Is Trump a Magical Realist?

By Edna Aizenberg

Author of On the Edge of the Holocaust: The Shoah in Latin American Literature and Culture  

The New York Times got it wrong. On the front page of its Sunday, January 29, 2017 edition, right under mega-headlines denouncing all manner of executive orders, fear-mongering, and unconstitutional edicts by our new president, it made a stab at categorizing the novice chief executive’s disconcerting behavior—Mr. Trump is a “magical realist” the Times declared, who makes “fantastic claims punctuated by his favorite verbal tic—‘Believe me.’”

In the article, written by reporter David Barstow, the editors of the venerable daily were laudably attempting—like so many other Americans—to decipher President Trump; or as we literary critics would put it in our lingo, they were trying to “represent” him, to find systems of meaning through which to understand and label the new resident of the White House.

The classifying phrase “Magical Realism” (MR) struck the Times as appropriate, since the term was taken to signify “fantastical claims,” “cascade of falsehoods,” and “alternate facts”—more simply and directly, lies. Mr. Trump was a magical realist because he was a skillful fibber, perjurer, fabricator, and so on and so on.

As a Latin Americanist specializing in Jorge Luis Borges, one of the initiators of the magical realism now identified with his continent’s literature, my attention was immediately piqued by the front-page combination of the Times, Trump and (un)Truth. Especially, I realized, because the distinguished publication had gotten it wrong. Magical realism is not lying, but the laying bare of lies; not fibbing, but the challenging of fibs; not a cascade of falsehoods, but a form that bears witness to the truth.

The only thing that the Times did get right in connecting Trump to magical realism was the political key, since one of magical realism’s central features is resistance to single-voiced political structures: it indicts, not supports political, cultural and social perversions.

Magical realism as an artistic concept was all the rage when I was a mere Latin American literature graduate student back in the antediluvian 1970’s. Everyone was suddenly gaga over an obscure novel coming out from, of all places, the scarcely-known Colombia, and entitled One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad, 1967) by one Gabriel García Márquez that broke with the realism of the traditional novel, and described the convoluted political and social history of South America, especially Colombia, through a blending of the magical and the mundane.

It was an artistic tour-de-force that earned its author the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. But in his Nobel lecture García Márquez warned against the misuse of magical realism, usually by Europeans and Americans, as precisely what it isn’t—an escape from reality and the justification for lying by governments and administrations.

Speaking of Latin America, García Márquez pointedly asked in his Nobel speech, “Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?” Notice the emphasis on social change. García Márquez, using MR, wants to retell a century of historical events in order to out the lies of official versions by displaying their outrageousness and absurdity.

The central occurrences in his book are the Thousand Days’ War (1899-1902) between Liberals and Conservatives in Colombia and the “banana massacre” of the workers striking against The United Fruit Company (1928). In opposition, García Márquez unearths the facts that are covered up—for example, his purposefully exaggerated portrayal of a heavy rain that falls on his town of Macondo relentlessly for five years to signal the destruction of the physical evidence of the brutal killing.

García Márquez was following in the footsteps of his precursor Borges, who in the 1940’s, while World War II was raging, attacked the genocidal totalitarians—Nazis, Communists, anti-Semites—who were questing global dominance through what he called the anti-human “rigor of chess-masters,” disintegrating our world by destroying peoples and nations as if they were no more than inert wooden pieces on a world-size chess-board, and by wiping out the past with the large scale provision of a fictitious past, outsizing the banana magnates of Macondo (he did this some years before Orwell in 1984.)

His masterful stories, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940), “El milagro secreto” (“The Secret Miracle,” 1943), and “Deutsches Requiem” (1946) propose topsy-turvy universes—imaginary planets in “Tlön,” stage plays where time moves backwards, and war crime trial proceedings constantly interpolated by the revelation of totalitarian mendacity.

Happily, we are not challenged on the magnitude that García Márquez and Borges were. But perhaps in the US the potential magical realists of our challenging moment are the masses gathered in Washington and elsewhere a week before the Times article for the Women’s March demanding gender equality in the face of Donald Trump’s glaring macho braggadocio.

Could the thousands of pink “pussyhats” they wore, adorned with cat ears, be not only a visual protest against the government, but the seed of a new fantastical strategy that will serve for future political purposes?

Edna Aizenberg is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies, Marymount Manhattan College (New York), and the author, most recently, of On the Edge of the Holocaust: The Shoah in Latin American Literature and Culture

Zingers, The Clubhouse Turn, and “The Intelligence of a Macaroon’’: Chuck McCutcheon’s Presidential Debate Primer

By Chuck McCutcheon

Coauthor of Dog Whistles, Walk-Backs, and Washington Handshakes and Doubletalk

Presidential debates feature many, many words — way too many for some people. But the language of the debates, and the media/political world’s reaction to them, leans on a surprisingly small handful of stock expressions and phrases.

