Science fiction. Welcome to the Bunch of Stuff Cast, everyone. My name is Jeff Dirigo. I'm the chief cook, bottle washer, writer, editor, etc., of this podcast. And generally we talk about books and writing here, but this week Uh well, technically we are gonna be talking about books and writing, but we're gonna be t dipping our toes a little bit into politics.
Which is generally something I don't do uh as part of this podcast because nah you can find politics stuff anywhere and uh why anybody would give a rat's ass what my thoughts are is beyond me. If for some reason you do want to torture yourself, you can find a bunch of my political writing in my Tumblr blog. I've got like a hundred articles there, of which maybe five of them or ten of them are political. So you know use your own discretion.
The uh blog is called Crap, a bunch of shit I guess, and you can find it if you look for J. DRIGO. Anyway. The reason that we're talking about uh books and a little bit in politics today is because I read uh a book in between novels for the Highline Marathon called It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.
No, I was aware of Sinclair Lewis because as an English major in college Uh while I drifted towards European literature, there was still discussion of American literature as I grew into being a student. And one of the things that we talked about was sort of the great muckraking novels of the early twentieth century, so The Jungle Wapton Sinclair, Molly, a girl of the streets, etcetera.
One of the ones that got mentioned was it can't happen here. And then it vanished from my memory almost immediately. So I was uh o of the reader persuasion where mixing up Upton Sinclair who wrote The Jungle and Sinclair Lewis who wrote this book as well as Elmer Gantry and some others.
was easy for me to do. Now I've read the jungle probably f twenty times by now. I used to read the public domain copy in text when I was at a workplace that uh I was pretty sure my job was gonna be evaporating, which When I was a temp was was pretty often, so I would sit at my desk and just read through the jungle, making it look like I was doing something for work, where I was literally just reading.
At any rate, d I picked up a copy of It Can't Happen Here because I saw a mention of it someplace. It could have been in a Reddit post. It could have been on Facebook. Somebody could have said it to me. I don't remember but I found myself hunting around to find a copy and was fortunate to find it at my local big bookstore.
Brought it home, started to read it, and was immediately horrified by what I was reading. So we'll give a little bit of context to the book first, but I want to talk about politics for a minute. Not my personal politics, but what politics kind of means. Heinlein brought this up in Podcane of Mars, where he describes politics as the greatest invention of mankind because without it, all we have is sort of hitting each other over the head with sticks to solve arguments.
And at the broadest sense, I don't disagree with that in any way, shape, or form. What I wanna talk about though is it's not so much national politics. that you interact with on a daily basis is stuff that's local. It may trickle down from national politics with changes to the economy.
etcetera. But generally when you're dealing with politics, you're dealing with your neighbors, people who live in your town, people who live in the city that you live in, and the decisions that they make and the way that they vote and the way that you vote all intertwines.
to determine how things run and the repercussions of that can be good, they can be neutral, they can be really bad. But if they're really bad, they're not always really bad for everyone. And if they're really good, they're not always really good for everyone. And if they're neutral, no one's happy
So that's that's kind of what the gist is of what we'll talk about in this book. So I I want you to think for a minute about national politics. I don't know where you get your political news from, whether it's from like online stuff like Reddit or Facebook or
Um, pick a political commentator that you like somewhere on YouTube, or if you get it from traditional media like CNN or MSNBC or even Fox News or whatever, what you're gonna generally see are discussions of like national scale, huge, completely disconnected from your day-to-day existence. uh politics. And i right now in the United States you can take this for what it's worth, but
P politics on the national scale has become a team sport here in the US. It's like football. It's like following baseball. You have a favorite team, you want the team to win. If they win, great. Even if they win in a way that is
Underhanded, okay. If they lose, it sucks, but the other team obviously cheated. Like that's kind of the mentality that we have right now here in the US when it comes to dealing with politics. And part of that is because of the way media interacts with us and we interact with media. And part of that is the way media ownership determines how they're gonna portray Political discussions.
and still make whatever their bottom line is for for money. So there's a financial incentive to report things or discuss politics one way or another. based on what the ultimate goals of the company that owns the media want to accomplish. But that's less important. What becomes more important is when the decisions that are made there that you sort of cheer on for your team trickle down to where you are during the day. Higher taxes for you might mean you have less food to eat.
Uh uh a drift towards authoritarianism may mean that there are police in the street that are m more numerous and m less tethered to social norms than they were before. And in the course of all of this, those are the people that you're gonna interact with most. I'll I'll tell you a quick story. We had the No Kings protest here, uh nationwide. I think it was like five million people or seven million people or somewhere between there protested on June, I think, twenty-second. I being the curious
you know, person that I am went downtown to my town to see if there was gonna be a protest and there's a couple of hundred people. It was really interesting, a lot of a lot of cheering, a lot of yelling and of course In the midst of this there's a older guy, older than me at least, um very tall, taller than me for sure, uh screaming and yelling at a high school kid who's holding a handmade sign that says no king.
And he's just howling and howling and howling at this this like fourteen year old kid completely unnecessary to to to to do. Like I can have a political difference with you and I can sit down and have a beer and talk with you about it. I don't have a problem with doing that. But I have a problem when the intimidation factor is like ramped up to a hundred million. There's no need for this fourteen year old kid to have to listen to this a grown giant dude screaming at him uh about
you know, the benefits of the current government. That just isn't necessary. So that's what I mean by local stuff, right? At this particular protest I walked around, got a feel for what was there, talked to some of the people, And as I was uh as my making my way back to my car, I ran into all of our local cops who were there. They were hanging around keeping the peace.
No masks on, very nice. They've our police in the town I live in are super friendly. They I know that they are they're looking out for for everybody in town. So like we get along well. We have a really good relationship, I think town wide.
with with our our police department. And f I've never had an interaction with them that has not been positive. Even when they've like pulled me over for rolling a stop sign. They're good dudes and and good dudettes, because we have a a a co ed or mixed a male-female police department.
So it was really nice to see them there as part of the community, being part of the community and looking out for those folks who were coming out to express their First Amendment rights. I thought that was great. And it was wonderful. And it was also very, very local. And what I mean is so that's the stuff trickling down from the top that becomes a local issue here. That's real visible. You can see that.
That stuff gets publicized, it gets traveled around, it gets coordinated, and it happens, right? But there's another layer of this that changes things, and that's like when there's no protest to do. when the top has changed enough so that uh groups of people who are in your neighborhood, in your town, in your city or whatever find themselves in a position of power because of the team that they root for. And what they are able to do with that power based on how that team
Looks at governing. And that's the gist of what Sinclair Lewis's novel is about. So it's a long way for me to get there. Nine minutes and fifteen seconds. Uh so f first, first and foremost, this is a political novel. It was written in nineteen thirty-five. Uh by Sinclair Lewis. His wife was the last American reporter to interview Adolf Hitler. She came back from Germany right after that because.
Things were about to go kind of haywire. He started putting this book together as a warning to the United States that, like Italy and Germany after it, And ultimately later, j well, I guess it wasn't that much later, but ultimately Japan, although we weren't interacting with them the same way, there was a real potential in the United States for a revolution that could go one of three ways. Communist Fascist.
Or some variation of what we were currently doing that was going to that was going to be more equal. for the masses. Now, think of nineteen thirty five. We are clawing our way out of the Great Depression, right? Uh Franklin Delon Roosevelt's in his f first term, I think, in thirty five.
And he is d trying to undo this s the problems that Hoover kind of created or exacerbated with his trade policies and protectionism and all this other sort of stuff. You can go read the history of the United States on Huron. Howard Zinn's book's real good, or pretty much any book from high school that you might have lying around or find at a yard sale will definitely do the job for you.
But ultimately the US was in a rough shape was in rough shape. In the nineteen twenties there was the bonus army issue, which was all the World War I veterans were promised a bonus, but it wasn't paid out and the depression was so bad.
that they were all running out of money, people were starting to starve to death, they were losing their homes and businesses and becoming destitute and wandering across the country trying to find a place to work and live. So a group of of veterans converged on Washington, DC and struck. They struck for their bonuses, and
And then ultimately that turned into a giant riot and a whole bunch of people got killed because the army rolled out and like started machine gunning stuff, people. And this this was bad. It's real bad. And like Russia before it in nineteen seventeen. When things are so bad that the army is shooting at regular people in the street, there's only kind of two ways things are gonna go. They're gonna jerk down and make that army stronger and force compliance.
Or they're gonna lose. And the people are gonna rise up just by virtue of n numbers. and destroy the power structure and rebuild it in a different image. That's what happened in 1917. A consequence of World War I, but also a consequence of a longstanding family controlling 90% of the wealth of the country, right? The Roman army.
And Because of the success of the Rom the the Communist Revolution in nineteen seventeen, and this economic success that the Russians had endured afterwards, al albeit with its own set of problems with authoritarianism. Other countries who faced the same sort of inequality that Russia faced started to see the same sort of agitation that Russia saw. So communists were organizing. Strikes were being prepared.
right? As a consequence of this, in places like Italy and Germany, another ideology was brought about, which was still kind of populist oriented, but it was where government begins to take possession of or favor certain industries. and regulate only those industries and consolidate finances and power among a small group of people, and then use police forces, armies, volunteers, etcetera, to establish rule
and change the way that the society structures irrespective of what the economy is like. One of the bigger issues with this kind of government style is that it favors a small group, right? Us the small group that are leading the pack. And that party becomes the party that dictates what happens to literally everyone. So in fascist Italy it was a way to rebuild the economy that had been pretty much destroyed after World War One. And a country that was insecure.
with Mussolini able to take power and then and begin to expand into sort of a modern European empire that it w wasn't tied to a royal family or an existing dynasty or something else, but by, you know, invading uh at the time Abyssinia and
trying to establish an Italian colony there. I think and and doing so, right? They got censored by the League of Nations but they stayed Uh Germany as well, who had been in the throes of a terrible economic crisis, the change in government from when the Kaiser uh abdicated the throne at the end of World War One to the Weimar government, which was a social democratic government trying desperately to sort of pull the economy together, but worldwide.
financial crisis hit and and their money became devalued and it was really terrible and the policies that they tried to put in place to uh assuage the problems just it's sort of exacerbated them for a while or didn't work fast enough to make it possible. And this fed fuel to both. uh communist organizations and fascist organizations that would ultimately become the Nazi Party. Right? So this is all going on in Germany and Italy at the same time. In the US
We're also dangerously close to this kind of revolution in political thought, political application. And here in the U.S., We were looking at Roosevelt. It's described often that Roosevelt saved capitalism. I'm saying that kind of with quotes. Because Roosevelt established programs that put people to work building national parks, monuments, repairing infrastructure and that sort of thing.
And repealed protectionist tariffs, gave some special financing to industry, to hire people, and started to put social safety net programs together, for example, Social Security.
and Medicare came out of this time period in the United States. And the reason he was able to get these things passed where there had been a hundred years of of pushback for anything like this and Admittedly a hundred years of pushback since is because the alternative he recognized or his government recognized would be the people would rise up and something different would take the place of the democratic system that we have in power right now.
And it could be communist and it could be fascist and it could be something even worse than either of those, depending on how you view any of these political systems. So Sinclair Lewis in recognizing that this collection of sort of political oily rags is laying in a garage in the sun on a summer day and is beginning to smolder.
starts to put together this book. And this book is an exploration of how the United States could slip very quickly from beleaguered democratic principles due to the economy, among other things, into full on corporate fascism and what it means not just at the national level when this happens, but at the local level where our main characters live. Now up until recently this book is sort of a curiosity, right?
It's like the jungle. After nineteen fifteen when the Food and Drug Administration was established as a result of the publication of that book and the conditions described in uh Dur the Durham Meat Packing Plant, which was a fictitious amalgam of all the plants from the Chicago stockyards to now the reasons for these books to exist is just sort of a historical curiosity.
But it's not really anymore. And that's why I read it and why I found this book so disturbing. More disturbing, I think, even than Tampa by Alyssa Nutty. And y I'm just like anybody else, I'm a political person. I have my political views, I have my thoughts and ideas based on what's going on nationally here in the United States right now versus what's going on locally in my town. at the same time. I don't generally talk about'em though, because you know, it's not
Anything that I would want you to have to listen to, uh unless we were having beer and talking about it or something. But nobody in their right mind would want to download a podcast of me rambling on about politics because who the hell am I? I'm a dude who reads a lot of science fiction books.
and likes to write stories. So so all that said, when uh I stumbled upon the discussion of this book and decided to read it, it was with the full understanding that it's a muck raking novel, the same way that the Jungle was a muck raking novel, and that It's a reflection of its time and I wanted to see how Sinclair Lewis saw the United States in nineteen thirty-five. But very, very quickly after I started to read this book, I became very disturbed.
Because it wasn't just that the descent into fascism is a terrible thing just in general, and reading about the United States sort of collapsing in on itself is difficult. But like the parallels to twenty twenty four's election are so striking and so v visceral that it it was almost like Sinclair Lewis was reading into the future when he wrote this. in nineteen thirty five. He was ninety years early, but he wasn't wrong.
When we get into the discussion of the plot of this book and the characters and stuff, you'll understand what I mean. What I'm getting at is that I guess things are really cyclical, right? There's a prescience and then there's event and in some cases there's more prescience and there's more event and it's a big circle.
from one to the other to the other and things never change. What happened in nineteen twenties in Italy, early nineteen thirties in Germany, twenty twenty four in the United States, etcetera, depending on how you view the current administration. it's it's uncanny that we continue to perform the same acts, we do the same things, we have the same arguments. We have to solve the same problems but never do.
that they just keep coming around again to the same try to trials and solutions that have been tried before and failed and led to widespread disharmony, but it's almost as if there isn't another way to go about changing things. And as I was reading this book and getting more and more uneasy as I read it, I started thinking about like w what's my place in this country, in this universe? What what can I do to improve things? How can I change things? Where should I put energy if I want to
make my voice heard to join a particular chorus. How do I do that? What do I do? Where do I go? W what's my motivation? Is there protection? What can I do? And and it's a book that if you read it as you read it it You can easily think of it as oh, it's a you know, dystopia novel. Nineteen eighty four, play your piano, brave new world, totally got it. I know the million, don't care. But
This one's different. This one's not a science fiction story. This one was a contemporary novel at the time, and I'm sure that it was looked at at the time as like ooh, this is
Spooky spooky and it's not spooky spooky, it's friggin' terrifying. And and it's terrifying now not just because of the politics that we have now or how similar the w United States is to the United States in It Can't Happen Here, but Sinclair Lewis manages to plot out sort of point by point by point by point how The United States government could be co opted and turned into a fascist dictatorship and
Look, we pick whatever political side you want to be on. You can look at the current administration either way, I don't care. But if you look at the the mile markers that Sinclair Lewis is in this book and you look at the mile markers of where we're at now in twenty twenty five. the parallels are uncanny. It's almost like this is a blueprint for kinda what we're dealing with now.
