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Gullible’s Travels: A Comical History of the Trump Era
Since Trump began his presidential campaign four years ago comedians have been complaining that because he is so preposterous it’s hard to satirize him, that he is self satirical. This has been true until recently with the publication of Marvin Kitman’s Gullible’s Travels: A Comical History of the Trump Era.
At first Kitman assumed that Trump’s candidacy was a publicity stunt. After he realized it was serious, as a satirist he felt very lucky writing that ”I have never had such a good time observing and writing about the follies of our country.“
He began keeping a comical journal modeled after A Journal of the Plague Year where author Daniel Defoe described the great plague that hit London in 1665.
Guest – humorist and author Marvin Kitman is a former columnist at New York Newsday and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize for criticism. He is the author of, among others, The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly and The Making of the President 1789.
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American Spring: Unfolding Crisis
The Chinese word for crisis consists of two characters. One means danger, the other means opportunity. We currently are in an historically unprecedented situation fraught with both danger and possibilities. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once remarked that sometimes nothing happens in decades and other times decades happen in a few weeks. This is our situation now. We see an American spring unfolding.
The public lynching of George Floyd has triggered massive outpourings in several thousands of American cities, both large and small. Black Lives Matter is supported by a majority of Americans including a majority of whites. This kind of broad solidarity was absent during the time of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The demonstrations are in large part led by people of color, mostly young people. Elected officials and traditional civil rights leaders are not leading the current uprising. As the L.A. Progressive has written, “The gross underlying inequality, racially and more broadly economically, affects every aspect of life in the US. and is the root cause of the volcanic anger irruption against the veneer of obsolete institutions.“
Guest – Glen Ford, editor of the Black Agenda Report. Ford founded the Black Agenda Report and has edited it since 2006. He was a founding member of the Washington chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists and he has delivered presentations at many colleges and universities.
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