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If you stick with this one, I think I\u2019ll be able to explain how it is that fascism can be made appealing to ordinary Americans, and no fooling. I want to be clear that by \u201cordinary Americans,\u201d I do not<\/em> mean Birthers and Teabaggers. I mean the rest of us: suburbanites, semi-sophisticates, people who sometimes vote for Democrats, carriers of canvas tote bags. And by \u201cfascism\u201d I don\u2019t mean any politics to the right of my own; I don\u2019t mean traffic cops and my gym coach. I mean unpleasant Italians in the 1920s, Teutonic ghastliness, the Spanish clampdown. I\u2019m not saying that I can show you how a generically right-wing politics appeals to the American Right; there\u2019s not much that needs explaining on that front. I\u2019m saying, rather, that I can show how something rather like National Socialism can be made appealing to you.<\/p>\n It all starts with Salon.com, which is, I grant, an unlikely place to begin a conversation about fascism. Salon<\/em>, after all, is an unmistakably \u201cprogressive\u201d undertaking: based in San Francisco, founded by a former editor at Mother Jones<\/em>, temperately anti-war, feminist, queer-friendly, &c. The site represents a kind of publication that has never really existed in print form or on glossy paper: a lifestyle magazine for middle-class liberals, a site where you can get in one click from some fairly trenchant analysis of the US government\u2019s misplaced \u201cimperial priorities\u201d to recipes for \u201cthe best burger I ever had\u201d (and in the event, also pretty good). Salon<\/em> is perhaps the closest thing Statesiders now have to an American version of the UK Guardian<\/em>, the sort of magazine that will occasionally let itself engage in utopian speculation, when no idiom is more foreign to official writing about politics than that. One recent article introduced its argument with a brief thought experiment about an \u201cimaginary classless society.\u201d But if you look just a little bit harder at that same article, it turns out that such a society would have a \u201cuniversal middle class.\u201d Socialism as the apotheosis of the middle classes, their driving of all other players from the field: that\u2019s Salon<\/em>.<\/p>\n Earlier this summer, Salon <\/em>decided to start a book club: the magazine\u2019s readers would all read the same long novel, at roughly the same time, and would have a public, on-line discussion about it over the course of three weeks. The first book that Salon <\/em>chose was The Passage<\/em>, a new vampire apocalypse by a writer who teaches at Rice named Justin Cronin. It\u2019s a little misleading to single out Salon <\/em>for pushing The Passage <\/em>this way. The novel has been getting all sorts of attention: declarations of love from Time <\/em>and The Guardian<\/em>, a book deal so big that it was reported as a news item in its own right in 2007. Ridley Scott has already bought the rights. There has been touting. Salon <\/em>was making sure it kicked things off with a novel lots of people were going to be reading anyway.<\/p>\n They were also making a clean break with Oprah, by throwing boy-readers a book they could gnaw it. There are at least two different ways of telegraphing what it\u2019s like to read The Passage<\/em>. One way is to note its literary affiliations: The novel basically just takes the premise of Richard Matheson\u2019s slender, economical I Am Legend<\/em>\u2014vampires have taken over the world\u2014and bulks it out to a length that is prolix and Tolkienian: so not just one survivor, as in Matheson, but an entire village of survivors, then a quest narrative, which eventually ramps up into an out-and-out war story, a cage match cosmic and Manichean, between the men of the West and what are really just bioluminescent orcs.<\/p>\n The other way is easier: The Passage <\/em>is a fast-zombie movie in prose. One suspects that Cronin has called his monsters \u201cvampires\u201d only because, in the fashion cycle of collective dread, vampires are back. Gone, mostly, are the zombies of the last decade\u2014the dilatory, the dawdling, the pointlessly milling dead. Pop culture once again prefers its ghouls to have purpose and penetrating stares. Cronin\u2019s cannibals resemble bloodsuckers in some respects, and the walking dead in others; five years ago he would have called them zombies; but it\u2019s 2010, so he calls them vampires. I want to be careful here. At some level, it\u2019s pointless to try to segregate out from one another Hollywood\u2019s vampire and zombie populations. Monsters routinely intermarry. There have been lots of vampire-zombie splicings, not the least of which is I Am Legend <\/em>itself. Or rather: I Am Legend <\/em>was, via its first film version\u2014not 1971\u2019s The Omega Man<\/em>, but a 1964 Italian production starring Vincent Price\u2014one of the major sources for Romero\u2019s Night of the Living Dead<\/em>, which means that the zombie movie as we know it actually began as a mutation in the vampire code. But we can just as well leave that history aside. The broader point is that any time a movie, 30 Days of Night<\/em>, say, has its vampires attack in numbers\u2014any time it deploys them against humans in formations larger than three or four\u2014it\u2019s going to start looking, whether it means to or not, like a zombie pic. Humans will board up their windows and huddle in locked rooms. They will fall to multiple, scrabbling hands.