Sinclair Lewis (1935)
From 70 years ago: Dark and not so humorous tale of a fascist takeover in the US. It starts with the highly contested election of an oafish yet strangely charismatic president, who talks like a “reformer” but is really in the pocket of big business, who claims to be a home-spun “humanist,” while appealing to religious extremists, and who speaks of “liberating” women and minorities, as he gradually strips them of all their rights. One character, when describing him, says, “I can’t tell if he’s a crook or a religious fanatic.”
After he becomes elected, he puts the media – at that time, radio and newspapers – under the supervision of the military and slowly begins buying up or closing down media outlets. William Randolph Hearst directs his newspapers to heap unqualified praise upon the president and his policies, and gradually comes to develop a special relationship with the government. The president, taking advantage of a crisis, strong-arms Congress into signing blank checks over to the military and passing stringent and possibly unconstitutional laws, e.g. punishing institutions that do not support his military programs and are not vociferous enough in their approval of his policies. Eventually, he takes advantage of the crisis to convene military tribunals for civilians, and denounce all of his detractors as unpatriotic and possibly treasonous.*
The Bush era is enough to make one nostalgic for the Great Depression. With dread I read the news. The blood froze in my veins last spring when an ABC journalist asked Scott McLellan: “With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek? Do you think it’s appropriate for you, as the official spokesman of the President to tell an American magazine what they should print?” That was the moment when I knew that democracy was finished in the US. It became official. The press is not free.
Last week we learned that the Bush Administration ordered the New York Times not to print a story about illegal domestic spying by the NSA. Had the Times printed then what we know now the outcome of the election might have been different. The balance of power in the Executive might have been different. The power of Congress to do its job might have been different. But how far back does it go?
Envisioning a world where we did not go to war in Iraq, and the hell on earth of the torture gulags, the evil legal geniuses who came up with the torture memos, and the real traitors who betrayed the Constitution in pursuit of unlimited presidential power…. the mind boggles. My blood stays frozen. It’s true then. Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here” is a comedy compared to the waking nightmare of Orwell’s “1984” that we are living through today.
These days I look with wonder at the genius of Sinclair Lewis, Charles Chaplin, and George Orwell. I marvel at them. I wonder how they could have read their present in a way which so clearly predicts our predicament today. All I can see is that the powers that control the media, those are the powers that determine our present and our future.
When the editors at the Times decided last month to go ahead with the article, President Bush personally summoned the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, and executive editor, Bill Keller, to the Oval Office in an attempt to talk them out of running the story.
From Keller and Sulzberger’s Statement as to why they didn’t run the story a year ago:
- “First, we developed a fuller picture of the concerns and misgivings that had been expressed during the life of the program. It is not our place to pass judgement on the legal or civil liberties questions involved in such a program, but it became clear those questions loomed larger within the government than we had previously understood.”
If this is true, which I sincerely doubt, then they were dead wrong. It is most certainly their job to pass judgement on the legal and civil liberties questions involved in NSA domestic surveillance. It is most certainly their job to recognize all the hallmarks of a corrupt and illegal power base at work in Washington. There are editors for high school newspapers all around the country who know better than this.
Did it take them a year to become clear on what laws and whose rights were being violated, or did they look at the work of one of their own NSA whistleblowing journalists, James Risen, and figure out they better make a judgement call on which side of the fence they were going to take their stand? Did they figure out that there is more profit in printing the real news… that is the true account of how very grave this issue is for all of us?
What I suspect really happened at the NYT a year ago, and many years ago, is that they had a taste of the kind of intimidation, pressure, and control that CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour was exposed to by the Bush Administration. (See: CNN War Reporting Intimidated by FOX and Bush Administration)
Considering that this is the Administration whose Attorney General made torture legal in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the Constitution and the Military Code of Justice, I don’t think I want to know what kind of pressure was brought to bear on the management of the New York Times.
Better to be a brave small fish in this shark pool like ABC News’s Terry Moran. He’s the reporter who confronted McLellan over the Newsweek story that reported the truth about desecration of the Qu’ran at Guantanamo.
McClellan said that Newsweek should make further amends for its mistake “by talking about the way they got this wrong, and pointing out what the policies and practices of the United States military are when it comes to the handling of the Holy Qu’ran.”
To which ABC News’s Terry Moran replied: “With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek? Do you think it’s appropriate for you, at that podium, speaking with the authority of the President of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?”
“Are you asking them to write a story about how great the American military is; is that what you’re saying here?” asked New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller….
This excerpt comes from
DANIEL FROOMKIN AT THE WASHINGTON POST !!White House Talk
Dan Froomkin
White House Briefing Columnist
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Walter Cronkite used to sign off his nightly news show that way. The week of May 18, 2005 was really interesting in the news. That’s the week that informed US citizens, mostly from the blogosphere came down hard on US media for not covering the Downing Street Memo story.
