presented that idea to a publisher,” Rushie said. “They would have said that really is not convincing. Go think of something more plausible. Implausible things are now an everyday reality and for a lot of people, bewildering.”
Rushdie goes on to point out that there is a new attempt of promoting a nostalgic past that never was.
“I think that what Mr. Trump is doing here that is similar to what’s happening in Britain and even what’s happening in India is in all three place, leaders are inventing a mythology of a false past, a kind of golden age, you know, that if we could only get back to, that everything would be good. You know, make America great again,” said Salman Rushdie. You, want to ask when exactly was that? Was it last week? Was it before slavery was abolished? Was it before the civil rights movement? Was it before women had the vote? When was America great in the way we should get back to?”
“The myth of the — the golden age is always a myth,” said Rushdie. “Boris Johnson right now in Britain is trying to sell the idea of a golden age of England that could be restored if only all these inconvenient foreigners would go away. Mr. Modi in India is trying to sell the idea of an ancient golden Hindu age which has been ruined by the presence of Muslims. All three are doing the same thing. They’re inventing history in order to justify the actions of the present, and I think that’s dangerous.”
Here is the thing, the folks who control the media are complicit in all of this. They see a purpose for this facade. If they had nipped the stupidy and idiocy emanating from our new political leaders which they have now made plausible in the minds of many who progressively depend on less information by design, we would not be here.
Salman Rushdie was promoting his new book Quichotte.