Beautiful Country Burn Again Quotes

“She does not always agree with us, but she's always straight." Over and over Bill sticks the landing, as they say in gymnastics, every applause line hits via a potent combination of elder-statesman gravitas and gleeful good fun; he is a granddaddy lion romping with the cubs. We get the full treatment tonight, the twinkly eyes, the coyly bit lip, the curl of devilment in the grin, and so we're reminded that seduction is his basic unit of being, every transaction a form of charming the pants off someone. One has to say it worked out pretty well for him, a large life by any measure though not without its lumps and bumps, an impeachment here, humiliated wife there, not to mention the histrionic "values" backlash that brought us George W. Bush. But Bill Clinton's so smooth you might forget all that, for an evening at least. Whoever said the man's lost it has rocks for brains. Perhaps he just needed a few days to strike the proper frame of mind, a trick of the Method actor's craft—he has to walk onstage pretending he's the candidate here.”
― Ben Fountain, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

“Clinton mastered the art of sending mixed cultural messages," Michelle Alexander would later write of the 1992 campaign. He could dog-whistle to angry whites from Stone Mountain one day, and the next walk into a black church and belt out "Lift Every Voice and Sing" by heart, or slide on some Wayfarers and play the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. "It seems silly in retrospect," Alexander wrote, "but many of us fell for that." Clinton was, by any measure, an abnormally gifted politician. "Where I come from we know about race-baiting," he said when formally announcing his candidacy in Little Rock. "They've used it to divide us for years. I know this tactic well and I'm not going to let them get away with it.”
― Ben Fountain, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

“Necessitous men are not free men," Franklin Roosevelt said in that 1944 State of the Union speech. "People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." A dire statement, demonstrably true, and especially unsettling now, a point in time when the American Dream seems more viable as nostalgia—make America great again!—than as present reality. Income inequality, wealth distribution, mortality rates: by every measure, the "average man" that Eleanor Roosevelt celebrated is sinking. A recent study by the Pew Research Center shows that the middle class has shrunk to the point where it may no longer be the economic majority in the U.S.21 And with widespread decline in economic prospects comes disillusionment: A recent poll shows nearly three-quarters of Americans across the economic and political spectrum believe that the U.S. economy is rigged. A quarter of these same respondents hadn't had a vacation in at least five years. Over half worried about missing their mortgage payment, and 60 percent of the renters expressed concern about making the monthly rent.22 Exceptional individuals continue to rise, but overall mobility is stagnant at best. More and more it comes down to the birth lottery. If you're born poor in Flint or Appalachia, chances are you're going to stay that way. And if your early memories are of July Fourth fireworks at the Nantucket Yacht Club and ski lessons at Deer Valley, you're likely going to keep your perch at the top of the heap.”
― Ben Fountain, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

“Then there was Obama being Obama the day after the election: "We have to remember that we're actually all on one team." A man's character is his fate, as Heraclitus said, and what a sick, twisted fate indeed that Barack Obarna-cerebral, disciplined, cool, ever seeking to reconcile and accommodate (as an African-American pastor in Charleston drily commented, once his presidency is over, Obama will no longer have "to be the least threatening black man in America” has had to contend these past eight years with a political opposition that regards him as very much not on the team. Not even American: "His grandmother in Kenya said, 'Oh, no, he was born in Kenya and I was there and I witnessed the birth.' She's on tape. I think that tape's going to be produced fairly soon...» or not a "real" American, but a "man who is a closet secular-type Muslim, but he's still a Muslim. He's no Christian. We're seeing a man who's a Socialist Communist in the White House, pretending to be an American. That terrorist fist-bump, remember? Oh, and he was the founder of ISIS, an aspiring tyrant aiming for a Nazi-or Soviet-style dictatorship, and looks like a skinny ghetto crackhead. "All this damage he's done to America is deliberate," said Marco Rubio during a Republican debate, which had to be one of the dumbest things anyone said during the whole campaign. If Obama wanted to destroy the U.S., all he needed to do was sit on his hands in 2009 and let the hot mess of the Bush economy melt the country down to slag. But the issue is bigger than any particular president. After his "all on one team" remark, Obama continued:
The point, though, is that we all go forward with a presumption of good faith in our fellow citizens, because that, of good faith is essential to a vibrant and functioning democracy.”
― Ben Fountain, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

“Then there was Obama being Obama the day after the election: "We have to remember that we're actually all on one team." A man's character is his fate, as Heraclitus said, and what a sick, twisted fate indeed that Barack Obarna-cerebral, disciplined, cool, ever seeking to reconcile and accommodate (as an African-American pastor in Charleston drily commented, once his presidency is over, Obama will no longer have "to be the least threatening black man in America't has had to contend these past eight years with a political opposition that regards him as very much not on the team. Not even American: "His grandmother in Kenya said, 'Oh, no, he was born in Kenya and I was there and I witnessed the birth.' She's on tape. I think that tape's going to be produced fairly soon.."5 Or not a "real" American, but a "man who is a closet secular-type Muslim, but he's still a Muslim. He's no Christian. We're seeing a man who's a Socialist Communist in the White House, pretending to be an American. That terrorist fist-bump, remember? Oh, and he was the founder of ISIS, an aspiring tyrant aiming for a Nazi-or Soviet-style dictatorship, and looks like a skinny ghetto crackhead.Z "All this damage he's done to America is deliberate," said Marco Rubio during a Republican debate,a which had to be one of the dumbest things anyone said during the whole campaign. If Obama wanted to destroy the U.S., all he needed to do was sit on his hands in 2009 and let the hot mess of the Bush economy melt the country down to slag. But the issue is bigger than any particular president. After his "all on one team" remark, Obama continued:
The point, though, is that we all go forward with a _presumption of goodfrith in our fellow citizens, because that, of good faith is essential to a vibrant and finctioning democracy.”
― Ben Fountain, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

“We must make our choice,” wrote Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
― Ben Fountain, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders,” Hermann Goering, the number two man in the Reich, once observed. “That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”
― Ben Fountain, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

“Fear is just another word for ignorance.7”
― Ben Fountain, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

“America is various. It refuses to be all one thing or all the other.”
― Ben Fountain, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

“. . . Ted Cruz – a soft, smooth Texan with the skin of an avid indoorsman”
― Ben Fountain, Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution