Maggie's Farm recommended this
article asserting that all American fiction is a re-working of "The Pilgrim's Progress."
Whether and in what way Trump is a Christian, though, is far less important than the fact that he is instantly recognizable as the protagonist in a Christian drama: the lone avenger who stands up to the depraved powers of the world and calls them out for combat.
He draws a contrast with Ted Cruz, who was a preacher rather than a pilgrim. The article closes with some of the usual damning-by-faint-praise, which I recognize in my own attitude toward the guy:
Donald Trump could be a character in a Frank Capra film or a Sinclair Lewis novel. He is our generation’s incarnation of Bunyan’s pilgrim. I do not mean that as praise (I never liked Bunyan, as it happens). That simply is the kind of people we Americans are, or rather the sort of people we have become at two and a half centuries’ distance from our Revolution. We never have succeeded in training an elite. Whenever an American elite finds itself in power it chokes on its own arrogance. I cheered Mr. Trump to victory in the last election out of disgust for the do-gooders and world-fixers of both the Republican and Democratic mainstreams. Now I wish him good luck. He’ll need all the luck he can get.
3 comments:
He could have started with William Tell, instead.
I notice that Tell, the article's cited heroes, and DJT are not outsiders. They are not outlaws. They are citizens imbedded in their own society that insist on living up to the basic principles we cherish, regardless of what some fake big shot says the law is.
We DO have a culture, we DO have customs, with monuments to our great national crises, all of which our self-styled betters have been trying to eliminate. The attempted erasure of the best of our culture was a theme in the last election, whether the author realizes it, or not.
DJT refused to salute a cap wiggling on a pole, and got elected US President for doing so.
Valerie
Which suggests to me that it is time that I finally read Pilgrim's Progress, which is one of the many as yet unread books on my actual and electronic bookshelves. BTW, Project Gutenberg has a children's version of Pilgrim's Progress.
Propaganda and legends have ever thus been capable of leading humanity down a cliff or into eternal war and damnation.
Surprisingly, a lot of those legends somehow ended up being based on factual events.
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