...
Show More
I dunno...seems timely...
- "We ought to keep all these foreigners out of the country" (10).
- "With all the discontent there is in the country to wash him into office, Senator Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, next November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us into some war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that we’re the huskiest nation going. And then I, the Liberal, and you, the Plutocrat, the bogus Tory, will be led out and shot at 3 A.M. Serious? Huh!" (16).
- "'Why, where in all history has there even been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!'...'It might not be so bad...with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours--not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini...and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous [ie: "Great"] again. 'Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not'" (17-18).
- "The Executive has got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates" (30).
- "There is no Peace! For more than a year now, the League of Forgotten Men has warned the politicians, the whole government, that we are sick unto death of being the Dispossessed—and that, at last, we are more than fifty million strong; no whimpering horde, but with the will, the voices, the votes to enforce our sovereignty!" (41).
- "Why, nothing much except that in a couple of years now, on the ground of protecting us, the Buzz Windrip dictatorship will be regimenting everything, from where we may pray to what detective stories we may read" (43).
- "As abruptly as one who, in the death cell, startles out of sleep to the realization, 'Today they'll hang me!' he sat up, bewildered, as he reflected that today Senator Berzelius Windrip would probably be nominated for President" (49).
- "Great and dramatic shenanigans had happened, and...they were reported by the hysterical radio and by bulletins from the A.P....since every delegate knew that [the other candidates] were far too lacking in circus tinsel and general clownishness to succeed at this critical hour of the nation's hysteria, when the electorate wanted a ringmaster-revolutionist like Senator Windrip" (50).
- "All through the campaign, Buzz Windrip was able to get lots of jolly humor out of puns on going to Wash., and to wash [ie: "drain the swamp!"]. It was a "comic masterpiece" (53), "Great showmanship. P. T. Barnum or Flo Ziegfeld never put on a better" (55).
- "Windrip stated that, just in case anyone did not completely understand his platform, he wanted to make it all ringingly clear.
Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but all for the bankers—except the Jewish bankers, who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World...and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy America in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly" (57).
- "(15) Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration, initiate amendments to the Constitution providing (a), that the President shall have the authority to institute and execute all necessary measures for the conduct of the government during this critical epoch; (b), that Congress shall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to the attention of the President and his aides and Cabinet any needed legislation, but not acting upon same until authorized by the President so to act; and (c), that the Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them to be unconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts of the President, his duly appointed aides, or Congress" (64).
- "they've realized that this country has gone so flabby that any gang daring enough and unscrupulous enough, and smart enough not to seem illegal, can grab hold of the entire government and have all the power and applause and salutes, all the money and palaces and willin' women they want.
They're only a handful, but just think how small Lenin's gang was at first, and Mussolini's, and Hitler's, and Kemal Pasha's, and Napoleon's! You'll see all the liberal preachers and modernist educators and discontented newspapermen and farm agitators—maybe they'll worry at first, but they'll get caught up in the web of propaganda, like we all were in the Great War, and they'll all be convinced that, even if our Buzzy maybe has got a few faults, he's on the side of the plain people, and against all the tight old political machines, and they'll rouse the country for him as the Great Liberator (and meanwhile Big Business will just wink and sit tight!) and then, by God, this crook—oh, I don't know whether he's more of a crook or an hysterical religious fanatic—along with [Bannon], [Conway], [Spicer], and [Rex Tillerson]—these five men will be able to set up a régime that'll remind you of Henry Morgan the pirate capturing a merchant ship" (66).
- "oh, if it hadn't been one Windrip, it'd been another.... We had it coming, we Respectables.... But that isn't going to make us like it!" (67). Seriously?! "Respectables" vs. "Deplorable." Seriously?!!!
- "watching Senator Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his 'ideas' almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill....derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—" (70).
- "Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common Man.
Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in...the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded...all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate" (71).
- "the Saturday Evening Post enraged the small shopkeepers by calling Wmdrip a demagogue, and the New York Times, once Independent Democrat, was anti-Windrip. But most of the religious periodicals announced that with a saint like Bishop Prang for backer, Windrip must have been called of God" (79).
- "Senator Windrip, he asserted, had been chosen 'not by the brains and hearts of genuine Democrats but by their temporarily crazed emotions" (84).
