This post was going to follow the two previous ones and explain how the conservative war against the judiciary, having been plotted for over thirty years, and having used most particularly the issue of legalized abortion as its bellwether, is intended to work on a practical level, and that yes, it does have a real, rational, logical (tho' evil) sense to it. But in the meantime I found online and then in paperback a copy of the Sinclair Lewis book people have been talking about all over Left Blogistan for some months now, and so I am doing this post as a "Lesson" on it and deferring the other one to my 2nd of today or 1st of tomorrow. But actually, it's really about the same thing...
I mentioned in the last posts It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis, which I had only read bits quoted from by various commenters, until a couple days ago.
If this book had been mandatory reading in high schools, since it was written in 1935, instead of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, I will venture to say ...
...that we might very well not have ended up where we are today.
1984 helped slow and stop and awaken people to certain realities: it wasn't enough, of itself, but Orwell's words were a very big shoe in the engines of Progress as it was understood in the "Free" West of the 1950s, just as
Fahrenheit 451 was another.
But Sinclair Lewis - oh man, did he call it!
You thought Freedom Fries were bad, and maybe you remember hearing about "Liberty Cabbage" being the new name for sauerkraut in WWI, but that German Measles were actually unironically renamed "Liberty Measles" by a Massachusetts physician - well, truth is stranger than fiction. But good fiction can get damn close to it, for truth and strangeness.
Women who campaign against equal rights, including voting, for women. Immigrants who denounce immigration. Professors who rant against the weakening, emasculating effects of liberal education. Ex-Socialists who have come to despise the proletariat and turned Establishment meme-shapers, big time. Closeted homosexuals who run political campaigns based on intensely-hypermasculine archetypes and framing. Charismatic ministers with Midwest media empires. "Liberal Hawks" shucking and jiving for the PTB. Conservative politicians who say that unlike the Nazis, they're only against the bad Jews who control the banks, not all Jews. Jewish-Americans who go along with this, voluntarily, for the sake of the power. Officers who never saw combat, except for shooting strikebreakers, proclaiming martial virtue. Scandal-laden businessmen/politicians doing business as usual. Angry white-trash punks who believe the demagogues who tell them that all their troubles are due to women and negroes taking their jobs, and who believe a former snake-oil salesman and fake-homespun folksy "salt-of-the-earth" politician who is half PR-campaign creation when he tells them that if they all just put their trust in him, he'll save them from themselves, give America back manly vigor and power to rule the rest of the world, clean things up and shake things up and give them not forty acres and a mule but $5000 apiece, once he's rescued his party from the ruin that FDR's made of it...
No, not Phyllis Schlafly, Michelle Malkin, David Horowitz, Ken Mehlman, Pat Robertson, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Medved, and the entire readership of National Review and the audience of Clear Channel listeners. This is the future Sinclair Lewis foresaw by 1935, for us, one where UnAmerican authors like Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse are banned for their lese majeste and subversion of authority, where Corpo Art produces Broadway musicals like Stalin's Callin' and nobody, nobody believes it's happening except for the people who are bringing it about, until it's too late.
When there are giant billboards with nothing but Party slogans, and huge corporate sponsor logos, and there's only one Party left in America, with a huckster who's stage-managed by a cynical former leftist with a good handle on advertising theory...
--It Can't Happen Here is a wierd book. I'd never read SL, I'd always had this vague impression of him as being one of those boring modern realistic authors who were Good For You and avoided successfully. But this is sort of something between Mark Twain and Henry James, gentler in its mockery, or quieter, than the old Anti-Imperialist; fiercer than the observer of New Yorkers' foibles in the Gilded Age; but sharing with both the awareness of the localized human condition in the wierdness that is America. Both Americas: the real, messy, Aristotelia America, and the nebulous, rosy Platonic America that never has been yet
Some people say that it isn't that great of a book literarily, or that it's dated. I disagree. I think it's a fine suspense novel, and what they're calling "dated" about it are the topical things, the current events and pop culture references of 1935, which lock it into place as futuristic allegories don't ever quite. Real people, real figures from history and the media and academics mix with SL's invented politicians and pundits and hatchet men, and their victims. It helps if you know some about Depression-Era America, but I don't think you need to be an expert on it to "get" the book. I'm not, tho' I know a good bit about it; I'd like to see an edition of it with complete endnotes, though, because there are a lot of ObRefs that I know I'm missing.
