Stephen King Laments Donald Trump's 'Poverty of Thought'

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Stephen King Laments Donald Trump’s ‘Poverty of Thought’
At the PEN Literary Gala, the horror king also attacked ‘that intellectual dead zone known as Twitter,’ while Margaret Atwood said the horror of her dystopian work is now reality.
Lloyd Grove
05.23.18 12:37 AM ET


It’s a terrifying time for democracy, not only in the predictable pockets of repression around the world but right here at home in the good ol’ U.S. of A.

That was the sobering, indeed disturbing, message of Tuesday night’s PEN Literary Gala at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, where horror virtuoso Stephen King and dystopian storyteller Margaret Atwood, along with movie star Morgan Freeman, sounded the alarm to a celeb-studded, black-tie crowd of nearly 1,000.

People who write books—and, just as important, people who read them—“are the crucial counterweight to those who are close-minded and mean-spirited,” King told dinner-goers sitting precariously under the museum’s 21,000-pound, 94-foot-long giant blue whale suspended from the ceiling; they included Malcolm Gladwell, Carl Bernstein, Masha Gessen, Walter Mosley, Mona Simpson, Ron Chernow, Robert Caro, Gay Talese, and actors Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

“Too many of those are currently in positions of power, their poverty of thought best expressed in that intellectual dead zone known as Twitter, where clear thinking and kindness is too often replaced by schoolyard taunts,” King added. “Not to mention bad spelling and bad grammar.”

Donald Trump hardly needed to be mentioned, although Freeman—in a speech introducing his friend King, the recipient of PEN America’s Literary Service Award—almost inaudibly mumbled the president’s name. For this crowd of well-heeled Manhattanites and belletrists, it could just as well have been “Voldemort.”

“While the United States isn’t putting reporters in prison yet, the tactics of the current administration are dangerous,” Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, warned. “They include attacking and discrediting reporters by name, threatening to punish unfavorable coverage, trying to convince the public that reputable and accountable news outlets cannot be trusted, and branding certain news organizations as the enemies of the American people.”

“The systematic effort to drive a rift between access to knowledge and the citizens of a country has a familiar ring to this dystopian novelist.”
— Margaret Atwood

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-king-blasts-trump-for-schoolyard-taunts-and-bad-grammar?ref=home