(and a man who turned down several of my resumes back when I was at loose ends), had a long appreciation of Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here in yesterday's Globe.
Breathlessly Joe thinks the book's tale of a Fascist takeover in the USA is scary & prophetic etc.
Well, Humble Elias is glad that old Sinclair is getting some props, but methinks this is a superficial reading of one of his personal favorites.
After all, the book has never been out of print, in fact it had a great deal of cachet when Nixon was tearing up the landscape.
In troubled times with rampant policians we tend to retire to this volume for any one of a number of reasons.
Conflating Buzz Windrip Lewis' American Dictator and an excellent caricature of Huey Long with George Bush is a mistake in Humble Elias' opinion.
Buzz Windrip and Huey Long both share a blood-lust for power and dark talent for demogaguery, but they are both lacking in any mythical ideological preoccupations. Lewis describes Windrip as a sort of Babbit like figure animated by a tawdry mind and coward's love of absolute power. Arthur Schlesinger noted Long's lack of a ubermenschen myth to his hodgepodge of "Share the Wealth" notions.
This is because, Long lived and died and Windrip was written prior to the revelation of Auschwitz and the Soviet Union's Great Terror. Prior to 1945 or so, no one truly believed mass murder on a cosmic scale might be undertaken and then justified solely to appease mere ideology.
No, Long and Windrip are not really any relation to George Bush. The President is after all a true believer, God, the freemarket, simpleminded paternal values and a messianic sense of destiny co-mingle in some dangerous ways in that otherwise empty uncomplicated head of his.
If anything Bush resembles that durable mystical caricature of liberal Presidential failure Edward M. Jason from the Advise and Consent series by Allen Drury.
Ah but Humble Elias promises you, Joe hasn't read any of those books.
:)
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