Hear George Orwell’s 1984 Adapted as a Radio Play at the Height of McCarthyism & The Red Scare (1953)

in Literature, Politics, Radio | September 20th, 2016

“If you want a picture of the future,” George Orwell famously said, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.” Since his ominous warning of coming tyranny, and the publication of his dystopian novel 1984, Orwell’s grim vision has been put to various partisan uses. Conservatives lamenting the policing of speech invoke Orwell. So too does a spectrum of voices speaking out against violent authoritarianism in actual policing, and in the politics of the right—related phenomena given the willingness of police and secret service to become enforcers of a campaign’s will at rallies nationwide. The state and corporate mass media have both become complicit in fostering a climate of outrage, mistrust, and insecurity in which there seems to be, as Orwell wrote, “no loyalty except loyalty to the Party.”

How did this happen? If we, in the United States, are ever inclined to learn from our history, we might avoid falling victim to the paranoid blandishments of demagogues and fearmongers. While one current threat to democracy comes from outside the political system, in the 1950s, an insider used several of the same tactics to hold the nation in thrall. The repressive postwar climate of anti-Communist panic in which Joseph McCarthy rose to power in the late 40s and 50s entrapped even Orwell, who “named names” in a list he sent to the British Foreign Office, suggesting certain acquaintances “were not fit for writing assignments” with the government because of supposed Soviet sympathies.

This secret act would have seemed like a bitter irony to many dissidents in McCarthy’s America, who surely read 1984 with increasing alarm as the Red Scare took hold of Congress. For their part, readers fearing the Communist threat heard echoes of Orwell’s warnings in McCarthy’s propaganda.

In whatever way it was interpreted, 1984 had an immediate impact on the culture. Its first radio dramatization, starring David Niven, premiered in 1949—the year after the novel’s publication—aired by the NBC University Theater. This was followed just four years later with another radio adaptation produced by The United States Steel Hour, a radio and TV anthology program that employed Rod Serling as a scriptwriter and featured notable guest stars like James Dean, Andy Griffith, Jack Klugman, and Paul Newman.

The program’s radio dramas, called Theatre Guild on the Air, adapted classic novels like Pride and Prejudice and plays from Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Its 1953 radio play of 1984 starred Richard Widmark as “Smith” and Marian Seldes as “Julia.” The play opens—as you can hear above—with a dire announcement of “the most terrifying subject in the news today: the threat to all free men of Communism or totalitarian domination in any form.”

Whether they saw creeping Stalinism or the rabid anti-Communism of McCarthy as the more insidious force, readers of the 1950s found Orwell immediately relevant. He has remained so, such that conservative columnist David Brooks, who has made many an Orwell reference in the past, describes the recent “birtherism” turnaround as an “Orwellian inversion of the truth” in the PBS Newshour appearance above:

And so we are really in Orwell land. We are in “1984.” And it’s interesting that an authoritarian personality type comes in at the same time with a complete disrespect for even tangential relationship to the truth, that words are unmoored.

And so I do think this statement sort of shocked me with the purification of a lot of terrible trends that have been happening. And so what’s white is black, and what is up is down, what is down is up. And that really is something new in politics.

Like comparisons to another, all-too-real, totalitarian regime, references to Orwell’s authoritarian society have grown hoary over the decades, and often seem so elastic that they fall into trivializing cliché. But comparisons to fascism in a time when many vocal partisans are avowed fascists, or may as well be, seem almost tautological. The moment Brooks calls “Orwellian” above also seems precisely that—a willful, coordinated, blatant, and total reversal of political language’s relationship to anything even resembling the truth.

You can also stream the radio production at the Internet Archive, who host all 74 Theatre Guild on the Air productions. 1984 was the last of the radio dramas before The United States Steel Hour moved to television, where Rod Serling attracted controversy for his 1956 drama Noon at Doomsday, inspired by the Emmett Till case, and another Cold War work still terribly relevant to our time.

“The victim” of the play, wrote Serling in the intro to his 1957 collection Patterns, “was on old Jew who ran a pawnshop. The killer was a neurotic malcontent who lashed out at something or someone who might be materially and physically the scapegoat for his own unhappy, purposeless, miserable existence.” The episode immediately provoked “a welter of publicity that came from some 15,000 letters and wires from White Citizens Councils and the like protesting the production of the play” for its resemblance to the Till case. “I shrugged it off,” wrote Serling, “answering, ‘If the shoe fits.…’ ”

Hear the Very First Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Starring David Niven (1949)

Huxley to Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Hear 21 Hours of Lectures & Talks by Howard Zinn, Author of the Bestselling A People’s History of the United States

in History, Politics | September 12th, 2016

Regularly in these pressure cooker days we hear plausible arguments from liberals and conservatives about how democratic institutions have recently failed us, and how uniquely polarized we have become as a people. We also hear often highly implausible claims about how current contenders intend to restore some kind of justice or fairness. Readers of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States will have a different perspective, one in which supposedly democratic institutions were never designed to work for the majority of the country’s inhabitants. And in which, by design, certain minorities have always remained at the bottom of the hierarchy.

“There is not a country in world history,” writes Zinn in his famous radical history, “in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States.” Far from a flawed yet exceptional form of government, the U.S. system, Zinn argued, began as a means by which the founders seized the prerogatives of the British for themselves, with no intention of expanding these liberties widely. On the contrary. As Zinn puts it in a chapter called “Tyranny is Tyranny”:

Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.

The American Revolution swapped out one rule by elites for another, in other words, and one empire for another. Or as Zinn wrote in his memoir, there is “something rotten at the root.” Those who object to Zinn’s work may find flaws in his scholarly methodology. Accusations of bias, however—even couched in polite pejoratives like “polemical” and “revisionist”—are pretty much moot. Zinn, who died in 2010, would agree. The necessity of taking a position, after all, was integral to the historian and activist’s entire ethos, such that he titled his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. “The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests,” wrote Zinn, “They were on the side of the rich and powerful.” He always made it plain whose side he took, an approach by nature controversial.

Was he a liberal partisan? Hardly. After taking a beating by police at a protest, Zinn writes, “I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country.” A Communist? “Marx,” wrote Zinn, “was often wrong, often dogmatic… too insistent that the industrial working class must be the agent of revolution.” Zinn admired Marx. He wrote a play about him, Marx in Soho, and describes in the forward how his early reading of Marx, while growing up in working-class Brooklyn, greatly influenced his view of the world.

But after “growing evidence of the horrors of Stalinism” and his experience with the grassroots “participatory democracy” of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Zinn became drawn to anarchism. Decidedly leftist and fundamentally egalitarian, Zinn’s analysis has proven broad enough to warrant admiration from several different political persuasions: from modern liberals to Marxists to libertarian communists to free market libertarians like Reason’s Thaddeus Russell, who pronounced him “no better exemplar of that thoroughgoing, anti-statist left.”

Like another famous anarchist intellectual of the radical campus left, Noam Chomsky, Zinn first came to national prominence in the 60s while organizing protests against the Vietnam War—and like Chomsky, he debated conservative standard-bearer William F. Buckley. Zinn previously protested segregation with SNCC while he taught at Spelman College, writing an influential history of the organization. His tireless activism continued until the very end of his life, and he delivered notable speeches and lectures throughout his involvement in the civil rights, anti-war, environmental, and economic justice movements.

In the Spotify playlist above, you can hear 22 of those talks for a total of 21 hours of Zinn, including that historic Buckley debate, which you can also hear in full at the top of the post. (If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here.) After their Tufts University meeting, notes Ed Welchel, Zinn reflected, “I found it curious that Buckley did not seem to understand that unsparing criticism of government is an essential element of a democratic society.”

