This is the church that hosted Trump

Of course it is.

Church warned to stop claiming COVID can be eliminated with air filtration

Trump's kind of Christianity.

Gantry's, too. And Sharon Falconer's.

The attorney general of Arizona issued a warning letter to a megachurch that claims its air filtration system "kills 99 percent of COVID within 10 minutes."

Attorney General Mark Brnovich sent the letter to Phoenix's Dream City Church on Thursday, saying that their claim -- which Brnovich said was not backed by any science -- may be illegal.

"In the absence of scientific evidence regarding COVID-19 specifically, statements suggesting that a product could provide nearly guaranteed protection from COVID-19 infections create a misrepresentation or a false promise. 

Misrepresentations and false promises are illegal under A.R.S. § 44-1522," Brnovich wrote.

The church, which can seat 3,000 people, had also claimed "when you come into [the church's] auditorium, 99 percent of COVID is gone" and "you can know when you come down here, you'll be safe and protected," according to his letter.

Dream City Church, which has six other locations, made some of the claims in a Facebook video ahead of hosting President Donald Trump this week.

Imaginary Trumpists

Imagine the Trump voters rejecting him because he supported legislative projects of the standard Republicans, way to the right of what he promised.

That is how Lewis sees Windrip supporters rising up against the fascist state created by him and his partisans in America.

In the name of a Cooperative Commonwealth.

This is not even half plausible fiction, any more.

This is absurd, quasi-socialist fantasy.

All the same, the incomplete but well-begin rebellion at the end is more plausible in another respect, not pitting unarmed people, powerless and ordinary, against a unified state backed unanimously by its elites but seeing large slices of the state join large slices of the people and of society at all levels in a common and increasingly general effort.

Reading It Can't Happen Here.

About rape

Julian is speaking.

"Do you realize, with your kidding yourself about being able to handle Comrade Shad so well, that he's husky as a gorilla and just about as primitive?

"One of these nights - God! think of it! maybe tonight! - he'll go right off the deep end and grab you and - bing!"

She [Sissy] was as grave. "Julian, just what do you think could happen to me? The worst that could happen would be that I'd get raped."

"Good Lord - -"

"Do you honestly suppose that since the New Civilization began, say in 1914, anyone believes that kind of thing is more serious than busting an ankle?"

She gets over this false bravado. 

Reading It Can't Happen Here.

Apollinian art

"But Dan Wilgus setting type on proclamations of rebellion, and Buck Titus distributing them at night on a motorcycle, may be as romantic as Xanadu . . . living in a blooming epic, right now, but no Homer come up from the city room yet to write it down!"

Musings of Doremus Jessup.

Epic elevates the sordid realities of human life - specifically, of political life - into dignity and beauty.

Even the lives of us vulgar, contemptible, and bug-ridden, naked apes.

Pass this on to Wayne La Pierre

Windrip & Co. had, like Hitler and Mussolini, discovered that a modern state can, by the triple process of controlling every item in the press, breaking up at the start any association which might become dangerous, and keeping all the machine guns, artillery, armored automobiles, and aeroplanes in the hands of the government, dominate the complex contemporary population better than had ever been done in medieval days, when rebellious peasantry were armed only with pitchforks and good-will, but the State was not armed much better.

Reading It Can't Happen Here.

Lewis's opinion of The Great War?

[Doremus Jessup] "But to let the Corpos steal the country and nobody protest! No!"

"That's the kind of argument that sent a few million out to die, to make the world safe for democracy and a cinch for Fascism!" scoffed Buck.

And he's right.

The Great War set up Italy for Mussolini and Germany for Hitler, partly by handing Russia to the Bolsheviks.

It Can't Happen Here.

True to his muse

The abysmal vulgarity of his American fascism is entirely to be expected from the author of Main Street and Elmer Gantry, both of which were made into movies when Hollywood made literature into movies and not comic books.

His Corpo State rather suicidally closes all the real colleges and universities, replacing them with worse than merely philistine, fake schools with curricula absent Greek and Sanscrit but heavy on close order drill.

Come to think of it, the ascendancy of Bozo brings Hofstadter to mind, after all these years.

And Ortega, and Marcel.

Afterthought.

The far more macho writer, Hemingway, was all the same so much greater an artist of prose.

Come to that, Lewis was no artist at all, no more than Dreiser.

As a writer, his merits do not require, and are quite other than, that.

While even at his worst, Hemingway has that, always.

He is an artist of prose.

Novelists are not poets, so that side of things can be neglected in their estimation.

But that is a mistake.

Really? Sinclair Lewis's bad guys are atheists?

About half way through It Can't Happen Here, Secretary of Education Macgoblin, drunk, says the only thing "we" agree with the Communists about is rejection of religion.

Official atheism of the Corpo State?

Official hostility toward religion?

First suggestion of that in the book, so far.

Official atheism was not typical of European fascism, as I recall.

Mussolini cut a famous deal with the Pope.

Delusions of the left

Doremus had assumed that .  .  . Liberal Capitalism would pastotally lead into State Sociaism, with governmental ownership of mines and railroads and water-power so settling all inequalities of income that every lion of a structural steel worker would be willing to lie down with any lamb of a contractor,  and all the jails and tuberculosis sanatoria would be clean empty.

Doremus is supposed to be a liberal.

Then I am no liberal.

Reading It Can't Happen Here.

Fake left, move right

Buzz Windrip's Fifteen Points

Mussolini, Hitler, and the general run of early 20th Century fascists, real and imaginary, ran much further left than Trump on the class war issues and ignored most of their lefty promises when they got into power.

Still, Trump ran a lot further left than the GOP and still orates further left, while in fact his actions and agenda on these things have been much more in line with standard plutocrat-serving Republicanism.

Enjoying Sinclair Lewis, again.

Left and right

Huey Long was a man of the left, more extreme than FDR, Democratic hero, whom he supported in 1932 but against whom he competed in 1936.

Buzz Windrip was Huey Long with significant authoritarian themes added in, seasoned with American patriotism, to the point of open and express rejection of the Constitution, of separation of powers, of the core idea of an executive and a government bound by laws.

At the head quote of chapter 5, he sounds like Trump attacking the press.

Reading It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis, 1935, again.