Paul Berman has a marvelous review of Philip Roth’s essay by Roth himself about how he found the inspiration of his novel in which America becomes a facist state when the Republicans run Charles Lindbergh to win the presidency away from FDR . . . there were isolationists at the time who did advocate running Lindbergh, a Hitler admirer and anti-semite . . . Roth discusses how he was inspired by his own family and wanted to write something personal . . . but one can’t help but find the parallels with the America of today where racial and religious profiling has been advocated recently by a Supreme Court Justice no less . . . where fear is at an all time high and the “other” has been daemonized as well as any facist propaganda machine could possibly have done.

The novel is yet another in a long line of quantum pieces, perhaps informed by a post-structuralist need to examine some of our so-called accepted presuppositions about what it means to be an American and the freedoms we cherish. The phrase that Lewis introduced into our vocabulary still rings as hollow today as it did back when he wrote it . . . “It Can’t Happen Here” . . . yes, it can . . . it already has . . . the Patriot Act, while passed with good intentions, certainly curtails more freedoms than any act of congress has ever curtailed in one fell swoop before . . . the question becomes, do we really want to give up those freedoms . . . not just for ourselves . . . but for everyone . . . not just citizens . . . but everyone . . . our children and their children included. Unfortunately . . . it can happen here . . . it can happen anywhere.