The playlist of Zinn lectures and talks will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

Adorn Your Garden with Howard the Zinn Monk

Noam Chomsky vs. William F. Buckley, 1969

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Penn Jillette Makes the Philosophical & Pragmatic Case for Libertarianism

in Politics | August 24th, 2016

For an anarchist like Noam Chomsky, libertarianism as it’s understood in the U.S. is a corruption of the term. Throughout their political history, Chomsky argues, “real” Libertarians have been anti-Capitalist—and he includes under this heading such classical liberals as Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson, as well as modern anarcho-socialists like himself. Modern U.S. Libertarians like Ron and Rand Paul, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick have all meant something very different by the term, and certainly haven’t agreed on what that is. So what exactly is Libertarianism?

Given popular misconceptions—and some less than stellar public relations moments—one perhaps gets a clearest idea of what American Libertarianism is by reading about what it isn’t, as in this essay from one of its most contrarian theorists, Murray Rothbard. Or we can spend a few minutes with that voluble comedic magician Penn Jillette, a well-known face of Libertarian and atheist thought for many years. Jillette’s thesis in his eighteen-minute Big Think video above comes down to this: “we think you should take as little from other people by force as possible and you should be able to do whatever you think is right.” Libertarianism, Jillette elaborates, “is the strongest sense of ‘please, do what you want, try not to hurt me.”

The concept he refers to is one Isaiah Berlin wrote of as “negative liberty,” or the principle of noninterference, a staple of all Libertarian thought. The heavy stress on individual rights has come in for critique as naïve, but as Rothbard notes, “no individualist denies that people are influencing each other all the time.” Libertarian thinkers have wrestled with the conflict (if not contradiction) between maximal individual freedom and freedom from harm. Robert Nozick, for example, extended his discussion beyond our responsibilities to each other to a moral case study of our duties toward animals. Responsibility stands as a key term in Jillette’s articulation of Libertarianism—a sine qua non of a Libertarian society.

But is there such a thing as a functioning Libertarian society? Or does Jillette describe an unrealizable utopia that depends not only on most people acting responsibly, but also on most people acting rationally? As he himself says, “Libertarianism is taking a right on money, your first left on sex, and looking for utopia straight ahead.” This language aside, he doesn’t seem to operate under the illusion that people always make the best choices for themselves or their families. As part of his argument, however, he admits he isn’t qualified or desirous to make those choices for other people when he can often barely discern the right course of action for himself. As it generally does, this course of reasoning brings us to the problem of taxation in Libertarian thought.

Jillette’s appeal seems commonsensical and pragmatic, and after his general pitch, he launches into a critique of corporate capitalism that could come right out of a Chomsky talk—in some small part, that is. Jillette believes that, absent most government interference, we would have such a thing as a “true free market” in which everyone could compete fairly and without coercion. This is a position even Nozick softened on many years after his classic Anarchy, State, and Utopia, calling it “seriously inadequate” and admitting that many democratic institutions Libertarians want to abolish preserve “our equal human dignity, our autonomy and powers of self-direction.”

Whatever we make of Jillette’s laissez faire ideology, his critiques of government speak to Libertarians on either side of the economics divide. He makes an incisive case against Clinton, then tears into Trump’s willingness to “give easy answers.” Holding up career politicians Bernie Sanders and Gary Johnson as “paragons” may seem a bit much, given Jillette’s forceful argument for a healthy and thoroughgoing mistrust of government. As he says in the earlier Big Think interview above, “part of the joy and the wonder and the brilliance of the ideas of the United States of America that whoever’s in power is questioned and beat up.”

He does not, of course, mean that last part in any literal sense. While Libertarianism has perhaps been tarred by association with an increasingly violent right, it would be a mistake to lump Jillette in with certain political opportunists who at one time or another have used the term to describe themselves. His commitment to anti-war and drug legalization policies is unwavering, and he makes a strong, well-reasoned case for his politics. It’s one worth hearing out whether you agree or not in the end.

