More recent iterations of the fascist-takeover genre have a global-heating backdrop and a theocratic spin. Octavia Butler followed up her popular Parable of the Sower (1993) with Parable of the Talents (1998). The novel is set in 2024 (!); the young heroine, Lauren, whose neighborhood, a walled enclave in a chaotic, ugly, bone-dry southern California, was destroyed, has headed north with companions, and seems to have found a refuge or at least respite. That is, until “Christian America” uses the chaos as an opportunity to take over; it begins a campaign to extirpate other religions and re-institute slavery. It’s interesting that post-Reagan dystopias in North American novels often feature fundamentalist regimes (The Handmaid’s Tale is perhaps the best-known). In The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993), by Starhawk, ecological deterioration has prompted a splitting-up of California into two states: the north, an ecotopian pagan community; the south, a fundamentalist dystopia. In Louise Erdrich’s recent Future Home of the Living God (2017), the melting permafrost seems to have released some kind of devolutionary force — there are saber-toothed tigers around, for instance. More importantly, there are fewer human babies being born, and those that are seem to have radically different anatomy to what we’re used to. Slowly but surely, a mysterious group begins replacing the street names with Bible verses and requiring mandatory neighborhood meetings. Then they become rather more aggressive, rounding up pregnant women. But, as in The Fifth Sacred Thing and Capital City, it seems to be a regional phenomenon — the theo-fascists are reportedly at war with other groups in other areas.
What none of these books envision is a United States government that never loses control and doesn’t change its basic ideology but just becomes increasingly repressive and militarized. If you don’t think that can happen — if you don’t think it has happened here — talk to people of color in the U.S. And it’s not clear that the military will refuse to follow illegal orders, any more than the police have. It is perhaps no coincidence that the most authoritarian-minded regime in the last 100 years of American history is also the most hell-bent on increasing greenhouse-gas emissions. Global heating is creating chaos, and the people making it happen are all too ready to use violence to repress and discipline the victims. Let’s be clear: they’re doing this to make money, not to create social turmoil intentionally (that part's simply the cost of doing business). And Trump is no Hitler. He’s just as cruel and egomaniacal; but Hitler was disciplined, goal-oriented, and he had an agenda (published it in a book, in fact). Trump just wants boffo ratings. Nonetheless, the recent use of military power to quell civil protest — to “dominate the streets” — has some of us concerned that the imposition of an authoritarian militarist state might be beginning in earnest. This time, protests of a police killing are the excuse. But climate chaos could become a giant, never-ending Reichstag fire. Let’s just hope we can keep such a thing in the realm of fiction.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |