Dave Eggers reimagines Trump as a captain of a ship called Glory (America) in this boring satirical novella, The Captain and the Glory.
Eggers doesn’t put much effort into his satire - a lot of it is him simply describing reality. Trump is the “man with the yellow feather” (meaning his much-mocked hair) who fancies his daughter, loves junk food, and “tweets” out nonsense (here Twitter is depicted as the cafeteria’s wipe-away board). His cronies are uncreatively named, ie. Paul the Manafort, Michael the Cohen, while Putin is the “Pale One” and Kim Jong-un is “Man So Soft”.
I suppose there’s some mild inspiration in calling his supporters the “Most Foul” (a riff on Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment) and having them dress up in chicken suits. I guess the voice in the vent, assuring the captain, is Fox News, aka the propaganda wing of the Republican Party?
The captain is an incompetent, insecure, unintelligent fat joke of a man who divides people, leans increasingly authoritarian, and generally makes life worse for everyone. Sounds like Trump to me - so what? So nothing, really. Eggers doesn’t have anything to say besides Trump = bad.
The impression I’ve got of Eggers over the years of reading him is that he’s very left-wing and, like a lot of people on the far left, he too is suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. He imagines the Captain literally handing power over to the Russians and the North Koreans and that is just coconuts. As loathsome as the stupid orange baby is (hey look, the cover is bright orange too!), he’s not a traitor who has the ability to cede America over to its enemies. Russia’s such a paper tiger - I wish the left would shut up about it and move on.
And what Eggers and a lot of the left fail to acknowledge is that Trump didn’t just happen - he’s the end result of decades of warped policies. This idea that things in America suddenly got bad because Trump was elected is such nonsense. Things have been bad in America for years. Obama wasn’t some shining example of a great president. He didn’t close Gitmo or end the wars, he continued them, even starting one, and became the president who used the most drone strikes than any other president - and this guy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize!!
The police (the “snowmen” in this book) haven’t been over-militarized, racist and corrupt under Trump only, they’ve been that way for several administrations, Republican and Democratic, and if Trump’s reach has been felt too strongly it’s because the powers of the office of president have been increasing for decades now.
Critiquing Trump is fine - he deserves it, he really is such a pathetic cretin - but let’s not pretend that the alternative, the Democrats (laughably described here as the “Kindly Mutineers”) are any better. Pelosi and her ilk are just as corrupt and uncaring as he is, serving corporate masters for personal gain to the detriment of the majority of US citizens. That’s why I think Eggers’ satire is so toothless - he takes the easy position of saying Trump is bad and mumbling about democracy and the old days as if the entire system itself doesn’t need reviewing and overhauling.
Some of the pseudo-tweets made me chuckle “Cheeseburgers are the Greatest! About half of people on ship = motherfuckers. If you didn’t vote for me, maybe you will be killed? And let’s hear it for the firefighters. They are the real heros. Also I am a firefighter.” And Jared Kushner does look like a doll, but it’s not enough to recommend this book in the least.
The subtitle is “An entertainment” and it isn’t at all. Dave Eggers’ The Captain and the Glory is a dreary, forgettable and obvious portrait of Trump and his administration that fails to compel in the slightest.
No comments:
Post a Comment