A Theory of Justice, the Musical Imagines Philosopher John Rawls as a Time-Traveling Adventurer

Noam Chomsky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resembles the Rise of Fascism in 1930s Germany

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Michio Kaku on Why Immigrants Are America’s Secret Weapon: They Compensate for Our Mediocre STEM Education & Keep Prosperity Going

in Politics, Science | August 3rd, 2016

Americans have often found themselves caught up in panics about immigration, like that now driving the campaign to build a wall between us and our third largest trading partner—when more Mexicans are leaving the U.S. than arriving. Then we have the talk of banning an entire world religion, though, of course, we’ve seen this before, lest we forget that the Klan resurged in large part as an anti-Catholic group. All of this misinformation, mistrust, and outright contempt comes at a high cost, including that of any real understanding of how immigration works, and why it works, no matter how vehemently certain organizations fight against it.

The fact is that the U.S. might be a dynamo for capital but not when it comes to what economists crudely call “human capital.” The point applies not only to immigrant workers who do jobs Americans won’t, but also those who do jobs Americans can’t, because, as physicist Michio Kaku argues above, “the United States has the worst educational system known to science.” Were it solely up to U.S. graduates, the scientific establishment and tech economy would collapse, he says, “forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley. There would be no Silicon Valley.” Instead, U.S. science and tech thrive because of immigrants who come on H‑1B visas, “America’s secret weapon… the genius visa.”

Kaku goes on to press his case with daunting statistics about the number of foreign-born Ph.D. graduates, though he doesn’t say that all of those grads have H‑1Bs. In fact, his position is a highly controversial one. Reliable studies show that many companies abuse the specialized work visa to outsource jobs Americans are fully qualified to do, and to create a class of immigrant workers who earn less than their U.S. counterparts and work under a modified form of indentured servitude. The visa is, after all, “a non-immigrant visa,” points out one critic, “and so has nothing at all to do with staying in the USA, becoming a citizen, or starting a business.” It is, more or less, a guest worker program.

Kaku’s tone can also seem grating, a smarmy reminder of what David H. Freedman calls in The Atlantic “open season on the nonsmart.” Calling American grads “stupid” will not likely endear many of them to his position. Nonetheless, when it comes to science education, it’s hard to argue with his assessments, and with his case for allowing the best minds in the world to come work for American companies (under more equitable conditions). In the Big Think video above, Kaku again presses his argument for the H‑1B as instrumental to a “brain drain” into the United States, feeding its science and tech industries with fresh minds and fresh ideas constantly. His ideas about meritocracy may seem blithe, especially given the material advantages so many guest workers already have before arriving in the States. But in purely descriptive terms, the best U.S. graduates just simply cannot compete with many of their foreign-born colleagues.

Here Kaku’s argument takes a turn in both these videos and shows how the “secret weapon” is one we’ve pointed at ourselves. We can’t continue to depend on “geniuses” from other countries, he says, to prop up our science and technology sectors, especially since the brain drains back out, with H1‑B visa holders frequently leaving, given their temporary status, and establishing companies in their home countries. “In reality,” wrote Mother Jones in 2013, “most of today’s H‑1B workers don’t stick around to become the next Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin.” That year, “the top 10 users of H‑1B visas… were all offshore outsourcing firms… that hired nearly half nearly half of H1‑B workers.” As one expert explained, “The H‑1B worker learns the job and then rotates back to the home country and takes the work with him.”

It’s likely large numbers of those workers feel less and less welcome in the U.S. But it’s also true, as Kaku says, that Americans continue to fall far behind in math and science. There may indeed be few Americans who can fill many of those jobs or continue to push technological innovation forward in the U.S.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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How Did Hitler Rise to Power? : New TED-ED Animation Provides a Case Study in How Fascists Get Democratically Elected

in Current Affairs, History, Politics | July 25th, 2016

How does one rise to public office? In part, by flattering the sensibilities of those one seeks to serve.

