Ghosts of the Gipper: Making America Sick Again

We’re in primary season, again. The rhetoric is strong and candidates are taking extreme stances to win their bases, stances that may or may not stick once the primaries are over. General elections have a tendency to turn once extreme views more centrist and focused on families’ kitchen table issues—cost of food, gas prices, medical care and the need for community safety in which families do not feel a constant fear of ICE agents gunning them down in their streets and cars.

I find myself thinking back to the 80s and Reagan and the fears I held as a girl growing up in Appalachia Ohio and West Virginia and what is more and more revealing itself to me as having been a proto-MAGA upbringing steeped in the Bible and Rush Limbaugh rage and conservatism.

There was a palpable fear of nuclear war and AIDS and I have that same pit in my stomach, now, deeper and wider during this Trump 2.0 administration—DOGE, ICE, mothers dying from lack of healthcare, anti-DEI through every policy and institution and let us not forget the Trump 1.0 ‘Make America Sicker Again’ and his ‘let them shoot bleach,’ Marie Antoinette moments, which we seemed to revisit this last week in his address to the nation. Sorry, dude, not sorry. Biden won.

So I turn off CNN for a few hours and open my books, this week returning to On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward. Ward’s words settle me in her wisdoms, in particular, the opening essay “Why Fiction Matters,“ in which she speaks about her grandmother, Dorothy, and the necessities of witnessing and remembering not only the good but also the difficult, a sort of chiaroscuro perspective of life giving depth to lived experiences and memories and the shadows they create. I am grateful for the words Ward gives me, the “respair” she describes, that fresh hope that comes after the despair. But I can’t help question. Can we fix what we have broken? Can we be stronger for it? Dare I hope for it?

“Vivid…harrowing…lyrical, meticulous prose…bold, courageous”

—Matt Bondurant, author of North Country,
Oleander City, The Night Swimmer, and Lawless

Precious Ugly is a searing debut novel for readers of Bastard Out of Carolina and Demon Copperhead, a story about survival, set in the Reagan era—Clementine is a thirteen-year-old girl living in a van with her father, a preacher and cult leader, on a campsite along the river. She must decide if the miracle he promises will save her or destroy her.

Rae Cline is the author of the story collection The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, North American Review and StoryQuarterly and more. She is the founding editor of Eckleburg and lives in New York City. Precious Ugly, her debut novel, was a finalist for the Curt Johnson Prose Award for Fiction and shortlisted for Craft’s First Chapters Award. Read more at raecline.com.