  

One maxim for politicians – especially in debates – is that you don’t always answer the question that you were asked; you respond to the one that you want asked. So get ready to hear “The question we should be asking…,” in the manner of Democrat John Edwards in 2007, when he was queried about whether he considered Russia a friend or a foe. After a perfunctory nonanswer, he honed in on what he wanted to talk about: “I think the question we should be asking ourselves is, how does America change the underlying dynamic of what’s happening in the world? 

… I think for that to occur, the world has to see America as a force for good again, which is why I talked about leading an effort to make primary-school education available to 100 million children in the world who don’t have it.”

This pivot happens so often in debates that there’s a name for it: the “clubhouse turn.”  Northeastern University journalism professor Alan Schroeder, author of several books on presidential debates, traces the phrase’s origin to Michael Sheehan, a debate coach for Bill Clinton and other Democrats. “‘Clubhouse turn’ strikes me as a particularly appropriate metaphor to apply to debates, since this is a genre with other parallels to horse racing,” Schroeder said.

Another debate maxim is to trivialize unwanted topics by seeking to regain the rhetorical high ground. Hence the popularity of the term “distraction from the real issues.” Lobbyist Jim Manley, a former spokesman for Democratic Senators Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid, calls it “a tried-and-true way to help yourselves get out of the hole and on the offensive.”

Debaters may despise their opponents, but the trick is to avoid seeming petty. That means invoking “with all due respect …” as a preface to leveling criticism, with the perfunctory pretense of appearing fair-minded. It’s the political version of the Southern phrase “bless your heart.” As humorist Dave Barry once wrote in his mock language column: “It is correctly used to ‘soften the blow’ when you wish to criticize someone in a diplomatic and nonjudgmental manner, as in: ‘With all due respect, you are much worse than Hitler,’ or ‘No disrespect intended, but you have the intelligence of a macaroon.’’’

Debates are mostly remembered for their “zingers,” the supposedly spontaneous clever one-liners that can shift momentum toward the candidates who utter them. Former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas is probably best remembered for telling Republican Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate, “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” In the Internet age, though, it can be difficult to get in a well-executed zinger, as journalists are constantly watching for scripted talking points.

Also a typical part of any debate is the “hypothetical,” the common reporters’ tactic for trying to get politicians to say something newsworthy. Most politicians, in general, duck legitimate questions by dismissing them as hypothetical. “They even seem to want credit for maintaining high standards by keeping this virus from corrupting the political discussion,” political journalist Michael Kinsley once wrote. But in debates, they’re often inescapable. The last round of GOP gatherings is still noteworthy for the 2011 question that asked candidates whether they would reject a hypothetical deal that cut $10 from the budget deficit for every $1 in tax increases; every candidate raised their hand.

Of course, debate observers will obsess over whether any candidate’s performance is so momentous that it’s a “game-changer.” That phrase’s now-common usage irks some academics looking for less simplistic explanations of how elections are decided.

“When it’s used to label events, it’s used very freely, generally with no empirical basis,” said Bethany Albertson, a University of Texas political scientist who studies political attitudes and persuasion. “I guess pundits are incentivized to use the language because it makes whatever happened sound hugely important, but there’s no check on its use.”

More from Chuck McCutcheon

Watching the Debates? Here's How to Game the Presidential Election

It's like BINGO, but fundamentally better for the 21st century.

Now less than a year from the 2016 presidential election, the GOP candidates vying for the office still number more than a dozen, the Democrats have narrowed to three, and we've only scratched the surface on the calendar of debates—though there's been plenty of excitement so far.

Depending on your political bent, or even your level of tolerance for other candidates within your party of choice, sitting through a three-hour debate can be any combination of exasperating, inspiring, dispiriting, hilarious, at times educational.

Between all the competition to get a word in edgewise and the ding-dinging time limits on the candidates' statements and rebuttals, these performances too easily devolve into canned polemics, nifty soundbites, and the kind of political doublespeak that lets a politician say as much as possible without really saying a thing.

Authors David Mark and Chuck McCutcheon wrote the book on this very phenomenon. Dog Whistles, Walk-Backs, and Washington Handshakes collects dozens of examples of the jargon and blather of the players, both elected and those behind the news desk, who make a living out of  misguiding the electorate. (Check out our coverage last year on "How to Talk Like a Politician.")

So, there's no reason why you and your friends can't have a little fun at the expense of these smooth talkers.

In honor of the forthcoming release of the eBook, Doubletalk (on-sale February 2016), Mark and McCutcheon's election season supplement to their first book, we created BINGO cards (like the one you see at the top of this post)—six of them—which you should totally print out and put to good use, abiding by whatever house rules you invent (ahem), when the next debate is on.

(By the date of this post, the next one is the Democrats' turn: Sat., November 14, 9 pm EST, on CBS.)

Click on the following link to download PDFs of all 6 BINGO cards, and have fun. It's gonna be yuge:

Presidential LINGO Game (PDF)