Yesterday 5:49 pm
Blackvegetable » Today, 12:44 pm » wrote: ↑ This use of a rural imaginary to pursue fascist aims also recalls Nathanael West’s biting satire of the Horatio Alger myth, A Cool Million (1934), written some seventy years before Roth’s novel. In that story, an American fascist party emerges during the Great Depression under a former president named Shagpoke Whipple who reemerges from retirement, touting the genius of the self-help myth. Shagpoke is all self-making without any moral scruples. He raises himself up from fame/infamy, all the while screwing everyone over in his midst as he builds his National Revolutionary Party. (His name implies a double screwing: shagging and poking.)
As he explains to the hapless, Candide-like hero of the book, Lemuel Pitkin, “The time for a new party with the old American principles was, I realized, overripe. [Shag’s infelicity with language is wonderfully comical. It’s overripe all right.] I decided to form it; and so the National Revolutionary Party, popularly known as the “Leather Shirts,” was born. The uniform of our “Storm Troops” is a coonskin cap like the one I am wearing, a deerskin shirt and a pair of moccasins. Our weapon is the squirrel rifle” (110).
https://s-usih.org/2016/12/the-plot-aga ... art-three/
Had to google coonskin, did ya?
An off topic bit of **** to copy/paste... How inspiring.
Please seat yourself.
I like the very things you hate.
I like the very things you hate.