So anyway, I want to get into the plot of this book and talk more about the characters and and stuff that's more interesting generally for me. Um but as we go through, I will start to show like, hey, this is like this, and hey, this is like that, and hey, remember this? This is kind of like this. And tie it to some of the stuff that we have that's really modern and contemporary, even though this book is ninety
plus years old. Alright, this book has approximately four million characters in it, so we're gonna keep this trimmed down to a manageable level and talk about only the ones that are the most important in a level of hierarchy. What is really interesting about this book Is that the impetus for everything that happens to our main characters? Character named Buzz Windrip, the president of the United States.
And the book starts out with his campaign, his nomination to the um no uh to the ticket for the Democratic Party, and his eventual succession to the presidency, and then his dismantling and remantling of the government into a fascist state. He never interacts with any of the characters that we have in this book, but he is such a big part of the book.
that he might as well be interacting with them. So what we're talking about here is like again setting policy at the top and it trickling down into your neighborhood. or the town that you live in. And that might be all the only interaction you have with this figure who is effectively running the show.
But you never interact with them on a personal level. They don't know who you are. You only know them from what you learn from the news or the newspapers or the perceptions that you have from the other people that you talk to, whether they support this person or don't support this person. And that is what makes Uh this the dynamic of this book so interesting. So while we're starting our conversation here about Buzz Windrip and he is the person who drives the entire story.
We should talk a little bit about the people that he surrounds himself with. Even though again our main characters never interact with any of these people, but because of who they are and where they are, the policies they set and their personalities as described in this book. Their shadow looms large over all that happens to our main group, or our main protagonist, uh Dor Dormus Jess. But anyway, in Buzz Windrip's organization there's a guy named Lee Sarenson.
who is his secretary of state and was his campaign manager. There's Dr. McGoblin, fantastic name by the way, uh who's I think the Secretary of Finance, I think. Anyway, he's another guy who's who was part of Windrip's campaign. And w we learn that through Buzz Wendrips' history that he was like a Kind of a craft driven politician in some undetermined state.
Sinclair Lewis based him on Huey Long. Huey Long had been killed the year before in the steps of the Senate, uh in Louisiana, where he was getting ready to sort of throw his hat into the ring. He was a really popular senator and really popular governor of Louisiana. He was also crooked as the days long. and was appealing to the populist nature and needs of the United St of the average American and that's what made him so so popular. His slogan was Every Man a King
But no head wears a crown, right? So share his whole platform was built around share the wealth where he's gonna redistribute money from big industry and and millionaires and I don't know if we had billionaires yet in the United States in the nineteen thirties.
and redistribute it on an annual basis amongst all Americans so that everyone would have a good standard of living. Again, the populist message that has not changed much and also virtually impossible to make happen, at least the way that the human nature tends to make. Windrip's based on Huey Long. He's real folksy. His book called Zero Hour is
quoted throughout the novel. And what uh Sinclair Lewis does with this book is he uses it to frame the contents of e chapter and as a way to sort of plot your way through the evolution of this political system as it happens. The model that he used for this book was Huey Long's speeches.
but in the style of what you would find like in uh Hitler's book, Mein Kampf. I mean it's it's really effective at at showing the way that politicians can play on the fears of the average person and play up their camaraderie with them as well to draw in their votes even though the policies that they're gonna implement will ultimately hurt all of them in the short term and in the long term.
So it's it's very it's very good. We'll be talking about excerpts from that as we go through this discussion. All of the characters that we're gonna talk about are in the Jessup family, uh or in and around the Jessup family. Because that's where our main focus is. Dormus Jessup is the editor of the Daily Informer, the local newspaper of a small Vermont town called Fort Beulah.
I don't know what town this is based on, but I live in a small New England town in New Hampshire, so I can imagine what it's like. But he's married to a woman named Emma. They have uh three children, Philip, Mary, and Sissy. Mary is married. Jonathan lives in Boston or Worcester and is a lawyer. Mary is married to the local doctor, Mark Greenfeld, and Sissy is an eighteen-year-old recent high school graduate who's
sort of flirting with the boys in town. Those boys are Malcolm Tasbro, the son of the big industry in Fort Beulah, which is the quarry. He's the quarry owner. And Malcolm is his son. And the other guy's name is Julian Falk and he's like the son of a local parson who's who's going off to college.
And that's that's the gist of our like main, main, main characters. Interacting with them are other people in town that are all going to play a relatively large part in this story. So there's a woman named Lorinda Pike. Who owns the local tea house and the
And I guess like Ben Breakfast, she's also Doremus' girlfriend on the side. There's there's Buck Titus, who is uh Dormus's best friend. He owns a hunting lodge in the woods. But the most important of these, who are sort of locals, is a guy named Shad Ledou. Shadladoo is the handyman that works for Dormas Jessup part time at his house and does things like sharpens his lawn morbid.
Fixes the furnace, does odd jobs here and there, and Dormas pays him for this, although his main job is to go and work. somewhere else in town. I think he built he does like b base level carpentry and and builds like shutters or something. And he is the counterpoint to Dormus Jessup. He's not very well educated. He kind of keeps to himself. He's not very good at his job. But
He is single-minded of purpose. Shadlodu uh resents his station in life and it's clear in the way that he interacts with or Dormas Jessup. uh and with his family. And and to be fair, Dormas, Jessup and his family do not treat Shialadu all that well. They treat him like a hired hand, a sort of big glute that they have to put up with who's not very good at what he does, but they keep him around like out of quote unquote charity.
At one point I think Dormas even says that, that he d wanted to hire him a few times, but he's never done it because he feels bad for him, which is uh there's two ways to view that. One way is to view that is he's taking pity on a person who needs assistance. And the other way is that it's negative that he pities him because he doesn't like him. He knows he's never gonna change his station in life. He's never gonna improve. Or whether that's financial or whatever.
And the reason I say that Shad is the counterpoint is because as the story goes on, he becomes much, much more important as the figure who represents Buzz Wendrip in town. And we'll get to that as we go. So let's let's talk a little bit about the plot here. As the story starts, we get introduced to all of our main characters. They're all at uh
Uh like a Rotarian meeting, and some of them because it's a Rotary Club, there's people from all different walks of life. There's some Republicans there, some Democrats there, etc.
And they're talking about the upcoming political season and Buzzwindrip's candidacy. Uh one of the people that's there, Mrs. Gimmett, is speaking on behalf of the daughters of the American Revolution, which if you know of that organization is a very old or organization in the United States with ties to things like slavery and stuff. They are generally very far to the right if you were looking at a political spectrum the way that we have a spectrum today.
And they still exist. So anyway, she's she's there and she's talking about Buzz Windrip and then when she's finished talking, they pretty much tell her to stop talking. Women had only had the right to vote for a few years by the time this book was written, and they were still Second class citizens at the very best.
So they could have a political opinion. They could tell you who they're going to vote for, but then the dudes would just tell them to shut up. And that's kind of what happens here. She's not a wonderful character anyway. Nobody really likes her because she is incredibly racist and anti-Semitic. So anyway, we meet her, we meet all of the main characters, Emma, Jessup, uh Dorimus Jessup. We meet Lorinda Pike who everybody complains is a socialist and she won't shut up about socialism. We meet
mister Tasbro, who owns the quarry, who's uh and all of these guys are there. They all get together after this meeting to go and drink and talk about politics and
Tasbro says, Oh, I'm gonna throw my you know, my support behind. Probably behind what Buzzwindrip, but I don't know. Another guy says, Ah, I'm gonna vote for Roosevelt. Another guy says, I don't know, I'm not gonna vote for either of these clowns. I'm gonna vote third party or not vote at all and exercise my freedoms, etc. And Doremus Jessup doesn't answer.
