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| Image borrowed from Amazon |
Bring out the old-time musket,
Rouse up the old-time fire!
See, all the world is crumbling,
Dreadful and dark and dire.
America! Rise and conquer
The world to our heart’s desire!
(p.60)1
This final chorus of the campaign song
for the 1930s nomination of Buzz Windrip as president of the United States of
America pretty much sums up the mood of the supporters
who put him into office, defeating F.D. Roosevelt. Buzz Windrip is
the creation of Sinclair Lewis in his 1936 novel, It Can’t
Happen Here, a sometimes-satirical, always-witty romp through the
possibility of America blissfully, blindly wandering down the paths of fascism in Europe. What would it be like if enough Americans
should embrace the option of fascism, of the clamp-down on the free
press, of the legitimizing of personal armies, of the brutal
suppression of opposition, of the seduction of the public with
unfulfillable promises and, yes, of the substitution with
“alternative facts” for actual facts?
A
campaigning Buzz Windrip clarifies his platform in a letter to be
read publicly by his deputy: “Summarized, the letter explained that
he was all against the banks but all for the bankers—except the
Jewish bankers, who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that
he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages
very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly
paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100
per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United
States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee,
sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that
it could defy the World . . . and maybe, if that World was so
impertinent as to defy America in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to
take it over and run it properly.” (p.62)
Turns out—according to It Can’t
Happen Here—that it would
rapidly turn into a blood bath; into the imprisonment, torture and
execution of journalists, suspected communists or socialists, and
finally, into internal party violence as members of Windrip’s cohort
seek to satisfy their whetted hunger for power by eliminating one another.
Naturally, a
resistance would grow among intellectuals, journalists, some
Christians and minorities as it became clear that in order to be a
secure ruler over people, the opposition--plus those who could
potentially become opposers--must be eliminated. Before Hitler
actually began with a full-scale resorting to concentration camps in
Europe, Lewis visualized their emergence in America as the means to
“concentrate” potential push back by the confining of doubtful citizens,
shooting them as necessary as an example to the whole country.
Tacit
permission is given to the “Minute Men,” the private, rabble
militia of the president, to be ruthless in their arrests, searches,
interrogations; Jews, authors, journalists, immigrants, pacifists,
African Americans are high on the undesirable list. Book burning, of
course, is a favourite means by which tyrants seek to suppress
ideas and the search for seditious literature, the setting of huge
bonfires becomes recreation for the M.M.
Doremus
Jessup is the soft-spoken, well-read family man and editor of his own
local Vermont newspaper, the Informer.
“He was an equable and sympathetic boss; an imaginative news
detective; he was, even in this ironbound Republican state,
independent in politics and in his editorials against graft and
injustice, though they were not fanatically chronic, he could slash
like a dog whip. (p.23) Lewis's plot follows him through his removal from
his own paper to his eventual role in the underground resistance, his
arrest and imprisonment on charges of opposing the government and his
escape to Canada where he feeds the resistance from a distance.
Interestingly,
the vitreol against Mexico foreshadows (along with many other foibles
of the tyrant, Buzz Windrip) Donald Trump, similarities that haven’t
been missed by the literati in the USA. Lewis wrote a play based on
his book which, although panned for it’s quality by some, toured
the USA. It was a time when play goers would probably have seen in it
the tyrants of Europe and missed the satire about American politics,
would have believed in the literal import of the title: It
Can’t Happen Here.
After
Trump’s nomination, the play was rewritten and has visited theatres
in US recently, the issues updated to more current trends in US
politics. I’d encourage readers of this to visit the New
Yorkers article on the revival
of It Can’t Happen Here. 2
Could
it happen here? I’m led to ponder. Surely in an enlightened
democracy the practical bounds of political deviation are known, the warning
signs of left or right wing demagoguery familiar. But one has to
wonder if, in fact, there doesn’t come a time when enough of the
population of a country becomes angry enough to welcome tyranny and
brutality. The kick-ass mood.
George
Orwell in Animal Farm
and 1984 did what he
could to warn the world that IT CAN
HAPPEN HERE. Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here
fits in that tradition; we do well to attend to the prophetic voices
of our poets and artists.
P.S.
An interesting side-note: Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway used the
expression “alternative facts” to dispute public reports of the
attendance at the Trump inauguration. According to one website,3
Amazon’s sales of Orwell’s 1984
have soared ever since. I leave it to those who’ve read Orwell to
ponder the reason: “Newspeak”
is a clue.
1
Page 60. All references are to the Feedbooks digital edition.
(www.feedbooks.com)