"It can't happen here"
"It can't happen here"
Turning to dystopian fiction at a dystopian moment in history.
Good evening(!), and welcome back to Writing About Reading.
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The usual housekeeping: I’m currently finishing Wilberforce by H.S. Cross and Draft No. 4 by John McPhee. I genuinely want to hear what you’re reading.
If you’re new here, last week was a timely look back at Hunter S. Thompson’s political reporting. The newsletter has also examined baseball fiction, William T. Vollmann’s travel writing, and The Sport of Kings.
And now: Issue 5.
It took nearly five days, but on Saturday, networks called the U.S. presidential election for Joe Biden. Regardless of your political leanings, it was a relief to many just to see a winner finally declared, and many are feeling some optimism about the country.
But a major takeaway from this election is how divided the country remains. There was no “blue wave.” Trump did far better than predicted (polling was even more wrong than in 2016). Democrats did not (yet) flip the Senate. And even as liberals rejoice about the imminent end of the Trump presidency, it will not be the end of Trumpism. 70 million Americans voted to reelect Trump; those folks aren’t going away, nor are their political views. As this week’s Businessweek cover declares, with a photo of a life-size Trump cardboard cutout on someone’s lawn, “Here to stay: Trumpism isn’t going anywhere.” In our Connecticut town, one neighbor has added more Trump lawn signs in the past two days, rather than removing them.
I believe the past four years have shown us that almost anything can happen in America right now, and anything can happen to America in the near future.
Meanwhile, more than 240,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, and more than 100,000 Americans are testing positive for the virus each day. President Biden and Vice President Harris will have to prioritize the pandemic. But if you ask Bill Gates, our planet faces an issue far more pressing than COVID-19: climate change.
With all that said, I’m thinking a lot about Omar El Akkad’s 2017 novel American War.
El Akkad imagines that a second civil war breaks out in 2074, caused by a nationwide split over a hot-button political issue: ditching gas-guzzlers. Climate change has caused sea level to rise dramatically, completely eliminating Florida and much of Louisiana, and carving into Georgia.
In the early 2070s, before the novel’s current action, the federal government (now based in Columbus, Ohio!) bans fossil fuels. (It is a novel Elon Musk would enjoy.) A group of Southern states rejects the ban and attempts to secede. South Carolina gets consumed by a virus and becomes a “forest of living dead” (note the South Carolina Quarantine Zone on the above map), Texas gets invaded by Mexico (see the Mexican Protectorate on the map), and the remaining states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia (“the Mag”) band together to fight the Northern Union.
Sounds dark—but alarmingly plausible, right? And here’s a twist: the book’s (anti)heroine, Sarat Chestnut, is on the side of the Southern rebels. Her father is killed in a bombing early in the book and she ends up in a refugee camp, where she meets Gaines, the man who will eventually radicalize her. (Sarat fights—and kills—for the South mostly out of a long-indoctrinated hatred of the North; the actual issue that prompted the war gets completely lost.) Interspersed with Sarat’s story are press clippings from newspapers that chronicle how the Second Civil War broke out.
In American War, which has a hell of a lot of violence, America has become the Middle East. El Akkad writes beautifully, like this thought from Gaines, which I underlined in my copy: “My father was a doctor, and he wanted me to study medicine. He used to say the only truly stable profession is blood work—the work of the surgeon, the soldier, the butcher. He said all industries rise and fall, but as long as there’s even a single man still alive, there will always be use for blood work.”
You probably gathered: there’s not much lightness or humor in this book. But the book has stuck with me because its premise is so brilliant and so terrifyingly real. It is a sobering but riveting read.
One traditional descriptor for this novel would be “dystopia,” but that almost feels too sci-fi for American War. After an event like the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the novel’s premise does not feel far-fetched to me.
On the other side of the coin from the dystopian novel, under the same broad genre, is the “alternate history,” and last year I went on a little alternate history kick.
First, I read The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel in which Germany and Japan win WWII and split up the United States. I had previously read only Dick’s short stories, including the story that inspired “Minority Report,” one of my very favorite movies. The end of the novel, which I won’t give away beyond saying that Dick breaks the fourth wall, blew my mind. (I then watched the first season of the Amazon Prime series, which premiered in 2005, and it was good, not great; the first season ends where the book ends, so I didn’t keep watching beyond that.)
Then I read Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America, in which the celebrity pilot (and accused Nazi sympathizer) Charles Lindberg is elected president amid the start of WWII and keeps America out of the war, championing isolationism and an “America first” agenda. (Sound familiar?) It was one of the few remaining Roth novels I hadn’t read. The main characters are the New Jersey Roths, including cousin Alvin, who is so appalled with the Lindbergh presidency that he joins the Canadian Army. It feels like a novel about the Trump presidency, rather than a novel about a fictional presidency. Then I watched the new HBO miniseries from David Simon (creator of “The Wire”) and, again, thought it was good, not great. (I suspect the show, despite terrific acting, would feel extremely slow for anyone who did not read the book.)
The Plot Against America has other uncanny parallels to now: After Lindbergh is elected, some Jews justify their submission to the Lindbergh presidency by pointing to the economy. Herman Roth, the fictional father in Philip Roth’s novel, rants to his brother Monty, a successful businessman: “The Depression is over, all you rich Jews tell me, and thanks not to Roosevelt but to Mr. Lindbergh. The stock market is up, profits are up, business is booming—and why? Because we have Lindbergh’s peace instead of Roosevelt’s war. And what else matters, what besides money counts with you people?” The stock market was keeping many rich Americans pleased with the Trump administration. Then the pandemic hit. But now, as the pandemic rages on, stocks are surging once again, unbothered by the discouraging economic data. The rich get richer.
There’s good reason both Dick’s novel and Roth’s novel (one more than 50 years old, one just 15 years old) became high-gloss streaming dramas in the past five years. They speak to the current cultural moment. They were timely when they were published, and they’re timely again now—urgently relevant.
For all three of the novels I’ve mentioned today, the ubiquitous phrase “It can’t happen here” comes to mind. Nowadays the phrase is often used sarcastically, since, clearly, it can happen here. The phrase originated in a 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel that imagines an “everyman” candidate named Buzz Windrip gets elected president in 1936 by pushing traditional “American family” values and the restrengthening of the working class. (Again: Sound familiar?) Once in office, Windrip rails against the media and goes after—surprise!—Blacks and Jews.
Thirty years after Lewis’s novel, in Roth’s novel, Herman Roth tells his wife amid the Charles Lindbergh presidency, “Every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.”
That is the job of dystopian fiction: not to predict the future, but to warp our current reality just enough that it’s scary (or funny), and still plausible, which makes it even scarier (or funnier). As Ursula Le Guin wrote in her author’s note to The Left Hand of Darkness: “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”
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One addendum: Another excellent near-future dystopia I recommend is Lionel Shriver’s “The Mandibles,” set during a massive American financial collapse in 2029. I wrote about the novel last April at Air Mail.
Coming up next time: The dog.