Time goes on as we get our information about how the Windrip campaign is progressing. And it's progressing in a way that's presented to us through Dormas Jessup. He's a newspaper guy. He's a news editor. So he has the information, since he's our point of view character, he has the information that makes it possible for us to understand what's going on and who the personalities are that are behind the scenes of this campaign.
and how people interact with them over mass media. So this is pre T V but post radio. And in being pre T V and post radio, everyone does certain things. There's only a certain number of channels that are nationwide. There's only a certain number of shows that anybody can listen to. There's only a certain number of networks that people have access to. So everybody has this shared experience with media.
less so than we have today. But I guess you could think of it as like radio is like Twitter. Newspapers are newspapers and they run the gamut between supporting Buzzwindrip and not supporting Buzzwindrip or being kind of in the middle like the paper that Dormas Jessup edits. But some of the big media figures of this time, uh at least in this book, is uh
Presbyterian minister who has a huge radio following, two or three million listeners average per week in this story. Dormas Jessup and his family listen to him every week as well. Uh his name is Bishop Prang and he's modeled on Father Coughlin who was really uh popular I I wanna say he was Catholic, but I don't know that he was actually Catholic. But anyway, it doesn't matter. Father Coughlin, who was a racist, uh misogynist asshole.
But he had a huge radio uh presence in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. He was listened to by millions upon millions of people. And definitely cross the line now and again between separation of church and state by you know um suggesting that his listeners should vote one way or the other, right?
Prang is the same and it's because of Prang and his ability to draw in people from all faiths for this for these like anti Semitic and and sort of racist folksy rants that he does on the radio. that e everyone sort of realizes that because he supports Buzz Wendrip, there's a really good chance that Buzz Wendrip will probably win the nomination for the Democratic Party. This is pre nineteen sixties um, southern strategy. So the Democratic Party is a holdover from the old slave owned state.
As opposed to the Democratic Party that we kinda have today where all the polls have sort of switched. I don't know. You do go do your own historical reading. That's for beyond the scope of this book. Uh the gist is that's that's the story. So they all listen to this to this preacher. They decide, you know, th after listening to him that they they probably are pretty sure that Buzz Windrop is gonna win and Windrop's can't campaigning on
A couple of different he has nine planks in his platform. One is He's gonna give every person five thousand dollars a year. Adjusted for the inflation, I guess, in t two thousand twenty-five money, that's about a hundred and fourteen thousand dollars a year. So if you're gonna strip money away from corporations and rich people and give it to everybody, they're gonna have about a hundred grand each per year.
That's a campaign promise that he makes over and over and over again when he does rallies and he speaks on the radio and he does editorials and all of this sort of stuff. Again, every man a king, but no man wears a crown. right straight out of Huey Long. So uh with that said, of where we start to see the breaks in the character based on w what they what they perceive as the alignments that there are already in town.
So right now there's a bunch of characters who are at um Malcolm Tasbro's father's bar that's in his house. This is post Rotarian media. demanded Tasborough. Why don't you take a tumble to yourself? All these years you've had a lot of fun criticizing always being again to the government, kidding everybody, posing as such a liberal that you'll stand for all these subversive elements.
Time for you to quit playing tag with crazy ideas and come in and join the family. These are serious times, and maybe twenty eight million on relief and beginning to get ugly thinking they've got a vested right now to be supported.
And the Jew communists and Jew financiers plotting together to control the country, I can understand how as a younger fellow you could jump up a little sympathy for the unions and even for the Jews, though. As you know, I'll never get over being sore at you for taking the side of the strikers when whose thugs
were trying to ruin my whole business, you burned down my polishings and cutting shops, why you were even friendly with that alien murderer Carl Pascal, who started the whole strike. Maybe I didn't enjoy firing him when it was all over. So that's a segment uh from the first couple of chapters of It Can't Happen Here. So that's Tazbro. He doesn't have a huge part in this book, but it's important at the beginning because he's one of the rich landowners, he's a rich business owner.
and through him he has fully supported Buzz Windrip. There's another character who is lot more important to this story named Shad Ledou. that works for uh Doramus Jessup and his family, who represents the other side of the support for Buzz Windrip. In in this bit, they've been listening to a radio address uh of uh Bishop Prang
and ultimately about Buzz Wendrip. And in the course of the conversation, we learn a little bit about how Shadladoo is perceived by the Jessup family and also kinda by society since our gateway into The world that we have here is through Dorma.
And I think if you look at the way that the twenty sixteen and the twenty twenty four elections kinda played out here in contemporary there was a hard lean towards characterizing the average Trump voter as like low information, low intelligence, low status job. etc. And it seems like that's pretty much the same thing that we see uh as written by Sinclair Lewis in nineteen thirty five. There's a segment in this picnic where
Shadladoo is doing some work for the family, moving refrigerators and things around, and draws the ire of of uh Doramus' son Philip. Philip, who is also a Buzz Windrip supporter, doesn't see Shad Ladoo as a quote unquote like quality human being. The only stain on the preparations for the picnic was the grouchiness of the hired man Shad Ledu. When he was asked to turn the ice cream freezer, he growled, Why the heck don't you folks get an alert?
He grumbled most audibly at the weight of the picnic baskets, and when he was asked to clean up the basement during their absence, he retorted only with a glare and silent fury. You want to get rid of that fellow Ledu, urged Doremus' son, Philip, the lawyer. Oh, I don't know, considered Doremus.
Probably just shiftlessness on my part, but I tell myself I'm doing a social experiment, trying to train him to be as gracious as the average Neanderthal man, or perhaps I'm scared of him. He's the kind of vindictive peasant that sets fires to barns.
You know that he actually reads Phil? No. Yep, mostly movie magazines with naked ladies and wild west stories, but he also reads the papers, told me he greatly admired Buzz Windrip, says Windrip will certainly be president, and then everybody, by which I'm afraid, Shad means only himself, will have five thousand dollars a year. Buzz certainly has a bunch of philanthropists for followers.
Now listen, Dad, don't you understand Senator Windrip? Oh, he's something of a demagogue. He shoots off his mouth a lot about how he'll jack up the income tax and grab the banks, but he won't. That's just molasses for the cockroaches. What he'll do, and maybe only he can do, is to protect us from the murdering, thieving, lying Bolsheviks that would why, they'd like to stick all of us that are going on this picnic, all the decent clean people that are accustomed to privacy
into hall bedrooms and make us cook our cabbage soup on a primus stuck on a bed. Yes, Or maybe liquidate us entirely. No, sir. Brazilius Windrip is the fellow to balk at the dirty, sneaking Jew spies that poses American liberals. The face is the face of my reasonably competent son Philip, but the voice is the voice of the Jew Bater Julius Stryker, sighed Doriman.
So again, you can see two different aspects of like the way that they view the Windrip character and the way that you know voters tend to view demagogic or I guess super populist type uh A super populous type. candidates, whereas Buzz Windrip uh appeals to Shad Ledoux because he promises him money. He appeals to Philip because he reinforces Philip's feeling of superiority and distrust of like Jewish people and banking in general and you know, v
suggest that Windrip is playing the quote unquote like dumb guys like Chad Ledoux against the regular folks to protect us all from communism. It's a big fearmongering thing and if you've gone back and listened to any of the campaign speeches from twenty sixteen or twenty twenty four You'll hear the same sort of language. the same sort of sentiment, the same sort of ideas presented as if
that they were honest. I mean, y we're the government is still referring to people that it dislikes as communists and socialists, even though they're members of the same government. They're members of the Democratic Party or like left or leaning members of the Republican Party. Not that there are very very many of them, but they're still viewed as like this absolute
black and white spectrum of you're either with us or you're against us, you're capitalist or you're communist or you want us to be alive or you want us to be dead. And that sort of dichotomy of thought is what makes American politics what American politics is right now. Anyway, I don't want to get too lost in the you know minutia of the book because I'm hoping that you'll take the
Several hours that it takes to read it and read it. It took me a few days to get through this book because uh I had to keep putting it down. Like it was like reading something that made my brain hurt, made my eyes angry, made my heart sick. My art already isn't that good. So so reading this Rick filled me with a lot of a lot of distress.