Okay, this is getting a bit dull and not telling you why this book is so appallingly cool. Time for a quote:
All of America was serious now, after the seven years of depression since 1929. It was just long enough after the Great War of 1914-18 for the young people who had been born in 1917 to be ready to go to college . . . or to another war, almost any old war that might be handy.
There are lots of good quotes. I promise not to spoiler the book, beyond the main theme which is after all the whole point of the book: homegrown fascism subverts American democracy in the 1930s. I'm just going to grab some of the most scorching quotes, and explain a bit of the setup. SL is really quite brilliant in making it plausible. It almost feels as if it did happen, by the time I got to the end. It's what would have happened, perhaps, if General Smedley Butler hadn't been incorruptible, in 1933 - something I learned about only here, from dKossacks. And I studied a lot of first-hand source material from the first half of the twentieth century! It was Minitrued, long before Orwell invented Oceania.
What's wrong with America? Plenty. There hasn't been a proto-Pearl Harbor, but the Depression has gone on and on and on - and one other thing we didn't learn in schools, things were bad for years and years before the Depression. It didn't come out of nowhere, it came out of three Republican presidencies and their policies. (Gee, I wonder why that never made it into our textbooks either?)
The climate of fear and uncertainty and hardship, trying to just get by day to day, has made ordinary people unable to concentrate, and even the comfortably well-off are feeling insecure and anxious, all the time.
It isn't just money, or the angst of the news, or the rapid social changes of the last couple decades - it's all of it.
Doremus was adjusting the doubtful portable radio. Once he thought he was going to be with them in the Home Sweet Home atmosphere, for he tuned in on a program of old songs, and all of them, including Cousin Henry Veeder, who had a hidden passion for fiddlers and barn dances and parlor organs, hummed "Gaily the Troubadour" and "Maid of Athens" and "Darling Nelly Gray." But when the announcer informed them that these ditties were being sponsored by Toily Oily, the Natural Home Cathartic, and that they were being rendered by a sextette of young males horribly called "The Smoothies," Doremus abruptly shut them off.
"Why, what's the matter, Dad?" cried Sissy.
"'Smoothies'! God! This country deserves what it's going to get!" snapped Doremus. "Maybe we need a Buzz Windrip!"
This is one of the cool, realistic things: Doremus Jessup, the protagonist, is an extraordinarily flawed hero. He has all sorts of human failings, not simply charming foibles, he is nearly seduced to the Dark Side several times (because he is sixty and he doesn't like the music nowdays, he doesn't like the fact that his daughter is eighteen and emancipated and goes out driving at night with her boyfriends and talks frankly about sex, he's frustrated with the stupidity and inefficiency he encounters) he doesn't know what to do at first and when he does he doensn't have the guts to do it for a long, long time.
And that's what makes him so great: he's The Decent Average American, he's us, all the Nice Folks here who always had liberal principles but never could take the dirty hippies seriously in their rantings, privileged folks who never comprehended how sheltered they were by birth and background, never dreamed they too, could ever end up in jail, beaten up by the police, watching America disintegrate as "patriotism" becomes the cover for every abuse and atrocity, tolerated openly here no less than any other dictatorship, for the sake of national security and moral values and manly pride.
Though she was not visible, Windrip did have a wife--Sarason had none, nor was likely to; and Walt Trowbridge was a widower. Buzz's lady stayed back home, raising spinach and chickens and telling the neighbors that she expected to go to Washington next year, the while Windrip was informing the press that his "Frau" was so edifyingly devoted to their two small children and to Bible study that she simply could not be coaxed to come East.
One of the architects of the coup, a footsoldier in it really, is Mrs. Adela Tarr Gimmitch. She's crusaded against alcoholic beverages, supported the troops, and campaigned to get immorality out of Hollywood entertainment. I think you'll recognize her right away...
She was full of friendliness toward all the men present: she wriggled at them, she cuddled at them, as in a voice full of flute sounds and chocolate sauce she poured out her oration on "How You Boys Can Help Us Girls."
Women, she pointed out, had done nothing with the vote. If the United States had only listened to her back in 1919 she could have saved them all this trouble. No. Certainly not. No votes. In fact, Woman must resume her place in the Home and: "As that great author and scientist, Mr. Arthur Brisbane, has pointed out, what every woman ought to do is to have six children."
--Yeah, I think it's pretty interesting that SL noticed how deeply rooted Volkism is in sexism, and also figured out the economic and social-engineering motivations of it, as well as racism. Something that most people discussing the Reich through most of my life missed or didn't comprehend the significance of - "Women's History" not being a real discipline, after all. (I know I resisted the opposition of feminism to Nazism when I first encountered it, still a conservative.)
