Fascism | The Electron Pencil

06/15/2026

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Fascism, Revolution

1068 Words: An Unforeseen Consequence

From this…

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…to this?

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I’m spending a good long time reading the new book about the lives of Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayres, and Zayd Ayres, the family on the run from the law in the 1970s and into the ’80s. Bernardine Dohrn was, for a while, on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. She and Ayres had founded the militant wing of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) known at first as the Action Faction, then the Revolutionary Youth Movement, and eventually the Weathermen. Then, the Weathermen declared war on the US empire, armed themselves, made and exploded bombs in public buildings, and aligned with the most militant faction of the Black Panther Party.

The accidental explosion of a homemade dynamite bomb that killed three Weathermen and destroyed a Manhattan townhouse in March, 1970 sent Dohrn and Ayres scurrying underground where they renamed their group, naturally, the Weather Underground. Dohrn and Ayres eventually became a couple, married, and had two kids even as they moved from place to place in the United States, assuming aliases, constantly looking over their shoulders for G-men, and hoping against hope no one would recognize them in a grocery store line.

I started reading Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young about two weeks ago. I’m a notoriously slow reader, plus the story is so compelling I find myself putting the book down for long periods of time just to contemplate, to digest what I’ve read. I try to cut through my emotional reactions and put myself in the shoes of Dohrn (mere) and Ayres as they lug their two little boys (one of them being Zayd, who authored this memoir of life on the run and the history of the radical groups his parents were involved with). Just as important, I try to empathize with the people affected by Dohrn’s and Ayres’s actions, including their parents, their former friends, law enforcement officials, and plain old folks at home, in their living rooms, watching TV news reports about the latest bombing of the US Capitol or a police station.

It might take me another two whole weeks to finish reading the book. That’s okay. I’m immersed in their world, trying to grasp it, and trying to understand my own feelings about the people involved. As noted previously in this global communications colossus, I idolized the militant radicals who scared the bejesus out of everyone from Richard M. Nixon to J. Edgar Hoover to Mayor Richard J. Daley to countless next door neighbors across the country.

I realize, at this remove, that my affinity for long-haired radicals hollering for an end to the war in Vietnam, to institutional racism, and to American imperialism around the globe was as much driven by my own teenaged urge to rebel as by a moral revulsion to America’s sins.

Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayres were not wrong for opposing, strenuously, the war, Jim Crow and other American evils but their “war” (yep, in May 1970, the Weather Underground issued a manifesto titled a “Declaration of a State of War” against the United States) was as fatuous, albeit homicidal, as anything conjured up by previously comfortable, entitled white kids.

That’s what Bernardine and Bill were, at first. Comfortable, entitled white kids. Members of the post World War II generation, they were the most well-fed, well-clothed, provided for generation in the history of the human race. Their country was the most powerful in the world and had just won, in part, a pitched battle against tyranny, the Holocaust, book burning, and more. Dohrn and Ayres grew up not only believing so much was due to them within their homes and families, but their nation believed the rest of the world owed it. The Baby Boomers understood from birth that whatever they wanted, they could get.Their parents stood on their heads to provide everything their kids needed. Their nation provided them fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter, a car for every member of the family, cheap gasoline, grocery store shelves packed to overflowing with countless brands of breakfast cereal. University education was either free or easily affordable even for families just scraping by. They had record players and braces on their teeth and princess phones and good shoes.

They naturally grew up thinking that whatever they wanted was attainable.

Until what they wanted was peace in Vietnam and a fair shake for Black people.

Suddenly, they were frustrated for the first time in their lives and, goddamn it, they weren’t gonna take that lying down. I know this sounds as though I’m minimizing Dohrn and Ayres et al’s commitment to justice. Yes, they truly wanted peace and harmony and racial equality. But when those ideals weren’t coming in the snap of a finger, they reverted to the entitled, privileged kids they still were. If they didn’t get their way, they were gonna throw a tantrum and wreck the house.

