CHRIS ROPER: Truth weirder than fiction
The latest buzzword of the US presidential campaign only deepens despair about democracy
The London Review of Books this month includes a piece about Reading Genesis, a new book by Marilynne Robinson, which is apparently an extended close reading of the first book of the Bible. You’ll be relieved that this is not the focus of this column. But I was struck by what the reviewer refers to as a dictum of Robinson’s: “It is my belief that a civilisation can trivialise itself to death.”
If you’ve been following the US coverage of the presidential race, you might share this belief. News outlets, from the respectable to the ratings-chasing, have saturated their reporting with accounts of the insults and name-calling that appear to be the dominant feature of the campaigns, as if the propaganda of the parties involved were a holy book from which they could eventually infer the ultimate name of God. ..
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