OLEAN -- With the Fourth of July just in front of us, this might be a good time to take a look at a startling new book coming out the middle of next month. There's a ton of buzz on the Internet about it, and even in this era of functional illiteracy it has a chance of attracting national attention. It might even focus needed discussion on a stark, unthinkable subject many of us, conservative or liberal, are jittery about but usually avoid exploring in discussion or print:
At times -- at least for those of us who read and think instead of watching the boob tube and gorging on vapid celebrity trivia -- our beloved United States of America seems to be in danger of coming apart at the seams.
The book is "Republic: A Novel of America's Future" (Cincinnatus Press, Cary, N.C., 332 pages, $16.95) It is written by Charles Sheehan-Miles, a veteran of the first Gulf War in 1991 whose initial novel five years ago, "Prayer at Rumayla" -- much of it actually a memoir -- drew ample praise from many reviewers, including this one.
The publisher, interestingly, lists the new book in two categories: "Fiction/Literature" and "Alternative History." That last one is meant to be foreboding.
"Republic" deals with a frightening future USA -- in which anyone deemed to be giving aid to terrorists can be detained without access to the courts, or without being notified as to why they're being held; in which the federal military can participate in local law enforcement in violation of the constitutional posse comitatus citizen protections; where the Military Commissions Act wipes out an American citizen's right to legal provisions of fair prosecution and trial; where federal government continuity plans give the president unprecedented executive power to run the nation without court or congressional oversight; where the Department of Homeland Security is given new enforcement control for almost every facet of civilian life; where private contractors sporting questionable background provide both domestic and foreign military security with scores of thousands of men under arms; where personal privacy completely disappears, domestic spying flourishes, and almost all electronic communication is monitored by federal authorities; where national elections are rigged and courts turn the other way; where totalitarian legislation is "softly" labeled with terms like Patriot Act; where criticism of, or stated opposition to, federal actions is judicially interpreted as giving aid and comfort to the enemy; where the government clearly favors the rich, and the middle class quickly evaporates as Congress does nothing; where the attorney general of the United States believes habeas corpus has no constitutional guarantees.
Oh wait, much of that is already happening. This powerful book deals with possible, even probable, future citizen reaction to such insults to our founding principles.
Sheehan-Miles, in his mid-30s now, comes from a military family. His father served in Vietnam, and his late grandfather, Pvt. Fred Harrison Miles, captured by the Japanese on Java shortly after World War II began, spent more than three years in enemy prison camps as a member of the "Lost Battalion." He died in 1971, the same year the author was born. "I wish I had had the opportunity to know you," writes Sheehan-Miles in the dedication.
Sheehan-Miles enlisted in the Army in 1990, eager to do his patriotic duty, and soon found himself in Iraq, a gun loader on a tank in an armored battalion assigned to Gen. Barry McCaffrey's famous 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, which on March 2, 1991, fought the last battle of that war, a precursor to our current presence in that shattered nation. It was the Battle of Rumayla (the title location in the first novel), and it was pretty much a turkey shoot.
McCaffrey, the same trim, white-haired, self-assured guy you now see commenting on TV about the current war in Iraq, was much praised for his victory, but continually has had to defend against accusations that at Rumayla he violated a cease-fire order in lighting up a Republican Guard unit that had already stood down in surrender and was trying to peacefully retreat to Baghdad with a convoy of huge hauling trailers full of demilitarized tanks, their turrets turned backward in non-firing positions to signify lack of threat. No journalists were present at the battle.
Sheehan-Miles, who wrote vividly in his first book of the killing spree and its personal psychological ramifications, has said since, "We took some incoming once, but it was friendly fire."
After that war, Sheehan-Miles helped found and became executive director of the advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense, and served on the board of another Washington-based influential veterans' advocacy group, the National Gulf War Resource Center.
