A review of Wen Wilson by Mattie McClane: Myrtle Hedge Press, Kernersville, NC (2009).
By Dennis King
In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the Presidential election last November, the reading public turned to dystopian classics such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America to figure out what to expect next. The increased sales for these books has endured since Trump’s swearing-in because of his continuing strong signals that he intends to steer the United States in a dystopian direction.
Trump has branded the mainstream media as “enemies of the people.” He has chosen the former CEO of the racist, anti-Semitic and conspiracy-drenched Breitbart News as his chief strategist. He has popularized Orwellian terms such as “fake news” (in reference to the mainstream media) and “alternative facts.” His Attorney General is in the process of halting Justice Department opposition to racist voter suppression laws in Red States. Over a dozen state legislatures, so far, are preparing bills to limit and ultimately suppress the types of mass protest that have become common since the January inauguration.
In this political climate, many readers will find helpful the novel Wen Wilson, published in 2009 when the Tea Party movement—the precursor of Trumpism—was getting started. Wen Wilson is set in a small Midwest town and the surrounding farming community—the type of white-heartland environment that many would assume is “Trump country” today. The book depicts a society controlled through mass conformism and the judicious use of police state violence, and in which the economy appears to have reverted back to a time when U.S. jobs were not threatened by globalization, automation and immigration.
North Carolina writer and poet Mattie McClane (Kristine A. Kaiser) places many of her fictional works in the Midwest (she grew up in what would become a rust-belt strip in Illinois near the Iowa border).
I became aware of McClane’s work about ten years ago when I happened upon a copy of her unusual dream-fantasy novel, Night Ship (2003), which portrays the personalities of six women characters both in their waking world and in their dream personas (or are they alters of a single dreamer?) who roam the 15th century Caribbean in their own sailing ship. Unlike in popular fantasy, no attempt is made to present the fantasy world as real; i.e., the plot and the settings are kept within the framework of a dream logic. McClane manages, however, to portray the rivalries of her characters in a realistic manner. I regard Night Ship, which ends on a note of reconciliation, as a work of true literary distinction.
McClane is also the author of Unbuttoning Light, a collection of short stories of which the first half is composed of a brilliant cycle about a young Iowa woman and sometime Democratic Party activist named Laura. The second half is composed of earlier stories, including “Graven Image,” which appears to be an attempt to conceptualize how a Christian Dominionist type of dystopia might emerge in the U.S.
The authoritarian America of Wen Wilson, however, is not primarily based on religion, just as Trumpism in the real world is not religion-based although certainly allied with the Christian right.
I think that McClane, herself a woman of faith, was wise to avoid a religious dictatorship scenario, since Robert Heinlein and Margaret Atwood have already been there and done that pretty thoroughly. Wen Wilson, with its secular emphasis, has ended up being more relevant to the threat we actually face: the possible erosion of U.S. democracy into nothing more than a shell—for decades to come—as a result of the new alliance of “white nationalism” and a clique of billionaire greed-heads.
Several elements of the novel’s plot need further clarification (for instance, the destination of the fleeing dissidents is changed without explanation from Canada to Switzerland). Also, the character of Wen could use some fleshing out. However, the book includes much, much fine writing and the heroine, Ruth Uppers, an elderly widow who runs a cattle farm, is a memorable creation. Furthermore, on a political level, Wen Wilson is worth reading not only because its author had the benefit of observing first hand the recent polarization in American society but also because she focuses on how an authoritarian or fascist state might work on the local level in precisely the type of community that ended up supporting Trump’s rise.
The story begins when Wen, a nonviolent resistance figure who is being hounded by the authorities, appears at Ruth’s farm bearing a letter from his mother asking Ruth (an old friend of hers) to give Wen refuge.
The unusual request takes place at a time when America appears to be on the edge of a transition from authoritarianism to some kind of totalitarian regime. Overt repression is still aimed mostly at active dissidents; nonpolitical people are subjected to social conformist pressures and various annoying rules, but not yet to anything worse unless they are intellectuals and/or possess private libraries, in which case they are automatic targets of official curiosity.
Ruth, whose own idealistic tendencies from her youth are now overlain by pragmatic caution, reluctantly agrees to accept the rather alarming Wen into the life of her farm. She cuts his hair, dresses him in farm clothes, and tells him to mimic the farm hands: “He would speak like a common man, a man with no college in his background.”
