by David Hoffman

This is more than a mere book review. This is an impassioned salute to its author, the iconically aware and journalistically gifted Nick Benton.

Sometimes hailed as the seer of Falls Church and surrounding environs – like a somewhat poorer but equally prescient Warren Buffet, sometimes himself called the oracle of Omaha – Nick Benton is truly a man a Man for All Seasons, for virtually dozens of reasons.

Benton is of course the founder and owner and editor of this very publication – the Falls Church News Press, founded and funded by him on a wing and a prayer in 1991, and continuously and prophetically in print ever since, with over 1600 consecutive weekly editions. Tireless and timely, Benton has somehow, through all these crazy, cranky, cursed and cracked-up years, remained comfortable in his own skin.

Occasionally a curmudgeon, although always charming (even when sounding the tocsin of alarm), a truly self-effacing Jeremiah quite as much as the enormously modest Buffett, Benton has retained a pivotal posture of uncompromising progressivism in an era of down-market right-wing snake oil salesmen.  Yes, I’m talking about you, President Trump!

Always a scrupulous observer and just-the-facts recorder of the frantic foibles and frequent foolishness of our post-industrial and post-modern life and times, Benton’s balancing act has been to stay in business somehow, during an era when print journalism is sadly fading away before our very eyes. 

Like a modern-day Clarence Darrow, Benton is himself deeply rooted in both the 20th and the 21st centuries. He is in fact so very essential to his faithful readers scattered throughout not only Falls Church itself but also the city of Alexandria and the populous counties of Arlington and Fairfax, that it may reasonably now be said that he is in fact (with minimum hyperbole) an heir to the literary canon and historic Enlightenment tradition of mordant satire and visionary call to alarms and arms of the stature of, yes, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745).  Himself the bearer of the eponymous adjective “swiftian,” the Anglo-Irish essayist and Anglican clergyman was the author of several lasting classics like “Gulliver’s Travels” and more to the current point, the tongue in cheek call to reduce alleged population pressures by the extremist Malthusian absurdity of eating the children of Ireland. 

Dear Reader, as Jane Austen might address you, Benton is simply the real deal! And believe it or not, this is actually his eighth book!  (I know people who haven’t even read that many books total, much less written them!) 

This one has a long title but “please” bear with me. It’s “Please Don’t Eat Your Children, Cult Century and Other 2025 Essays: Contributions to Contemporary History” (Falls Church, Virginia: BCI Books, 2025, published this week and available online).

Like the impish author himself and his sometimes-antic muse, Benton is frequently puckish as in, “What fools these mortals be.” He is equally a nimble satirist, throughout these compelling collected essays, many of which were originally published in this very newspaper.

He is also often, in these immensely readable pages, an amiable satyr, yet with a solidly Christian soul underlying his occasional pagan reflections in a golden eye, and his distinctively witty and syncretistic synthesis of sin and salvation.

The lead title is a direct reflection derived from Swift’s original fierce satire about dining on Irish infants and children. Cult Century meanwhile is a deliberate and well-deserved poke in the eye of the boastful and benighted Bloviator in Chief, President Donald J. Trump and his motley gang that mostly couldn’t shoot straight – the shocking menagerie headed by the truly odious Stephen Miller and the creepy collection of semi-neo-fascist hangers-on who staff – like latter-day bargain-basement Goebbels and Himmler – the Trumpist revanchist cult of blood-and-soil Christian nationalist 4th-Reich-Rightwing-Reactionary Republicanism so gravely out of synch with Eisenhower or Reagan or Bush or McCain or Romney.

In conclusion, Benton even provides a confessional note.  He admits to his own personal “gullible’s travails,” in his blessedly relatively brief involvement in the 1970s in the foolish and bizarre cult of Lyndon LaRouche, a genuine precursor to today’s catastrophic Trump MAGA cult.

In effect, Benton pulls back the proverbial screen and warns us to pay close attention to the malignant cancer of the Trump cult, this bewitching brew of morose mayhem and mischief.  Benton essentially says that Trump is a “fountainhead” of feral and facile fascism, to adapt the very title of the grotesquely curdled 700-page mess of a lumpy libertarian wet dream, the best-selling melodramatic and hopelessly didactic novel published in1968 by the kooky right-winger Ayn Rand, about the architect Howard Roark, an obsessed builder like Trump himself. Later adapted into one of the lesser films starring the often somewhat wooden Gary Cooper, “The Fountainhead” is the antithesis of Nick Benton’s sprightly counter narrative. From Roark to Trump, how history repeats itself (or rhymes), the first time as facile melodrama, the second time as fascist farce.