<\/p>\n So vampires often look like zombies. And then there\u2019s the simple point that filmmakers and especially novelists have woven so many variations on the vampire that they, like the queer people they are often made to resemble, come in all possible forms: vampire politicians, vampire mechanics, the vampire homeless. It seems useless to insist that vampires are really one way and not another. One wishes to say all the same that the genre\u2019s anchoring works\u2014the stories and novels that have set the horizon for the form: Polidori, Stoker, Anne Rice\u2014have always given special emphasis to aristocracy, etiquette, seduction, intelligence. For a creature to register emphatically as a vampire\u2014for it to be recognizable as something other than a zombie\u2014it needs to seem like a superior being, Luciferous and more than human; and it needs to be something you could possibly make the mistake of falling in love with. All I mean is that a certain Byronism is pretty well wired into the thing.<\/p>\n Cronin\u2019s \u201cvampires,\u201d meanwhile, are dim and scavenging herd animals, not superhuman but rather the opposite: degenerate and cretinous. Rigor commands that I also list the ways they are not <\/em>like zombies: They are light-sensitive; they don\u2019t turn everyone they bite; a very small number of them emit their memories and commands in a manner extrapolated from antique vampire mind-control or mesmerism; they are fairly hard to kill. But these are secondary characteristics, whereas the monsters\u2019 zombie traits are central to one\u2019s experience of the novel: They don\u2019t have manners, and they (mostly) don\u2019t have minds. Most important: They come in nests and pods and swarms and packs and scourges and hordes.<\/p>\n I want to stick with \u201chordes.\u201d It\u2019s important to get the matter of genre right, because to opt for the fast zombie, as your particular horror niche, is to place in front of a readership a distinctive set of historical or sociopolitical concerns, concerns that are at this point built into those monsters. Here\u2019s the quick-and-dirty version: Fast zombies, as cinematic and now literary figures, are built almost entirely out of perceptions of Asians and Middle Easterners and Africans and native Americans, some of them new\u2014fast zombies sometimes get framed as terrorists\u2014most of them old: they are above all savages. (They are in this sense unlike slow zombies. I\u2019ve argued out the distinction here.) This was already true of the landmark fast-zombie movies\u201428 Days Later<\/em> and Zack Snyder\u2019s Dawn of the Dead <\/em>remake\u2014and Cronin simply follows suit on this front. When the zombie epidemic erupts, the novel begins to incorporate all sorts of Bush-era GWOT-speak, which means that its vampire apocalypse is at some level nothing more than the War on Terror imagined as lost. But then Cronin has at the same time found a way to reactivate some very old colonial nightmares: One scene has a settlement of human survivors\u2014the creepy survivors; the bad <\/em>survivors\u2014readying a human sacrifice, to placate the vampire-zombies, in what is clearly a replay of early Spanish lore about the Aztecs. This association is then cemented by Cronin\u2019s notion of where vampirism comes from: It is a virus, let loose from deepest Bolivia, a kind of bat-Ebola, and its sinister work will be to make the United States equatorial<\/em>. Fast-zombie stories take civilization as their highest good\u2014that might sound like an uncontroversial proposition, but it isn\u2019t\u2014lots of stories don\u2019t. They then designate the zombies as that-which-can-cancel-civilization, a baggy category that can include both al Qaeda and Zulus. Or to put this another way: Fast-zombie stories are devices for making palatable some of the old imperial beliefs, or, if you like, for manufacturing neo-imperial anxieties, though they have their own distinctive way of doing this, one that rather than flaunting the sturdy supremacy of civilization, emphasizes instead the latter\u2019s tenuousness and so the possibility that culture and progress and refinement might collapse in their very hubs and capitals.<\/p>\n What I want to do at this point is list a number of things that early reviewers have said about The Passage<\/em>; itemize this generic praise back into its commonplaces; and then work out what those vague and blurbish abstractions, with particular reference to this specific novel, actually mean.