Reaping the whirlwind

Back in 1980, I came up with an idea for a novel.

Ronald Reagan had just been elected president, and many of us were alarmed at what seemed like a lurch toward far-right populism -- anti-regulation, pro-corporate policy that was marketed as somehow being beneficial to the working class.  The buzzwords were "trickle-down economics," the idea that if you gave big tax breaks to the rich, the benefits would "trickle down" to you and me and the rest of the working stiffs.  It was bolstered by a belief that the rich were actually concerned about lifting the working class out of poverty; that it was possible, in the society as it was, for a poor person to become wealthy.

That, to quote Steinbeck, the poor were just "temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

It didn't work.  The rich got richer (as intended) and the working class reaped exactly zero benefits from it.  And it generated deep resentment, as corporate profits soared, CEOs raked in unimaginable amounts of cash -- and workers' salaries stagnated.

And I thought: this can't go on forever.  At some point, people are going to get fed up, decide they have nothing to lose, and pull the whole superstructure down.

This was the genesis of my novel In the Midst of Lions.

The title comes from a line from Psalm 56: "Have pity on me, O God, have pity on me... for I lie prostrate in the midst of lions that devour men."  The story is set in Seattle, and centers around five completely ordinary people who are caught up in the collapse.  The attacks are precipitated by a shadowy worldwide organization of violent anarchists called the Lackland Liberation Authority; the "Lacklanders" are people who lost their property from corporate buy-ups of land for industrial agriculture and mining, and because price increases made home ownership out of reach.  Threatening LLA graffiti, in their trademark red spray paint, begins showing up on walls.  

Then the attacks start.  At first, they're scattered and sporadic, targeting a few of the most egregious offenders; but when that doesn't work, they strike hard, and simultaneously, at governmental and business leaders across the world.

The result is spiraling chaos.

Back in 1980 I wrote a few chapters of it, but somehow sensed that I didn't have the background, knowledge, or writing skill to pull off something this big, so I tabled the project.  It was in the back of my mind -- for forty years.  In 2020 I finally decided to tackle it, and wrote it and two sequels (The Scattering Winds and The Chains of Orion), which I published in 2023.  

The reason this comes up is that there's a passage from In the Midst of Lions that's been on my mind for the last couple of days:

“But there’s one thing I don’t understand,” Soren said.  “If they had this coordinated, worldwide plot, planned well in advance, there has to have been communication between different places.  By destroying the telecommunication hubs, they’ve cut themselves off along with the rest of us.  It’s sawing off the tree branch you’re sitting on.”

“I doubt they care.” Cassandra’s lips tightened, the only display of emotion she revealed.  “I’ve read some of the Lacklanders’ manifestos.  They’re no different than the suicide bombers in the Middle East back during the Gulf Wars.  The point is to destroy the power structure they despise.  If they can take down the corporate-capitalist overlords, they still count it as a success even if they go down along with them.”

“That makes no sense at all,” Mary said.

“I didn’t say it was rational.”

The deadly attack on UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson comes from this same desperation.  UnitedHealth is in first place amongst American health insurance companies for percentage of claims turned down -- estimates are around a 32% denial rate.  "Deny, Defend, Depose" was written on the bullet casings -- and the disingenuous media is still saying, "Gee, I wonder what the murderer's motive was?"  Instead of outrage at the violent act, the result has been an outpouring of anger against health insurance companies -- and by extension, ultra-wealthy corporate CEOs everywhere -- coupled with a complete lack of sympathy for Thompson and a celebration of his killer (who, at the time of this writing, remains unidentified and at large).  A Facebook post by UnitedHealth asking for "understanding in this difficult time" got almost a hundred thousand responses -- 77,000 of which were laugh emojis.  

But what gave me the biggest shiver up the spine was the following image of graffiti I saw on Facebook.

In red spray paint.  In Seattle.

I said to a friend -- and I was only half joking -- "I didn't think I'd have to move In the Midst of Lions to the non-fiction shelf quite this soon."

Thompson's murder, and the glee that followed, isn't laudable, but it is understandable.  And it definitely isn't one pundit's characterization of "a sign of the deep moral and ethical corrosion of America."  It's a result of something that we've seen over and over again in history, from the American and French Revolutions to what's happening right now in Syria; if you push people long enough and hard enough, profit off their struggle, empower corrupt oligarchs and expect the working class simply to play along, eventually the whole tower of cards collapses.  People will then take action by whatever means they can to put an end to it -- legally or illegally, ethically or unethically, peacefully or violently.

Something Donald Trump and his ultra-wealthy corporate capitalist cronies might want to keep in mind.

Stephen King wrote, in his book The Stand, "The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short."  It's a line that's stuck with me since I first read it, perhaps thirty years ago.  The power-hungry and super-wealthy -- who are, of course, usually one and the same -- think their riches will protect them.  That's what King Louis XVI thought; so did Napoleon, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Idi Amin, Benito Mussolini, Pol Pot, Ferdinand Marcos, and Muammar Gaddafi.  