The author, even before his first was published, began thinking about this second novel in the mid-1990s following the deadly domestic terrorism of Pendleton native Timothy McVeigh, who in 1995 blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City with a fertilizer truck bomb. Sheehan-Miles, trying to envision federal response in the name of national security and citizen reaction if such homeland upheaval continued, began jotting down notes.
"I was imagining a future America where an intrusive federal government was spying on citizens, listening in on people's phone calls, suspending habeas corpus, and using the military in ways that violated posse comitatus," wrote Sheehan-Miles in a personal blog recently. "Little did I imagine then that of virtually everything I thought of, we would see worse in the months and years after September 11."
He also began trying to envision what the reaction of the American citizenry would be, and just what it would take to lead to civil insurrection -- a new Civil War, in other words.
He sets much of the action in his new book in West Virginia, a state not unfamiliar with illegal federal military intervention in basically local matters such as coal strikes and such -- all to protect politically wired rich people.
In "Republic," the catalyst event is the closing of a West Virginia computer-chip factory by an industrialist friend of, and bigtime contributor to, the president of the United States. The plant is very profitable, but not profitable enough to satisfy the sneering corporate greedball who shuts it down without warning, moves it to Jakarta, hands out a measly severance, cynically offers relocation benefits to local workers who might want to move there, and abruptly dismisses generous offers from West Virginia businessmen to purchase the factory and keep locals employed. When the local congressman appeals to the White House for help, the president -- in essence -- politely advises him to take a crap in his hat and pull it down over his ears.
Feeble worker protests turn to street violence, largely because of the ham-fisted handling of the situation by officious Homeland Security goons unconstitutionally assigned to protect the property of the presidential friend. The labor violence leads to death, protesters are deemed to be terrorists, locals are outraged, their politicians move to secede from the Union, sympathetic regional National Guardsmen find themselves pitted against a display of great federal force, and the media generally botch the story, portraying the aggrieved citizens as domestic terrorists just because the feds say so.
The author told Daily Kos, the excellent political blogger Web site favored by the proletariat, that it's not a stretch to envision Civil War-like divisions in this country if current trends continue:
"In a civil war, all sides believe they are in the right. The real danger we face, as individuals and as a nation, is that we all become so convinced that our own point of view is the correct one that we become unable to listen to anyone else's. It is not an accident that much of the rhetoric I read in blogs, both from the left and right, mirrors in tone and in some content the speeches, newspapers, and pamphlets of the early 1860s, prior to the beginning of the Civil War that killed more than one million Americans."
Something to consider without irony, with the sesquicentennial of our Civil War rapidly approaching. While "Republic" offers a fictional world, Sheehan-Miles told Daily Kos, "perhaps ten years in our future, it is also the world we might one day live in."
Sheehan-Miles, already a good writer, has improved his impressive style in this following book. He can change scenes seamlessly, move characters about in time and place without confusion, and he writes sparse, clean narrative sentences that have powerful verbs and a paucity of adjectives. You care about his characters. As mentioned above, the blogosphere has gone wild over this book already, with postings by writers who have sampled chapters on the author's free podcasts (www.sheehanmiles.com) -- and many bloggers zero in on the favoring-the-rich angle.
One writer -- posting last week as "stonemason" -- notes that rich corporate heads are "fleeing for the hills" and their remote newly built hideouts, both foreign and domestic, "because of the credit bubble and the monster of a government which will take over things once it bursts."
Stonemason accurately observes that under Patriot Acts I and II, "many archaic asset confiscation laws have gone into effect for, of course, anyone the state might deem an enemy, and the rich see things coming." He also notes that rural states such as Montana already host new, ultra-secure compounds for the likes of Donald Trump, Bill Gates and Henry Kissinger, and that American millionaires now comprise about 10 percent of Costa Rica's population.
Pay attention to this new book. It's a book about how rapidly things have changed for us all, about how we live, about our motives, and about the motives of those who govern us. A lot of thought went into it. It might scare you into doing something productive for the nation, and for your future.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | July 3 2007 |