It’s no secret that at any given time, the NYT Bestsellers list will have at least one book by Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and/or Michelle Malkin. That’s been true for a long time now, but it’s been especially true over the last nine months.
Over at Salon, Steve Almond has been reading the bestsellers of conservative pundits so you don’t have to, and he’s come to a fascinating conclusion:
These texts are not the psychotic, fact-challenged rants of the mad, but carefully crafted metafictions in which the mundane terrors of cultural dislocation are recast as riveting epics of paranoia.
As such, they fit into a long literary tradition, one that extends from the rhapsodic delusions of "Don Quixote" to the airborne toxic events of Don DeLillo, from the surreal prophecy of Revelation to the post-apocalyptic visions of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." Though written in different eras and wildly divergent styles, these works are all about the incursion of sinister forces on an unsuspecting populace. It’s possible he’s being sarcastic here. But he’s got a point.
I mean, look at the basic synopsis of these books:
A charismatic and suspiciously wealthy foreigner with a false US passport rises to power and – despite reams of evidence indicating he was born on foreign soil and has close ties to Chicago’s corrupt political machine – is inexplicably elected president, after which he enacts a secret, multilayered plan to rewrite the Constitution and create a Socialist dictatorship where gun ownership and Christianity are capital crimes and dissenters are thrown into FEMA camps – and all with the help of the sympathetic mainstream left-wing media who helped him achieve power.
It sounds like something Dan Brown would come with, doesn’t it?
Or it would if Obama was Roman Catholic. But you see what I’m saying.
If these books were in the Fiction section, they’d be right at home alongside Sinclair Lewis’
It Can’t Happen Here, Jack London’s
The Iron Heel, James Ellroy’s
American Tabloid, Larry Beinhart’s
American Hero (now known as
Wag The Dog) and other American conspiracy classics – to say nothing of alternate histories like Philip Roth’s
The Plot To Destroy America, Philip K Dick’s
The Man In The High Castle and, well, everything Harry Turtledove writes. Okay, they wouldn't be as good as any of those. But neither is Dan Brown, and he's successful enough to warrant his new book
getting pirated on the Internets.
The problem, of course, is that Beck et al are NOT in the Fiction section. And their fan base, for the most part, believes every word of it is true. Hence all the shouting and freaking out.
But considering we’ve reached a stage where reality TV is scripted and it is entirely possible to filter yr media/information intake to conform with all of yr sociopolitical biases to the point where subjectivity morphs into a vivid alternate reality, the separation of fact and fiction is probably a moot point.
Which gets me to thinking about something I thought of back when Michael Crichton’s eco-terror thriller
State Of Fear (the central premise of which is that the global warming skeptics are right)
won an award for journalism from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which is this:
Imagine if the “Fiction” and “Non-fiction” sections were blended into one big section, leaving it entirely up to the reader to decide which is a true story and which is 100% fabricated. Some would be rather obvious (space operas, movie novelizations, Harlequin romances, etc). Others, perhaps not.
Would the results really be all that different from what’s happening now?
Stranger than fiction,
This is dF
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