Jonathan Safran Foer has sharp words for Trump-bashers

Novelist speaks out at Brooklyn Book Festival

September 18, 2017 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Jonathan Safran Foer reads from his novel “Here I Am” at the Brooklyn Book Festival. That's novelist Fernanda Torres at left and novelist Rodrigo Hasbun at right. Eagle photo by Lore Croghan

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Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer has some sharp words for Trump-bashers.

“I feel like Trump has become a kind of convenient way not to think about what one does in one’s home, because we have this perfect symbol of everything that’s wrong in the world embodied in one individual.

“Obviously that’s not the case. But it has begun to feel like that’s the case,” Foer said during a Brooklyn Book Festival author panel on Sunday. “And our relationship to news has become indulging these big negative feelings that are not generative.

“And it’s fun to read about his last faux pas. And it’s fun to read essays that take him down. And it’s fun to watch [MSNBC host] Rachel Maddow … It’s not a good kind of fun, actually. It’s a destructive kind of fun,” Foer said.

This fun is had at the expense of people who voted for Trump in the November 2016 presidential election “not because they’re racist, and not because they’re stupid, but because they are extraordinarily disappointed with their lot in life,” the author said. “And he somehow was able to embody their disappointment.”

Foer is tired of people who dump on Trump for his decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord but won’t consider taking even the smallest steps in their own lives to help protect our planet, such as changing their diets.

Not eating meat one meal a day would do as much good as taking millions of cars off the road, said Foer, who wrote a non-fiction book about animal agriculture called “Eating Animals.”

“It’s convenient and it’s happy and it exercises good, fun feelings in us to march and to say, ‘What have we become?’ rather than saying, ‘What might I become?’” Foer added.

In addition to talking about Trump during the panel, which was called “Lust for Life: The Search for Meaning, Inside and Outside Family,” Foer also read an excerpt from his most recent novel, “Here I Am.”

Two earlier novels he wrote, “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” were made into movies.

The other authors on the panel were Fernanda Torres (who wrote a novel called “The End”) and Rodrigo Hasbun (whose novel is called “Affections”).