Especially when compared to the news of the day that I'm reading every day. So I'm gonna get into a little bit more of the like the overall arching plot soon, but there's another segment here about Shadow Dew that I think is important to read. This is from page fifty eight. It was after seven that morning when Dormas came home, and remarkably enough Chadled, who was supposed to go to work at seven, was at work at seven.
Normally he never left his bachelor shack in lower town till ten to eight, but this morning he was on the job chopping kindling. Oh yes, reflected Doramus. That probably explained it. Kindle chopping, if practiced early enough, would wake up everyone in the house. Shad was tall and hulking, his shirt was sweat stained, and he as usual he needed a shave. Foolish, that's Doramus' dog. Foolish growled at him. Doramus suspected that at some time he had been kicking Foolish.
He wanted to honor Shad for the sweaty shirt and honest toil and all the rugged virtues, but even as a liberal American human humanitarian, Doramas found it hard always to keep up the Longfellow's village blacksmith slash come Marxist attitude. consistently and not sometimes backslide into belief that there must be some crooks and swine among the toilers, as, notoriously, there were so shockingly many among persons with more than thirty five hundred dollars a year.
Well, been sitting up listening to the radio, perdormas. Did you know the Democrats have a nominated Senator Windrop? That's so, Chad growled. Yeah, just now. How are you planning to vote? Well now I tell you, mister Jessop, Shad struck an attitude leaning on his axe. Sometimes he could be quite pleasant and condescending, even to this little man who was so ignorant about coon hunting and the games of craps and poker.
I'm gonna vote for Buzz Windrip. He's gonna fix it so everybody will get four thousand bucks immediate. And I'm going to start a chicken farm. I can make a bunch of money out of chickens. I'll show some of those guys that think they're so rich. But Shad, you didn't have so much luck with the chickens when you tried to raise them in this back shed there. You uh I'm afraid you sort of let their water freeze up on'em in winter and they all died, do you remember?
Oh them? So what? Heck, those were too few of'em. I'm not gonna waste my time foolin' with just a couple of dozen chickens. When I get five or six thousand of'em, it'll make it worthwhile. Then I'll show you, you bet, and most patronizingly, Buzz Windrip is okay. I'm glad he has your imprimature. Huh? said Shad and scowled. But as Doramas plodded up the back porch, he heard from Shad a faint derisive Okay, Chief.
The relationship that Shad has with Dormus is fraught And admittedly we're only fifty pages into this book. The first hundred and fifty pages is is a lot of setting the scene, and that's sort of standard for muckraker books. If you read the jungle the first half Almost of that is the family kind of getting settled in Chicago, in the stockyards, finding a place to live.
being concerned about, you know, the money that's sewn into one of their clothes and if the house is a good deal that they rent or are they really buying it and then all the different places that they go to work. And all the benefits that come from having a job in Packing Town at um at Durham's meat packing plant that then become the story of working at Durham's meat packing plant. And that's what the real gist of the plot is.
Here is the same structure. For the first hundred and fifty or so pages, we're learning about Buzzwood Drip's campaign. Buzzwindrip's administration, we're learning about the direction that Buzz Windrip is planning to drive the country and that he ultimately does drive the country. And it's not until halfway through or so that the story of how Doremus Jessup interacts with these events begins to take shape and then drives the narrative for the rest of the book.
Again, right now we're still introducing characters and getting a feel for how they respond to what's going on in the world around them, but there's no plot yet. It's just interactions and reflections on things that they're hearing on the news or reading in the papers or being forced to report on. So that's kind of where things are.
uh right now. It's interesting the way that he does it in that it's compelling to read. It's like reading uh somebody explaining a history book to you, and it's really frightening. So let's let's jump back in a little bit later. There's a the picnic And then um Sissy who's hanging out with both Malcolm Tasbro, the son of the guy that owns the quarry, and Julian, the son of the uh the the parson in town.
are hanging around because they're all school schoolmates. Malcolm wants to date Sissy. Julian also wants to date Sissy, but she's more interested in Julian than Malcolm. But Malcolm has money, etc. They're talking about the the election as well. Sissy Jessup sat on the running board of her coop.
Hers by Squatters rights, with Julian Falk up from Amherst for the weekend, and Malcolm Tasborough wedged in on either side of her. Oh nuts, let's quit talking politics. Windrip's gonna be elected, so why waste time yodeling when we could drive down to the river and have a swim? complained Malcolm.
He's not going to win without our putting up a tough scrap against him. I'm going to talk to the high school alumni this evening about how they got to tell their parents to vote for either Trowbridge or Roosevelt. snapped Julian Falk. Ha ha ha And of course, the parents will be tickled to death to do whatever you tell'em, Julian. You college men certainly are the goods. Besides, want to be serious about this fool business?
Malcolm had the insolent self assurance of beef, slick black hair and a large car of his own. He was the perfect leader of black shirts, and he looked contemptuously on Julian, who, though a year older, was pale and finish. Matter of fact, it'll be a good thing to have Buzz. He'll put a damn quick stop to all this radicalism, all this free speech and libel in our most fundamental institutions. Boston, American last Tuesday, page eight, murmured Sidney.
And no wonder you're scared of him, Julian. He sure will drag some of your favorite Amherst anarchist profs out to the Hoosgau, and maybe you too, comrades. So you're starting to get a feel for like between one group and another. And this is in the same age bracket. These are teenagers.
So there's like a key phrase in that which is when he describes Malcolm as being a perfect person to be in the black shirts. Black shirts were Mussolini's like street thugs stormtroopers. And we get those in this book too. One of the things that Windrip administration does is they establish a thing called the Minutemen. Minutemen are a gang of uniformed, black clad,
quote unquote volunteers, uh or members of a quote unquote marching club who effectively become the de facto police in the towns where they are established. And there are lots and lots and lots and lots of them. Lots and lots and lots and lots. Once Windrop takes over the government and begins to reorganize the United States into eight districts instead of the fifty states that we have, his Minutemen are incredibly important in that
They become the strong arm of the administration. They are the ones who operate the work camps. They're the ones who go and collect money. from the local businesses is a form sort of of extortion. They're the ones who beat down protesters and kill strikers. They're the ones who act as a domestic army.
One of the first things that Windrit does is he assigns every member of the Minutemen a machine gun, a pistol, and a truncheon, so that they have those so that they can keep the effective peace. And by keeping the effective peace, it means stamp out any dissent. Malcolm Tasborough becomes one of these. Julian does later too, but they're for different reasons. So As we're watching this this stuff unfold.
We're starting to see how once once in power, it's really not that difficult to impose your will if you have the will to do it. And Windrup does this with, you know, probably some assistance from Lee Sarrison by doing like four things. Thing number one, he depowers the Supreme Court so that the Supreme Court can't have a check and balance on anything that he does. He gets unilateral action. Two, he takes all of his political enemies in Congress and he banishes them.
They're all put into a quote unquote hospital for crazy people, as it's described in here. But he banishes them all. There is no opposition party anymore. Uh three, every single person who could be an enemy of his or to to raise raise a popular sentiment against him like Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Hubert Herbert Hoover or Upton Sinclair, others, they're all granted they are all given
Ambassadorships in distant countries. So they're effectively exiled from the United States. Even Henry Trowbridge, who ran for president against him and lost, is under. constant surveillance for months where it's learned that all he's doing is writing letters and articles about radishes until he's able to sneak away into Canada.
