whose plot against america?

(Before any of this: the tsunamis in Asia are sucking all of our attention. I have nothing sensible to say here, except that I'm glad my friends in Asia are safe and wonder, loosely, if the increasing frequency of earthquakes 8.0 and above in the region is connected at all to global warming. I can't even conceive of the grief involved in those 23,000 deaths.)

This month's New York Review of Books contains an article by Mark Danner, who seems to break up his excruciating time in war zone with a different kind of war: "How Bush Really Won."  Both painful and illuminating, it also reminded me of why I'd wanted to write an extended blog about The Plot Against America.

I initially bought the book, by the way, as a Christmas gift for my father (the irascible Italian Republican I mentioned a few weeks back). But I had to peek, even though I'd always been skeptical of Roth, and the opening blew me apart: Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews. I knew I'd have to buy another for dad and get to the bottom of this myself.

Roth has claimed, in numerous interviews, that this book is more a "shadow memoir" than a comment on the present: yet he wrote as the Iraq war was brewing and after the first time GWB swamped the airwaves with his persona and his coherent if fantastical worldview. Tell me he didn't have Shrub in his mind as he bred Charles Lindbergh the presidential candidate:

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On the holiday weekend that closed out the summer of 1940, Lindbergh came nowhere near besting the record time for a coast-to-coast nonstop flight that he'd himself set a decade back with an aircraft more advanced than the old Spirit of St. Louis. Nonetheless, when he arrived at Los Angeles Airport, a crowd consisting largely of aircraft workers—tens of thousands of them, employed by the big new manufacturers in and around L.A.—was as overcome with enthusiasm as any ever to greet him anywhere.

The Democrats called the flight a publicity gimmick stage-managed by Lindbergh's staff, when in fact the decision to fly to California had been made only hours earlier by Lindbergh alone and not by the professionals who had been assigned by the Republican Party to steer the political novice through his first political campaign and who, like everyone else, had been expecting him to turn up in Detroit.

His speech was unadorned and to the point, delivered in a highpitched, flat, midwestern, decidedly un-Rooseveltian American voice. His flight outfit of high boots and jodhpurs and a lightweight jumper worn over a shirt and tie was a replica of the one in which he'd crossed the Atlantic, and he spoke without removing his leather headgear or flight goggles, which were pushed up onto his forehead exactly as Sandy had them positioned in the charcoal drawing hidden beneath his bed.
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Did no one else reading this think of "Mission Accomplished?" Of the Texas twang as opposed to, God forbid, Kerry's Massachussetts roll? Danner sits in a Florida stadium surrounded by cheering Bushies, and reflects on the comfort they seek and what they give up:

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The thousands cheering around me in that Orlando stadium, and the many others who would come to support Bush on election day, faced a stark choice: either discard the facts, or give up the clear and comforting worldview that they contradicted. They chose to disregard the facts.

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The book's not all, or even primarily, of course, about elections; it's about the anti-democratic results of his election, as it's experienced by a young Philip Roth in Newark (thus the "shadow memoir").  The narrative sweeps you in so deeply it has taken me this long, weeks, after I finished, for me to feel disappointment at the thriller-plot epilogue (in which Lindbergh is revealed to be a victim of blackmail) or to think more, as a writer, about characters like Aunt Evelyn and young Seldon Wishnow. I was too swept up in the military occupation of the country, the crackdown on dissent, and the creeping (and not-so-creeping) anti-Semitism that ensues after Lindbergh's election.

All the First Amendment rants I've included in this blog, the ones I never got around to writing, the shutdown of all dissent and even disagreement inside the Bush Administration: all are mirrored in this novel, inside Roth's straightforward telling of this fable. 

And as I was reading, the season's "Bring Back Christmas" inanity targeted Jews  more explicitly than I'd seen in my lifetime, as did discussion of Mel Gibson's The Passion, as noted by Frank Rich, in the Times:

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"Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular," William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, explained in a colloquy on the subject recently convened by Pat Buchanan on MSNBC. "It's not a secret, O.K.?" Mr. Donohue continued. "And I'm not afraid to say it. That's why they hate this movie. It's about Jesus Christ, and it's about truth." After the show's token (and conservative) Jewish panelist, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, pointed out that "Michael Moore is certainly not a Jew" and that Scorsese, Coppola and Lucas are not "Jewish names," Mr. Donohue responded: "I like Harvey Weinstein. How's that? Harvey Weinstein is my friend."
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Is it just a few short hops from "defending" Mel Gibson, from slandering a mayor in Florida "who appears to be Jewish,"  to the "absorption" program limned by Roth, which dispersed Jewish families to the prairie to become more  "American?"  Okay, not so short. Still, added to the much-discussed survey in which 44 percent of Americans appeared to  approve of reducing Muslim civil liberties, the level of fear and suspicion of religious minorities just doesnit fit, in a republic founded by religious minorities.

Distrust of the other. Suppression of dissent. Tolerance of torture (with the FBI and the CIA as the good guys). Is this the America our grandparents struggled to get to?

Comments

[Dianne]

"the "absorption" program limned by Roth, which dispersed Jewish families to the prairie to become more "American?" "

I imagine that this was based on the historical attempts to make American Indians more "American" by taking them from their families and putting them in boarding schools or with (white) adoptive families where they were taught that their religion and way of life were wrong, primative or even evil.