I had a conversation with One-Of-Them who voted for You-Know-Who recently, and it quickly devolved into whether I had a job and paid taxes, the implication being if I’m not tired of carrying half the country around on my overburdened tax shoulders, I should be. My return was that I’ve worked for 40 years and Christians who ignore the love thy neighbor stuff in favor of a lower tax burden are missing the point. I mentioned my 80-something parents are both part of the fabled 47%. I was feeling around in the conversation for the racism, and it soon came out: “I’m talking about Muslim youth who want to come here on the dole while they study bomb making.”

Freddie Boom-Boom Washington DC?

You know, the story of angry brown people coming to kill your babies is running a little threadbare, of late. This idjit feels Taxed Enough Already because of a government demolitions work-study program for Muslim youths. Who knew? What do they call it? Fannie Mae Explode? Freddie Mac-10?

That’s apparently how we lost Pennsylvania: mouth breathers like this one frenzied into a lather by breathless bullshit pumped into their low-info bubble. And I’m coming to the conclusion that there’s nothing we’re going to be able to do about it. We can’t save these people from themselves. We have to save the rest of us from themselves, and hopefully the rising tide will lift all boats. If themselves drown, however, it will be by themselves’ own hands.

My parting shot was, “You can stand against the wall now, or be stood against it later, remember the Sinclair Lewis quote?”

Well, it turns out, neither did I, so well; it’s one of those quotes fostered on various people about a theme that’s been around for some time. The basic version is: “when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.” Here is what Sinclair Lewis actually DID say on the subject in It Can’t Happen Here.

“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.”

I loves me some Bob Dylan, but the greatest American author not to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature many say is Philip Roth. He returned to Sinclair Lewis’ time and wrote The Plot Against America as if it DID happen here, and he said: “–nor had I understood til then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others”

That “shameless vanity of utter fools” is today called the “Dunning Kruger Effect.” There’s science and everything about it. Roth also said, quite presciently:

“To have enslaved America with this hocuspocus! To have captured the mind of the world’s greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth! Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on earth!”

(In Roth’s book, Clueless Amerika Firster Celeb President = Charles Lindbergh. Malevolent man = Hitler.)

Perhaps borrowing from both Sinclair and CS Lewis, Yale School of Divinity Professor Halford Luccock also warned in a 1938 Sermon:

When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled “made in Germany”; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, “Americanism.” … The high-sounding phrase “the American way” will be used by interested groups intent on profit, to cover a multitude of sins against the American and Christian tradition, such sins as lawless violence, teargas and shotguns, denial of civil liberties …

He later continued:

For never, probably, has there been a time when there was a more vigorous effort to surround social and international questions with such a fog of distortion and prejudices and hysterical appeal to fear. We have touched a new low in a Congressional investigation this Summer, used by some participating in it to whip up fear and prejudice against many causes of human welfare, such as concern for peace and the rights of labor to bargain collectively.

Notice the repeated themes: a credulous, confused electorate; a fog of disinformation; a patina of patriotism; special interest groups subsuming American values and redefining the idea of America as mere profit.

It can’t happen here. And yet, now, it HAS happened here. So stand against his wall now. Or be stood against it later.