Amy Frykholm

This week's Books and Culture podcast is on Julian of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography. Check it out!

Clearly I am on a mid-20th-century kick here, but a friend forwarded me this piece published in the spring by Chris Hedges on truthdig.com and I've been thinking about it ever since. Hedges question is an interesting one, "Is America yearning for fascism?" At first, as I read it, I thought that Hedges is way over-stating his case. I get tired of liberals ranting about their sense of betrayal by the Obama administration. It seems unproductive and ridiculously ideological. But several elements have stayed with me, and I think Hedges' question needs to be taken seriously. 

One is his quotation from historian Fritz Stern: "In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented." In other words, the conditions for fascism are laid culturally long before any leader gives it form. Are we laying that foundation now? I think of it every time I hear someone say that we need more "border security." We have done nothing but add militarization at the border for more than a decade. Such comments stem from a seemingly insatiable desire to attain an imagined level of safety and insularity. In the phrase "border security," I hear a dream for ultimate control that, to me, has fascist intonations.

Here is Hedge's summary of how fascism emerges:

The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

The image of the "thugs and demagogues" has stayed with me to chasten my too-easy assumption that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are too ridiculous to be taken seriously. "We can laugh at these people," says Hedges, "but they are not the fools. We are."

Hedges doesn't mention it, but for me, immigration is the exact location we need to pay attention to. In an interview I did last year with Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok, he pointed to the crossroads at which we find ourselves, 

It's not merely that the country is changing; it's that the die is cast—nothing will prevent this country from becoming a genuinely multiracial democracy in which no racial group dominates. Even if we were to seal the borders today, whites would still lose their majority. 

But something can prevent us from becoming a "genuinely multiracial democracy," and that is if we choose paths of violence and fear on this road. Frankly, this is already happening. 

Fifteen years ago, I started an essay about the Estonian sauna that has finally come to fruition in the most recent issue of Relief. You can see a story about my story at the Relief website.

Here's a piece by Rodger Kamenetz on what we might mean when we say that the situation surrounding the oil spill in the gulf is "Kafkaesque." Kamenetz is the author of two books, both of which I love. The Jew and the Lotus and The History of Last Night's Dream.He is working on a biography of kafka, which means he is walking around a lot thinking about things like what it means to be "Kafkaesque."

My favorite line in Kamenetz' essay comes as he is imagining what Kafka would be doing if he was working in New Orleans: "When he wasn’t musing on the seeming absence of God, he investigated industrial accidents for a workmen’s-compensation insurance company."

I learned from Monday’s Denver Post that people who eat fruits and vegetables are called “nutritarians.” People who go for walks are getting “green exercise.” And George Orwell thought the English language was in trouble in 1946. What makes these two phrases both ridiculous and sad, indeed tragic, is the complete rupture between those who speak them and the natural world itself. 

Our language develops from the world that we inhabit. We speak the words we need to describe our experience. Likewise, the words we speak create and shape our experience of the world. What can we make of people who would need the word “nutritarian” to describe the experience of eating? What is a more basic and more intimate an act than that?  “Nutritarian” is a parody of a word, infused with a bizarre brand of pseudo-science along with a false sense of self-righteousness.  Nutritarians can’t possibly eat. If they do, they don’t taste. They think about eating, while calculating the number of ANDIs (Aggregate Nutrient Density Index) in their food. In other words, they have made the intimate experience of eating into an ideological act and a linguistic nightmare. 

Likewise, green exercise. “Green exercise,” write Drs. Kay Judge and Maxine Barish-Wreden, “refers to physical activity that is done while simultaneously being exposed to nature. Various forms of green exercise include hiking, biking, outdoor sports or beach activities.” Have the people to whom they are writing forgotten what it is like to go outside? Do they need to have as motivation a study by the University of Exeter that “two out of three people have improved self esteem” after performing green exercise?  

Orwell argued that the problem with the English language in 1946 was its tendency to be abstract and unclear. It lacked simplicity and reference to the material world.  Unfortunately, “nutritarian” and “green exercise” are the words of a people far more lost and confused than even Orwell imagined.