Additional notes on Philip Roth's
Plot Against America
Some people have wondered why it was a big yawn to me.
And there are relevant reasons I didn't include in the original review.
It is supposedly a meditation on what might have been, but like Dan Brown's DaVinci Code, if you'd already read the Baigent and Leigh Holy Blood, Holy Grail books, it was old information.
It's not exactly what might have been. It's closer to what was and, to some extent, what IS.
1940?
Henry Ford was spending so much money printing and circulating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on behalf of Hitler and sending so much money to the Reich, Hitler commissioned a life-sized oil painting of the man and kept it on the wall of his office.
Our national government was taken over in the year 2001 by an heir to a fortune largely assembled when both of his grandfathers were raising money for Hitler in the 30's and 40's and continued to do so even 10 months into the war, until October 1942 when congress finally stopped them. George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush were part of the Harriman, Brown operation sending money to Hitler so he could buy bullets to fire at our troops.
Today, the governor of California is a man whose father was a Nazi Party member in Austria, and he lies about having seen "Russian tanks" in the streets when he grew up -- tanks and Russians that were both long gone, but it makes a good (i.e., vote-getting) story.
(N.B. --I do not attribute or detect any Nazi sentiments to Mr. Schwarzenegger. The fact that he behaves like a thug is not relevant.)
He is married to a woman whose grandfather was so virulently pro-Hitler, he had to be recalled from the Court of Saint James, and when he was, Winston Churchill opined that Joe Kennedy should be tried for treason when he got back to the USA.
The grandfather of Karl Rove (Roverer) was an engineer who designed and built the Birkenau section of Auschitz, the section (of three sections) which had the gas chambers and body-disposal ovens. Rove holds dual citizenship in the USA and Germany.
George W Bush managed the "ethnic consultants" for his father's campaign, that group, so-called, consisting of 11 former SS Officers. When word leaked out, it was Dubya who quietly fired them one at a time so as to avoid making waves.
So the idea of an America where pro-Nazi officials and/or the family, friends, and children of Nazi's take power (regardless of whether or not they uphold those same sentiments) hasn't been fantasy for some time.
And the pursuit of world domination using the political structure of National Socialism in which the country becomes governed by an authoritarian merger of corporations and the state is not fantasy either.
To paraphrase the old dishwashing liquid commerical:
"National Socialism? You're soaking in it."
So, again, Mr. Roth is a masterful writer, but for some of us, we've already seen that nightmare.
Plot Against America
Some people have wondered why it was a big yawn to me.
And there are relevant reasons I didn't include in the original review.
It is supposedly a meditation on what might have been, but like Dan Brown's DaVinci Code, if you'd already read the Baigent and Leigh Holy Blood, Holy Grail books, it was old information.
It's not exactly what might have been. It's closer to what was and, to some extent, what IS.
1940?
Henry Ford was spending so much money printing and circulating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on behalf of Hitler and sending so much money to the Reich, Hitler commissioned a life-sized oil painting of the man and kept it on the wall of his office.
Our national government was taken over in the year 2001 by an heir to a fortune largely assembled when both of his grandfathers were raising money for Hitler in the 30's and 40's and continued to do so even 10 months into the war, until October 1942 when congress finally stopped them. George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush were part of the Harriman, Brown operation sending money to Hitler so he could buy bullets to fire at our troops.
Today, the governor of California is a man whose father was a Nazi Party member in Austria, and he lies about having seen "Russian tanks" in the streets when he grew up -- tanks and Russians that were both long gone, but it makes a good (i.e., vote-getting) story.
(N.B. --I do not attribute or detect any Nazi sentiments to Mr. Schwarzenegger. The fact that he behaves like a thug is not relevant.)
He is married to a woman whose grandfather was so virulently pro-Hitler, he had to be recalled from the Court of Saint James, and when he was, Winston Churchill opined that Joe Kennedy should be tried for treason when he got back to the USA.
The grandfather of Karl Rove (Roverer) was an engineer who designed and built the Birkenau section of Auschitz, the section (of three sections) which had the gas chambers and body-disposal ovens. Rove holds dual citizenship in the USA and Germany.
George W Bush managed the "ethnic consultants" for his father's campaign, that group, so-called, consisting of 11 former SS Officers. When word leaked out, it was Dubya who quietly fired them one at a time so as to avoid making waves.
So the idea of an America where pro-Nazi officials and/or the family, friends, and children of Nazi's take power (regardless of whether or not they uphold those same sentiments) hasn't been fantasy for some time.
And the pursuit of world domination using the political structure of National Socialism in which the country becomes governed by an authoritarian merger of corporations and the state is not fantasy either.
To paraphrase the old dishwashing liquid commerical:
"National Socialism? You're soaking in it."
So, again, Mr. Roth is a masterful writer, but for some of us, we've already seen that nightmare.
posted by Saintperle at
11:35 AM
