A farce that prefigured our times

Plus ça {expletive deleted} change

Fifty five years ago Philip Roth published Our Gang, a broad satire on the Nixon regime in which the president invades Denmark to distract from his domestic troubles. Whole chunks of the dialogue could come from inside the White House today.

“Gentlemen,” President Trick E. Dixon explains to his staff, “these are going to be free elections. I want it to be perfectly clear beforehand that I wouldn’t have it otherwise, unless there were some reason to believe that the vote might go the wrong way.

“They have thrown me out of office enough in my lifetime! I will not be cast in the role of a loser—of a war, or of anything. And if that means bringing the full firepower of our Armed Forces to bear upon every last Brownie and Cub Scout in America, then that is what we are going to do. Because the President of the United States and Leader of the Free World can ill-afford to be humiliated by anyone, let alone by third- and fourth-graders who have nothing better to do than engage the United States Army in treacherous house-to-house combat.”

How can this threat best be dealt with? Here he explains that

“One experiment that we have tried with some success here in Washington is the ‘Justice in the Streets Program.’ This is a program whereby sentencing and punishment, for capital crimes as well as felonies and misdemeanours, is delivered on the spot at the very moment the crime is committed, or even appears to have been committed.”

Just how Dixon has offended the Boy Scouts of America, who are marching in protest against his regime, is too complicated and anachronistic to go into here: they believe he is in favour of sexual intercourse, not a charge that would shock supporters of Donald Trump. The other divergence from Trump is that when Nixon (“Dixon”) wants to dress up as a man of action, he puts on American football gear, complete with his helmet and has his advisers pretend to be coaches; Trump just puts on his hair and makeup and consults the television news.

But you probably want to know how he goes to war with Denmark – sorry, with the “Pro-Pornography government in Copenhagen.” This has nothing to do with Greenland.

This plot hinges on a black American baseball player named Curtis Flood (who really existed) and who left the country after he sued the sport’s governing body (he really did) over contract terms which treated the players as serfs of the owners.

In the book Flood flees to Copenhagen, “the Mecca toward which the filth peddlers of the world go down on their knees morning and night. The pornography capital of the world.

“POLITICAL COACH: Wow! (Ecstatic) And that’s not all they’ve got in Denmark to compromise Mr. Flood, is it? HIGHBROW COACH: Very fast on your feet, young man … The word is miscegenation. Here is a black man engaging in just about the wickedest act any American can imagine, and with the women of Denmark, who are among the whitest in the entire world.”

So the Sixth Fleet is dispatched to recapture this domestic terrorist and a thousand marines occupy Helsingør and its castle. This, Dixon explains, “was not an invasion of Danish territory, but the liberation from Danish domination of a landmark that has been sacred for centuries to English-speaking peoples around the world …

“After centuries of occupation and touristic exploitation by the Danes, the town and the castle, which owe their fame entirely to William Shakespeare, the greatest writer of English in all recorded history, are occupied tonight by American soldiers, speaking the tongue of the immortal bard.”

An expedition to capture Flood, Maduro-style, is foiled because the satellite pictures which were supposed to show him in a countryside retreat in fact depicted a large black labrador, which was captured instead and brought home as a triumph of American arms.

At this point the plot goes off the rails, for Dixon himself is assassinated in hospital, which he has entered to undergo a minor cosmetic surgery. The details are all rather baroque; offstage, it emerged that he had managed to destroy Copenhagen with a nuclear bomb.

The book ends with Nixon in hell, where he campaigns to overthrow Satan and take his place. He addresses the assembled devils:

“I firmly believe that I was able to maintain and perpetuate all that was evil in American life when I came to power. Furthermore I think I can safely say that I was able to lay the groundwork for new oppressions and injustices and to sow seeds of bitterness and hatred between the races, the generations and the social classes that hopefully will plague the American people for years to come.”

And who would dare say he was wrong?

Roth’s main target is the debasement of political language