<\/p>\n What Cronin shares with the Mediterranean and Mediterranean-style epics, in other words, is their long-dur\u00e9e concern with the Fate of Civilizations, a concern that requires his distended and decidedly non-novelistic narrative canvas, the span of generations. It is from the epic, too, that he has borrowed his descriptions of the zombie armies, though perhaps unwittingly and at two or three removes. Epics are utterly fixated on the distinction between fully settled people and still tribal or semi-nomadic ones. The final books of The Aeneid <\/em>describe a small army of Trojan survivors as they invade Italy and conquer its indigenous people. Milton\u2019s Paradise Lost <\/em>describes Adam and Eve as two dwellers in the wilderness, naked foragers in \u201cthe new world.\u201d The first American epic, Timothy Dwight\u2019s Conquest of Canaan<\/em>, recounts in heroic terms a righteous people\u2019s war of extermination against a nation of savages whose land they regard as earmarked. The affinity matters because it is in some of its epic qualities that The Passage <\/em>is least like a fast-zombie movie, since the films generally have compressed time-frames; are interested only in the apocalypse and its immediate aftermath; and almost never show survivors successfully fighting back. This is how we know that Cronin is not just cashing in\u2014because to write a fast-zombie epic is something entirely different from, say, just novelizing Dead Alive<\/em>, simply by virtue of letting the novel proceed past page 250, past the nuclear explosions over Boise and Bend, Oregon\u2014simply, that is, by allowing that there might be, even after the swarming, more story to tell.<\/p>\n This then brings us to the next claim that reviewers have been making, which is that\u2026<\/p>\n There are actually two major historical models that Cronin has incorporated into his book. The first is medieval Europe, especially in its early stages, the systole and diastole of contraction and expansion, the post-Roman heartbeat: villages in Normandy gathering in their borders like so much extra fabric; towns building walls; lords building castles; and then\u2014back out into the wastelands; the outgrowth of an armed agrarianism; planned settlements for serfs beyond the Elbe, generous terms, no labor service, five years rent-free!; Teutonic Knights; Frankish machine-men with their monster-horses and their death-arrows; northern crusades into the heathen Baltic; the Spanish Reconquista<\/em>\u2014and no historical meme looms larger in The Passage <\/em>than that: the Reconquest of America. The book\u2019s survivors live in a walled city and have something like guilds and wear tunics and have all but abandoned books and carry crossbows, which was the tenth century\u2019s great advance in military technology, a weapon that was so unsportingly good at killing people that the Church tried to limit its use and crossbowmen were briefly pariahs.<\/p>\n The survivors also ride horses, though this image obviously does double duty. For beyond its medievalism, The Passage <\/em>is most obviously a zombie Western\u2014Cronin himself has said as much\u2014subcategory siege<\/em>, with the California settlement doubling as fort. Survivors trek across Nevada and Colorado. They cook jonnycake. A man in a remote house pours boiling water into a tub for his pregnant woman and sits watch at night, shotgun across his lap, armed against whatever may come stalking out of the woods.<\/p>\n The Passage<\/em>, then, generates \u201chope\u201d only because it\u2019s underlying notion is that we\u2019ve been through this all before; it is telling, through proxies and vampire-puppets, a history whose ending we already know; and so reassuring us of a certain cycle or historical repetition. Cronin\u2019s answer to our usual bum and apocalyptic trip is to help us envision another round of colonization. North America will get to resettle itself. Indian Wars will be refought. To this end, the novel works in five or six documents form the distant future\u2014conference papers from some symposium a millennium down the line\u2014which is our guarantee, from an early point in our reading, that civilization has survived somewhere and in some form.<\/p>\n Another claim out of the reviews\u2026<\/p>\n It is under cover of phrases like these\u2014\u201csustaining community,\u201d \u201cideal city life\u201d\u2014that the novel\u2019s fascism rides in. This is itself rather fascinating, since utopia often seems like the special province of the political Left, in some another-world-is-possible kind of way. The term itself, officially neutral, nominally harnessed to no particular ideology, was claimed by socialist thinkers early on. Fredric Jameson continues to use it as a euphemism for \u201ccommunism.\u201d So it is all the more remarkable to watch an American novelist, in apparent sincerity, attempt a utopia with strong fascist elements. There are at least three:<\/p>\n That\u2019s how the passage looks if you organize its utopian qualities, hence its imagined innovations, its breaks with the established order of 2010\u2014and it\u2019s worth underscoring that these add up to a kind of political argument, since Cronin is trying to explain the difference between a society that knows how to survive a terrorist-savage threat and the United States, which, in the novel\u2019s terms, mostly hasn\u2019t. To that extent, these breaks all have the force of recommendations<\/em>, what the U.S. could have done, but failed to do, to keep itself intact: Streamline the political chain of command, make sure pregnant women stop working, strictly limit the rights of immigrants, lie to the children, seal the borders, build a wall around them, shoot anyway who gets close.