But he spotted something else, too:
Those of you who remember the Konvention Kicker and his pals, the Protest Warriors, may have noticed a certain peculiar thing, a certain dissonance between the "manly manliness" and the undertones of Arno Breckerische art, something we joked daringly about until it turned out (cough*Bulldog*cough) that our jokes weren't nearly forward enough.
(We also see here that familiar disconnect between servile veneration for the ideal of the military, and treatment of actual personnel who don't buy it.)
An old man, shabbily neat, stood blocking them and yelled, "To hell with Buzz! Three cheers for F.D.R.!"
The M.M.'s burst into hoodlum wrath. The cornet in command, a bruiser uglier even than Shad Ledue, hit the old man on the jaw, and he sloped down, sickeningly. Then, from nowhere, facing the cornet, there was a chief petty officer of the navy, big, smiling, reckless. The C.P.O. bellowed, in a voice tuned to hurricanes, "Swell bunch o' tin soldiers! Nine o' yuh to one grandpappy! Just about even--"
The cornet socked him; he laid out the cornet with one foul to the belly; instantly the other eight M.M.'s were on the C.P.O., like sparrows after a hawk, and he crashed, his face, suddenly veal-white, laced with rivulets of blood. The eight kicked him in the head with their thick marching-shoes. They were still kicking him when Doremus wriggled away, very sick, altogether helpless.
He had not turned away quickly enough to avoid seeing an M.M. trooper, girlish-faced, crimson-lipped, fawn-eyed, throw himself on the fallen cornet and, whimpering, stroke that roustabout's roast-beef cheeks with shy gardenia-petal fingers.
One thing which is fascinating to me is that SL sets it in my own New England - not here, but in the Vermont that then was solid Republican, but the Republicanism that Sen. Jeffords talked about when he spoke of his whole family being Republicans for generations, and how it hurt him to have to break with the Party now. In this, the novel is more like the Reagan Revolution, with plenty of "Buzz Republicans" crossing over to vote Democrat this time.
And with each such triumph of Windrip, all the well-meaning, cloistered Doremuses of the country were the more anxious.
When "downhome" Windrip wins, on his platform of populism and jingoism and faith and manufactured Americana, it isn't long before he has his own youth militias - clean cut kids in good clean white, or U.S. khaki, called "the Minute Men."
At first sane, reasonable people just laugh at the "M.M.s" and call them the "Mickey and Minnie Mouses", just as they laugh at Buzz Windrip's garbled fake-folksy patter and country-boy routine. By about halfway through, though, things are starting to get worrying enough that people who pay attention are starting to wonder if they ought to move themselves and their families to Canada.
Most of them don't.
Even the ones who in their coldest (or hottest) moments, know exactly how bad it can get - don't really believe it will happen. Not now, not here, not to them.
Pondered Doremus: Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists, and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated--tortured--slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition!
One of the things SL calls is the divisions on the Left, the infighting and the unwillingness/inability to work with each other. It goes both ways, too: Jessup is frustrated with the obstinacy and purism of the serious Communists, and only partly realizes that he's just as bad, in his own way. Eventually he comes to see patterns in all movements, and dangers common to all of them, and the need for tension, opposition, the thing that I struggled to define to myself many years ago in the phrase: Civilization is a performance art.
He found, on his one attendance at the Universalist church, a scattering of thirty disciples, being addressed by a "supply," a theological student from Boston, monotonously shouting his well-meant, frightened, and slightly plagiaristic eloquence in regard to the sickness of Abijah, the son of Jeroboam. Doremus looked at the church walls, painted a hard and glistening green, unornamented, to avoid all the sinful trappings of papistry, while he listened to the preacher's hesitant droning:
"Now, uh, now what so many of us fail to realize is how, uh, how sin, how any sin that we, uh, we ourselves may commit, any sin reflects not on ourselves but on those that we, uh, that we hold near and dear--"
He would have given anything, Doremus yearned, for a sermon which, however irrational, would passionately lift him to renewed courage, which would bathe him in consolation these beleagured months. But with a shock of anger he saw that that was exactly what he had been condemning just a few days ago: the irrational dramatic power of the crusading leader, clerical or political.
Worst of all, for him, is the ongoing realization of his own passive complicity in this: that by never taking any of it seriously enough, when they came down on strikebreakers and started wars with Cuba and the media corruption and dilution and the long, long grinding away at respect for education and the arts as things in themselves, that he didn't see that when some are not free, then no one is free, and that all this selfishness and insecurity was lethal to us, and to the whole world.
