I WONDER WHAT HE/SHE THINKS?

A wide swath of celebrities and pundits have been interviewed about American politics, here and abroad. My thoughts drift with authors from other countries, outsiders, whose works describe political chaos, many in their own countries, and social disillusionment through their fictional characters.

Milan Kundera (The Festival of Insignificance, his most popular work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being), Tom Stoppard (Rock 'N Roll; film fans will know him as the Academy Award winning screenwriter of Shakespeare in Love), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) and Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale) are alive and kicking. How would they analyze the current American circus performers? I'd never presume to step in these author shoes and theorize their personal beliefs; however, I'd go so far as to posit what their characters might say.

In The Festival of Insignificance Milan Kundera offers his admiration and criticism of French cultural life and politics, and the bourgeoisie in all its incarnation. Political satire that cuts but doesn't burn. Kundera's prose (written in his second language, French) elicits laughs, smirks and daggers. He sees all the foibles of his adopted homeland and never embraces blind patriotism, a lesson his protagonist learned in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The Soviets marched in with tanks into Prague, Czechoslovakia; initially resistance was futile. Kundera, in his stories demonstrated he learned the power of the press. Nowhere, in The Festival of Insignificance, does he lampoon his characters to the level of our loud-mouthed, bombasts or apathetic dissonants who decry the horrors of American life yet refuse to participate in its democracy. In essence, Milan Kundera comes from the land of "The Velvet Revolution."

Tom Stoppard, another Czech ex-patriot, (his family left their country before the Nazi occupation) explores in his play. Rock 'N Roll, the dramatic swing between the Prague Spring (1968) and the "Velvet Revolution (1989), and how Western music served as a catalyst to the reformers. Stoppard alludes to dissident Václav Havel's future vision for his country, as seen in Havel's own plays and writings. Socialism supercedes repressive communism, allowing for freedom of expression and tolerance, The hero argues that social upheaval does not demand brutal resistance. Is this always true?

Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran, returned to Iran to teach, as professor of Western Literature, at the University of Tehran during the calculated upheaval of Iran's revolution (1978-1981) in 1979. Idealistic that the end of the Shah's regime would bring political and social freedoms, Nafisi explains in her memoir how she rebelled, endured, then rebelled against the religious intolerance espoused by the Ayatollah Khomeini, e.g. refusing to wear a head scarf  in the classroom and later forming a private book club for students where they discussed forbidden works, e.g. Lolita. (SPOILER ALERT) Once in the U.S. Azar Nafisi acknowledged that blaming the Iranian government completely would then dismiss the peoples' part, enabling a fundamentalist regime to gain power. Interesting that Nafisi emigrated to a country where, in some places, selected fiction has been banned and history re-written to serve an intolerant elite.

In Margaret Atwood's book, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), leaders, albeit fictional, have also established a religious, fundamentalist, caste-driven state, the former United States of America. The heroine (Offred) is captured and made to serve as a concubine. Her reproductive rights in tatters, Offred is forced to help a childless couple conceive, the assumption being the statesman's wife is infertile. Yes, Atwood's dystopian, "speculative" (her word) fiction, has an outsider's perspective--unlike the above authors I've mentioned. But, Atwood touches on a more than topical premise: the direction the U.S. could be headed, because of narrow-minded anger, ignorance or apathy, if our people allow it. Moreover, at the end of  The Handmaid's Tale,(SPOILER ALERT) Offred appears to escape her captors. In the movie adaptation, Offred takes her exodus one step farther: she leaves for the land of the free, Canada.