The US media’s reluctance to cover this story is the key, I think, for us to understand now what stories the Bush Administration ordered stopped, killed, redacted, controlled. They were all stories about the build-up and reasons for war with Iraq.
Torture stories were permitted, and they outnumbered pre-Iraq war intelligence stories 70 to 1. This even when the minutes of the July 23, 2002 Downing Street meeting were published in Britain on May 1, 2005 which said, among other things, that “intelligence was being fixed to suit the policy” of inevitable war with Iraq. Also reported in Britain at that time was the illegal RAF double-bombing of Iraq to provoke Saddam Hussein into war. These are the stories that were not fit to print anywhere, anytime, by anyone.
After a three week long letter writing campaign the New York Times and the Washington Post succumbed reluctantly to cover these stories. But again that was due to public pressure and the vigilance of Public Editors Byron Calame (NYT) and Michael Getler (WaPo).
The New York Times is today at best bipolar, at worst schizophrenic. The only management worth reading on the NSA issue at the NYT is Public Editor Byron Calame. I wait on the 35 questions he has delivered to Keller and Sulzberger with expectations that on their publication there will be a shakeup at the NYT equivalent to the shockwaves in Christiandom when Martin Luther nailed his 98 protests on the Church’s door.
However, considering that they HAVE now after a year of deliberations printed the NSA story, maybe they’ll make a run of it.
Today’s NYT:
- Basis for Spying in US Is Doubted
By Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane
The New York Times
Saturday 07 January 2006
Washington – President Bush’s rationale for eavesdropping on Americans without warrants rests on questionable legal ground, and Congress does not appear to have given him the authority to order the surveillance, said a Congressional analysis released Friday.
There are many members of Congress who have stated publically that they never granted the president the power to spy on US citizens. Tom Dashle has a great piece that was published in the Washington Post on the 23rd of December. I like to think of this article as Daschle’s Christmas present to all of us.
Please read POWER WE DID NOT GRANT, and when you do, consider that this is a theme that might carry us through the months ahead. The only legitmate power of a president, or a senator, or a newspaper, for that matter is the power that we grant. We have the right to vote, to petition, to write, to protest and to boycott. These may not seem like powerful tools or weapons in these dark days, but I honestly think they’re the only tools and weapons we’ve got. And you know what they’re made of? Paper. Just paper.
- Our liberty is grounded in the First Amendment.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Our liberty is grounded in the Fourth Amendment.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
When I read these words I weep. When I read these words, the blood thaws, the heart quickens, I gain the courage that was frozen in dread. And I find the Action Item… “Congress Shall Make No Laws… abridging free speech and the freedom of the press.
Is that how we got to this point? Did the Congress sell us down this river? Or did the current president seize the power that was never granted him… not by the Constitution, not by the Congress, not by the electorate, and not by the God of his delusions. And is it possible that an American newspaper, the “newspaper of note,” The New York Times, facilitated this illegal appropriation of power? No, it can’t happen here.
_________________________________________
By Sinclair Lewis (1935)
is available on the web, in its entirety, thanks to the Gutenberg Project.
Just click IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE.
* (From a 1993 review by Charles Häberl (Cambridge, MA United States)
M. Suskind is a writer — with no money, no e-mail, and no permanent address. Things are, however, looking up.
The Bush presidency is enough to make one nostalgic for the Great Depression.
Not yet. The crash is still to come. Then you can be nostalgic.
It is good to rail against the death of the American Republic. And it is good to wake people up–if they can be.
But both the political and economic situation will deteriorate without end–without bottom. The way is already being paved for Bush’s replacement, so that the enslavement of America can continue–more efficiently. But the collapse will not be halted, because it cannot. Our civilization that depends on resources that are running out or no longer exist. What then?
Start imagining the collapse, and what happens after it. There are endless senarios, but they have a common thread. What is it? Plan for that.
very quietly i have to say, “and you’re right, too.”
“It” HAS happened here.
It is ALWAYS happening, this push and pull between freedom and power.
We are down now. But we will come up again.
You write:
It is very simple, how they managed to read their present so presciently.
Nothing has changed.
Nothing except the forms that are taken by this eternal struggle. The content…the meaning…remains the same.
They were not prescient enough to predict the Information Age and computers.
THAT’S “form”.
But the content has been the same since we were living in caves. Bet on it. One group wanting peace and freedom, another wanting control, dominance and “safety”. Always and forever. Plus a third, much larger group that simply sways with the prevailing wind.
And those artists saw it.
You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind has been blowing here for the last 50 years or so. We are in a dustbowl of the soul.
But weather changes.
“Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” (Attributed to Mark Twain, but really written by Charles Dudley Warner.)
Yup.
But the weather always changes nonetheless. And in THIS instance we can “do something about it.”