The mammoth building, as in exhaustion Doremus crawled up to it, was entirely ringed with M.M.'s, elbow to elbow, all carrying heavy canes, and at every entrance, along every aisle, the M.M.'s were rigidly in line, with their officers galloping about, whispering orders, and bearing uneasy rumors like scared calves in a dipping-pen.
These past weeks hungry miners, dispossessed farmers, Carolina mill hands had greeted Senator Windrip with a flutter of worn hands beneath gasoline torches. Now he was to face, not the unemployed, for they could not afford fifty-cent tickets, but the small, scared side-street traders of New York, who considered themselves altogether superior to clodhoppers and mine-creepers, yet were as desperate as they. The swelling mass that Doremus saw, proud in seats or standing chin-to-nape in the aisles, in a reek of dampened clothes, was not romantic; they were people concerned with the tailor's goose, the tray of potato salad, the card of hooks-and-eyes, the leech-like mortgage on the owner-driven taxi, with, at home, the baby's diapers, the dull safety-razor blade, the awful rise in the cost of rump steak and kosher chicken. And a few, and very proud, civil-service clerks and letter carriers and superintendents of small apartment houses, curiously fashionable in seventeen-dollar ready-made suits and feebly stitched foulard ties, who boasted, "I don't know why all these bums go on relief. I may not be such a wiz, but let me tell you, even since 1929, I've never made less than two thousand dollars a year!"
Manhattan peasants. Kind people, industrious people, generous to their aged, eager to find any desperate cure for the sickness of worry over losing the job.
Most facile material for any rabble-rouser.
It isn't good enough to be nice, decent Americans. Not when crooks like this are around:
Nor could Sarason ever have convinced the wealthy that the more Buzz denounced them and promised to distribute their millions to the poor, the more they could trust his "common sense" and finance his campaign. But with a hint, a grin, a wink, a handshake, Buzz could convince them, and their contributions came in by the hundred thousand, often disguised as assessments on imaginary business partnerships.
They, having been fed so long on the Murdoch Hearst-controlled papers, the mindless demagoguery of the radio pundits like (the real) Fr. Coughlin and (the fictional) Bishop Prang, have no defenses, and so they end up enslaved by unscrupulous intellectuals and social predators, backed by an army. (We also have an early foreshadowing of Waco, showing how futile all the "stockpile your guns" rhetoric of the NRA is, when they send tanks and bombers against untrained guys with shotguns.)
...There was a certain discontentment among people who had once owned motorcars and bathrooms and eaten meat twice daily, at having to walk ten or twenty miles a day, bathe once a week, along with fifty others, in a long trough, get meat only twice a week--when they got it--and sleep in bunks, a hundred in a room. Yet there was less rebellion than a mere rationalist like Walt Trowbridge, Windrip's ludicrously defeated rival, would have expected, for every evening the loudspeaker brought to the workers the precious voices of Windrip and Sarason, Vice-President Beecroft, Secretary of War Luthorne, Secretary of Education and Propaganda Macgoblin, General Coon, or some other genius, and these Olympians, talking to the dirtiest and tiredest mudsills as warm friend to friend, told them that they were the honored foundation stones of a New Civilization, the advance guards of the conquest of the whole world.
They took it, too, like Napoleon's soldiers. And they had the Jews and the Negroes to look down on, more and more. The M.M.'s saw to that. Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
When the new Corpo party can't deliver (obviously!) on its plan for handing out $5000 to everyone, and "full employment" has been achieved by the neat trick of putting all the out-of-work into slave labor camps, and people are getting more and more disillusioned with their Savior President, the natural alternative, which has been there humming in the background all along, is War With Mexico, worded towards even while they claim to be seeking peace...
New wars breed new pop songs:
As he came out of the hotel, a squad of Minute Men were marching by. They were farm boys, newly recruited for service in Mexico; they looked as scared and soft and big-footed as a rout of rabbits. They tried to pipe up the newest-oldest war song, in the manner of the Civil War ditty "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again":
When Johnny comes home from Greaser Land,
Hurray, hurraw,
His ears will be full of desert sand,
Hurray, hurraw,
But he'll speaka de Spiggoty pretty sweet
And he'll bring us a gun and a señorit',
And we'll all get stewed when
Johnny comes marching home!
Heretical Doremus begins to question everything, finally: from Prohibition to the Civil War to the Revolutionary War, coming to see a pattern of disfunctionality, control-freakishness, and ass-backward responses to problems, particularly by "nice, decent, moderate" people who ignore problems until they explode.
