The Angels of Fascism

In 1933, as America struggled to pull itself from the ruins of the Great Depression, the world was coming to terms with a rising movement.

The collapse of the economies of the West created a time of social foment, and into that mess stepped fascism.  Fascism's clarity of purpose was unquestionable.  A single autocrat, empowered by the newly mechanized military and industrial systems of modernity, was able to project power with remarkable effectiveness.  Coupled with print and the new broadcast media, the domination of the physical world was coupled with the ability to similarly dominate the information space.  

In the economically struggling United States of the early 1930s, many looked across the ocean to Mussolini's Italy with admiration.  Look at what he's accomplishing!  Look at the trains, running on time!  It was bold and strong, and there was an appeal to that.

The yearning for a single strongman to tower like a colossus over America found a focus, for some, in Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Roosevelt's corporate supporters, like the media magnate William Randolph Hearst, were eager for him to seize the reins.  Roosevelt had popular support, and having survived an assassination attempt by an anarchist, had been lionized as a hero.   What if, Hearst pressed Roosevelt, you were to simply take over?  Suspend the Congress.  Rule by fiat, by diktat, and get done what needs to be done!

Hearst was so into this idea that he produced a movie as part of his effort to persuade Roosevelt, a propaganda piece about a president who casts aside the restraints of the Constitutional order and saves America.  

"Gabriel Over the White House," it was called.   In it, a lazily corrupt president has a near death experience.  He survives, but is...er...possessed...um...by the Archangel Gabriel.  And possibly also the spirit of Abraham Lincoln.

I know, I know, but this was a film for the masses.  It's not any dumber than The Fast and the Furious, eh?

Angelically animated by Gabriel, the president starts agitating for real change.  When Congress tries to impeach and remove him, he forces them to adjourn, and takes over to rule as America's first dictator.  A "Jeffersonian dictator," or so the film tries to convince its viewer, and that makes perfect sense if you know nothing about Jefferson but his name.

Then he fixes everything, at which point he dies a hero and the savior of America.

Again, the film was American fascist propaganda.  This is not me being the Little Leftist Boy Who Cried Fascist.  

It's unabashedly, intentionally, and explicitly fascist, in the same way that Birth of a Nation is unabashedly, intentionally, and explicitly racist.  Calling it fascist isn't invective.  It's just true, like saying the sky is blue, or grass is green.  Gabriel Over the White House was inspired directly by 1930s fascism, and was made in an attempt to encourage the rise of fascism in the United States.

So.

If someone were to remake this movie today, how many Americans would uncritically embrace it?

The Fiction of American Fiction

So.  I watched American Fiction last night, as it was movie night with Mom, and both Rache and I had wanted to see it.  As a writer and author with four traditionally published books and three agents (fic/nonfic/book-to-film), this spoke right into my existence...and to the peculiar place intersectional orthodoxies inhabit in the contemporary publishing world. 

There were some excellent performances, some early moments of real feeling, and it was often entertaining.   But at other points it felt...off.  It frequently pulled punches, drifted into intermittent bathos, and had a logically incoherent ending.

As a satire of the publishing industry, it just didn't feel like it cut close enough to the mark.  For readers of fiction with a surface-level grasp of what it means to publish and be published, perhaps.  But for me, the satire didn't cut deep, and the further we got past the premise, the more shallow it felt.  

Much of that came from the "authors life" that was presented in the film.  Our protagonist is purportedly a "struggling writer," meaning his books are excellent but unsuccessful.  When he presents on a panel at a conference, his panel is attended by fewer than a dozen extras who have clearly been told to look like they'd rather be anywhere else.  He's rejected, over and over again.  His whole schtick is supposed to be that he's barely making it.

Yet when he arbitrarily goes into a franchise bookstore, there are a solid dozen of his books on the shelves.  The "black" shelves, which troubles him, but shelves nonetheless.  If you can walk into a random bookstore and it stocks multiple copies of several of your books, you're not struggling, honeychild.

He meets with his agent in a big shiny downtown office, because that's how all agents are, right?  I've got three, and while my LA-based book-to-film agent might have an office, I wouldn't know.  I've never met him in person.  My fiction agent...London-based, a successful and reputable agency...works from home.  We Skype.  My Austin-based nonfic agent?  Works from home.  We talk on the phone.  We Zoom.  We've met once in the last ten years.  Again, if you're a mid-list author, it's not 1997.  You don't get flown places or spend the money to do so unless you're in the very tippy top of the list.  Publishing doesn't work that way.

A substantial subplot thread involves the author asserting control over the title of the book, to the point where they can pitch a hissy and get it changed late in the pre-production process.  If you're a name, maybe.  But if this is your debut novel, ain't no way that's happening.  Just no way.  In the same way that you're not gonna be writing the screenplay for your novel, particularly if you don't have a clue how screenplays work.  Because screenwriting is an art in and of itself, as I've learned in conversation with the gifted show runner/screenwriter who optioned my own novel.  

And if your books are scraping by, is anyone you randomly meet...like the attractive and recently single public defender who lives across the street of your beautiful Hamptons-Vineyard beach house...likely to ever have read them?  O Lord no.  With three thousand new titles burping out of tradpub, POD, and self-pub outlets every single day?  Not gonna happen.  That space is too supersaturated.

