Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Juneteenth thoughts


























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The Plot Against AmericaThe Plot Against America by Philip Roth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a very interesting piece of alternate historical fiction. Philip Roth asks the question - what if FDR had been defeated in his presidential run for a third term by the charismatic, anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh whose main campaign promise was to keep the US out of World War II while having a darker motive for acquiring great power? Roth tells his story in a macro way as well as going micro and showing the impact of Lindbergh's presidency through the eyes of a boy in a Jewish family living in Newark, NJ. I decided to read this book upon learning that HBO is doing a movie adaptation of it, with portions being filmed in my neighborhood. I took the opportunity to visit the site of filming when it was taking place a few blocks from my house. It was a cool experience made cooler by getting to hang out with a few of the extras. I've long been a Philip Roth fan, and while this novel didn't impress me quite as much as the masterful American Pastoral or crack me up like the hilarious Portnoy's Complaint, it was still a great read. Parallels between the 1940's of Roth's imagination and our current political climate are striking. Simply switch the idea of a man who ascends to the presidency aided by a foreign government (Germany) with the idea of a man ascending to the presidency aided by a foreign government (Russia). Switch a celebrity with no previous political experience having an improbable, meteoric rise to the White House with a celebrity with no previous political experience having an improbable, meteoric rise to the White House. Switch people being thrown into hellish concentration camps because they're Jewish with people being thrown into hellish detention centers because they crossed a border in hope for a better way of life. One is hypothetical fiction, the other is the life we're living. The deeper into the book you get, the more you marvel at how Roth seemed to be stealing from a reality that hadn't happened yet by creating one that never happened. As a wise man once said, truth is stranger than fiction.

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