- "Oh, my dears, this beastly election! Beastly! Seems as if it's breaking up every town, every home" (89).
- "He slid into a rhapsody of general ideas—a mishmash of polite regards to Justice, Freedom, Equality, Order, Prosperity, Patriotism, and any number of other noble but slippery abstractions....
Something in the intensity convinced them...that he was telling them the truths, the imperious and dangerous facts, that had been hidden from them" (98).
- "Certain though Doremus had been of Windrip's election, the event was like the long-dreaded passing of a friend (102).
- "He wanted to be 'in' things, and he was daily more irritable as Windrip began, even before his inauguration, to dictate to the country...now, after Buzz's inauguration, everything is going to be completely simple and comprehensible again—the country is going to be run as his private domain!" (103,105).
- Obviously many fewer updates towards the end because the latter half still hasn't happened here (yet). Am I so naive to think that it still can't happen here? It's just so impossibly absurd! But then again, so was the first half, which read like a script for the current administration. For me, this rings all too true: "So debated Doremus, like some hundreds of thousands of other craftsmen, teachers, lawyers, what-not, in some dozens of countries under a dictatorship, who were aware enough to resent the tyranny, conscientious enough not to take its bribes cynically, yet not so abnormally courageous as to go willingly to exile or dungeon or chopping-block—particularly when they 'had wives and families to support'" (201).
- Overall, even taken out of its chillingly relevant real-world context, this is a great read. It's much darker than I thought (of course I expect good and LOGIC to triumph in the end!), yet it never loses its relatively lighthearted, satirical tone. Well-written, too!
- "If I ever hear that 'can't make an omelet' phrase again, I'll start doing a little murder myself! It's used to justify every atrocity under every despotism, Fascist or Nazi or Communist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs! By God, sir, men's souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!" (238).
- "Like all religious zealots, they had a blessed capacity for blindness" (351).
- "He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word "Fascism" and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson" (358)
Update--Only on page 18 and scared:
- "We ought to keep all these foreigners out of the country" (10).
- "With all the discontent there is in the country to wash him into office, Senator Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, next November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us into some war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that we’re the huskiest nation going. And then I, the Liberal, and you, the Plutocrat, the bogus Tory, will be led out and shot at 3 A.M. Serious? Huh!" (16).
- "'Why, where in all history has there even been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!'...'It might not be so bad...with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours--not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini...and have 'em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous [ie: "Great"] again. 'Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not'" (17-18).
Update--only on page 68 and...holy shit!
- "The Executive has got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates" (30).
- "There is no Peace! For more than a year now, the League of Forgotten Men has warned the politicians, the whole government, that we are sick unto death of being the Dispossessed—and that, at last, we are more than fifty million strong; no whimpering horde, but with the will, the voices, the votes to enforce our sovereignty!" (41).
- "Why, nothing much except that in a couple of years now, on the ground of protecting us, the Buzz Windrip dictatorship will be regimenting everything, from where we may pray to what detective stories we may read" (43).
- "As abruptly as one who, in the death cell, startles out of sleep to the realization, 'Today they'll hang me!' he sat up, bewildered, as he reflected that today Senator Berzelius Windrip would probably be nominated for President" (49).
- "Great and dramatic shenanigans had happened, and...they were reported by the hysterical radio and by bulletins from the A.P....since every delegate knew that [the other candidates] were far too lacking in circus tinsel and general clownishness to succeed at this critical hour of the nation's hysteria, when the electorate wanted a ringmaster-revolutionist like Senator Windrip" (50).
- "All through the campaign, Buzz Windrip was able to get lots of jolly humor out of puns on going to Wash., and to wash [ie: "drain the swamp!"]. It was a "comic masterpiece" (53), "Great showmanship. P. T. Barnum or Flo Ziegfeld never put on a better" (55).
- "Windrip stated that, just in case anyone did not completely understand his platform, he wanted to make it all ringingly clear.
Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but all for the bankers—except the Jewish bankers, who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World...and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy America in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly" (57).