Other things bugged me.  Like, does he even have an editor?  AN EDITOR?  Apparently not.  I mean, books don't have editors, right?  Or copy editors.  You just write it, and rich white publisher ladies publish it and give you tons of money. 

Then there's the money involved.  Seven hundred thousand dollars for an unknown author is a preposterous advance, a fantasy advance.  Yeah, it's satire, but c'mon.  And four million for the immediate purchase...not option, but purchase...of film rights?  The industry usual and customaries on that number are a set percentage of total production budget.  Four mil assumes, what, a final production budget in the hundred million dollar range?  Given the current market, and the nature of the film that would be made, that's preposterous.  You'd take a bath.  Maybe if it's a write-off, but jeez louise.  And the film gets made IMMEDIATELY?  

There's more, particularly around what actually happens to a book and movie deal if an author fundamentally misrepresents their identity.  Which, er, isn't what happens in the film.

Much of the dissonance in the film may be a factor of the vintage of the book upon which the film is based.  Percival Everett published ERASURE back in 2001, which means that the narrative was conceptualized, constructed and written in the late 1990s or very early 2000s.  That was, obviously, a very different time in the life of the publishing industry. 

Perhaps that's why American Fiction felt rather more...fictional...than I'd expected.

Jack Chick, Dark Dungeons, and Leveling Up

The other day, whilst perusing one of my social media feeds, I encountered a promo for an upcoming crowdsourced semi-amateur indy movie.

The film in question is an adaptation of a psychotronic comic-tract produced by the mysterious and elusive Jack Chick.  Jack Chick, if you're blessed not to know of him, produces those weird little pamphlets handed out on street corners by Christians who are convinced they are doing evangelism by just giving flyers and odd looks to passers-by.  

Chick tracts come in comic book form, and garishly represent the wildest and most insanely paranoiac version of Christianity imaginable.  

Global warming?  It's the devil at work.  Trick or treating on Halloween?  It's the devil at work.  Evolution?  It's the devil at work.   Being a race car driver with an Asian Buddhist wife?  It's the devil at work.  

Notice a theme?

The film in question is one based on one of his tracts: "Dark Dungeons."  That tract was produced in the 1980s, and was an attack on the then-new world of Dungeons and Dragons and role playing gaming.  Dice-and-book-games are how we become snared in the occult, it says!  These games control and destroy our lives, it says!  Those spells are real!  Burn your TSR books!  Throw away your dice!  Give up your satanic obsession and come to Jesus!

It's a peculiar tract, particularly if you have any first hand knowledge of the game itself.  Role playing gaming is social, pleasant, imaginative, and totally compatible with Christian faith.  Evil?  Not even vaguely.

The film itself is even more peculiar.

It's being produced by avid gamers, who find Jack Chick's attacks on their pastime so preposterous and insane that they can't resist the opportunity to make a film out of it.  I can't blame them in the slightest.  It's a joke, but as they go to great length to explain, it's neither parody or satire.  They're just presenting Jack Chick, exactly as Jack Chick presents himself.

Which is why Jack Chick has given them the rights to make the movie.

It's bizarre.  Here you have "evangelists" who know that they are working with people who view them as self-parody.  The movie, like the tracts, will just make Christian faith look laughable.  And yet...the evangelists don't care.

It's hard to know how to process that kind of willful obliviousness.  

How do you respond to that sort of disconnect from the actual results of an action, without getting your dander up and saying bitter and mean stuff about the creators of these utterly counterproductive tracts?  How to be loving, affirmative, and gracious, and yet debunk their dark imagination?  It's a struggle, but it's one worth having.  Because we do not overcome evil with evil, but with good.  We don't overcome hatred with more hatred, but with grace.

Sometimes, though, you need to overcome bad crazy with double-extra-good-crazy.

It is for that reason, among others, that I have produced what I believe to be the single geekiest book in all of Christendom.  I say this with pride in my own geekitude, as an unabashedly and unashamedly geekish pastor who fondly remembers both gaming as a kid, but also gaming with his boys when they were little.

The title: Leveling Up: How to be a Christian Cleric. 

This short tome is a love letter to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, one that plays around with the conceit that in some odd way, Jack Chick was right.  D&D is real.  And in that bizarre place where it is real, one can choose to be not just a fighter or a magic user or a thief, but a cleric.

And not just any kind of cleric, but a Christian cleric.

With spells and all, ones that Christian clerics would use, and that actually kinda work if you think about them in the right way.

Being a level eight Presbyterian cleric myself, I'm just the right person to pull that off.

If that sounds entertaining, or at least silly, feel free to go to Amazon and snag a copy.  The eBook version is no pricier than the Diet Dr. Pepper you'll drink while reading it, although the formatting is a bit squirrelly.  I'm still fiddling with that.

You're better off with the print version, honestly, though it'll put you back the cost of couple of pints of ale.

That a problem?  If you're short on silver pieces, just hit me up at belovedspear at gmail dot com, and I'll pitch you a nice clean PDF for free.