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Thursday, February 13, 2003
Fun with fiction time
War cheerleader Andrew Sullivan posts:
LETTERS: "In light of the current crisis with Iraq, I thought it might be interesting to read again Frederick Forsyth's wonderful novel on the Gulf War, The Fist of God, published in 1994. Take note of this gem I discovered on page 351:
'He (Saddam Hussein) thinks the United Nations peacemongers could pull the rug. He's gambling that time is on his side, that if he can keep spinning things out the resolve of the UN will ebb away. He could be right.'
'The man doesn't make sense,' snapped Laing. 'He has the deadline. January 16, not twenty days away. He's going to be crushed.'
'Unless,' suggested Paxman, 'one of the Permanent Members of the Security Council comes up with a last-minute peace plan to put the dealine(sic) on hold.'
Laing looked gloomy.
'Paris or Moscow, or both,' he predicted.
So why are we surprised now?"
Ooooooooo...spooky. Speaking of prescient novels, try this one on:
It Can't Happen Here
Novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1935. It is a cautionary tale about the rise of fascism in the United States. During the presidential election of 1936, Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, observes with dismay that many of the people he knows support the candidacy of a fascist, Berzelius Windrip. When Windrip wins the election, he forcibly gains control of Congress and the Supreme Court, and, with the aid of his personal paramilitary storm troopers, turns the United States into a totalitarian state. Jessup opposes him, is captured, and escapes to Canada.
Some more eerie parallels:
In this novel, Sinclair Lewis asks the question – what if some ambitious politician would use the 1936 presidential election to make himself dictator by promising quick, easy solutions to the depression - just as Hitler had done in Germany in 1933.
The hero, Doremus Jessup, a small-town newspaper editor in Vermont, turns 60 years old the year the dictator is elected. Doremus struggling for a year with the new government’s attempts to censor his paper and ends up in a concentration camp. Within a year he escapes to Canada, from there, he goes on missions back into the states for the underground resistance movement against the dictatorship.
While Doremus Jessup could be anybody, the identity of Buzz Windrip, the power-hungry senator who makes himself a dictator would be obvious to any American in 1935. Parallels are made in his dictatorial control of his own un-named state with the career of Huey Long, senator from Louisiana. In 1935 Long had a mass organization, the Share the Wealth League, and was planning to challenge Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination for the president in 1936. (While Lewis was writing his novel, Long was assassinated.)
The identity of the main ally of the fictional dictator would be equally obvious, Bishop Peter Paul Prang, the popular radio preacher who endorses Buzz Windrip’s campaign, is based on Father Charles Coughlin, the most popular radio speaker of the thirties who had a weekly program on CBS in which he denounced President Roosevelt and the Jews for causing and perpetuating the depression. Father Coughlin’s fans included the father of Pat Buchanan, a candidate for the Republican nomination for the president in the year 2000.
The parallel between Father Coughlin and such present-day TV evangelists as Pat Robertson is equally obvious. (In his novel, Lewis foresees that TV would have even greater propaganda potential than the radio – this fictional dictator introduces mass coast-to-coast TV broadcasting in 1937 - something that did not happen in reality until 1948.)
Lewis’s novel was supposed to be made into a film in 1936, but Will Hays who was in charge of censorship for the movie studios, used all his power and stopped the film from being made. Hays felt that a film of this novel would be seen as an attack on the Republican party.
Notice any coincidences?
Me neither...
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