Their “war” against the US, their revolution, appealed to an entire generation of people, many of whom wouldn’t give a second thought to Vietnam or voting rights in Mississippi. It was appealing because it allowed them, metaphorically, to thumb their noses at square Mom and Dad, to flash the finger at their mean old high school principal, and to tell the cop busting them for smoking pot to fuck off. Radical revolutionaries in the 1970s were the ultimate rebels, James Dean, Bob Dylan, and Hunter S. Thompson on steroids. All authority was evil. Everybody in a suit a tyrant. We could do whatever we wanted and fuck you if you didn’t like it.

And the funniest thing of all is, that train of thought is what led us directly to MAGA, a nation of rebels uprising against,.., well, everything. Morality? Please, don’t make me laugh. Justice? Don’t try to force that shit on me. Regulations? Try and stop me from doing what I want to do whenever I want to do it.

Doctors, lawyers, priests, politicians, experts, scientists — anybody in charge of anything must be defied. Wear a mask during a pandemic? Why, it’s tyranny! Electric cars? How dare you — I love rolling coal! And worst of all, a black man has become President of the United States of America? Damn it, we have to tear the whole thing down!

What a bizarre irony. The revolution of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayres was an arrow pointing directly to the neo-fascist Donald J. Trump.

Who could have ever guessed?

08/25/2025

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Dorothy Parker, Fascism

864 Words: Mrs. Campbell’s Résumé

Dorothy Parker is one of my favorite figures in American history.

Parker

Born in 1893 in Long Branch, New Jersey, one of those beachside communities south of the New York metro area, she grew up to be a writer. And when I say writer, I really mean it. She wrote poetry, fiction, plays, screenplays, essays, and criticism. She was a member of the fabled Algonquin Round Table, where she was referred to as Mrs. Campbell. She’d been married, twice, to another writer named Alan Campbell (actually, they were her second and third marriages; she’d married a stockbroker just before he shipped out to fight in World War I when she was 23). She must have been gaga over this Campbell fellow to have married him twice. Like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

In any case, Parker (or Mrs. Campbell, if you prefer) hung out with the likes of Robert Benchley, Robert E. Sherwood, Franklin P. Adams, Alexander Woolcott, Harold Ross, Edna Ferber, Heywood Broun, Ruth Gordon, and Harpo Marx — as brilliant, cutting, imaginative, and outspoken a group of Americans that have ever existed. Parker not only held her own among them, the lot of them had to scramble to keep up with her. One of my favorite books is The Portable Dorothy Parker, a compendium of her wildly varied works including her signature short story, “Big Blonde.”

The Algonquin Roundtable is one of the two historical places I’d wish to be reincarnated in (the other being the writers room of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour). I’d probably swoon over Parker, although she’d never be available to me considering she was herself in thrall to that Campbell guy. In fact, their relationship largely is reflected in the 1937 movie, A Star Is Born. Parker and Campbell co-wrote the script and, like the main characters in it, her fame dwarfed his.

To this day, Parker’s light and breezy but incisive as a scalpel poems ring true, as relevant as they were a hundred years ago. A couple of examples:

Her take on falling in love with creative types, “Bohemia.”

Authors and actors and artists and such Never know nothing, and never know much.

Sculptors andsingers and those of their kidney

Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.

Playwrights and poets and such horses’ necks

Start off from anywhere, end up at sex.

Diarists, critics, and similar roe

Never say nothing, and never say no.

People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;

God, for a man that solicits insurance.

And, perhaps her most famous poem, “Résumé”:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

Once, when told her editor was hollering for her to turn in a story she’d missed the deadline on because she was on one of her honeymoons, she replied to the messenger: “Tell him I was too fucking busy — or vice versa.”

She had a definitive attitude toward wealth. She wrote: “I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it.”

Which brings us to this observation of hers:

I think I knew what side I was on when I was about five years old, at which time nobody was safe from buffaloes. It was in a brownstone house in New York, and there was a blizzard, and my rich aunt — a horrible woman then and now — had come to visit. I remember going to the window and seeing the street with the men shoveling snow; their hands were purple on their shovels, and their feet were wrapped with burlap. And my aunt, looking over her shoulder, said, “Now isn’t this nice that there’s this blizzard. Now all these men have work.” And I knew then that it was not nice that men could work for their lives only in desperate weather, that there was no work for them in fair. That was when I became anti-fascit, at the silky tiones of my rich and comfortable aunt.