And they destroy higher education and rebuild it, too:
Dr. Macgoblin pointed out that this founding of entirely new universities showed the enormous cultural superiority of the Corpo state to the Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Fascists. Where these amateurs in re-civilization had merely kicked out all treacherous so-called "intellectual" teachers who mulishly declined to teach physics, cookery, and geography according to the principles and facts laid down by the political bureaus, and the Nazis had merely added the sound measure of discharging Jews who dared attempt to teach medicine, the Americans were the first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free from the very first of any taint of "intellectualism."
All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirely practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition.
Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical study, archaeology, philology; all history before 1500--except for one course which showed that, through the centuries, the key to civilization had been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against barbarians. Philosophy and its history, psychology, economics, anthropology were retained, but, to avoid the superstitious errors in ordinary textbooks, they were to be conned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under the direction of Dr. Macgoblin.
Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modern languages, but they were not to waste their time on the so-called "literature"; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead of antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English, some study of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for political speeches, but the chief courses were in advertising, party journalism, and business correspondence, and no authors before 1800 might be mentioned, except Shakespeare and Milton.
In the realm of so-called "pure science," it was realized that only too much and too confusing research had already been done, but no pre-Corpo university had ever shown such a wealth of courses in mining engineering, lakeshore-cottage architecture, modern foremanship and production methods, exhibition gymnastics, the higher accountancy, therapeutics of athlete's foot, canning and fruit dehydration, kindergarten training, organization of chess, checkers, and bridge tournaments, cultivation of will power, band music for mass meetings, schnauzer-breeding, stainless-steel formulæ, cement-road construction, and all other really useful subjects for the formation of the new-world mind and character. And no scholastic institution, even West Point, had ever so richly recognized sport as not a subsidiary but a primary department of scholarship. All the more familiar games were earnestly taught, and to them were added the most absorbing speed contests in infantry drill, aviation, bombing, and operation of tanks, armored cars, and machine guns. All of these carried academic credits, though students were urged not to elect sports for more than one third of their credits.
SL doesn't romanticize the Ordinary American - not the poor, not the workers, not even the ideallists, all are flawed vessels: one of the reasons Windrip succeeds is that he suckers in both the unemployed yobbos and the WWI veterans who you may remember, famously were not paid or taken care of after coming home to a grateful nation &c &c &c. Just as in the planned 1933 coup, the American Legion figures prominently in his rise to power.
(There are two sturdy myths among the Liberals: that the Catholic Church is less Puritanical and always more esthetic than the Protestant; and that professional soldiers hate war more than do congressmen and old maids.)
Torture, when committed by the Minute Men, is tolerated.
The government press releases made much of the fact that the torturer was rebuked by the District Commissioner and removed from his post. It did not mention that he was reappointed in a county in Florida.
Eventually there starts to be some "buyers' remorse", like this local company owner:
He burst out, one evening, "Jessup, there isn't another person in this town I'd dare say this to, not even my wife, but I'm getting awful sick of having these Minnie Mouses dictate where I have to buy my gunnysacks and what I can pay my men. I won't pretend I ever cared much for labor unions. But in those days, at least the union members did get some of the swag. Now it goes to support the M.M.'s. We pay them and pay them big to bully us. It don't look so reasonable as it did in 1936. But, golly, don't tell anybody I said that!"
But there's no going back.
I said I won't spoiler it. And I won't. There are some bits that are so amazing that I can hardly bear not to say, "and you know what else happens!?" but I'll only tell you that halfway through the pace changes, shockingly. And yet, always, plausibly. The backstory and the follow-through are much more carefully built and shaded-in than most Dystopias, such as The Handmaid's Tale. This is painstakingly authentic - now I found out that SL's wife was a journalist, a foreign correspondent, so that explains why his description of the newspaper world is so true to life - but also how the Enemy manipulates the media, and what the world of politics looks like backstage.
The only thing I'll tell you is that Doremus Jessup finally comes to understand, completely, why it is that John Brown became a violent revolutionary...
(I want to see a movie of it. It would be cooler and scarier than 1984 or Fatherland, I think.)
------
Go read it. Today.
Don't get it from Amazon. --Not just because of their politics, but because they've posted a spoilering review on the front page! Get it from your local bookstore. Meantime, or if you don't mind reading books online, you can get started with the Australian etext (Aussie copyright is different, theyre not part of the Berne Convention) here. Harder to read, better for copy & paste.
And then give it to somebody else.