But not if we do not realize the simple fact that this is an ongoing process. It has ALWAYS been like this. It has always been “happening here.”
Happening EVERYWHERE.
Check out this little quote from Twain. About “the weather.”
– “The New England Weather”, Mark Twain’s Speeches
He must’ve known Tom DeLay.
It is ever thus.
And there are always People like Twain and Douglass and Paine and Chaplin and Orwell and Sinclair and Cervantes and Shakespeare and Socrates and Jesus Christ to point this out.
Feel free. Point away.
Sic ’em, Tighe!!!
AG
All three of them: Sinclair, Chaplin, and Orwell were looking down the road, and they had and kept a clear vision. Even the brilliance of their own work/vision did not cause them to become snowblind. The marvel of it, to me, is that through the extreme times they lived through they had clear heads at all.
Orwell, especially, knew the extreme mental duress that many other writers didn’t survive:
`You are improving. Intellectually there is very little wrong with you. It is only emotionally that you have failed to make progress. Tell me, Winston–and remember, no lies: you know that I am always able to detect a lie–tell me, what are your true feelings towards Big Brother?’
`I hate him.’
`You hate him. Good. Then the time has come for you to take the last step. You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to obey him: you must love him.’
George Orwell, 1984
Then there’s this:
1984 On Line
He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure FOR EVER? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette packet–everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed–no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
Then finally:
O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
George Orwell, 1984
And I AGREE with you about Form. Above all Form. That is art. I’m sure that the only way to keep one’s sanity, to rise above the seemingness of this contemporary world is to sink down deep into the truly subversive language of poetry, music, drama, literature, sculpture. Now there’s not a NSA spybot that can be programmed to interpret this language!
So I am very, very happy with your list:
Twain and Douglass and Paine and Chaplin and Orwell and Sinclair and Cervantes and Shakespeare and Socrates and Jesus Christ. I don’t know about Douglass, but I can say for the rest that they were the real deal — subversives every man jack of them.
In the end there is the love of language, of the written word, of meter, of cadence, and sound. Just that is enough to keep one’s keel steady pointed towards a “point” on the horizon.
Someday, when I have time, I will go into these three men. Of the three I am today most interested in Chaplin. And when I referred to him it was for “The Great Dictator” (1940). His film… written, directed, produced and acted all by him…. and his first “talkie.” What an enormous risk! And what a catastrophic bomb !! I think it had him bankrupted.
I suppose the only modern equivalent is “Dr. Strangelove.” And, maybe, “Catch 22.” Maybe Vonnegut…. I don’t know.
Thank you, friend.
When the iron is hot, the only way you can safely tell is to spit on it, eh what?
And that’s when you strike…. when the iron’s hot.
Not news to you.
MS
Check out Frederick Douglass. An amazing man. Up from brutalizing slavery to sheer human genius of the spirit in one lifetime.
A sampler:
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Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will….
——————————————————–
Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress….
—————————————————–
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will….
————————————————————
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe….
Yup.
Between 100 and 150 years ago.
Right here in the heart of racist America.
In its face.
He was a free man…he could have just backed off.
But he didn’t.
TRULY free.
One of the greatest of ALL American heroes.
AG
“Agitate…agitate…agitate. …”
Great diary, Suskind!
There’s much sustenance to be had from what Anne Waldman has called the ‘Outrider tradition.’
I’ve fed often & have been returning of late to Robert Duncan; here’s a small snippet:
that Sinclair Lewis wrote his novel as a social commentary on the present, his present, rather than just a futuristic “what if”. It took collusion between American media and the government to push the United States into World War One. Dissenters, and there were thousands, were imprisoned for speaking out against that war.
This collusion between media and the government is nothing new, and in fact, reflects the corporate nature of major media, which has been around a long time now.
While I haven’t read Lewis’s novel, it was written in 1935, when distrust of the government was strong, although the socialist movement was under constant attack. Socialists helped labor to continue to organize at the time, and helped the unemployed to organize as well.
I think the New York Times chose to keep the information on spying out of their newspaper for one year; they chose to cave to heavy pressure from the government. This is an extension of the media all but giving a free pass to this government in its march to war with Iraq.
The Newsweek reporter standing up to McClellan shows a bit of “uumph” in the media, which has been sorely lacking. Don’t hold your breath though.
The corporate media will always be the corporate media. At the turn of the century and beyond (20th), small socialist newspapers, 1000’s of them, were the alternative media of the day, and they did it well and with fewer resources than we have.
It is the structure of capitalism itself, and the general belief in capitalism, that promotes corporate melding with every sphere of our lives. To our credit, we have created an alternative media on the internet, and it is up to us to judge its effectiveness. The introduction of ads on blogs should rightly be questioned as having an effect on the messenger and the message served, and also serves as a reflection of the message.
you are brilliant.
Oh Suskind, your diaries are so well thought out! I try hard not to miss any of them.
As I slowly awake from my damn slumber of unawareness, I find I have been snookered once again for my faith in humanity and governement.
I try hard to love and find good in most anyone. This has made me one of the gullible. I have awakened in 1999 to find I should not have wanted that sleep, for what ever reason I chose. I was abanded and forgotten while I was napping. This will not ever happen again, with me. I just wonder to myself, it it is too late for me to shake it off and do what is right and get back to the good in all my thinking. Do I have to get a new way of fighting in my mannerisms? I am so very thankful for y our diaries. You are so open and thoughtful. Makes me think, of which is why I am online and learing in the first place. So without adu, “THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH FOR DOING WHAT I WISHED I COULD DO”.
PS: as Walter Brennen would say, this is not brag, just fact. I ask for your help to understand what is happening around me, as I do others. Please help me to understand this nightmare.
I think it’s just:
Then, it’s all in the learning. Whatever you’re trying hard at…. you’re succeeding. (You just probably don’t see the progress) Whatever you admire, you’re treading that path. Whichever way you’re pointed… well you WILL end up at the destination.
However… by the time you get there it all will have changed. What you thought you knew is what you do not know and on and on and on.
But as to the nightmare, Brenda
It Is Not Real. The goodness IS real. In a bad dream… well these years have been a bad bad dream. And the cultural medium is all about fear, fear, fear.
All you’re doing is changing and learning. That’s all it is. Seeing in a new way. Learning. That’s all we’re doing. I have learned LOADS ! All the old trite stuff. We create our own reality. The secret to everything is to love one’s own self. All of it. Most of the important stuff come’s from children. This world we live in… the world of grown-ups is complete bollocks.
But don’t you think we’re all like the story of the blind men describing the elephant? One says it’s a snake… one says the trunk of a tree…. We all see a different aspect and no one has the whole truth or the whole picture.
These people… Sinclair Lewis, Chaplin and Orwell… their giftedness seems superhuman to me. And if one could get there by way of education or upbringing or life experience or work experience or by character or talent…. then I think it’s too late for me, it’s not in the cards. I’m hopeless. I’m just not that smart.
But one of the things I learned is that I don’t have to be brilliant, and whatever I do doesn’t have to be perfect. Just good enough is good enough. When it feels complete is when it is good enough. That’s well done and well made and well enough done.
And that applies to ANYTHING. Except cooking. Too much fussing about cooking is disaster-ville. It takes natural instinct.
But making a garden, or building something… thought or writing or anything that is crafted, shaped, worked on…. there’s something about it. Now caring for people, there’s another thing. I’m sure we all care, but we just don’t know how to express it.
I guess my theme of the day is that there’s art in everything, and everything is an artform. The reader’s art is the compliment to the writer’s art, like the taster’s art is the compliment to the chef’s art. The art of being receptive…. without it what would giving be?
The only thing I think you want to do that you’re not doing is waking up 20 minutes earlier every morning, sitting down in a quiet room and writing your little head off. Just stuff. And rants. And drivel. And garbage. And your dreams. All of it. Just write and write and write. That’s all that’s frustrating you.
That’s what I think, anyways.
I’m going to be teaching It Can’t Happen Here, along with The Handmaid’s Tale, Player Piano, and The Trial in my freshman comp class, this semester. Maybe I can open the eyes of just a few of these highly-indoctrinated kids.
And hey, before you go and tell me that these books are too much for the freshman mind to comprehend, the department loves the idea and is giving me its full support.
It sounds like a good list to me? Why would it be too much for a freshman?
If only I was as bright as most 8th graders I would consider myself brilliant. Seems to degrade from there, but yes… there’s certainly another peak of insight and splurge of learning in freshman. At 4 years old, at 14 years old, and at about 18-20 years old…. after that…… dunno. I seemed to go into retrograde after that…..
So I think it’s great. That’s the future members of Congress you’re teaching there. And I hope you have a Sinclair, a Charlie and a George in your class. Maybe a Margaret, a Kurt and a Franz, too. We never know.
Today’s rejects and misfits and those considered “slow” and maladjusted seem to be the overachievers of tomorrow. Einstein, they say, was dyslexic. Certainly a non-conformist!
I just posted this on dKos:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/1/8/112846/3059
A spider from iraq.centcom.mil has been visiting my site recently since I started writing about the war and surveillance.
Make of it what you will…
Suskind, thanks for this diary. It really is amazing how things don’t change, how the eternal struggle continues. Growing up, my father had a library in our home which included early copies of many Sinclair Lewis books. I always wondered about them but never got around to reading any. I am prompted to now.
Wonderful comparison, and the continuing struggle for mankind.
Kudos sir, peace be with you.