Can It Happen Here?

[Q]

September 14, 2004

Can It Happen Here?

by Maureen Farrell

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis penned the cautionary tale, It Can’t Happen Here, chronicling the fictional rise of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, who becomes President against the protests of Franklin D. Roosevelt and America’s saner citizens. A charismatic Senator who claims to champion the common man, Windrip is in the pocket of big business (i.e. Corpos), is favored by religious extremists, and though he talks of freedom and prosperity for all, he eventually becomes the ultimate crony capitalist. Boosted by Hearst newspapers (the FOX News of its day), he neuters both Congress and the Supreme Court, before stripping people of their liberties and installing a fascist dictatorship. One might argue, of course, that since It Can’t Happen Here was written nearly seven decades ago and America has yet to succumb to fascism, the book is the product of a novelist's runaway imagination, with an interesting yet less than probable theme. But then again, the same might have been said of George Orwell's 1984, before most realized that the book is brilliantly prescient -- and merely off by a couple decades.

Like 1984's warnings about perpetual war, doublespeak and Big Brother, It Can’t Happen Here describes conditions for totalitarianism that exist to this day. There is the usual ignorance and apathy ("most of the easy-going descendants of the wise-cracking Benjamin Franklin had not learned that Patrick Henry’s ‘Give me liberty or give me death’ meant anything more than a high school yell or a cigarette slogan."); blind faith in American exceptionalism ("Everyone, including Doremus Jessup, had said in 1935, "If there ever is a Fascist dictatorship here, American humor and pioneer independence are so marked that it will be absolutely different from anything in Europe. . .All that was gone, within a year after the inauguration, and surprised scientists discovered that whips and handcuffs hurt just as sorely in the clear American air as in miasmic fogs of Prussia."); and a sense of the surreal ("It’s not that he was afraid of the authorities. He simply could not believe that this comic tyranny could endure. It can’t happen here, said even Doremus – even now.").

During last spring’s Dixie Chick fiasco, columnist Paul Krugman drew parallels between Sinclair Lewis’ book burnings and modern CD smashings. "One of the most striking took place after Natalie Maines, lead singer for the Dixie Chicks, criticized President Bush; a crowd gathered in Louisiana to watch a 33,000-pound tractor smash a collection of Dixie Chicks CD's, tapes and other paraphernalia," Krugman explained. "To those familiar with 20th-century European history it seemed eerily reminiscent of. . . . But as Sinclair Lewis said, it can't happen here."

And certainly, the hatred towards treasonous "anti-Buzz" factions could readily be applied to those who believe being "anti-Bush" is somehow anti-American. "Antibuzz. . . was to be used extensively by lady patriots as a term expressing such vicious disloyalty to the State as might call for a firing squad." Lewis wrote. "Today, at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of a Democrat's manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief," Zell Miller ranted -- though in saner times, a "manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief" was called a "presidential election."

(For more on Mr. Miller and American fascism, Google "Zell Miller, Dominionists".)

http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/09/far04030.html