Step by step the author reveals the nasty details of the new order. Public libraries have been closed and university libraries are very difficult to access. In a fine satiric passage, McClane’s hero describes how law books have been seized from attorneys’ offices and placed under lock and key at local police stations where they can only be examined by special permission, with the police keeping a record of which book the lawyer consults. The legal profession is thus relegated, Wen says, to only handling wills and estates. Dissidents are in hiding and occasionally become the target of assassination (as in Putin’s Russia today) if they try to speak at rallies.
McClane wisely decided to remain silent about who is really in charge of the United States. Commands or strong suggestions come down through shadowy channels from unnamed individuals and entities. “Government agents,” apparently from a national secret police, show up without announcement.
This deliberate vagueness enables the author not only to evoke the fear of questioning things that is always present in an authoritarian society, but also to concentrate on the methods of social and political control in small-town America, and the varying degrees of conformism, cowardice, toadyism, and sadism—and, from time to time, of good will or even flashes of a real moral courage—shown by local officials, ministers, lawyers, Ruth’s neighbors, the hired hands on her farm, and others.
Of course, the authorities are one step ahead of both Ruth and Wen. When Ruth orders stone from a quarry to rebuild a historically significant Civil War wall on her property, the government agents suddenly show up to demand inspection of each stone, and to give Ruth “papers” that she must submit before proceeding. It is obvious this is one of the regime’s low-key methods of pressure—they want her to kick Wen off the farm.
When Ruth goes to a local lawyer for help, he tells her: “We all have families. I don’t think my wife would let me become involved in this.” The lawyer then asks Ruth if she’s romantically involved with Wen (she isn’t, and Wen ends up marrying a young woman from the community). The lawyer then confronts the dissident and says:
“You’re trouble, Wilson…You can’t adapt to the new establishment. You question too much and are a smart man. But you’re not smart enough to know when to keep your mouth shut; you’re not smart enough to avoid dragging everyone down with you.”
Meanwhile Wen continues to argue with Ruth about the new order:
“Thinkers are being silenced, oh not in well-publicized bans but in quiet erasure. Certain books just disappear like they never existed. Authors’ names are wiped from databases. The news is purged.”
After Wen is beaten by one of the cattle hands, a local builder tells Ruth: “I’ve got a crew of men who feel exactly like [Wen’s attacker] … Cities are better for bookish men.”
Ruth’s minister is also present at the end of the beating. His response?
The minister picked up Wen’s mangled wire-rimmed glasses and handed them to Ruth. The broken item signaled peril; there were a thousand brutes to every thinking man. The minister witnessed Wen’s vulnerability. His religious beliefs wouldn’t approve of a beating. Ruth directed her uncertainty squarely to the minister. “Can I count on you to be with us on Sunday?” The minister appeared confused. “Mr. Wilson and his family will join our congregation,” Ruth said. “I trust that you’ll make sure that he’s welcomed in a Christian way.”
“The talk,” the minister said.
“The talk is talk, Phil, and you shouldn’t let it bother you in the slightest,” Ruth said.
Ruth fires the employee who attacked Wen; the employee throws his farm keys on her table, saying:
“He’ll be in town some day, and he just won’t come back … The town will cheer for me; they’ll make me out as a hero … He’s a sissy-assed poet, and he writes bad things about the country.”
If I’d read this before the rise of Trump, I might have said there was a certain elitism in how the distinction is drawn between educated and uneducated, but after viewing on TV the behavior of the yahoos at numerous Trump rallies, including his “victory rallies,” I’d say McClane was being realistic about certain thuggish tendencies.
Also, her fictional America is one that has evolved far beyond Trumpism, which currently has only a shaky hold on power and is often on the defensive. In McClane’s America the media has been successfully suppressed, the Bill of Rights set aside, repression institutionalized right down to the local level, and education debased. The new order’s strategic attack on law and language is nearing completion.
In comparison to the timidity of Ruth’s friends and neighbors, the opponents of authoritarianism in our own 2017 world are resisting by the millions in both Blue and Red states, even showing a surprising boldness in the small cities and towns where Trump achieved a substantial majority of the votes. But this doesn’t mean that McClane’s view of such communities in a dystopian context is wrong-headed. The community in which Ruth and Wen live is one in which most avenues of effective Resistance (and of accurate information) have been closed. Wen Wilson, like most dystopias, is a cautionary tale.
