It Sure Is A Rising Tide, And

Work Is Hard. Distractions Are Plentiful. And Time Is Short.

If Your Real Wages Are Declining, Your Job Is At Risk, You Fear Your Children Will Be Worse Off Than You Are, It's Tempting To Want To Blame It All On An Easily Identifiable Target: Muslims, Immigrants, Refugees, Blacks, Jews.

It Sure Is A Rising Tide, And We Have A Particularly Nasty Exemplar Of It In The U.s., In Donald Trump.

The Late Nadine Gordimer In South Africa, For Example, Had A Wonderful Ability To Get Her Country's Injustices And Contradictions Down On Paper. Ditto For Her Countryman The Great Playwright Athol Fugard.

How Many Really Great Writers Are There Who Are Totally Non-political? You Can Hear The French Revolution In The Poetry Of [percy Bysshe] Shelly And [john] Wordsworth; You Can Sense The Vast Inequalities Of Tsarist Russia In [anton] Chekhov And [lev] Tolstoy.