Do you appeal to their higher nature, their sense of civic responsibility and interconnectness?

Or do you capitalize on pre-existing biases, stoking already simmering fears and resentments to the boiling point?

The world paid a ghastly price when Germany’s Chancellor and eventual Führer Adolf Hitler proved himself a master of the latter approach.

It seems like we’ve been hearing about Hitler’s rise to power a lot lately… and not in anticipation of the fast-approaching 80th anniversary of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

We must always resist the temptation to oversimplify history, especially when doing so serves our own ends. There are way too many contributing factors to Hitler’s ascendancy to squeeze into a five minute animation.

On the other hand, you can’t dump a ton of information on people’s heads and expect them to absorb it all in one sitting. You have to start somewhere.

TED-Ed lesson planners Alex Gendler and Anthony Hazard, in collaboration with the Uncle Ginger animation studio, offer a very cogent explanation of how “a tyrant who orchestrated one of the largest genocides in history” achieved such a calamitously powerful position. All in a democratic fashion.

When viewers have more than five minutes to devote to the subject, they can delve into additional resources and participate in discussions on the subject.

The video doesn’t touch on Hitler’s mental illness or the particulars of Weimar era political structures, but even viewers with limited historical context will walk away from it with an understanding that Hitler was a master at exploiting the German majority’s mood in the wake of WWI. (A 1933 census shows that Jews made up less than one percent of the total population.)

Hitler’s reputation as a charismatic speaker is difficult to accept, given hindsight, modern sensibilities, and the herky-jerky quality of archival footage. He seems unhinged. How could the crowds not see it?

Perhaps they could, Gendler and Hazard suggest. They just didn’t want to. Businessmen and intellectuals, wanting to back a winner, rationalized that his more monstrous rhetoric was “only for show.”

Quite an attention-getting show, as it turns out.

Could it happen again? Gendler and Hazard, like all good educators, present students with the facts, then open the floor for discussion.

How Jazz-Loving Teenagers–the Swingjugend–Fought the Hitler Youth and Resisted Conformity in Nazi Germany

Noam Chomsky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resembles the Rise of Fascism in 1930s Germany

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Allen Ginsberg Teaches You How to Meditate with a Rock Song Featuring Bob Dylan on Bass

in Music, Poetry, Politics, Religion | July 25th, 2016

Image via Elisa Dorman, Wikimedia Commons

Whatever other criteria we use to lump them together—shared aims of psychedelic consciousness-expanding through drugs and Eastern religion, frank explorations of alternative sexualities, anti-establishment cred—the Beats were each in their own way true to the name in one very simple way: they all collaborated with musicians, wrote song or poems as songs, and saw literature as a public, performative art form like music.

And though I suppose one could call some of their forays into recorded music gimmicky at times, I can’t imagine Jack Kerouac’s career making a whole lot of sense without Bebop, or Burroughs’ without psychedelic rock and tape and noise experimentation, or Ginsberg’ without… well, Ginsberg got into a little bit of everything, didn’t he? Whether writing calypsos about the CIA, performing and recording with The Clash, showing up on MTV with Philip Glass and Paul McCartney…. He never worked with Kanye, but I imagine he probably would have.

For each of these artists, the medium delivered a message. Kerouac’s odes to jazz, loneliness, and wanderlust; Burroughs’ dark, paranoid prophecies about government control; and Ginsberg’s anti-war jeremiads and insistent pleas for peace, freedom, tolerance, and enlightenment. Ever the trickster and teacher, Ginsberg often used humor to disarm his audience, then went in for the kill, so to speak. We may find no more pointed an example of this comedic pedagogy than his 1981 song, “Do the Meditation Rock,” recorded in 1982 as a shambling folk-rock jam below with guitarist Steven Taylor, and members of Bob Dylan’s touring band—including Dylan himself making a rare appearance on bass.

