For the last four years people have all but chanted “you can’t make this stuff up”; in fact, a lot of people did predict those horrors in intimate detail, years or in some cases decades ago. The phrase was part of a kind of generic liberal denialism, in which the only way they can describe their world is through negations: “this isn’t who we are,” everything is unbelievable / incredible / impossible, the people in power are incompetent, unintelligent, insane, immoral, etc. The non-right will remain on the defensive until it finds ways to describe things in affirmative terms — not in the warm-fuzzy sense of supporting them but in the more ~philosophical sense of just fucking describing what things are instead of what they aren’t. That said, here’s something you really couldn’t make up: Samuel Delany went to high school with Ariel Dorfman.
