I’ve come to realize that I basically have three Top Comments diaries: the video clip parade, the rant, and the “I watched something interesting on tv”. Tonight is one of those third versions. For a brief time I had some access to HBO and decided to watch “The Plot Against America” on binge mode. It’s been too long since I read the book to be able to compare film and written versions but the show stands on its own. I have … thoughts.
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No, Sinclair Lewis did not write that when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. I can’t find any definitive source for that phrase after 5 whole minutes of googling. That, however, doesn’t make the sentiment wrong. It’s just mis-attributed.
The Plot Against America quick synopsis is that Charles Linbergh runs for president as a Republican and defeats FDR in 1940 on an America First, WWII neutrality platform with just a hint of anti Semitism that grows in scope through the course of the action. Certainly the ugliness is let loose by the Lindbergh administration but the real ugliness comes from the everyday bigots emboldened to let their hate fly free.
Watching the show’s six hour-long episodes back to back in July 2020 ripped through me. Reading the book during the W administration was difficult enough. Watching the series under a Trump administration was a whole different endeavor. The ugliness of the America First crowd in real life was still just under the surface then.
Don’t get me wrong, the Confederate flags and police brutality and Klan/Neo Nazi fuckers were all there. And life for minorities wasn’t really any better then either. Yet the scab had not been ripped fully off the White supremacy wound in the nation’s soul. Yes, there were just as many threats in 2004 as in 2020. But the racists still felt the need to keep it (a little) concealed.
Because here’s the thing. I knew in 2004 that Roth was not writing an alternative history as if one change could lead to the ugliness we are all witnessing real time now. He was writing an alternative version of when it would explode onto the political and cultural landscape. Roth was calling out the Southern Strategy and the Republican base and the GOP itself. He was not saying “what if”. He was using a literary device to show us who we as a nation were.
And that was a mere 16 years ago. Trump is so awful that he has some Democrats remembering Reagan fondly. As if Reagan weren’t just as bad or dog whistling to the same America Firsters. At least W tried to maintain some semblance of playing the normal game. But Roth laid that lie bare with the novel. Trump has taken us so far over the cliff that even David Simon, creator of the Wire among other things, couldn’t make this a plausible alternative reality.
And, to his credit, he doesn’t try. Maybe I’m going too far with my own reading of the show. I don’t know. But in 2020 the television version of The Plot Against America just shows us that we haven’t really changed all that much in the last 16, or 80, years. This country is built on White Supremacy.
And it is long past time to do something about that. The Democratic party can truly become a force to heal our divisions, end our collective trauma, and build that “more perfect union”. Or it can continue to play civility politics. But it can’t do both.
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