The other things that the government starts to do is starts to rebuild the military, starts to threaten Mexico, starts to threaten Canada, starts to talk about uh uh an American expansion that goes all the way to the Panama Canal and beyond. So all of these things that are happening, uh, are are happening. If you look at today, you have a lot of the same things.
happening in parallel. To the same extent, maybe not. We haven't banished the Supreme Court, but it's full of sort of pro Trump justices. So effectively they've taken away that check imbalance. He doesn't follow the ru rulings of the Supreme Court anyway.
Congress is depowered and doesn't have the ability to do anything because the opposition party is both weak and in the minority. Three, there are right now there's effectively a a militia in the street collecting undocumented people from the United States. That he also flirted with like the the Proud Boys and others who are like the Minutemen in this book. So it's really it's really frightening to read it as it goes along.
But I want to focus on just the parallels. As we move into the story, what happens is over the course of the next The next few days things sort of shake out. Windrip wins the presidency, and he does it because of, you know, Bishop Prang's assistance and etcetera, and it's a it's a pr resounding win. He's promised to give every American five thousand dollars a year, which again, uh
Adjusted for inflation is$114,000 today. Same thing with passing hard tariffs, reducing the income tax, et cetera. All of these things that are real populist message type policies. But he breaks the United States into eight districts. Vermont becomes part of the New Hampshire, Vermont, New Hampshire, Vermont something district, and is broken into four pieces.
Those four pieces are northern Vermont, Southern Vermont, Northern New Hampshire, Southern New Hampshire. And because Doramas lives in Vermont, he lives in one of those districts. And the commander of that district. Appointed to run the show there is Shad Ledoux. So he becomes ultimately the authority for this quarter of this district here in the United States. And As with anyone who is risen from a point of being on the fringes of society.
or the lower spectrum of the economy into a position of power, it's very easy for Shat Ladu to abuse the power that he has. He does this first by spying on Doromus and identifying that he's having an affair with Lorinda Pike. Dormus fires him from being his handyman. He says he doesn't care. He then demands two hundred dollars a week from the newspaper that Dormas is the editor of, duh specifically donated to the Buzzwindrip Something Something Foundation.
and d is doing this to the other businesses in town. He also participates in things like chasing out a a the local Jewish family and beating up people who wanna protest, etcetera. And this continues on until Dormas is torn. He wants to write an article condemning Buzzwindrip and all of Buzzwindrip's followers.
and put it in the newspaper, but he's afraid that if he does that it's gonna cause strife for him and for his family. He asks his wife and she's like, Yeah, you really shouldn't do that. I don't think that's a good idea. He asks Lorinda, and Lorinda says, You absolutely have to publish this. Somebody has to speak out. It might as well be you, and you can't be the only one who does this.
If you speak out, others will also speak out, and then you'll have strength in numbers and there'll be energy to generate a movement. It may not be you that starts it, but somebody will. So he thinks about it. He write he takes the article, he publishes the article, the article goes live.
The paper drops the next morning, and within a day he's r he's grabbed and taken to the district office where he's placed in front of a guy named Effingham Swan. Effingham Swan is a guy that controls all four districts. of this part of the the United States. And he's effectively Shad Ladu's boss.
Chadladu brings him in and says, Here he is. You know, here's the guy that wrote that article. Do you want me to beat him up some more? And he says, No, you don't have to beat him up anymore. Effingham Swan says he wants Doramas to stay on at the paper uh and continue to edit it while he trains up this other person to take it over in the f sometime in the future.
But at no point can he publish anything that's critical of the administration, the administration's policies, people who are involved in the administration, or the direction that America is going. Everything has to be a patriotic or entertainment story and he doesn't have any choice. And he's constantly being watched by the person that he's training because that person is one of the Minutemen. He says he doesn't want to do it. Well, he's told he doesn't have a choice.
In the course of all this, Mark Greenhill, Dormus' son-in-law, comes into the building and is like, hey, what are you doing with my father-in-law? This is not okay. You can't just grab somebody because he wrote an article, and they take him out and shoot him. And that's where the story of this book starts. the story part of this book. As things go on, Doramas continues to work at the newspaper. He continues to have his affair with Lorinda Pike.
He continues to squabble with Shad Ledu. The Minutemen become more powerful. They open a work a concentration camp just north of town where a lot of the town's local radicals or people that Shad Ledou didn't like end up being placed and tortured and beaten uh and not fed. Even though the propaganda that is put out by the government is that these are camps where people are like learning to be patriotic again and to have a work ethic again and what they're really being
uh taught is to give up the names of people who might be not sympathetic to the government after severe beatings. So Things go bad. It's getting it's getting more frightening, there are more threats. There are more concerns with how Doromus is writing the paper and he's starting to get comfortable with the way things are. And that's a problem that he recognizes at one point and says we we probably should get the hell out of here.
So he and and Buck and his family make a run for Canada. But they don't make it. They get they drive off in a snowstorm at night. They get close to the border, put the border stop, but at the border stop they make them wait for the the commander, which will be Effigum Swan. So they can't stay there, so they turn around and go back.
So now he's sort of stuck in the fight. What they decide to do is everybody who's not supportive of the government and his friends are Dormas, they sort of concoct this plan. They steal an old printing press from the basement of the newspaper and all the slugs required to run a paper. And they start generating and dropping off a s a subversive news pamphlet.
around town and around the other towns in New Hampshire and Vermont where they can get to. Sissy is actually very good at this because she has a car. As t time goes on, uh the administration starts to call for books to be banned. and books to be burned because they're subversive, and it's things like You know, Alice in Wonderland.
are the kind of books that they're burning on top of books like the Communist Manifesto and other things. But a lot of them are relatively benign, but they all speak to a authoritarian questioning theme. When they come to burn Doromus's books, he hides his subversive ones upstairs, but they take the his like Charles Dickens collection and they burn that. They burn a bunch of other books and
He gets really, really, really, really upset about this. As time goes on, his relationship with Emma begins to deteriorate because she's ambivalent to all of this that's going on. And everyone else in his house is is participating in this newspaper, except for Mary. Who has pretty much gone catatonic since her husband has been killed.
Her son, the kid, who's like nine years old, is dressing up like a Minuteman and he's playing army games and he's playing around with the kids in the neighborhood and he's acting like any nine or ten year old would I would think in an authoritarian country. Right? What you get for toys are toy guns. What you get for Toy uniforms or toy uniforms. You belong to like the Minuteman Scouts and you go do Minuteman Scout things.
And all of these things are government programs meant to sort of shape your mind into somebody who's a effective citizen in that regime. This continues. Philip keeps asking his father to leave and to move to s to Worcester with him, and if to not to do that, to publicly declare that he supports Buzz Windrip and to make the best of it and get the Minutemen off of his back, and he refuses. Sissy starts flirting with Shadladoo to try and find out when the next raid is gonna take place.
Dormas is wary of this plan that she has because Shadladoo is big and frightening and gross, at least how he's kind of described there. And he's afraid that she's gonna be accosted. She says, Oh, don't worry, I can control him. I've got it I've got him in the palm of my hand, etc. Don't sweat it.
And a as she's probing him for information, he starts to realize that something's up because she's not very good at it. And he keeps pushing her to have sex with him, and she keeps turning him down. And every time she turns him down, he gets more suspicious of what her motives are.
Because she keeps asking him, When's the next raid gonna be? I'd love to see one. When can I go see a raid? Oh my god, it would be so amazing to see a raid. And he'd be like, I can sh I can take it to raid, but you know, I gotta get to base number two. And she's like, Oh no, no, no, no, you can't you can't touch me. So after a while he stops giving her information.
