I just finished reading Philip Roth’s last book, The Plot Against America.  I had a difficult time with it because the locale, the names and the action were all renewed and freshly real from my memory of that time and that place he wrote so much detail about. It was uncomfortable for me partly because the anti-Semitism of that time before the third term of Franklin D. Roosevelt has never gone away and there are echoes of the fright and real concern that what happened in Nazi Germany could have happened here. I lived in the Newark he describes at the time he writes about.

The premise is a quite a bit shaky, Charles Lindbergh becomes president instead of FDR getting a third term. Walter Winchell becomes Lindbergh’s nemesis and runs for the Presidency with an unlikely consortium of Liberals and lately awakened others who are concerned with the ties “Lucky Lindbergh”. He tamed the skies to fly the Atlantic solo and still as President flies about the country. He tells the same message over and over that things are fine and don’t get upset by his program that is reminiscent of Germany settling its Jewish “Problem”.

I found Roth’s description of his own family split by the new conditions upsetting but grimly read through to the end where he provided some detail of the research he (Roth) had done in creating this story. This was only a story but it brought up to date the 1930’s, It Can’t Happen Here, book by Sinclair Lewis. In both books, Hitler was given inhuman power to subvert democracy and the complacent way of life Americans lived then and continue to thoughtlessly pursue today.

Mr. Bush frightens me much as the Lindbergh in the Plot Against America frightens the reader.  Here are men who conquer the air but who are conquered by their lack of understanding of the words they use to calm Americans.  Don’t worry, be happy and content.  Don’t question and certainly do not look to what is happening in other parts of the world so you will be upset.  In Roth’s book, the isolationists had the upper hand and kept us out of the European madness and glossed over the treatment of Jews and the conquered peoples in other nations. Hitler was appeased by Lindbergh and it is strongly suggested that Lindbergh was part of a Plot Against the America we know.

Mr. Bush has turned the story around and instead of isolationism he has adopted intervention and actively seeks to engage in war other peoples who might discover how to settle their own problems without American munitions and lives. I finally finished the book and can go back to reading simpler, unthreatening stuff.