Ironically, there is no mention of a computer in Ruth’s house, although any cattle farm on her scale in our world surely would be computerized. There is a reference to electronic books but it’s in the section about moving to Switzerland. There is also a mention of names being purged from American “databases” (a term common even before the mass computerization of our society).
The novel’s lack of emphasis on computer technology is quite plausible if one posits economic and technological decline as going hand in hand with extreme cultural and intellectual repression, resulting in a return of society to the idealized 1950s for which the Tea Party yearned and Trump’s working class and lower middle class supporters now also yearn.
There are no undocumented immigrants and/or Muslims, blacks, or Hispanics in this novel. Their invisibility appears to be part and parcel of McClane’s decision to withhold any details about the nameless regime that rules America, how this regime came to power, and how it enforced its national will before establishing long-range institutions of control in small town and rural white America. Have all minorities been deported? Are they in labor camps? Or has the regime merely set up barriers to easy communication between various elements of society, keeping them isolated from one another?
Near the end of the book, Ruth, who is a widow, falls in love with an elderly judge who is an important resistance leader. Wen and his new family, as well Ruth, the judge and several others, decide to leave the country and continue their struggle from overseas. As described, their plan for exiting the country by way of a New York airport seems dubious of success, although McClane is too good a writer to make this explicit. She ends the book with a dinner on the farm the day before they begin their journey—whether to freedom or to capture and imprisonment—and with Ruth still torn between pragmatic everyday life and Wen’s idealism:
[T]he dessert [at dinner] seemed as significant as anything she imagined about [political and literary] texts. She would never be able to erase the many mundane aspects of a farmer woman’s life. She loved to feed people. The babies bawled. Wen sang Van Morrison, revealing both a singer’s name and a talent. Alex tapped his foot. Mix giggled. The babies bawled. Hugh hugged Connie Mae. Tomorrow, the room would be busy in a different way, but tonight was a blessing from wise, sensible angels.
[end]
Podhoretz Continues "War of the Worlds" Bashing
JULY 31, 2005
John Podhoretz, he of that most famous of neocon dynasties, just can't get the alleged subversive subtext of Spielberg's "War of the World" out of his mind. Now he's zeroed in (New York Post, July 27) on David Koepp, the co-writer of the screenplay. Podhoretz quotes from an interview on the film that Koepp gave to the Chicago Sun-Times: "Certainly there are a lot of political undertones and overtones. In the '50s, 'War of the Worlds,' was, 'My God, the commies are coming to get us.' Now its about fear of terrorism. In other parts of the world, the new movie will be fear of American invasion. It will be clearly about the Iraq war for them." Podhoretz interprets this statement as saying that the aliens in the Spielberg film "are intended to symbolize the U.S. military."
But the quote from Koepp doesn't say this. It says that different people in different countries will read into the "War of the Worlds" what they want to read into it, as have people in past decades and places. Naturally today's Americans will project fear of terrorism into it on some level. And of course Iraqis (whether anti-U.S. or pro-U.S.) will associate the Martian invasion with the shock and awe show over Baghdad and the ensuing events when they view videos or DVDs obtained from the copyright pirates in China. In an interview with IGN FilmForce, Koepp is crystal clear about this: "I think the movie will be seen as a prism that will reflect whatever people already believe" (emphasis added).
Koepp is silly, however, to say that the film will play overseas to fears of a U.S. invasion. The French love to bash America but I doubt there's a single Sorbonne intellectual who really believes the U.S. military is planning to drop daisy-cutters to take out the Left Bank. Probably the only people with a sincerely held fear of a U.S. invasion post-Iraq by America's depleted army of National Guardsmen are the North Korean crazies--and they are unlikely to let anyone in their country see this or any other Hollywood movie.
Koepp in other interviews not quoted by Podhoretz has admitted that he himself identifies the Martians with the U.S. military. But just because a screenwriter has ultraliberal personal views doesn't mean those views find their way into his or her script (these guys are professionals when all is said and done), or are retained by producers or directors even if they do appear in an early draft. Certainly there is no hidden subversive subtext in "Spider-Man," "Jurassic Park" and "Mission Impossible," all of which Koepp worked on (unless the message "Don't Clone Dinosaurs" is some kind of attack on multinational biotech companies). And does Podhoretz really think Spielberg would have risked the public hue and cry that comparing the U.S. Marines (even in a coded form) to Hitler-style mass-murdering aliens would have triggered?