Right. Her boyfriend, Julius Falk, joins the Minutemen, uh, as a way to s to get information out of the organization and send it to Dormas so that he can warn people that are gonna be raided so that they can hide. Right. Somebody pokes their head into the window of where they're making the newspapers, which is in the basement of of Bucks Hunting Lodge. So they know that they're kind of caught.
They hide all the stuff, and then they invite Shad Ledue to come play p cards with them. In the course of playing cards with them, they tell him to go downstairs to get some more beer, and he goes down to where they were making the newspaper, and it's all just a basement now. to try and throw him off the scent. And it works for a little while, but not for very long. They find all of um Dormus's subversive papers, beat the ever loving crap out of him and take him to a concentration camp.
In the camp they beat him repeatedly. While he's in the campaign.
He is reunited with his friend Carl, the communist, the Tasbro who owned the quarry, some other people from town who were Windrip supporters, but not strong enough Windrip supporters or had concerns about Windrip, even though they were supporters, and they're all trapped in this in this concentration camp that used to be a girls school and they're repeatedly beaten and forced to answer questions and told to confess their problems and to name other people who are subversive.
This goes on for months. In the course of this going on for months, Shad Ladoo is also brought in. I'm gonna spoil some of the book here, but Shad Lazoo is also brought in because he's been stealing money and he hasn't been sharing it with his His supervisor, right? He's been engaging in graft for himself, but he hasn't been passing the graft on to those above him.
So he gets implicated and he gets sent to the concentration camp. While he's at the concentration camp in a cell, bunch of the people that are there throw some gasoline soaked rags into a cell and burn him to death. He dies screaming, with everyone outside of his cell listening to him die.
Julian gets dropped in there as well because they realize that he was a s he was a spy inside of the Minutemen and they beat him badly and almost to death as well. Carl hangs himself like all these bad terrible things happen and Dormas is considering what he can do next. And he has maybe two choices. One, he hopes that they let him out, and then he doesn't know what he'll do. And two, he could kill himself.
and and end his involvement with this in a in one way or the other. In the course of doing this, like he he runs into like The town doctor who's allowed to come into the to the prison to treat him after he's been beaten so severely that like his his the ribs of on his back are visible through the slashes of where the metal whip was hitting him. And he learns that, you know, Emma has moved is moving to Worcester to be with Philip.
and taking Mary's kid with them. Mary, who's started learning how to fly a plane because of the militarization of the United States, everybody's encouraged to join the military. So she joins the nascent air corps, learns to be a pilot. And then, you know, things are things are bad and they're getting worse. There are all these rebellions that have taken place in other parts of the country. And uh I'll read you a segment of that.
December tenth was the birthday of Brazilius 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, and to shout, with real tears in his eyes, that he cum that his complete name was Berzelius Noel Weinact Windrick.
His birthday in nineteen thirty seven he commemorated with the historical order of regulation, which stated that through corporate government and the that though the corporate government had provided both its stability and its goodwill, there were still certain stupid or vicious elements who in their foul envy of the corpo success wanted to destroy everything that was good.
The kind hearted government was fed up with the country, was informed that from this day on any person who by word or act sought to harm or discredit the state would be executed or interned. Inasmuch as the prisons were already too full, both of these slanderous criminals and for their persons, whom the kind hearted state had to guard by protective arrest, were immediately to be opened all over the country, country.
Dormus guessed that the reason for the concentration camps was not only the provision of extra room for victims, but even more for the provision of places where the livelier young minute men could amuse themselves without interference from old time professional policemen and prison keepers. most of whom regarded their charges not as enemies to be tortured, but as cattle to be kept safe.
On the eleventh, a concentration camp was enthusiastically opened with a band, music, paper flowers, and speeches by District Commander Reek and Shad Ledoux at Trianon, nine miles north of Fort Beula, in what had been a modern experimental school for girls. The girls and their teacher, no sound material for corporism anyway, were simply sent about their business.
And on that day, and every day afterwards, Dormas got from journalist friends all over the country secret news of corpo terrorism and of the first bloody rebellions against the Corpos. In Arkansas, a group of ninety six former sharecroppers who had always bellyached about their misfortunes yet seemed not a bit happier than In well run hygienic labor camps with free weekly band concerts attacked the superintendent's office at one camp and killed the superintendent and five assistants.
They were rounded up by the Minutem Regiment from Little Rock, stood up in a winter ragged cornfield, told to run, and shot in the back with machine guns as they comically staggered away. In San Francisco, dock workers tried to start an absolutely illegal strike and their leaders known as the Communists were so treasonable that their speeches against the government
that a m Minuteman commander had three of them tied up to a bale of rattan which was soaked with oil and set a fire. The commander gave warnings to all such malcontents by shooting off the criminal's fingers and ears while they were burning, and so skilled a marksman was he So much credit to the efficient minute men training that he did not kill one single man while thus trimming them up.
He afterward went in search of Tom Mooney, released from the Supreme Court of the United States in early nineteen thirty six. But that notorious anti corpo agitator had had the fear of God put into him properly and had escaped to a schooner for Tahiti.
In Patucket, a man who ought to have been free from the rotten seditious notions of of such so called labor leaders, in fact a man who was a fashionable dentist and director of a bank, absurdly resented the attentions which a half a dozen uniformed minute men, they were all on leave, and merely full of youthful spirits anyway,
bestowed upon his wife at a cafe, and in the confusion shot and killed three of them. Ordinarily, since it was none of the public's business anyway, The Minutemen did not give out details of the disciplining of rebels, but in this case, where the fool of a dentist had shown himself to be a homicidal maniac, the local Minutemen commander permitted the papers to print the fact that the dentist had been given sixty nine lashes with a flexible steel rod
then, when he came to, left to think over his murderous idiocy in a cell in which there was two feet of water in the bottom, but rather, ironically, none to drink. Unfortunately the fellow died before having the opportunity to seek religious consolation.
In Scranton, the Catholic pastor of a working class church was kidnapped and beaten. In central Kansas, a man named George W. Smith pointlessly gathered a couple of hundred farmers armed with shotguns and sporting rifles, and an absurdly few automatic pistols, and led them in burning a minute man barrack.
Minuteman tanks were called out, and the Hick would be rebels were not this time used as warnings, but were overcome with mustard gas, then disposed of with hand grenades, which was an altogether intelligent move since there was nothing of the scoundrels left for the sentimental relatives to bury and make propaganda over.
But in New York City the case was the opposite. Instead of being thus surprised, the Minutemen rounded up and suspected all communists in the former boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx. And all persons who were reported to have been seen consorting with such communists and interred the lot of them in the nineteen concentration camps on Long Island. Most of them wailed as they were not communists at all.
So you can see how this kind of grows, right? There's a term that's used in there called corpos. What Buzz Windrip does is he creates a corporate government. That's the name of the political party that there is allowed to be in the United States, just the corpos. And it's like the cor the corporate owned States of America or something like that. And their their short herm their short name is Corpos.
