America: Four Possible Futures

[Draggingtree]

American Greatness

America: Four Possible Futures

By Roger Kimball| August 8, 2017

Back in August 2016, I was pleased to have been able to amaze the world with an important literary discovery: a hitherto unknown manuscript by the famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

 Everyone knows about Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film Rashomon. In that clever post-modernist exercise, the sanguinary tale of the woodcutter, the bandit, the wife, and the medium is told from several different perspectives, giving us in effect several different tales each of dubious narrative authority.

What the world had not previously known, but what I was pleased to reveal, was that Kurosawa, possibly in cahoots with his far-seeing medium, had privately given the 2016 U.S. presidential election the Rashomon treatment. In one scenario, Hillary, always the inevitable candidate, won hands down, shoulder pads nudging Bernie Sanders to the side of the road, pantsuit girded so she could walk like Nancy Sinatra right over The Donald.