All of them were wrong, and several of them paid for that error with their lives.

The problem with all this is that the result of the downfall of dictators is often chaos, destroying economy, infrastructure... and the ordinary people who only wanted to be able to feed their families and have a roof over their heads.  In In the Midst of Lions, it's not just the corporate oligarchs who end up suffering, it's everyone.

I'd like to hope that the people in charge will recognize where we're headed before it's too late, but unfortunately, we have a very poor track record of learning from history.  (Or from cautionary fiction, for that matter.)  The overweening arrogance that comes with wealth and power tends to make them say, "Oh, sure, it may have happened to all those people in history... but it won't happen to me."

It all reminds me of another biblical quote, this one from the Book of Hosea: "Who sows the wind, reaps the whirlwind."

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Waiting for the Reichstag Fire

Back in November of 2015, I wrote a post that got a lot of pshaw-ing by people who ordinarily would be fairly close to me in political outlook.  In it, I compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler -- and the lead-up to the 2016 election to the situation in Weimar Republic Germany in the mid-1930s.

Some of the naysayers thought I was being an alarmist -- that okay, Trump had some pretty reactionary ideas, but (1) they weren't really so far out of the mainstream of conservative ideology, and (2) if he did go off the beam too badly, we have a system of checks-and-balances set up that will rein him in.  Others admitted that Trump was an amoral sociopath who was interested in nothing but self-aggrandizement and stroking his over-inflated ego, but they argued that he wasn't going to get very far.  I had one person say to me, "There's no way that man could ever get the Republican nomination, much less win the presidency.  Calm the hell down."

I don't like being wrong any more than the next guy, but believe me when I say that this is one time I'd have been delighted to be completely off-base.

And every time I think we've reached the absolute nadir, that surely someone is going to step in and stop our slide into a true fascist dictatorship, something worse happens.  Witness the poll by the Washington Post that found that over half of the Republicans surveyed would be in favor of Trump suspending the 2020 presidential election "as long as necessary," and more specifically until he could see to it that we'd "weeded out illegal voters."

If Congress got behind the move, the support rises to 56%.

[Image courtesy of the Creative Commons Michael Vadon, Donald Trump Laconia Rally, Laconia, NH 4 by Michael Vadon July 16 2015 03, CC BY-SA 4.0]

First, let's just put out there that Trump's repeated claim of "millions of fraudulent voters" has not a shred of evidence behind it.  An exhaustive study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that the incidence of voter fraud in the United States was right around 0.0003%, regardless of whether you looked at local, state, or federal elections.

Put bluntly, the president is lying for the sole purpose of whipping up fear of evil "illegals" rigging elections in order to manipulate his followers into supporting his becoming Dictator-for-Life.

And just as with Hitler, a lot of effort is going into making Trump seem superhuman.  Instead of the racial purity ideologues (although there's a measure of that, too), here what we have is the Christian evangelicals treating Trump as inviolable, God's representative on Earth.  Don't believe me?  Just two days ago, Leigh Valentine, host of Faith and Freedom on Bill Mitchell's "Your Voice America" network, said the following:

Let me tell you, whether you believe it or not, [Trump] is speaking words of life over our country and over this nation, and every word he speaks, I see the hand of God upon it.  He is a very, very smart man and he knows what he is doing.  He knows the art of the deal and a lot of this is God’s deal, let me tell you.

Then there's the story in The Atlantic this week wherein we read some pretty alarming stuff.  Back in January 2016 Thomas Wright, a Brookings Institute scholar, warned that Trump had a "fondness for authoritarian strongmen."  More chillingly, a senior White House official who (unsurprisingly) declined to be named described Trump's policy in three words: "We're America, Bitch."

If someone can explain to me how that's different from Deutschland über alles, I'm listening.

No wonder Trump is disdainful of an articulate negotiator like Justin Trudeau, and as I write this is overflowing with praise for a bloodthirsty, ruthless dictator like Kim Jong Un.

So what we have here is a president who is a wannabe autocrat and has no intention of turning over the reins of power when his term is up, and a Congress that seems to think its job is kissing Trump's ass and rubberstamping whatever he proposes.  The whole time, the state-supported propaganda mill over at Fox News is convincing the masses that as long as we do what Der Führer says (and salute at the right time, and don't do anything outright treasonous like kneeling during the National Anthem), everything will be fine.  America will be great again.

Still doubtful about the parallels between where we are and Weimar Germany?

All we need is the final ingredient -- this era's Reichstag Fire.  Something calamitous that ignites a frenzy in his supporters, and allows Trump himself to say, "See, I told you so."  And at that point, the slide into catastrophe might well be unstoppable.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic: the late Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.  It's required reading for anyone who is interested in the inner workings of the human mind, and highlights how fragile our perceptual apparatus is -- and how even minor changes in our nervous systems can result in our interacting with the world in what appear from the outside to be completely bizarre ways.  Broken up into short vignettes about actual patients Sacks worked with, it's a quick and completely fascinating read.