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A Dystopian Novelist Predicted Trump’s Campaign Slogan In The ‘90s
Octavia Butler wrote about a zealot who promised to “Make America great again.” Sound familiar
There’s something maddeningly vague about Donald Trump’s catchall campaign slogan, “Make America great again.”
Maybe it’s the blatant fallacy of “again,” alluding to imagined halcyon days. Or maybe it’s the lack of specificity of the word “great” — if you were to survey 10 Americans about what greatness looked like to them, you’d likely turn up a mish-mash of responses, and certainly nothing actionable.
Whatever the case, it seems sci-fi writer and unofficial Queen of the Galaxy Octavia Butler predicted the slogan a couple of decades ago. Nearly 20 years before Trump trademarked the term, she wrote about a character named Senator Andrew Steele Jarret, a harbinger for violence in her 1998 book Parable of the Talents.
You can see an excerpt outlining Jarret’s use of the phrase “make American great again” below:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b0416464100242
Octavia Butler wrote about a zealot who promised to “Make America great again.” Sound familiar
There’s something maddeningly vague about Donald Trump’s catchall campaign slogan, “Make America great again.”
Maybe it’s the blatant fallacy of “again,” alluding to imagined halcyon days. Or maybe it’s the lack of specificity of the word “great” — if you were to survey 10 Americans about what greatness looked like to them, you’d likely turn up a mish-mash of responses, and certainly nothing actionable.
Whatever the case, it seems sci-fi writer and unofficial Queen of the Galaxy Octavia Butler predicted the slogan a couple of decades ago. Nearly 20 years before Trump trademarked the term, she wrote about a character named Senator Andrew Steele Jarret, a harbinger for violence in her 1998 book Parable of the Talents.
You can see an excerpt outlining Jarret’s use of the phrase “make American great again” below:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b0416464100242