- "(15) Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration, initiate amendments to the Constitution providing (a), that the President shall have the authority to institute and execute all necessary measures for the conduct of the government during this critical epoch; (b), that Congress shall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to the attention of the President and his aides and Cabinet any needed legislation, but not acting upon same until authorized by the President so to act; and (c), that the Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them to be unconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts of the President, his duly appointed aides, or Congress" (64).
- "they've realized that this country has gone so flabby that any gang daring enough and unscrupulous enough, and smart enough not to seem illegal, can grab hold of the entire government and have all the power and applause and salutes, all the money and palaces and willin' women they want.
They're only a handful, but just think how small Lenin's gang was at first, and Mussolini's, and Hitler's, and Kemal Pasha's, and Napoleon's! You'll see all the liberal preachers and modernist educators and discontented newspapermen and farm agitators—maybe they'll worry at first, but they'll get caught up in the web of propaganda, like we all were in the Great War, and they'll all be convinced that, even if our Buzzy maybe has got a few faults, he's on the side of the plain people, and against all the tight old political machines, and they'll rouse the country for him as the Great Liberator (and meanwhile Big Business will just wink and sit tight!) and then, by God, this crook—oh, I don't know whether he's more of a crook or an hysterical religious fanatic—along with [Bannon], [Conway], [Spicer], and [Rex Tillerson]—these five men will be able to set up a régime that'll remind you of Henry Morgan the pirate capturing a merchant ship" (66).
- "oh, if it hadn't been one Windrip, it'd been another.... We had it coming, we Respectables.... But that isn't going to make us like it!" (67). Seriously?! "Respectables" vs. "Deplorable." Seriously?!!!
I NEED to hurry up and finish this to see how we, I mean it, ends!
Update: Trudging along because of the queasy Twilight Zone feeling I get. On page 116 and:
- "watching Senator Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his 'ideas' almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill....derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—" (70).
- "Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common Man.
Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in...the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded...all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate" (71).
- "the Saturday Evening Post enraged the small shopkeepers by calling Wmdrip a demagogue, and the New York Times, once Independent Democrat, was anti-Windrip. But most of the religious periodicals announced that with a saint like Bishop Prang for backer, Windrip must have been called of God" (79).
- "Senator Windrip, he asserted, had been chosen 'not by the brains and hearts of genuine Democrats but by their temporarily crazed emotions" (84).
- "Oh, my dears, this beastly election! Beastly! Seems as if it's breaking up every town, every home" (89).
- "He slid into a rhapsody of general ideas—a mishmash of polite regards to Justice, Freedom, Equality, Order, Prosperity, Patriotism, and any number of other noble but slippery abstractions....
Something in the intensity convinced them...that he was telling them the truths, the imperious and dangerous facts, that had been hidden from them" (98).
- "Certain though Doremus had been of Windrip's election, the event was like the long-dreaded passing of a friend (102).
- "He wanted to be 'in' things, and he was daily more irritable as Windrip began, even before his inauguration, to dictate to the country...now, after Buzz's inauguration, everything is going to be completely simple and comprehensible again—the country is going to be run as his private domain!" (103,105).
Finally finished:
- Obviously many fewer updates towards the end because the latter half still hasn't happened here (yet). Am I so naive to think that it still can't happen here? It's just so impossibly absurd! But then again, so was the first half, which read like a script for the current administration. For me, this rings all too true: "So debated Doremus, like some hundreds of thousands of other craftsmen, teachers, lawyers, what-not, in some dozens of countries under a dictatorship, who were aware enough to resent the tyranny, conscientious enough not to take its bribes cynically, yet not so abnormally courageous as to go willingly to exile or dungeon or chopping-block—particularly when they 'had wives and families to support'" (201).
- Overall, even taken out of its chillingly relevant real-world context, this is a great read. It's much darker than I thought (of course I expect good and LOGIC to triumph in the end!), yet it never loses its relatively lighthearted, satirical tone. Well-written, too!
Other Favorite quotations
- "If I ever hear that 'can't make an omelet' phrase again, I'll start doing a little murder myself! It's used to justify every atrocity under every despotism, Fascist or Nazi or Communist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs! By God, sir, men's souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!" (238).
- "Like all religious zealots, they had a blessed capacity for blindness" (351).
- "He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word "Fascism" and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson" (358)
