Moi who am a novelist, I do not think I see the world in a very different light from any reasonably engaged citizen, even if he is only half informed. I certainly don’t know more than the others. Assuming there is a difference of opinion between me and say, a plumber, an insurance broker or a school teacher – and again, I could be wrong – is that I write made-up stories and I am therefore resolutely led to believe that anything is possible; that the field of plausible experience goes far beyond what history, logic or conventions tell us.
I spend most of my time imagining not the things that could, or even should, logically happen, but the things I can make happen by making them interesting and useful. When you write novels and short stories, and even articles like this, nothing is easy and anything can follow. Fortunately, unfortunately sometimes it is the same in real life, including politics.
In America, you might know, we’ll be voting soon [le 3 novembre] to choose our next president. And at the same time to find out what country America is today and will be tomorrow, and what people we are. If it seems to you that this is an uncomfortable, precarious state of affairs, perhaps fraught with consequences and indeed rather heartbreaking, it is indeed so. It is alarming that a great nation places such a stake on an isolated civic exercise, programmed in time and prescribed by law.
Two visions
Normally, in an election where one camp puts forward a vision of the country while the other proposes a rather different one, the country in question wins with the victory of one or the other. This relative lack of drama, many find it uninteresting, not me.
So if it’s my side that loses, I tell myself “Well, be it”, since the mere fact of voting strengthens the country. In sum, both visions result from largely undisputed conceptions of the nation, themselves derived from our many founding beliefs, myths of its origins.
With regard to America, we will name in the register of these points of confidence the one that the legislature and the judiciary are required to supervise the considerable powers of the executive. That the right to vote itself be guaranteed, and the elections made sanctuary. That the chief executive cannot profit financially from his / her elected position. That a regular tax be collected, capital for the management of the country.
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