The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

Author: Brooke Gladstone

Rating: ⭐ 4/5

Date Read: 2017/09/12

Pages: 96

I live in a bubble in Northern California. Admittedly, it’s a nice bubble: the people around me are well-educated, well-informed, and from diverse backgrounds. The liberal values that built the San Francisco Bay Area have resulted in economic prosperity and high quality of life. This is a region where people strive to make the world a better place for future generations, where the best public university system in the world produces a qualified electorate, where it’s emphatically not okay to express Nazi viewpoints.

Naturally, I’ve spent much of the last year asking myself “What the actual fuck is happening?” And, regardless of how much I read on the topic, I’m still not sure how the United States has devolved into a shit show of factory-produced panem and lowest-common-denominator circuses.

The Trouble With Reality doesn’t necessarily explain what’s going on (it’s hard to explain Trump and his supports from a logical perspective, as his positions don’t depend on logic). However, writer (and NPR journalist) Brooke Gladstone aptly describes the problem. Part of the difficulty of Trump’s administration is that he manages to do ridiculous, unprecedented stuff on a daily basis. It’s sometimes hard to remember what he did just a month back, and that makes it important for journalists like Gladstone to detail his actions in longer-format work. She also makes connections to other abusers of propaganda, which I found fascinating.

Unfortunately, books like these tend not be read by the uninformed masses that need them the most. Still, I think The Trouble With Reality is a powerful piece of short nonfiction, and is worth a read if you are as troubled as I am.