Surprise, surprise......over 80 years since its initial publication, it's a best seller again, along with "1984", George Orwell's nightmarish depiction of a brutal totalitarian society. Both books feature a terrorized populace under the yoke of an all-powerful leader. Dissenters invariably face firing squads, concentration camps or they tend to disappear altogether. The glorious Leader, rules with absolute authority, controlling all mass media....
Hmmm........wait a sec......some of this is starting to ring a bell.......a big Orange one....
So like every other reader who's recently delved into "It Can't Happen Here", the BQ cracked it open to see just how close it comes to current events......
It does, allright......sometimes enough to scare the crap out of us. Lewis's All-American Hitler, Senator Berzelius 'Buzz' Windrip, spellbinds depression-weary voters, promising them a guaranteed $5000 a year and vowing to put Negroes back in their place and women back in the kitchen where they belong. (Amusing note: Buzz never does quite figure out how he's going to pay for the $5000 a year deal.....unlike today, he doesn't promise his rabid throngs that he'll get another country to pay for it.....)
With the aid of his sinister, shadowy second-in-command (and most likely, puppeteer) Lee Sarason, Windrip sweeps into the White House...and promptly sweeps democracy out the front door.(Imagine that.....a blowhard with a creepy adviser behind the curtains....)
Author Lewis recounts all the horrors that follow with a casually offhand, calloused satirical eye.........the end of constitutional freedoms, murders or imprisonment of political opponents, concentration camps, forced labor camps, terrorizing by homegrown stormtroopers, fancifully dubbed 'Minute Men' by Lee Sarason. Standing nobly against this tidal wave of atrocities is the novel's protagonist Doremus Jessup, an aging Vermont newspaper editor who pays dearly for his resistance.
Frightening? You betcha. Prescient? Some of it......with dead accuracy at times. At one point, this government of gangsters hopes to divert rumbling unrest among the masses by declaring war on Mexico.(My, my, isn't that absurd...) And Windrip's swift silencing of any journalism unflattering to him made us queasy in its blatant parallels.
The downsides? Fair warning......Lewis's prose often becomes dense and near impenetrable. The story springs to life in the dialogue sequences, but much of the stilted speech sounds like the title cards that pop up in silent films. The basic premise - that Windrip and Sarason could accomplish their complete fascist conquest of America in about two years - still comes off as a little Sci-Fi for us, like the flying cars that always sail around in fiction set several years in the future.
What amused us greatly was Lewis's ploy to make power-behind-the power Lee Sarason especially loathsome......by sketching him as a homosexual sadist who enjoys both beating and loving the boys of his Minute Men brigade. And we adored the movie-ready sequence in which Jessup's enraged daughter exacts spectacular vengeance against a Windrip minion who ordered the execution of her husband. Insane, really....but worthy of an Indiana Jones film.
Optimistically, Lewis has his totalitarian monsters start turning on each other like a bunch of Rotary club Borgias, somewhat similar to Orwell's 'Animal Farm'.At least he remembers to leave you with a glimmer of hope.....and as the Academy Award winners would say.......a reaffirmation of the the human spirit. As for the BQ, we identified most with the sadder and wiser Doremus Jessup, disgusted with the misery and violence caused by unbending idealogues and their causes.
Worth a read? If you care at all about what's unfolding in front of you every day....absolutely. We don't know yet if it can happen here......but it's sure making its initial efforts. BQ gives out 4 fearful stars (****).
No comments:
Post a Comment