Parker, who by 1939 when she wrote this, had become a successful Hollywood screenwriter with Alan Campbell. She was as comfortable as a bankable script writer could be in those days. She wasn’t in Rockefeller or DuPont territory but she was never in danger of missing a meal. Nor did she have wait for a blizzard to earn a paycheck.

And then, along came the communist witch hunts. Anyone in Hollywood who didn’t genuflect before wealth was drummed out of business, including Parker. The FBI kept a 1000-page file on her. She was denied a travel visa during World War II (she wanted to work as a war correspondent) because she’d once belonged to the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. And, worst of all, she’d been a loud advocate for civil rights. After the war, movie work became so scarce for her that she had to collect unemployment checks.

There are a few people, gone now, whose take on the reign of Li’l Duce and the creeping fascism overtaking this holy (unholy?) land I’d love to know. Mike Royko is one. George Carlin is another. Eleanor Roosevelt, of course. Frances Perkins and and Malcolm X, too.

And, of course, Dorothy Parker.

03/15/2025

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Fascism

632 Words: There’s No Doubt Now

Even though I have recently resurrected my years-old nickname for the 45th/47th President of the United States, I have steadfastly resisted the urge to call him, flat out, as many of my cohorts have, a fascist.

It was too easy. It was, I reasoned, as overly melodramatic as calling Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris socialists or even communists. Which, by the way, many, many, many 45/47 idolators did, do, and will continue to do. It was the over-the-top rhetoric of the witless.

So, yeah, I’ve taken, once again, to calling the Commander-in-Cheat Li’l Duce. Look, he loves with all his heart strongmen like Putin, Orbán, and Duterte (who, I might add, faces International Criminal Court charges for his…, well, fascism). I always figured that even though Li’l Duce digs tyrants, he was American enough not to want to be one here.

And I say this with the full understanding that, in his feverish dreams, he’d be the strongest man in America, and by extension, in the world. I gave him credit for having a conscience.

I shouldn’t have.

Yesterday, Li’l Duce addressed this nation’s chief attorneys at the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building. The dept.’s own website describes its reason for being thusly:

The Justice Department’s mission is to uphold the rule of law, keep our country safe, and protect civil rights.

Lofty, eh? More like bullshit, now.

That’s because Li’l Duce, took the extraordinary step of giving the nation’s top lawyers marching orders in his speech. And those orders have nothing at all to do with the rule of law, safety, or civil rights. US attorneys now know exactly what Li’l Duce wants them to do.

His address wasn’t exactly the Reichstag Speech but it was close enough.

His Attorney General, Pam Bondi, introduced him and told the crowd, “We will never stop fighting for him and our country.”

Note, country came second.

Then Li’l Duce went on a rampage.

He called himself the “chief law enforcement officer of the country,” a term traditionally reserved for the Attorney General. Meaning: he’s now the law.
He moaned that he and his family, staff and supporters have been “persecuted” by critics.
He repeated his claim (as always, without evidence) that the 2020 election was “rigged and crooked.”
He called the mob, many of whom were convicted of serious crimes, that stormed the Capitol in his name on January 6, 2021 “hostages.”
He claimed that criticism of him by media outlets is “illegal.”
“Unfortunately,” he said, “in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and good will built up over generations.”
He promised to “expel rogue actors and corrupt forces,” from the federal bureaucracy.
He said, “We will expose, and very much expose, their egregious crimes and severe misconduct….”

All of these bullet points are straight from the fascism playbook. Especially the one about criticism of him being illegal.

As for his detractors, he said, “…[T]he people who did this to us should go to jail. They should go to jail.”

Whoever those people are. Which, I guess, is the point. By being nonspecific he puts everyone on notice.

Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Orbán, Duterte, Mao, Gaddafi, Fidel, Saddam, Pol Pot, and Putin all would stand and applaud.

From the Everybody’s against me but I’m still here card, to usurping his nation’s legal powers, supporting violent mobs acting in his name, and declaring anything short of fawning adoration for him a crime, Li’l Duce has, at last, revealed himself to be the brother, spiritually and in practice, of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Orbán, Duterte, Mao, Gaddafi, Fidel, Saddam, Pol Pot, and Putin.

They all would roar their approval.

