Seymour Hirsch / The Plot Against America

Ever read a novel, finish it, close the book, put it down, go about your day, and then find that you feel like you're somehow living in a continuation of that story?

I just finished reading Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (NY Times review) about what would have happened if Hitler sympathizer Charles Lindbergh had become president of the United States during World War II. Not a perfect book (the ending is a little rushed and wacky) but it does give an evocative picture of America during the 1940s and a vivid portrait of Jewish Newark neighborhoods. It also conveys that slow creepy feeling so well... how bad are things going to get? What does this or that politician's statement mean? Do people seem more hostile than they used to? Why are our family arguments about politics getting so nasty.... and so personal? Am I crazy to think there's a problem, or are my relatives crazy for ignoring it?

Have we "been taken over by a cult"?

There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do -- there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways -- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.

No, that wasn't from the novel; that was Seymour Hirsch...