I'm not gonna say that it's the same thing as Make America Great Again or MAGA, but there are parallels between the two. You could make an argument that the Republican Party right now is split into two factions. There's the MAGA faction and there's the other faction and The MAGA faction is uh much more is much more like the corpos as portrayed in this book. As the story goes on, we get more of this stuff. Later in the plot, we get a little aside about Mary, who has been mostly absent from this.
from this story since her husband was killed. And she wasn't super pro participatory in the beginning of it either. But what she wants to do is she wants to kill Effingham Swan because Effingham Swan killed her husband. And to do that, she enrolls in the Army Air Corps, she learns to fly a plane, she learns when Effingham Swan is gonna be flying from New Hampshire to Boston. She makes a solo flight that day. Gets above his plane.
tries to destroy it with grenades and fails and then dive bombs the plane and kamakazes it and dis and kills them both. So Mary's dead. Again, uh Dormus learns of all this stuff from the doctor in town who comes to the prison to tell him. He also learns later that that Carl has hanged himself. And things are looking as grim as they can be. later he is outside
And one of the guards tells him, Hey, you know, the fence is open over there. There's a car down the street. You should run up through the fence and and go to the car. And it's because Lorinda Pike has paid off a guard to let him escape from the concentration. He does that, he goes to Canada, Learn that Pike goes to Canada, Sissy goes to Canada, everybody goes to Canada. And they r recover and then start to become part of the revolution s that's spreading from there. And by the end of the book
Like there are different territories that are like reclaiming back territory and kicking the Min and Men out and s threatening the destruction of the government. It Rough. There's a palace coup as well. So we we get a snap back to the administration. So Lee Sarrison deposes Buzz Windrip. And Buzz Windrop goes to Europe with some stolen money. Then Lee Sarison gets killed by the leader of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that guy takes over.
So the government is already going through a period of violent upheaval. as this is going on in the United States and and the United States is starting to organize against it. And that's kind of where the story ends. There's no happy ending here. There's no there's not even a good ending. Doramus is is effectively planning to come back to the United States to continue to fight.
But how much can he do as an older man who's been beaten so mercilessly, you know, he doesn't know what's good, bad or otherwise? Lorinda Pike and he his relationship falls apart because she's so involved in the in the revolutionary activities that She can't she can't be with him. Sissy is the same. There's a segment in here, a last segment that I wanna read. This is when they're still uh doing the newspaper and living at the hunting lodge and he's
He's pretty much shacked up within sleeping regularly with Lorinda Pike. Dormas, it's been marvelous to have this companionship with you, but She looked a little timid, sitting cross legged on the rattan top stool before the old mahogany dressing table. No silver or lace or crystal was there, but only plain wooden hairbrush and a scant luxury of small drugstore bottles.
But darling, this cause, oh curse that word cause. Can't I ever get free of it? But anyway, this new underground business seems to me so important. And I know you feel that way too, but I've noticed that since we've settled down together two awful sentimentalists, you aren't so excited about writing your nice venomous attacks, and I'm getting more cautious about going out distributing traps.
I've a foolish idea. I have to save my life for your sake. And I ought to be only thinking about saving my life for the revolution. Do you feel that way? Don't you feel that way? Don't you? Don't you? Dormas swung his legs out of bed, also lighted an unhygienic cigarette, and said grumpily, Oh, I suppose so. But track?
Your attitude is simply a holdover of your religious training, that you have a duty towards the dull human race which probably enjoys being bullied by Windrip and getting bread and circuses except for the bread. Of course it's religious. A revolutionary loyalty. Why not? It's one of the few re religious feelings. A rational, unsentimental Stalin is a kind of a priest. No wonder most preachers hate the Reds and preach against them. They're jealous of their religious power.
But oh, we can't unfold the world this morning, even over breakfast coffee dormus. When mister Dimmitt came back here yesterday he ordered me to Beecher Falls, you know, on the Canadian border, to take charge of the NU cell there. ostensibly to open up a tea room for the summer, so hang it, I've got to leave you and leave Buck and Sis and go. That's Lorinda telling Dormas that she's leaving to go and open up a tea house and continue the rebellion by creating a new cell.
And then there's my probably my favorite passage in the book, and it's the one that I've sent out as a clip. Okay, so let me set this scene up. This is Dormas reflecting on the state of the United States, what's left of it, and and how the population has shifted towards the new reality that is the corpus government.
For almost a year after Windrip came in, this seemed true. The chief was photographed playing poker in shirt sleeves with a derby on the back of his head with a newspaper man, a chauffeur, and a pair of rugged steel work.
doctor McGoblin in person led an Elk's brass band and dived into competition with the Atlantic City Bathing Beauties. It was reputably reported that Miniman apologized to political prisoners for having to arrest them, and that the prisoners joked amiably about the guards at first.
All that was gone. Within a year after the inauguration, and surprise scientists discovered that whips and handcuffs hurt just as sorely in the clear American air as in the miasmic fogs of Dormus, reading the authors he had concealed in the horsehair sofa the gallant communist Car Billinger, the gallant anti communist Cernavin, and the gallantly neutral Laurent, began to see something like a biology of dictatorships, all dictators.
The universal appreciation of the timorous details of faith, the same methods of arrest, sudden pounding on the door late at night, The squad of police pushing in, the blows, the search, the obscene oaths at the frightened women, the third degree by young snipe of officials, the accompanying blows, and then the formal beatings when the prisoner is forced to count the strokes until he faints.
The leprous beds and the sour stew, guards jokingly shooting round and round a prisoner who believes he is being executed, the waiting in solitude to know what will happen, till men go mad and hang themselves. 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, and now, in humorous, friendly, happy go lucky land of Mark Twain, Doramus saw the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had in Central Europe. It's a good passage. Take from it what you will. But when I read that, it stopped me in my tracks. I had to stop reading. And that's near the end of the book. And I was fully page turning my way through.
But I read that, and I stopped. And I read it again and I stopped again and I kept rereading it over and over again and knowing what I know of history and researching what I have of of historical events and understanding how the world of the twentieth century has worked. It struck me. Should strike any of you who are listening.
whether you agree or disagree. Again, I don't know what dog you have in this fight. So, sing clear Lewis, it can't happen here. And here we are in 2025, and you could argue that it happened. Worth a read. All right, so What else is going on with me? I landed a short story in a magazine called Portrait of New England, which is a literary journal that comes out of somewhere in New England. I don't know, but my story
Anna F will appear there in July 2025, I believe, which at the time of this recording is only a few days away. So when that goes live, I will link to it in the next show. And I will link to it at my Tumblr. I've been writing uh quite a bit. Most of it is short stories to try and find homes for and a lot of query letters for things.
But I have been doing uh kind of a lot. I've been doing a lot of editing. And there's like a special project that I've got uh I've been doing a lot of reading too. I'm gonna pick the next Hein Line Marathon book, especially after this one. I I I may be reading like some juvie like have spaces who will travel. But I am kind of feeling the pull towards something a little bit more political. Maybe the moon is a harchmistress. I don't know yet. But I'll be picking that book out this weekend.
I'm also reading a bunch of other stuff. So like I had mentioned in the past, my son gave me a whole collection of the destroyer novels, and I'm working my way through those in two hour segments at a time because that's about how long it takes to read one of those books. I'm contemplating doing a podcast uh breakdown of those as well.
But there's a lot of'em, and they're a lot the same, so maybe I'll just do one on that type of fiction and kind of go from there. They're a lot of fun. Politically they hew a little bit further right than I do, but they're pretty funny. If you can get past some of the underlying politics of the stories. I especially like the writing in them, because it is over the top and goofy. So with all that said, that's the show for this week.
I hope you enjoy it. And as always, you can find me at Facebook as J.R.D.R.I.Go. Find me at Instagram under J.R.D.R.I.G. But I probably won't interact with you with either of those places, but you can always try. Uh you can also email me at jrdorigo at gmail.com or you can follow my Tumblr page and I'll interact with you there if you if you reach out to me. Uh it's JDRigo and the blog is called crap, uh a bunch of shit I guess.
And there's a longer description or discussion about Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen here posted there already. So hopefully uh you'll go and check that out and enjoy. Until then, keep reading and those of you who are writing, keep writing and don't give up. There's a market out there for your stuff somewhere. Have a good day.