What It Means To Be A Writer In The Time Of Trump

-       Robert McLean

Looking back at me from a nearby pile of books is the work of Charles Mackay’s, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”.

Conscious of what Mackay wrote in 1841 – The follies of mankind are not unique to the modern world – The Huffington Post assemblage of “What It Means To Be A Writer In The Time Of Trump” was like the call of a siren.

According to The Post:

Ernest Hemingway said, “The writer’s job is to tell the truth.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who wishes to shirk this responsibility. But, there’s discrepancy among us about what “truth” really means. Should we share our emotional truths? Should we accumulate facts? Should we work to empathize with others, and in doing so learn to see one another more clearly? Should we make our political motivations clear? Should our truth-seeking and truth-telling change along with our political situation?

Hoping to better examine these questions, we asked authors ― most of them writers of fiction ― what it means to them to do their work during Trump’s presidency.

The truth would be remote if I failed to admit that moments of disbelieve and confusion about climate change had not scurried through my thinking, but unlike the delusions Mackay has written about, which were ignited and driven by confused beliefs, values, and emotions, climate change is a clearly defined factual, scientifically proved and illustrated event, all human-caused, affecting Earth’s atmospheric mechanics.