Like a lot of Americans, Steve Almond spent the weeks after the 2016
election lying awake, in a state of dread and bewilderment. The problem
wasn't just the election, but the fact that nobody could explain, in any
sort of coherent way, why America had elected a cruel, corrupt, and
incompetent man to the Presidency. Bad Stories: What the Hell Just
Happened to Our Country is Almond's effort to make sense of our
historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the
deluge of hot takes and think pieces. Almond looks to literary
voices―from Melville to Orwell, from Bradbury to Baldwin―to help explain
the roots of our moral erosion as a people.
The book argues that Trumpism is a bad outcome arising directly from the
bad stories we tell ourselves. To understand how we got here, we have to
confront our cultural delusions: our obsession with entertainment,
sports, and political parody, the degeneration of our free press into a
for-profit industry, our enduring pathologies of race, class,
immigration, and tribalism. Bad Stories is a lamentation aimed at
providing clarity. It's the book you can pass along to an anguished
fellow traveler with the promise, This will help you understand what
the hell happened to our country.
