Trump's Dream of Autocracy

GETTING CLOSE TO FASCISM WITH SINCLAIR LEWIS’S “IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE”

By Alexander Nazaryan

   October 19, 2016

"It Can’t Happen Here,” which came out in 1935, was a frightening book written for frightening times. Sinclair Lewis published the novel as Adolf Hitler was making Germany great again, violating the Treaty of Versailles by establishing the Wehrmacht. Benito Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Things at home weren’t much better: a race riot in Harlem, dust storms in the Midwest. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, but the promise of the New Deal remained unfulfilled for many. The Times, that November, reported on a meeting of the New Jersey Bankers Association, whose president offered a blunt assessment of the national mood: “America is tired of adventure and anxious,” the man of industry said. The people wanted “safety and conservatism again.”

And, as October surprises start to yield to a November shaming, Trump has been lashing out at the media with ever greater fervor. In the Times on Monday, Jim Rutenberg wrote that “some news organizations are providing security for staff members covering Trump rallies.” The Committee to Protect Journalists has declared Trump “a threat to press freedom,” the way it might have some post-Soviet despot.

“It Can’t Happen Here” is an argument for journalism as a basic pillar of democracy. And civic education, too, which many of Windrip’s supporters appear to lack. So do many Americans today, regardless of their convictions. That makes people easily exploitable by modern-day Windrips who know that they will not be made to account for their promises—or for their flagrant violations of democratic principle. The curious pronoun in Lewis’s title, lacking an antecedent, may well refer to the rise of fascism in the United States. But a less literal reading of the title suggests that “it” is something more subtle: a collective apathy, born of ignorance, and a populace that can no longer make the kind of judgments that participatory democracy requires.

************************************************************

This morning I bought the hardcover edition of the book, "1984". I read this novel in high school back years ago and remembered that it frightened me then. It made me think about what my world would be like if those things actually happened in my lifetime? I no longer wonder because fiction has become an approaching unchecked reality. I wonder if the fear I feel today is the same feelings that some German Resistance people felt so long ago?

What happens to any nation when the pillars of what their country stands for is destroyed and replaced with a dictator's regime?

Today I've decided to serve up a lunch with some spirit lifting protein to help fortify America's strength, as we fight to preserve democratic ideology in our fragile and weakened country's political Democracy now threatened by a madman's dream of his own Autocracy. Invite your family and friends to dine with you. Happiness lifts all hearts.

                Granny Annie's Politic Cafe Grilled Chicken 

1 lb. chicken

2 cups of Patron Citronge Lime Liqueur

1/2 cup of chopped Cilantro

1 cup of Olive Oil

1/4 cup of clover honey

1 tblsp. Mediterranean Sea salt

1 tblsp. coarse ground pepper

Soak chicken in 2 quart bowl filled with all mixed ingredients. Cover bowl and let marinate for 5 hours in refrigerator. Start your charcoal grill with plenty of time to let coals burn white before applying meat to grill. Serve with grilled buttered corn on the cob and asparagus, along with baked potatoes slathered in butter/sour cream. Boner Appertite!