Virtual Memories Show 406:
David Shields
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“So much of American history has been a fairy-tale children’s history, and so much of Trump’s dealing with COVID was a Norman Vincent Peale ‘think positively and it’ll all go away.’ So much of the connection is an absence of reality hunger, not to name-check my own work.”
In 2018, essayist David Shields wrote Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention (Thought Catalog). For Election Day 2020, we decided to revisit that book, how he would write it differently now, and why Trump is the Bizarro World’s Personal Essayist #1. I prompt David with the adventitious sight of a car that bore the message, “Compassion Is Another Word For Control,” and we go off to the conversational races, talking politics, the superior messaging tactics of the right-wing, concerns about far-left cultural policies, faith in radical skeptical intelligence, the absence of reality hunger vis-a-vis the history of America, why rage isn’t a primary emotion but rather a cover for fear and pain, the lessons of Howard Stern, and why “An Intervention” is not for Trump but for the American people. Give it a listen! And go read David’s books!
“I’m really interested in strength, weakness, confessionality, brokenness, and woundedness, and obviously Trump and I approach those in very different ways.”
“The conversation is not getting this guy right. In terms of the left media coverage, it’s wrong in the sense that it’s just the taxi-meter running on their moral indignation, covering Trump 90% to Biden’s 10%.”
“It’s like Antonio Porchia said: ‘Man is weak and when he makes strength his profession, he makes himself weaker.'”
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About our Guest
David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-two books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade by LitHub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention was published in 2018; The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power appeared in 2019. James Franco’s film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017 (available now on Amazon Prime, iTunes/Apple TV, Vudu, Vimeo, Kanopy, and Google Play). Shields wrote, produced, and directed Marshawn Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance (rave reviews in the New Yorker, Nation, and dozens of other publications; film festival awards all over the world; available now on Sundance TV/AMC, Amazon Prime, iTunes/Apple TV, Google Play, etc.). A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.
Follow David on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone
