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.
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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.