As the story goes, according to Hank Shteamer at Rolling Stone, Ginsberg was in Los Angeles and “eager to book some studio time. Dylan obliged, and agreed to foot the bill for the studio costs on the condition that Ginsberg would pay the musicians. The two met at Dylan’s Santa Monica studio and, as Taylor remembers it, jammed for 10 hours.” Many more recordings from that session made it onto the recently released The Last World on First Blues, which also includes contributions from Jack Kerouac’s musical partner David Amram, folk legend Happy Traum, and experimental cellist, singer, and disco producer Arthur Russell.

See Ginsberg, Taylor, Russell, and Ginsberg’s partner Peter Orlovsky (meditating), perform the song above on a PBS special called “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell,” created in 1984 by Korean video artist Naim June Paik. As Ginsberg explains it in the liner notes to his collection Holy Soul, Jelly Roll, the song came together after his own meditation training in the late seventies, when the poet got the okay from his Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (founder of Naropa University) to “show basic meditation in his traditional classrooms or groups at poetry readings”—his goal, he says, to “knock all the poets out with sugar-coated dharma.”

Christmas Eve, I stopped in the middle of the block at a stoop and wrote the words down, notebook on my knee. I figured that if anyone listened to the words, they’d find complete instructions for classical sitting practice, Samatha-Vipassana (“Quieting the mind and clear seeing”). Some humor in the form, it doesn’t have to be taken over-seriously, yet it’s precise.

You may have noticed the familiar cadence of the chorus; it’s a take-off, he says, on “I Fought the Law,” recorded in 1977 by his soon-to-be musical partners, The Clash. In the live version below at New York’s Ukranian National Home, the song gets a more stripped-down, punk rock treatment with Tom Rogers on guitar. Like many a wandering bard, Ginsberg changes and adapts the lyrics slightly to the venue and occasion. See the Allen Ginsberg Project for several published versions of the lyrics and his changes in this rendition.

Apart from the basic meditation instructions, which are easy to follow in writing and song, Ginsberg’s “Do the Meditation Rock” had another message, specific to his understanding of the power of meditation; it can change the world, in spite of “a holocaust” or “Apocalypse in a long red car.” As Ginsberg speak/sings, “If you sit for an hour or a minute every day / you can tell the Superpower, sit the same way / you can tell the Superpower, watch and wait.” No matter how bad things seem, he says, “it’s never too late to stop and meditate.” Hear another recorded version of the song below from Holy Soul, Jelly Roll, recorded live in Kansas City by William S. Burroughs in 1989.

Allen Ginsberg & The Clash Perform the Punk Poem “Capital Air,” Live Onstage in Times Square (1981)

‘The Ballad of the Skeletons’: Allen Ginsberg’s 1996 Collaboration with Philip Glass and Paul McCartney

Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spoken-World Albums: A Sublime Union of Beat Literature and 1950s Jazz

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Octavia Butler’s 1998 Dystopian Novel Features a Fascistic Presidential Candidate Who Promises to “Make America Great Again”

in Current Affairs, Politics, Sci Fi | July 21st, 2016

Image by Nikolas Coukouma, via Wikimedia Commons

The Internet has been abuzz and atwitter these past few months with stories about prophetic predictions of the rise of Trump, buried in ancient texts like Back to the Future II, and an episode of The Simpsons from 2000. Then there’s Mike Judge’s now ten-year-old satire Idiocracy. While not specifically modeled after a Trump presidency, its depiction of the country as a violent, backward dystopia, armed and corporate-branded to the teeth, sure does resemble the kind of place many imagine Trump and his supporters might build. These allusions and direct references don’t necessarily provide evidence of the writers’ clairvoyance; after all, Trump has threatened us with his candidacy since 1988, with mostly unserious statements. But they do show us that we’ve seen this version of the future coming for the last thirty years or so.