<\/p>\n But we can also run the argument in the other direction, and emphasize instead those features of our readerly present that Cronin\u2019s settler-utopians would preserve. The novel\u2019s medievalism is something of a red herring, since its survivors see themselves as the keepers of American techno-civilization; the guardians of illumination in a vampire dark age, though that word now refers to halogen lamps and not manuscripts; the ones who can keep running\u2014literally; this is in the novel\u2014the Humvees of the lost world. The novel\u2019s premise is that civilization has collapsed, and yet it remains most interested in the people who have inherited American achievement. Civilization will only be possible again when people figure out how to re-activate its machinery. The middle sections of the novel are accordingly made up of three stock scenes regularly repeated: Characters try to improvise a patch on some machine they consider essential but no longer know, curved-arch-like, how to manufacture. Characters leave the colony to scavenge century-old goods from decaying strip malls and military bases, hunter-gatherers foraging for high-tops like they\u2019re loganberries. Characters encounter some forgotten or never-before-seen device and wonder what it is and how to use it. This aspect of the novel becomes more and more important until it effectively takes over, since the novel\u2019s final order of business is to fold the colonist-survivors into the U.S. Army, which is a techno-survival of an entirely different order, the novel\u2019s strange belated admission that civilization didn\u2019t really <\/em>collapse after all, certainly not to some zero point. What destroys the first host of vampire-zombies, then, is a nuclear bomb left over from the military, which Cronin sees as straightforwardly providing the solutions to any problems it might create. Salon<\/em>\u2019s Laura Miller says she likes that the colonists come to the realization that they \u201cneed the outside world,\u201d but \u201cthe outside world\u201d could mean just about anything, when the novel is in fact much more specific: They need the military and things that go boom.<\/p>\n The one observation that Miller makes that is flat out wrong is that the novel\u2019s idiom is not ethical or religious. She has said this more than once: \u201cCronin\u2019s novel isn\u2019t about the clash between good and evil, but about humanity\u2019s struggle to forge a better world.\u201d \u201cCronin\u2019s characters, unlike [Stephen] King\u2019s [in The Stand<\/em>], are not caught up in a struggle between Good and Evil.\u201d It\u2019s true that Cronin is being a little sneaky on this front. The survivor colony is nominally post-Christian; they remember Christmas only as a rumor or a legend; the have adopted a new calendar that makes no reference to Domini. But then Cronin makes it his business to sneak back in all the Christian language that this framework officially disallows. The Passage<\/em>, indeed, is so stupidly ethical that it features not only a demonic head vampire whose name contains the word cock<\/em>, but two supernaturally good characters, as well, the more important of whom is a pre-pubescent girl, and cock <\/em>and girl appear to one character by turns in a dream and tell him respectively to murder and not to murder a woman in that dream, as in: Cartoon devil on your left shoulder, cartoon angel on your right<\/em>. That the other radiantly moral figure is a Catholic nun should sufficiently confirm the point. In fact, by the time the novel ends, readers will have to swallow: an immortal nun, an act of heroic martyrdom, characters galvanized upon hearing Bible stories, a set of fiendish counter-apostles called \u201cthe Twelve,\u201d and a group fighting these hellhounds led by a man named Peter, about whom sentences like this are written: \u201cHe inched his way forward, each step an act of faith.\u201d (712)<\/p>\n More generally, The Passage <\/em>is packed with writing borrowed from the traditions of sentimental and domestic writing. This is another of the ways\u2014indeed, the most pervasive way\u2014in which The Passage <\/em>tries to make literature out of its cinematic scenario. Everything is POV, free indirect discourse, interior monologue. Events are endlessly focalized, and an intimacy is thereby intruded on this Gibbonesque-Hobbsean story of civilizations falling and original contracts being formed. It is hard to overstate just how much family writing there is in this book, writing about the ferocious attachments one feels to one\u2019s closest kin: The only moment of love the colony\u2019s leader ever felt was when his daughter was born. One woman reflects at length on how \u201cwonderful\u201d it was \u201cto feel a baby moving inside her.