It is widely known that screenwriters have very little artistic control over their scripts (just read F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Pat Hobby" stories). It is the directors and producers who make the final decision, and their decision in this case clearly was to make a summer blockbuster, not a magnet for demonstrations and boycotts. There is nothing of any significance in the final script or in the movie as a totality that would lead a reasonable person to conclude that it is propaganda aimed at the U.S. military or the U.S. government. I mean, the bad guys invade the United States, not Iraq. They destroy the government in Washington, not Baghdad. They have no sympathizers or allies among the American people. And the U.S. military fights back heroically against them.
I also stated in my previous posting on this subject that there is nothing to lead one to believe the Martians are intended by Spielberg to symbolize Islamic terrorism--they are armed with death rays, not box cutters; and their aim is to exterminate the human race, not forcibly convert it. If they bring down tall buildings, well so have dozens of s-f and disaster films going back to "Godzilla"--and no, that famous monster wasn't a symbol of the Soviet Red Army, it was just a lizard.
Well's "War of the Worlds" is one of the great archetypal tales of modern popular literature, working on the preconscious mind and (in Freudian theory, at least) on the unconscious. As such it is a magnet not only for the political obsessions of individuals but for all kinds of projections of their personal "stuff" (the latter often assumes a political form without the person being aware fully or at all about what he or she is really expressing). The same thing can be said of the artistic creator: H.G. Wells the novelist, Orson Welles the radio dramatist, and the successive screenwriters, directors and producers of film versions have all expressed their own personal conflicts as well as society's "group fantasies" in this story. The kind of one-sided ideological interpretations in which political pundits excel tends to miss this forest for the trees (as when Bill O'Reilly seized on a single statement of the hero's teenager son about wanting to kill the aliens and ignored the many previous scenes depicting the boy's rage at his father).
And by the way, if there is any clear reference to contemporary events in "War of the Worlds" it is to the breakup of the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman marriage and the issue of whether the kids will be raised as Scientologists or Catholics. This situation may account for the unusual power and depth of Cruise's acting this time around.
Podhoretz's latest remarks on "War of the Worlds" are contained in a column with the headline "Hollywood Hell: Stars are out to bash U.S." I grant that columnists don't always have control over the dumb headlines that the tabloids attach to their writings, but this particular column appears to predict the worst based on the strange assumption that Hollywood moguls are so ideologically driven that they no longer care about the profits that result from appealing to the broadest possible audience. Although Podhoretz does make some legitimate points about Hollywood individuals who have a history of making foolish remarks, the people in question are mostly not the ones who make the final decisions about important films. However, I fully concur with his concern over how the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre (and Mossad's subsequent tracking down of the terrorists) will be handled in Spielberg's next film, because of the director's past record of naivete about the Palestinian cause.
But Podhoretz, like so many neocons, overstates his case by a galactic parsec. We even get a weird replay of Red Channels type McCarthyism. Actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, we are informed, is the daughter of Naomi Foner who in turn is the sister of historian Eric Foner (and of course, although Podhoretz doesn't say it, Eric and Naomi's uncle was the labor historian and Communist party member Philip Foner).
What's the point here? Should we do DNA testing on everyone in Hollywood to see who is or isn't related to some dead white male Stalinist or ex-Stalinist? But then, to be fair, we'd also have to test all the conservative pundits in New York and Washington to see who's related to dead or elderly white male ex-Trotskyists....
Political incorrectness on the Sci-Fi Channel? In the most recent episode of "Battlestar Galactica," soldiers from Commander Adama's fugitive human fleet are trapped on a planet where the Cylons have set up missile defenses. The Cylons of course are the robot life-form ("there are many copies...") who almost wiped out humanity in a sneak attack and are now pursuing them through the galaxy. The trapped soldiers have to take out the Cylons missiles so that the shuttle from the Mothership can rescue them. So the surviving officer says to his little band, "Let's go jump some toasters." Toasters? This was a new one on me, although folks tell me the term has been used on this series since the beginning. Maybe the young techno-geeks at MIT and Stanford who're working on real robotics should start a movement to protest this dangerous precedent of hate speech against robots and their kitchen-appliance ancestors.
Credit where credit's due. In my July 6 posting I mentioned that Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" embodies, among other things, a parental rescue fantasy. This concept comes from the ongoing film research of Geraldine Pauling, a member of the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA).
Sunday, July 31, 2005 in Political commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)