A few months ago, I spoke at the New Hampshire Progressive Summit and attempted (to varying degrees of success) to connect the challenges facing the progressive community and my new book,
The Execution Channel: A Political Fable. I turned a phrase about "speaking truth to power" into "How do you speak truth to absurdity?" given the toxic political environment in which the Tea Party-saturated GOP has almost entirely abandoned the idea of governing, compromise, or working at all to meet urgent needs and deal with major issues. They are no longer a serious party but a cartoon caricature with a mean streak and the real ability to cause damage. It's also a bleak landscape in which much of the samestream media practices a form of willed subservience that it's politics as usual and both sides do it.
My answer to the challenge of speaking truth to absurdity was to write a satire, a political fable set in a future parallel universe that imagines the consequences of Tea Party-like ascendancy to destroy government (and even to eliminate the idea of government) and eliminate all restraints on so-called free-market capitalism and let the good times roll. The book aspires, as Lewis Carroll's White Queen so eloquently put it, to believe six impossible things at once, if not before breakfast then certainly by supper.
The Execution Channel: A Political Fable is set mostly in 2017-2018 and readers will discover the emerging new country of Real America with a new flag (see the book cover above) and currency (RAC or Real American Currency). Real Americans embrace the Galtian Imperatives as the faith-based economic religion which promises that extreme austerity and tax cut policies will ensure "prosperity for all" though the exact details of the magic remain elusive. Next, readers will see that John Galt, the fictional hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, has become the founding father icon of Real America and the Real American Party, the new political force sweeping the land. Local militias do their patriotic duty and lead the privatization craze throughout Real America while employing a creative protection racket plan to fit every business budget. It also has a cast of characters who take unenlightened self-interest to new heights.
And then I hope readers will behold the brilliance majesty of The Execution Channel - a televintet network and Ponzi investment scheme that promotes a focus-group tested variety of live, gory and very public executions in football stadium settings. As foretold by the Galtian Imperatives, The Execution Channel has been hailed as a model of modern economic policy that seamlessly merges massive private sector profits and public sector bankruptcy.
Or as one of the main characters, Gov. Lawrence C. Bowie of the Real American Republic of Texas says to justify the Galtian Imperatives:
“If people don’t die from lack of health care and children don’t starve, we can’t create inspiring tales of innovation and economic development that leads to prosperity for all. It’s time for the poor to stop taking, to stop whining about their plight and expecting taxpayer-financed gifts. They need to make more sacrifices to boost morale for our Guardians of Galt.”
The book is national scope and the roots of this uniquely American dystopia will be familiar and drawn from the very headlines discussed daily and passionately by Daily Kos readers.
Susan Bruce, a New Hampshire progressive activist and blogger, had this to say when she talked about the book in a recent blog post:
Michael McCord calls this book a political fable. It's a look into a bizarre political landscape that takes place in the near future.
The book is laugh out loud funny in places. At other times it seems to be an eerie predictor of what is just about to happen. It's so well done that political junkies from every state will be able to identify which members of their legislatures might make up the Imbecile Caucus of the Mad Hatter Republicans in Real America, on both a state and national level.
In this (not so) strange world, there are two kinds of people: Real Americans or moochers. Real Americans read the Sludge Daily War Report or the Galt Street Journal. They support the Galtian Imperatives (even if they don't understand them) and the War on the Poor. Fact free statements have become the guiding principle of the Mad Hatter Republicans. The characters from Ayn Rand's novels are deified as if they'd actually existed.
Vermont is a foreign country in this world, an anti-Galtian political zone.
As I was reading the book, headlines kept cropping up in the real world that were straight out of McCord's fable. On June 24: "Under GOP Plan, States Would Be Free to Take Money Away From Poorest Schools." That's right out of the Galtian Imperatives. Last week another story prompted me to email Michael to say, "You thought you were writing fiction, not history."
That's what is so interesting and creepy about this book. As you read, you'll see it happening all around you. It is smart, funny, and one heck of a ride into a horrifying future. You'll find that by the end of the book you're not so sure where the lines are drawn between fact and fiction.
Another reader sent me a link to a
Paul Krugman column today (on the ludicrous farm bill passed by the House GOP Mad Hatters last week) and said: "your book could not be more timely."
I'll let readers decide how well I've touched the zeitgeist but I started this satirical romp in the fall of 2011 after the GOP Mad Hatters threatened economic apocalypse with the debt ceiling crisis. And then there was Republican presidential primary debate when some of the audience cheered at the notion that if people without health insurance died, there was nothing anyone could do. I then made the leap to a perfectly sensible investment scheme of publicly televised executions in which guilt or innocence matter less than profit margins. The theme menu grew to include the cult of Ayn Rand, political ambition, incoherence as a political virtue, greed redefined, secession, free market economics with no restraint, the primacy of sperm, backyard rocket launchers, psychic readings, reality TV mortgage foreclosures and monuments to austerity.
I invite Daily Kos readers to visit the book's web site to find out more about me (I am not your typical political journalist), the book, and read Chapter One to get an idea of the mischief I am causing. There are direct links to the special e-site to buy the book and I have also intentionally kept the cost of the paperbound version below $15 so more people can hopefully afford it.
I also invite you to keep up with the book's adventures and like it on Facebook so we can expand our social media presence nationally.
Thanks for taking a look and spreading the good word.