The Weekly Dig is a free magazine here in Boston. The editorial this week is excellent, and I obtained permission from the author,
Joe Keohane, to reproduced it here. Here's a snippet:
Earlier, the town cynic, an editor, berates a room of neighbors who insist a dictatorship can't happen here. "The hell it can't," he says. "There's no country in the world that can get more hysterical!" He launches into a litany of ways Americans have espoused fascist ideals, one of which is, "Remember when hick legislators in certain states ... set up shop as scientific experts and made the world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?"
Ha ha. Remember that?
Keohane is quoting from Sinclair Lewis's 1935 book It Can't Happen Here. Full text after the flip.
Granted, I walk around in a state of perpetual alarm at how poorly read most people my age are, but never more so than when I bring up Nobelist Sinclair Lewis, and no one knows what I'm talking about. So listen, I really need you fuckers to go get the following two books: Babbitt (1922) and It Can't Happen Here (1935).
The first is a scathing broadside against the Middle American middle class after WWI. Actually, for a while, the word "Babbitt" became slang for well-intentioned, self-deluding, sin-deploring bumpkins. Here's one of the approximately eight zillion whoppers from this book: "The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trouser-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeated a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever."
It Can't Happen Here traces the origins of a totalitarian movement in Depression-era America, as it grows from a gathering of Babbitts to a bloody, full-blown national dictatorship. The message is basically how easy it would be to sell spooked Americans on the idea of protecting our liberties by subverting them entirely. Here's a speech from Berzelius Windrip, the self-consciously folksy and plain-spoken (ahem) demagogue at the center:
"I want to stand up on my hind legs and not just admit but frankly holler right out that we've got to change our system a lot, maybe even change the whole Constitution (but change it legally, not by violence) ... The Executive has got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by dumb shyster-lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates ... but these new economic changes are only a means to an End, and that End is and must be, fundamentally, the same principles of Liberty, Equality, and Justice that were advocated by the Founding Fathers of this great land back in 1776!"
Earlier, the town cynic, an editor, berates a room of neighbors who insist a dictatorship can't happen here. "The hell it can't," he says. "There's no country in the world that can get more hysterical!" He launches into a litany of ways Americans have espoused fascist ideals, one of which is, "Remember when hick legislators in certain states ... set up shop as scientific experts and made the world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?"
Ha ha. Remember that?
It's sad that thousands of years after humans learned to write, ignorance is so rampant despite the availability of information. It's especially sad that we (well, they) don't judge our leaders by the content of their character but by superficial matters like a fake Texan accent. I deal with genomes every day, so it's particularly disturbing that as we progress, a small faction is dragging us back to the Dark Ages, when God was the answer to everything and inquisitive though was stifled.
I've never read any books by Sinclair Lewis, but I've added these two to my list. I hope deeply that the upcoming indictments will mark the beginning of the end of fascism in America, but it would seem that they will merely mark the end of a phase that is sure to repeat itself.