One prediction you may have missed, however, offers us a much more sober take on the rise of a frightening neo-fascist during a time of fear and civil unrest. As Twitter user @oligopistos pointed out, in the second book of her Earthseed series, The Parable of the Talents (1998), Hugo and Nebula-award winning science fiction writer Octavia Butler gave us Senator Andrew Steele Jarret, a violent autocrat in the year 2032 whose “supporters have been known… to form mobs.” Jarret’s political opponent, Vice President Edward Jay Smith, “calls him a demagogue, a rabble-rouser, and a hypocrite,” and—most presciently—Jarret rallies his crowds with the call to “make America great again.”

Though Trump has trademarked it, the slogan did not originate with him, nor even with Butler’s Jarret character—the 1980 Reagan-Bush campaign used it, as Matt Taibbi pointed out Rolling Stone last year. (Historians have even shown that another of Trump’s slogans, “America First,” was used by Charles Lindbergh and “Nazi-friendly Americans in the 1930s.”) Again, proto-Trumpism has been in the zeitgeist for a long time. While Butler may have used “Make American Great Again” from her memory of Reagan’s first campaign, the way her character employs it speaks to our moment for a number of reasons.

It’s true that Senator Jarret differs from Trump in some significant ways: “Jarret’s beef is with Canada instead of Mexico,” writes Fusion, and “instead of business acumen as his main credential, religion is Jarret’s stump. He’s the head of a group called Christian America, which is intolerant of other religious views, and whose supporters burn ‘witches’—meaning Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists—at the stake.” Our current candidate may have co-opted the religious right, but he doesn’t speak their language at all. Nonetheless, he has made promises that give secularists and non-Christians chills, and religious intolerance has formed the backbone of his campaign and of the rhetoric that has driven his party to the far right.

Jarret and the fanaticism he inspires become central the novel’s story, but the crucial background in Butler’s 1998 depiction of a post-apocalyptic 2032 are the conditions she identifies as giving rise to the Senator’s rule (and which she described in the first book, Parable of the Sower). In Talents, the narrator’s father Taylor Franklin Bankole writes,

I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as “the Apocalypse” or more commonly, more bitterly, “the Pox” lasted from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos…. I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.

In Butler’s fiction, the rise of Senator Jarret and his mobs is an outcome of the same kinds of impending crises we face now, and that far too many of our leaders dutifully ignore as they stage increasingly acrimonious and bizarre forms of political theater. Butler’s indirect warning to us in Parable of the Talents may be less about the demagogic leader and his cult—though they pose the most dire existential threat in the book—than about the causes and conditions that created “the Pox,” the kind of social collapse that Kurt Vonnegut warned of ten years before Butler in his time-capsule letter to the people of 2088, vaguely identifying similar kinds of “climatic, economic, and sociological” crises to come. Would that we could abandon empty spectacle and heed these Cassandras of the near future.

via The Huffington Post

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today

Noam Chomsky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resembles the Rise of Fascism in 1930s Germany

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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New Web Comic Revisits the Artists & Writers at the Bloody ’68 Convention: Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs & More

in Comics/Cartoons, History, Politics | July 13th, 2016

Drawing of William S. Burroughs by Nathan Gelgud/The Paris Review

America’s political circus will soon roll through Cleveland and then Philadelphia–the sites of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. And, not without some merit, there’s concern that the carnivals could turn violent, as happened in 1968, when Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley, backed by 23,000 police and National Guardsmen, assaulted protesters in the streets. A federal report later called it a display of “unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence.”

This week, that tumultuous ’68 convention is being commemorated in a comic over at The Paris Review. Issued in daily installments by illustrator Nathan Gelgud, the comic–simply titled “Unconventional”–looks at the writers, artists, and demonstrators who attended the convention. Part 1 features poet, singer, activist Ed Sanders. Part 2 puts Jean Genet center stage (who knew he was there?). Part 3 focuses on Norman Mailer, who was always ready for a fight. Part 4 gives us the inimitable William S. Burroughs, and Part 5, Terry Southern. You can follow the series here.

To learn more about what happened at that historic convention, you can read Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

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