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In 1935, Sinclair Lewis penned the cautionary tale, It Canâ??t Happen Here,
chronicling the fictional rise of Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, who becomes President
against the protests of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Americaâ??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 Canâ??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 Canâ??
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 Henryâ??s â??
Give me liberty or give me deathâ?? 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 (”Itâ??s not that he was afraid of
the authorities. He simply could not believe that this comic tyranny could
endure. It canâ??t happen here, said even Doremus â?? even now.”).

During last springâ??s Dixie Chick fiasco, columnist Paul Krugman drew
parallels between Sinclair Lewisâ?? book burnings and modern CD smashings. “One of the
most striking [vehement pro-war rallies] 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”.)

And though It Canâ??t Happen Here is out of print, and surprisingly hard to
find, selected quotes remind us that despite its 1935 publication date and
antiquated references, the book remains far too relevant:

“The D.A.R. [Daughters of the American Revolution]. . . is composed of
females who spend one half their waking hours boasting of being descended from the
seditious American colonists of 1776, and the other more ardent half in
attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the principles for which such
ancestors struggled.” â?? page 5

“Senator Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, next
November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us into some war,
just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that weâ??re the huskiest
nation going.” â?? page 20

“Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut â??Liberty cabbageâ?? and
somebody actually proposed calling German measles, â??Liberty measles?â??And
wartime censorship of honest papers?. . . Remember when the hick legislators in
certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology
from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the
whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?” — page
21

“[T]he Saturday Evening Post enraged the small shopkeepers by calling Windrip
a demagogue, and the New York Times, once Independent Democrat, was
anti-Windrip. But most of the religious periodicals announced that with a saint like
Bishop Prang for backer, Windrip must have been called of God.” — page 96

“For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and the World
War, people were afraid to say whatever came to their tongues.” â?? page 263

“December tenth was the birthday of Berzelius Windrip, though in his earlier
days as a politician, before he fruitfully realized that lies sometimes get
printed and unjustly remembered against you, he had been wont to tell the world
that his birthday was on December twenty-fifth, like one whom he admitted to
be an even greater leader. . .” – page 260

“The newspapers everywhere might no longer be so wishily-washily liberal as
to print the opinions of non-Corpos; they might give but little news from those
old-fashioned and democratic countries, Great Britain, France and the
Scandinavian states, might indeed print almost no foreign news, except as regards the
triumph of Italy giving Ethiopia good roads, trains on time, freedom from
beggars and from men of honor, and all the other spiritual benefactions of Roman
civilization.” — Page 342

“But he saw now that he must remain alone, a “Liberal” scorned by all the
nosier prophets for refusing to be a willing cat for the busy monkeys of either
side. . . ‘More and more, as I think about history,’ he pondered, ‘I am
convinced that everything that is worth while in the world had been accomplished by
the free inquiring critical spirit and the that preservation of this spirit is
more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and
the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of
silencing them forever.’” â?? page 433

America is haunted by past sins, to be sure, and Sinclair Lewis craftily
presents a series of them as a primer for what the “land of the free” is capable
of. “Why, thereâ??s no country in the world that can get more hystericalâ??yes,
or more obsequious!â??than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch
over Louisiana. . . Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radioâ??
divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted
Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President
Hardingâ??s appointees?. . . Remember the Kuklux Klan?. . . Remember our Red
scares and our Catholic scares. . .and the Republicans campaigning against Al
Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize
their children?. . .Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy
lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibitionâ??shooting down people just because they
MIGHT be transporting liquorâ??no, that couldnâ??t happen in AMERICA! Where in all
history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!”

Yes, the mindset that allowed for slavery and lynchings and the Scopes monkey
trial still produces an unsettling undercurrent, while radioland demagoguery,
crooked Presidential appointees and dishonest and prejudicial Carolina
political smears are hardly things of the past.

Meanwhile, like “the hick legislators” Lewis described nearly 70 years ago,
the President of the United States advocates teaching Creationism in public
schools and putting the kibosh on real science. Just as President Windrip told
people he was born on Christmas “like one whom he admitted to be an even greater
leader,” George Bush dubbed Jesus Christ his favorite philosopher. And while
all of Lewis’ “Corpo Universities were to have the same curriculum,” Mrs. Dick
Cheney and stealth Bush appointee Daniel Pipes actually made “lists” of
academics straying from acceptable parameters of thought.

And it was just three short years ago, you might recall, that voting one’s
conscience, speaking one’s mind or criticizing G.W. Bush (regardless how
truthful and pointed the criticism), was enough to get a person fired or bombarded
with death threats.

At the start of our recent weirdness, Dave Weissbard, of the Universalist
Unitarian Church in Rockville, IL studied It Can’t Happen Here alongside They
Thought They Were Free (Milton Mayer’s nonfiction account of Germans’ perceptions
during the Third Reich’s reign) and related the themes to contemporary
America.

“Sinclair Lewis used racism and jealousy of privilege as his motivators for
the election of a demagogue. I believe it takes more,” he said. “It takes a
patriotic frenzy constructed on fear and on feelings of superiority. Thatâ??s why I
have combined Lewis’ novel with Mayerâ??s nonfictional analysis of the coming
of dictatorship. The combination of those two with the current news causes me
some terror.”

Chronicling a now familiar list of liberties surrendered and endangered,
along with increased government secrecy and belligerent nationalism, Weissbard
concluded: “The problem, of course, is not in Washington in the hands of two or
three. The problem is in America where there are people who are frightened and
who have a loose commitment to our freedoms.”

And so it goes.

On Sunday, the St. Petersburg Times ran an Op-ed entitled, “Americans in
danger are vulnerable to dictatorship,” describing the frighteningly simple
conventional wisdom the country now seems to embrace. “The ‘man on horseback’
mentality, the belief that a leader’s strength is more important than where it leads
them, defines a population that is vulnerable to dictatorship,” Martin
Dyckman wrote, before adding (else someone jump down his throat) a disclaimer. “This
is not to call Bush a dictator or suggest that he wants to be one.” (Never
mind Bush’s thrice-repeated joke about wishing it were so).

“But let no one believe that it couldn’t happen here, as has happened so
often elsewhere,” Dyckman concluded, echoing Lewis’ ageless theme.

Of course, now that two wars and two Presidential campaigns are underway,
attention has been diverted. But the unease that rippled from post-9/11
aftershocks continues. It’s just different now. Somehow.

“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time
goes on, it grows,” one of Mayor’s subjects confided. “You speak privately to
you colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say?
They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And it’s not so bad. For the moment. Or at least until after the election and
the return of the draft or until after the next major attack and the triumph
of fear over liberty. After all, mainstream papers are free to discuss
Americans’ vulnerability to dictatorship, while citizens are still permitted to read
70-year-old novels describing conditions that are eerily familiar.

But, still. . .

“Thus had things gone in Germany, exactly thus in Soviet Russia, in Italy and
Hungary and Poland, Spain and Cuba and Japan and China. Not very different
had it been under the blessings of liberty and fraternity in the French
Revolution. All dictators followed the same routine of torture, as if they had all
read the same manual of sadistic etiquette,” Lewis wrote, long before anyone
heard of Abu Ghraib.

Could it happen here? Looking at the past four years, from the bizarre
election to the shadow government to secret detentions and pre-planned wars, doesn’t
it seem naive to think we’re immune?

Maureen Farrell is a writer and media consultant who specializes in helping
other writers get television and radio exposure.