Friday Reads: Exhuming McCarthy

This week got hectic on me, which is a little strange, because my job is supposed to be sitting at a desk and typing.

But the world keeps tapping at our windows, harder and harder every day. And sometimes it’s making funny faces and other times it’s baring sharp teeth.

This week was mostly smiles and sunshine for me, but I know there are people out there facing down monsters all the time. I have the luxury of looking at most of the stuff outside as entertainment; I know not everyone is that lucky. I knock wood and I try to stay grateful.

All of this is a long way of saying I spent more time online than I should have. The news read like Billy Joel working on a new set of lyrics for “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”1

But I still managed to get some pages written and read.

I started both Catherine Lacey’s The Biography of X and Larry Tye’s Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. The word “fascism” is used a lot these days, and I’ve been thinking about it for a future project. Both of these books deal with the subject, one through fiction and one through fact.

In X, the narrator is writing a biography of her wife, a famous artist/writer in an alternate America that split into three countries at the end of World War II, before reuniting more than 50 years later. The Southern states split off from the rest of the country into a Bible-belt theocracy. (This is in response to a host of social programs and reforms implemented by Emma Goldman, FDR’s vice-president. After the break, the Northeast becomes a social democracy, while the West goes its own way.)

Demagogue is a real-life biography of an actual fascist, Joe McCarthy, who rode a wave of anticommunist hysteria to become, briefly, the most powerful man in America. Even Eisenhower was afraid to cross him at the height of his influence. Then it all came crashing down.

I’m not deep enough into either book to make anything but the most shallow of comparisons yet. But the one thing they share is the deadpan tone of normalcy even as democracy is shredded. It’s always interesting to me how fast people can accept things as normal.

Let me know what you’re reading. Reviews and suggestions always welcome in the comments.