1/ #LiveFromTheWhiteHouse

“Alone in his decaying pleasure palace, Charles Foster Kane continued to direct his falling empire…vainly attempting to sway, as he once did, the destinies of a nation that has ceased to listen to him." (Citizen Kane)
#Trump

2/. Citizen Kane should be viewed as it was intended: as a warning from history

In 1933 Herman Mankiewicz, who co-wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane, wrote a screenplay about Hitler

The Mad Dog of Europe predicted a future genocide, but was never made

3/. “Farewell to the arts, to eloquence.” (Mary Shelley)

We naturally turn to science for solutions to #COVID19, but the arts shouldn't be ignored

Art & literature not only help us make sense of the world & our responses to it, but can also help uncover truths & offer warnings. https://twitter.com/stefsimanowitz/status/1244738865669312515

4/. In his 1722 “A Journal of the Plague Year” about the bubonic plague, Daniel Defoe writes how the govt tried “to suppress the printing of such books as terrify’d the people."

Beyond familiar literary dystopias (Oceania, World State, Gilead etc), lessons are buried everywhere.

5/ “Our civilization has chosen machinery, medicine & happiness. That's why I have to keep these books locked up in the safe"

In Brave New World, literature/Shakespeare is locked away

Huxley was using an imagined future to write about the present & was also sending us a message

6/. Camus, writes allegorically in 1947:

“The plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good: it can lie dormant for years…& perhaps the day will come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it will rouse up its rats again & send them forth to die in a happy city.”