Finally read
It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis and it is not a very well-written book. It is, however, very instructive.
The onset of American Fascism as imagined by Lewis happens much too quickly and the fight against it is far too romantic; but then he was writing in 1935 without the experience and history we can recognize now, even though his wife at the time, Dorothy Thompson, had direct experience, as she was a reporter kicked out of Nazi Germany and roughed up later in Madison Square Garden by the German-American Bund in 1939 when she laughed at their rally. However, it is extremely canny about the American social psyche and eerily prescient in its details.
We still have the taste of freedom and the best thing we can do is exercise it. Vote yes, demonstrate yes, but most importantly, talk loudly at the bus stops and don't be afraid. Be angry and work like hell.
My notes and quotes after the flip. Plus two definitions of a "Liberal."
In Lewis' book, Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip is called The Chief and engineers the rise of "Corporatism" in the USA with the help of his handler, Lee Sarason. Their shock troops and street thugs are called the Minute Men and Windrip is a determined vulgarian, "a man of the people" through and through, proud of his own ignorance which he identifies as common sense. People go along to get along and "soft" tyranny quickly ensues, complete with concentration camps and public murder.
Oddly enough, Lee Sarason is a closeted homosexual and eventually supplants Windrip to be assassinated himself in turn by one Dewey Haik, a true tyrant and religious fundamentalist. The book ends with the protagonist, Doremus Jessup, an over sixty editor of a small town Vermont newspaper, on the run from a Corpo posse, a revolutionary hero who will never die, an American Zapata of legend.
However, Lewis is right in the fact that, for all intents and purposes, it could happen here and, in fact, it has happened here already. Habeus corpus is gone. The Bill of Rights is gone. The Constitution is gone, superseded by signing statements and the theory of a unitary executive in a permanent state of war. All we need is a precipitating incident to allow all the recent legal changes to come into play and shut the cell door on a prison America under complete tyranny.
It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis
NY: New American Library, 1935
(12) epidemic patriotism
(82) When I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used to tell me, "Buzz, you're the thickest-headed dunce in school." But I noticed that she told me this whole lot oftener than she used to tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to be the most talked-about scholar in the whole township. The United States Senate isn't so different, and I want to thank a lot of stuffed shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly. Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip
NB: Many of the chapters in Lewis' book are introduced by quotes from Windrip's fictional handbook, Zero Hour
(107-108) "But - but - what burns me up - it isn't that old soap-boxer's chestnut about how one tenth of 1 per cent of the population at the top have an aggregate income equal to 42 per cent at the bottom. Figures like that are too astronomical. Don't mean a thing in the world to a fellow with his eyes - and nose - down in a transmission box - fellow that doesn't see the stars except after 9 pm on odd Wednesdays. But what burns me up is the fact that even before this Depression, in what you folks called prosperous times, 7 per cent of all the families in the country earned $500 a year of less - remember, those weren't the unemployed, on relief; those were the guys that had the honor of still doing honest labor.
NB: $500 in 1935 dollars is roughly $7000 in 2006 dollars and about 8.64 % of the population make $10,000 or less today.
"Five hundred dollars a year is ten dollars a week - and that means one dirty little room for a family of four people! It means $5.00 a week for all their food - eighteen cents per day per person for food! - and even the lousiest prisons allow more than that. Adn the magnificent remainder of $2.50 a week, that means nine cents per day per person for clothes, insurance, carfares, doctors' bills, dentists' bills, and for God's sake, amusements - amusements! - and all the rest of the nine cents a day they can fritter away on their Fords and autogiros and, when they feel fagged, skipping across the pond on the Normandie! Seven per cent of all the fortunate American families where the old man has got a job!"
Julian was silent; then whispered, "You know - fellow gets his discussing economics in college -theoretically sympathetic - but to see your own kids living on eighteen cents a day for grub - I guess that would make a man pretty extremist!"
(134) Fouth coup was a special message, next morning, to Congress (in session since January fourth, the third having been a Sunday), demanding the instant passage of a bill embodying Point Fifteen of his election platform - that he should have complete control of legislation and execution, and the Supreme Court be rendered incapable of blocking anything that it might amuse him to do.
NB: Unitary executive and signing statements
(154) Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists or, familiarly, the "Corpos," which nickname was generally used.
NB: Molly Ivins, whom we love, has written that the Bush Republicans are properly not Fascists but Corporatists, the name Mussolini originally thought of for his party. I agreed with her before I knew she wrote that. Fascists believed in the unity of the State with the Corporation, with the State holding the upper hand. Corporatist also believe in State and Corporate unity but in their formulation the Corporations have the upper hand. Sound familiar?
(156) Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
(180) And one seemingly small but almighty important point he learns, if he does much speechifying, is that you can win over folks to your point of view much better in the evening, when they are tired out from work and not so likely to resist you, than at any other time of day. Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip
(191) "Habeus corpus - due processes of law - too, too bad! - all those ancient sanctities, dating, no doubt, from Magna Charta, been suspended - oh, but just temporarily, y'know - state of crisis - unfortunate necessity martial law -"
NB: Spoken by a Corpo Military Judge from the bench
(204) It isn't what you earn but how you spend it that fixes your class...
...we don't like murder as a way of argument - that's what really marks the Liberal!
NB: Here's another definition of liberal from Upton Sinclair written a few years later:
...a liberal was a high-minded gentleman who believed the world was made in his own image.
(282) ...yet didn't Mr Windrip speak beautifully about pure language, church attendance, low taxation, and the American flag?
(354) Windrip and Sarason had not minded mirth and dancing in the street so long as they could be suitably taxed. Haik disliked such things on principle. Except, perhaps, that he was an atheist in theology, he was a strict orthodox Christian.
(359) I am convinced that everything that is worthwhile in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.
(371) It was the part of America which had always been most "radical" - that indefinite word, which probably means "most critical of piracy."
(372) There are two sturdy myths among the Liberals: that the Catholic Church is less Puritanical and always more esthetic that the Protestant; and that professional soldiers hate war more than do congressmen and old maids.