\u201d A tough warrior out on the quest confesses that what he misses most are \u201cthe littles.\u201d Time <\/em>praised the book for its \u201cpsychological insight.\u201d Laura Miller said it was a vampire-zombie story \u201cwith heart.\u201d In sentences like those we see a hard Right politics being made psychology plausible to a contemporary readership\u2014and the psychology in play is a reassuringly familiar one, the psychology of Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin <\/em>or a PTA meeting, the known term that carries you to an unknown place. Fascism is something you do for the kids.<\/p>\n What we can say now, then, is that Cronin\u2019s utopio-fascism is tempered by a certain conservatism. But then fascism, of course, came in all sorts of different forms; it had national variants for one; and each fascist intellectual dreamed up a slightly different fascism, none of which corresponded precisely to any of the fascisms that actually existed on the ground. In the interests of precision, then: Cronin is helping us make our peace with an American fascism, but his is not <\/em>the fascism of the intellectuals and the avant gardists, not a Nietzschean and anti-bourgeois fascism, which would, let\u2019s face it, probably prefer the vampires. His is a fascism that has in certain key tenents\u2014respect for Christianity and a conventional military hierarchy\u2014joined forces with the conventional Right: a Spanish fascism, if you follow me, rather than a German one.<\/p>\n But then it\u2019s not enough to name, however precisely, which particular historical variant of fascism Cronin is trying to resurrect. The important point, rather, is that Cronin is trying to imagine a version of fascism that has never existed, and this gets us to the crux of the matter: How, after all, do you engineer a fascism that will be palatable to a contemporary American audience, and not just to any audience, but to a Salon <\/em>audience, a bunch of literate Lefties, the type of people who participate in book clubs? The answer, I think, is quickly given: You subtract race from the equation. For Cronin\u2019s colonists are all multi-racial; the novel makes a big deal of this early on. Racial categories are, like the Jesus story, one of those things from Before that the survivors have heard about but barely understand. The novel is more cunning than this even. The utopian section begins with a kind of oral history recorded by the last survivor from Before, the last person who was born before the vampire apocalypse. And she\u2019s an old black woman, although the novel never out and tells you this; it expects you to hear it in her cadences. That\u2019s a far cry from, say, Tolkien, who is sheerest poison, Wagnerite Anglo-fascism without the tunes. Tolkien\u2019s racialism was always all but overt, just under the surface, like Norplant: all those Celtic-Viking heroes and elephant-riding bad men from the East; that scheming, greedy golem-Jew; those monstrous Urak-hai-sounds-like-Iroquois. So whatever Cronin is up to, it\u2019s not that<\/em>. Instead, he has worked out a more subtle kind of racial feint: making a black woman our gateway into the fascist utopia. The novel actually does something similar in matters of gender, since our colonist-heroes end up visiting two other survivor compounds, each of which treats women much worse than the novel\u2019s central settlement, which means that readers can tell themselves that the colony, whatever its policies on pregnant women, has achieved a fair degree of gender equity. And then that\u2019s it right there: A fascism in which people of all races and genders can participate (almost) equally\u2014that\u2019s how one creates a fascism that will pass first-line liberal scrutiny. If you make it so that fascism isn\u2019t primarily racial, an American reader won\u2019t even recognize it as fascism. But then, of course, Cronin can only produce this de-racialized version of fascism because he has transferred the entire apparatus of race onto the zombies, who are sometimes just called \u201cthe Many\u201d and who are, of course, a population of the killable; he can loosen racial categories among the survivors, because he has preserved the lethality of race at a higher and more abstract level. Not that any of this is buried in the novel, since the survivors have a series of different racial epithets for the zombies, one of which is \u201csmokes,\u201d which, well, if you don\u2019t know, you should probably look it up, is all I\u2019m saying. One of the Salon<\/em>\u2019s readers said that \u201csmokes\u201d was \u201cinvented language.\u201d And it just ain\u2019t\u2026neat, I mean\u2026or invented.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you stick with this one, I think I\u2019ll be able to explain how it is that fascism can be made appealing to ordinary Americans, and no fooling. I want to be clear that by \u201cordinary Americans,\u201d I do … Continue reading \n
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