Forever Isn't Over Yet

Okay, I’ve read Liberal Fascism. I was asked for my thoughts on it, and I’ve already given a few in an earlier post. Now that I’ve finished the last chapter, here’s what I think. This post is addressed to Jonah's fans.

Jonah Goldberg is lying to you. Enumerating every one of his lies would practically fill a new book, so I’ll just start here with the biggest one.

”the fascist label was projected onto the right by a complex sleight of hand…before the war, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States…After the war, the American progressives who had praised Mussolini and even looked sympathetically at Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazism. Accordingly, leftist intellectuals redefined fascism as “right-wing” and projected their own sins onto conservatives, even as they continued to borrow heavily from fascist and pre-fascist thought.”

This is what’s called a “whopper.” First of all, anyone going through periodical archives of the 20s and 30s, anyone reading writers of that era, knows that both liberals and conservatives associated fascism with the right wing well before WWII. Travel books of the 1930s, for instance, listed the Nazi party under right wing political groups, as did liberal magazines like The New Yorker and conservative magazines like Time :

There will be 607 Deputies in the new Reichstag, largest, in German history. Simplifying the returns, it means that the Nazis and other Right Wing Parties will have a total of 277 seats." Time Magazine, 8/8/32

It took no “liberal sleight of hand” to associate fascism with the right – unless you are willing to characterize Time’s rock-ribbed Republican and conservative publisher, Henry Luce as a liberal engaging in “sleight of hand.”

( Oh yes, there's more... )

I just finished reading a novel I liked very much, Gerri Brightwell’s The Dark Lantern a thriller set in Victorian London. To read it is to be plunged, as a twenty-first century reader, into an alien and inhospitable city seen from several POVs – a naïve young man struggling to make a name for himself in the new “science” of psychometry, his beautiful secretive wife, and a country girl newly arrived in London to work as a housemaid.

It’s a claustrophobic, gas-lit, pungent world that Brightwell creates, and she’s populated it with people so vivid, so believably shaped by their time that I found it almost impossible to put down. The main character, the housemaid, is not so much naïve as painfully aware of her own ignorance and vulnerability, occasionally shaken by the repressed rage of the powerless and hungry. The villains range from a skin-crawlingly evil ex-convict, to an ordinarily malicious and mercenary fellow housemaid, to the secretive wife, who veers from sympathetic character to antagonist and back throughout the book. Best of all, the ending is logical, satisfying, and unpredictable. Not many fiction writers can open and end a novel well. Or so neatly illustrate what a myth is the term “the good old days” when it comes to the poor.

In the meantime, I am continuing my long, thankless slog through Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. No, I am not a masochist. Badlydrawnjeff threw down a gauntlet of sorts by saying he’d be interested in my opinion of the book once I’d finished, and now I’m chained to the damned thing until the bitter end. The last time I felt so honor bound to finish a nonfiction book was when I read The Bell Curve, and that was at least clearly written.

So far the “secrets” breathlessly imparted to me by Lucianne’s boy include the astounding news that Mussolini preceded Hitler, that the KKK was once quite a powerful force in American politics and that Margaret Sanger had an unsavory connection with the eugenics movement -- in short, “secrets” that are well known to anyone who’s actually read about WWII, the holocaust, the Klan, or the eugenics movement.

Goldberg’s target audience seems to be very young and/or very ignorant souls who have not actually read books about twentieth-century history. In fact, they’ve apparently not even seen movies or read novels about the rise of the Third Reich etc. They’ve just read rightwing websites talking about what all those commie-lib college professors, novelists and filmmakers supposedly say about it. It’s a mindset moved three notches to the right of reality.

And unlike The Bell Curve, it’s badly written. I’d been assured that Goldberg, whatever his faults, is a very witty lad indeed, but I have this fetish about lucid writing and if he’s witty I’m missing the jokes as I try to sift through a sticky morass of shifting definitions and illogical connections.

I’ll go into the self-serving and Conservapedia-like lies of omission that riddle the book later, after I’ve read the last page and have returned the thing to the library, possibly using a pair of tongs.

One of the side effects of getting older, I’ve noticed, is that I’ve become increasingly exacting about the fiction I read. Tomorrow I’m going to carry yet another novel back to the library after trying and failing to get past the first few pages. “You can’t shit an old-timer,” a nun once told me, and more and more I’m finding that to be true within the first page, sometimes even the first paragraph, of a novel or short story.

In this case, it’s a murder mystery that looked promisingly grisly, tropical and topical, set in New Orleans immediately after Katrina. The prologue drew me in nicely, and had me turning the pages, but what defeated me was our introduction to the hero. He’s on a blind date, you see, a terrible, awful blind date with a terrible awful woman. We know she’s terrible and awful because she talks a lot while she’s eating. We’re not actually told what she says. Suffice it to say that she is talking a lot and that, we’re expected to understand, is bad enough.

I had fair warning, I guess. The blurb on the dust jacket tells us the hero “isn’t much of a team player” and there’s a reference to at least one encounter with a “beautiful psychiatrist.” Before closing the book I told myself I should give it a chance, that the “beautiful psychiatrist” might turn out to be a guy, which would put an at least slightly original spin on the plot. Leafing ahead revealed the good doctor to be a “she.” (This kind of fiction never involves easygoing individuals who are a delight to work with and who become entangled with short, plump, nearsighted female psychiatrists.)

To be fair to the author, the current primaries and the coverage of Hillary Clinton have left me with a tendency to narrow my eyes into two steel-gray slits at the slightest whiff of sexism. I’m an Obama supporter, but after reading opinion piece after opinion piece from liberals and conservatives about how annoying Hillary Clinton is, how “shrill,” her voice is, how “grating,” how “nagging,” how “like fingernails on a chalkboard,” I’ve become painfully aware of that assumption from which most misogyny springs; That there are few things more horrid than the sound of a woman talking. So back to the library you go, Mr. Downs. Sorry and good luck.

That’s just one example, of course. Back in the 90s, I began closing books or magazines when the hideous realization hit me that, yet again, incest was going to be revealed with a flourish like an increasingly threadbare rabbit pulled from a hat. A surfeit of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Ann Rice left me allergic to sensitive vampires. For a while I liked PD James, but her characters are so veddy veddy British that they all seem to have been injected with a local anesthetic that’s deadened not only their skin but their emotional responses. Murder in these novels often seems to be regarded as little more than a dreadful breach of taste. And as for modern literary novels, if by the fourth chapter I can’t think of a reason to care about any of the characters, or fathom why they are behaving the way they are behaving, or put my finger on an actual plot development beyond some affluent New Yorker/academic/bestselling writer looking in a mirror and thinking about how much his/her life stinks, it gets added to the stack of Annie Proulx and Don Delillo books people keep trying to get me to read.

I think I'll dive again into my copy of B.R. Myers' A READER'S MANIFESTO, always a comfort at moments like this.