Randi Kreiss

Going under cover in the age of Trump

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Do you know what happened on May 10, 1933? Hitler ordered the burning of some 25,000 books. Joseph Goebbels, his minister of “enlightenment and propaganda,” moved to eradicate all Jewish influence from the literature of the times. From there, Goebbels went on to censor newspapers, magazines and radio broadcasts.

All authoritarian regimes eventually lock down media outlets in order to maintain absolute rule and repress insurrection.

Yes, I am drawing a line between autocratic rulers and President-elect Donald Trump, because Trump is openly trafficking in lies, scapegoating and simply making stuff up to feed the frenzy of right-wing supporters. He has, from the beginning of his run, attacked the press when it challenges his statements or views.

No love is ever lost between presidents and the press corps that follows them day after day. Still, freedom of the press and freedom of expression in other media are critical to the survival of a democracy.

As the holidays approach, I’ve compiled a list of books you might read or give as gifts. They speak directly and indirectly to the passion for freedom that we share, the quest for justice, the lessons of history and the power of storytelling. There are five novels, one nonfiction work and one play.

First up is “Fates and Furies.” This novel by Lauren Groff is, on the surface, the story of a marriage. But it’s also a brilliant discourse on the variability of empirical fact when viewed through individual lenses. The life one marital partner leads is altogether different from the other partner’s. Spend some time thinking about what’s said between the lines. We are, after all, living at a time when it’s particularly difficult to know what’s true and what’s false.

“Mothering Sunday,” by Graham Swift, is enchanting entertainment, which we all need at this time. Read it for the escape value. Set in the days between the great wars, it brings us back to another time and a bucolic place in the English countryside. It is, as one reviewer wrote, “both a dissection of the nature of fiction and a gripping story; a private catastrophe played out in the quiet drawing rooms of the English upper middle class.”

“Fieldwork,” by Mischa Berlinski, is about an American missionary family living and working among an obscure tribe in Thailand. A terrific read, it puts us in touch with all that connects us to other human beings, even people as strange and exotic as the Dyalo. Stephen King wrote of this book, “This is a great story. It has an exotic locale, mystery, and a narrative voice full of humor and sadness. … You can’t stop reading until midnight (good), and you don’t hate yourself in the morning (better).”

“The Association of Small Bombs,” by Karan Mahajan, is about yet another bombing in a market in Delhi. But nothing about this striking novel is like anything you’ve read. It puts you in the shoes of parents who lose a child and in the heads of the perpetrators, and moves you from perspective to perspective, leaving behind all the usual stereotypical thoughts about terror and terrorism. This is a book for now, more than ever.

“The Little Red Chairs,” by Edna O’Brien, is a mysterious kind of novel that I loved but didn’t completely understand, and that’s OK with me. On the surface, it’s about the fallout from the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the fracturing of cultures in the Balkan states. But more important, it’s about recovery from trauma and drawing threads of love from heaps of destruction. It also brings home the message that political abuse inevitably leads to abuses of human rights and, eventually, the abuse of human beings.

Finally, I would read two books together: “The Witches: Salem, 1692,” by Stacy Schiff, and Arthur Miller’s classic “The Crucible.” Schiff’s book is a nonfiction account of what took place in Salem, Mass., in the late 1600s, when 14 women and five men were hanged for being witches. A reviewer wrote that the book asks, “How could such a thing happen? How do good people, reasonable people, do great evil?” Indeed, a question for our time.

In “The Crucible,” Miller asks the same question. Written as an allegory about McCarthyism, which was a political witch hunt, “The Crucible” explores themes that couldn’t be more relevant today: intolerance, misogyny, mass hysteria and the dangers of blurring the lines between church and state.

Let us be vigilant. Let us keep reading challenging and provocative novels and nonfiction. Let us protest any efforts to constrain the media.

We have to hope for the best. So far, we haven’t heard of any minister of enlightenment and propaganda being named to the Trump cabinet.

Copyright © 2016 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.