BOOK REVIEW: Imagine Vermont Secession in "Burning Books On Fenwick Street"
Submitted by Rob Williams on Fri, 05/05/2006 - 11:00am.
The future is now
By Tim Matson
To read the whole review, visit the Vermont Guardian.
Review: Burning Books on Fenwick Street by C. Lee Dravis (PublishAmerica, $19.95)
John Kolzig wants to move to the country. The country of Vermont, that is. And who can blame him?
The United States of 2020 is a right-wing Christian fundamentalist dictatorship, the Constitution merged with the Ten Commandments, alcohol and unmarried sex outlawed, non-whites herded off to concentration camps, and every neighborhood stocked with a church deacon to spy on the citizens. Oh, you attend church on Sunday, or else.
Such is C. Lee Dravis' dystopian vision in Burning Books on Kenwick Street. It's a compelling addition to the secessionist fiction genre, which includes Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia, Stan Barnett's Single Star Flag, Frank Bryan's Out, and, of course, Gone With the Wind.
Getting there is half the fun, tracking Kolzig's journey from oppressive suburban Virginia to the embattled outlaw mountain Republic of Vermont, where a voluntary militia wages perpetual guerilla war against the U.S. military.
Dravis is a dutiful storyteller, mixing the conventions of a political thriller with a disturbingly plausible picture of the United States we fear we are becoming. Books fly off the shelves, not into readers' hands, but bonfires of political incorrectness. Mandatory urine and breathalyser tests, along with loyalty oaths, keep the workers in line. Echoes of 1984 and Farenheit 451 rebound through the book, but instead of shopworn clichés they have an honest resonance.
Following a convincing setup, the seeds of Kolzig's escape are planted. His brother lives in Vermont and urges him to flee. After years of humiliating subservience, Kolzig feels the call of the wild. “I found myself daydreaming of slipping across the border, offering my dubious services to the rebels and tasting the freedom of that tiny sliver of land which stabbed down into the states like a dagger.”
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...Rather, it seems to me, as a fundamentalist Christian, that the native population of the U.S. will increasingly identify with secularism and irreligion. Contravened perhaps by traditional Roman Catholic (Mexico) and Mohammedan (Middle East) mass immigration.
It seems to me that the main fear of Mr. Dravis and his partisans might just be reduced to our common enemy: the over-bloated and ever-present State that is our Federal government.
Here's what I mean... Few people worried of religious or political factions at the time of the Revolution and the decades to come simply because the Federal government at that time simply did not have the power to interfere with people's lives (as well as that of the community or the state) to any degree.
Now that we have that which we have today, the State --capital 'S', by which is meant the servile bureaucracy at all levels -- is so powerful and can controll many aspects of our business and personal lives, it becomes imperative for the various groups in this nation to "grab their piece of the pie", and now it seems, to Mr. Dravis and others, that with George W. Bush at the helm, it it now the Fun-damn-mentalists who are King of the Hill.
I would point out at this point that such a fear is illusory inasmuch as I believe Dubya merely plays my conservative Christian compatriots as one would play a violin: a few pious-sounding speeches here, a "faith-based" initiative there, and viola... Our Christian President. One must study genuine history diligently to find that Lincoln was much the same way, using religious-sounding speeches to mollify the abolitionists, et.al (not that all of them were fooled [Spooner]) while doing the bidding of the Northeastern [Boston] business interests.
Dear Mark,
Thanks for your comments. I sorta wish you'd read the novel first, though.
Your points, in a contemporary framework (Bush/Iraq/religion/gas/immigration, et. al.), are quite valid. However...
I started writing "Burning Books on Fenwick Street" back in 1980, intrigued (& frightened) by Pat Robertson's run for the presidency. Later, I read "The Turner Diaries" and wondered "what if" an extreme right-wing movement won control? Not necessarily through revolution, but through advertising, social engineering and subtle political dances. And over the years before publication in 2002, certain events (Oklahoma City, 9/11, domestic spying, hostility to "certain" religions, overseas wars) caught up with the narrative.
I remember a radio interview I did a few years ago where the producers surprised me with an "opposing view", a university professor who hadn't read my novel, and who proceeded to ridicule the premise nevertheless.
There is probably no greater danger than an ignorant citizen.
My point is that this particular scenarario I imagined fot the book... or the nightmare of your own choice... can become reality if we have an inattentive populace, a disregard for our own Constitutionally guaranteed liberties, an accquisitive/energy-inefficient society, and a fifth-estate that won't ask the hard questions.
I'm pleased that my novel has struck a chord in Vermont.
But it could've been Utah.
Lee et al.
I read about "Burning Books on Fenwick Street" in this blog, bought it, and am enjoying the book immensely! (About half-way through; the gang is at the AIDS camp, about to head for Lake Champlain.)
Several comments:
- A monolithic fundamentalist Christian state might work on a regional or municipal level in the US if central authority collapsed, but I have a hard time imagining how such a regime could be coordinated across the whole US.
- In a US at war with Vermont, in economic disarray, and with a fundamentalist regime, it seems inconsistent that you could just hop a plane to Newark and buses to Albany and Glens Falls without having to show your documents at every step, and in 2022, we can assume the databases will be reliable. I'm having to vigorously suspend my disbelief that Jack, John, Michelle, etc, could have gotten so far so fast. Ever travel in the old days behind the Iron Curtain? Totalitarian states empower every bully, paranoid, and nosy sadist in a given society, and they get involved wherever they can.
- The notion of Brattleboro under siege scares the heck out of me, because this is where I live, and the topography is remeniscent of that around Sarajevo and Srebrenica: a sniper or someone with a mortar up on Mt Wantastiquet (across the Connecticut River in New Hampshire) would have a full panorama of the town. (This is related to concerns today that a terrorist might target the Entergy Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in Vernon, VT from the heights across the river.) Unless Vermont made an incursion into New Hampshire past Hinsdale, Bear Mountain State Park, and Chesterfield, it would have to withdraw into the hills just west of Brattleboro, sadly.
- In contrast, a ground force without heavy air support would probably have great difficulty taking much of Bennington County (as is claimed in the book), because of very defensible topography, narrow passes, thick woods, etc.
HOWEVER, the above "cheap shots" aside, what fascinates me about this book is that I started a novel about a year ago, long before I heard of "Burning Books...", and there are some odd similarities. It's set in 2040, on the eve of a presidential election. It is also a "road novel", starting in North Carolina, passing through Virginia/DC/Maryland, and ending up in Vermont, which is on the verge of secession, along with other New England states. Fundamentalist theocracy plays a role in the novel, as does a fascist movement called the Homeland Front. Differences include much more emphasis on climate change and energy scarcity, foreign intervention by China and the EU, and a well-developed virtual-reality-based evolution of the Internet. Also, structurally, I use several 2nd-person protagonists whose tales are woven together, instead of one 1st-person protagonist. But the parallels are striking.
I'm currently at 230 pages, and plan to finish this summer. With luck, if I can get it published, it will serve as another addition to the "Vermont Secession Scenario School" of fictional novels.
Onward with Chapter 16!