No, it’s not overly dramatic. It’s not over the top. It’s not witless anymore.

Donald J. Trump is a fascist. He just doesn’t wear a uniform

12/20/2015

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2016 Democratic Candidates Debate, Armaan Singh Sarai, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Douglas A. Wissing, Fascism, Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley, Racism, Texas

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Hell-ary

I didn’t watch last night’s Democratic candidates debate but I understand Hillary insisted it be conducted in Afrikaans. Yet another craven attempt to sabotage Bernie Sanders, whom the vast majority of America prefers and who holds a triple digit lead over her.

Clinton: “Ons sal julle vermorsel!”

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Like It Is

On a serious note, for all the bluster about which candidate speaks her or his mind and which one will dare to utter one or another truth, it was Martin O’Malley last night who was bold enough to say what the sane among us know:

What our nation needs right now is to realize that, while we face a terrible danger, we also face a different sort of political danger. And that is the danger that democracies find themselves susceptible to when unscrupulous leaders try to turn us upon each other.

O’Malley (AP/Patrick Semansky)

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We will rise to the challenge of ISIS and we will rise together to the challenges that we face in our economy. But we will only do so if we hold true to the values and the freedoms that unite us, which means we must never surrender them to terrorists, must never surrender our American values to racists, must never surrender to the fascist pleas of billionaires with big mouths.

Unscrupulous, racist, fascist, and a billionaire with a big mouth. Yeah, that’s pretty much a capsule summary of Donald Trump. And, hell — let’s take the gloves all the way off — he’s a terrorist, too.

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Another Brown Bomber

Are you freaking kidding me? Yet another brown boy has been busted in Texas for the heinous crime of carrying something that some fever-delerious pack of scared bunnies thought was a bomb.

Yep. Last weekend, a 12-year-old kid named Armaan Singh Sarai was held in juvenile detention for three days in Fort Worth because some white boy miscreant told the schoolteacher he was going to bomb the school.

Ka-Boom!

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The teacher reacted — oh-so-reasonably, natch — by immediately calling the cops, who came to the school, took Sarai in, and locked him up from Friday through Monday. All on the say-so of some adolescent dickhead. Sarai’s parents, BTW, were not told of his whereabouts while he cooled his heels in stir.

It turns out Sarai has a backpack with a solar panel on it so he can charge his electronic device while carrying it. A dopey-assed clown in his class pointed it out to Sarai and told him he was gonna tell the teach it was a bomb. Sarai laughed and the dopey-assed kid laughed. But, mirabile dictu, the dopey-assed kid dropped a dime on Sarai anyway and paranoiac psychosis ensued.

The whole damned incident could have been no-harm, no-foul, except Sarai was incarcerated for the entire weekend and — get this! — he is suspended from school, must wear an ankle monitor, and still faces unspecified criminal charges.

No mention is made of the teacher, the cops, or any sane authority figure simply eyeballing the solar panel backpack and, once establishing it was not an weapon of mass destruction, kicking the class clown in his white-boy ass.

Kicking kids in the ass is forbidden in schools these days.

Putting them behind bars — especially when their melanin level is more elevated than the average Cauc. kid’s — ain’t.

‘Specially in the Lone Star State. Do us all a favor, Tex: Secede.

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Wissing Well

A quick update: Doug Wissing’s new book, IN Writing: Uncovering the Unexpected Hoosier State, is flat-out flying off the shelves at the Book Corner. Grab it while you can, kiddies.

Douglas A. Wissing

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12/05/2014

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Fascism, Militarization of Police, Police Brutality, Police State

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Something’s Rotten

For a very long time I’ve resisted the terms fascism and police state to describe the happenings in this holy land.

I figured the folks who threw these words around were drama queens and kings, prone to hyperbole and panicky language. Hell, I’m prone to hyperbole, as Pencillistas well know — but I use it for comic effect. Too many others, though, have employed the rhetorical device to make whatever case they have for or against Barack Obama and other Murrican saints/sinners seem that much more urgent.

I’d hear or read the word fascist and roll my eyes.

Now, no more.

There is indeed a fascism here. This is truly a burgeoning police state. When cops start killing people willy-nilly, when prosecutors and Grand Juries and courts say, Hey, that’s cool to more and more homicides of citizens, be they petty criminals or innocent victims, when police departments large and small armor up like an occupying army, well, then, we’ve got a rotten problem.

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We hated the Nazis, the KGB, the East German Stasi, Lon Nol’s Cambodian thugs, even Bull Connor’s deputies and Alabama state troopers for their brutality. We called them fascists. We understood that they ran police states.

In the case of the Americans just mentioned, we comforted ourselves by saying, What bad guys! They weren’t real Americans. Those were isolated incidents. We’re better than that.

We weeded out our fascists — or so we hoped.

And then in the 21st Century, we started calling everybody and everything we disagreed with fascist.

A Congress and a President imposing a national health insurance program on the citizenry is not fascism. Nor is a passel of benighted fundamentalists claiming that dinosaurs strode the Earth with humans or that global warming is a hoax.

What defines fascism more than anything is the drawing of blood. Governments regularly draw blood — both of their own citizens and of those from far off lands — but most have the decency to try to hide it, to excuse it, or to apologize for it.

Today, though, American police officers are drawing blood and many of us — way, way, way too many of us — not only are excusing it, we’re cheering for it.

Fascism only works when the people demand it. Many Americans, babies, are demanding it today.

There’s your fascism. There’s your police state.

It’s here. Now.

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10/19/2013

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Andrew Breitbart, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Compromise, Edward Snowden, Fascism, Howard Zinn

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The State Of The Prez

Now and again I feel I have to defend Barack Obama before my Far Left/Radical/Anarchist friends and acquaintances.

Republicans, Me Party-ists, professional paranoiacs, and others may portray the Prez as the second coming of Karl Marx/Joseph Stalin/Osama bin Laden (or even ObL himself), but the rational among us know that Obama is about as centrist as anyone can be. He is, it can be said, a human gyroscope, spinning on a tightrope pulled on by the ghosts of Andrew Breitbart and Howard Zinn.

As such, he infuriates both ends of the political spectrum, much as our previous hyper-centrist Democratic president, Bill Clinton, did.

Here’s an irony: both the Far Left and the Far Right call Obama a fascist.

Italian Fascist Party Headquarters, 1934

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Anyway, my lefty sisteren and brethren become apopleptic every once in a while in reaction to some sin the Obama administration has committed. For instance, the F-word (not that one; this one) was dropped indiscriminately when Edward Snowden was flitting around the world looking for a country that is notorious for its news media repression where he could find freedom. It was the Obama Fascist State, of course, that’d driven the delightful young man to seek asylum in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Natch, I think describing Barack Obama as a fascist is way over the top. That’s because I read books and they tell me about people who have been real, honest-to-gosh fascists in this cruel world.

Apparently, some people believe the word fascist means anyone you don’t agree with.

So, I feel compelled on occasion to defend Barack Obama (and myself) against charges that he’s the worst human being since Dr. Mengele. I did, after all volunteer for the Obama primary campaign in Kentucky during the 2008 election season. I, in my miniscule way, helped get this fascist elected. I had, I try to convey to my angry interlocutors, the best of intentions. Honest.

Make no mistake: I’ve been disappointed by much of what Obama has done as this holy land’s Kenyan-in-Chief. I wanted single-payer universal health care. I wanted the Goldman Sachs stink washed out of the world’s economy. I wanted the speeding train of privatization slowed down (at least). I could scream while pounding my fists on the sidewalk, as others do, that Obama betrayed me.

I won’t though, because I understand that no matter how much I loathe what the Far Right and the Me Party-ists stand for, they still deserve to get much of their way as part of the normal give and take of a democratic republic. Not only does Barack Obama understand that as well, he realizes, too, that he cannot govern unless he throws bones to those he profoundly disagrees with. And he has.

Tightrope Walker

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It occurs to me, ergo, that any time a huge swath of the American public is deliriously happy with a Prez, somebody’s getting roundly screwed.

It also occurs to me that any Prez who is roundly despised by both ends of the spectrum just might be doing a bang-up good job.

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Category Archives: Fascism

1068 Words: An Unforeseen Consequence

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864 Words: Mrs. Campbell’s Résumé

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632 Words: There’s No Doubt Now

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