The Real Amerika
Stein, Benjamin J.
Benjamin J. Stein THE REAL AMERIKA The story that ABC bought but didn't sell. Tn the summer of 1980, while I lived .1 in Aspen, Colorado I wrote a treatment for a book. It was to be a novel...
...Against all odds, Paglin kills McClure on national television and then disappears into the mountains for his final stand, along with Scull's army, against the forces of Red America...
...The "extremely aggressive" part is a compliment in the newspaper business...
...If he ever allowed it to exist outside his mind, he would have to act, and that would lead to the cellars of the Ministry of Friendship...
...After furious negotiations, a deal was hammered out...
...The Bill of Rights has been abolished...
...There is no Constitution...
...Work, keeping himself buttoned down, and never questioning the new order of things in Red America is the way of life for Franklin Delano Paglin and for everyone else who wants to stay alive and out of the dreaded camps of the Directorate of Voluntary Labor of the Ministry of Equality or of the Ministry of Environmental Protection...
...It has abolished all restrictions on water and air pollution in order to keep industrial production at a maximum to reimburse the comrades of the Soviet Union for their sacrifices during the period when the United States imposed an arms race upon the Soviet people...
...She is twenty years old, beautiful, her strong and alluring body kept only partially hidden under the baggy uniforms of the Ministry of Equality, Feed Grains Division, and Frank Paglin cannot control falling into a furious affair with her...
...Although the diligent efforts of the Ministry of Friendship have reduced the threat to the peace from those organizations to almost nothing, there are still headlines in every morning's People's Post about the latest atrocities of the rebels, who operate under the leadership of the leading enemy of peace in the entire world, David Scull, whose leering, cruel face looks down on every hallway in Red America, above the legend: The Enemy of Peace...
...The Ministry of Environmental Protection has enforced the cutting down of almost the entire redwood forest of northern California and southern Oregon to be shipped to the Soviet Union as reparation for the provocations which the United States directed at the USSR prior to the establishment of the Workers and Farmers Republic of America...
...They are taken to the headquarters of David Scull, in New York City itself, an area which no one will enter because of the radiation...
...I kept it handy in my files...
...In his most secret thoughts, he knows that the new socialist, peace-loving society is cruel, vengeful, violent, and madly exploitative...
...Frank Paglin learns how men and women who had been thought to be leading citizens in the old America worked in a concerted group with high officials of the government, especially the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department, to destroy America...
...When Paglin offers to help, he falls into the hands of the "Investigations Bureau" of the Ministry of Friendship and sees from the inside what happens to Americans who do not fall unquestioningly into the lockstep of Red America...
...There was a notice from the Neighborhood Committee for Peace and Justice telling him that they were being re-assigned to new roles in the society and had to be reeducated...
...Herbert Paglin and the others had been led to confess that in the guise of "freedom of expression" they had been trying to stir up war fever between the U.S...
...In one of the daring acts of the guer- rillas of David Scull, both Frank Paglin and Mary Cruz are rescued while being shipped to the television studio/courtroom...
...Paglin, thirty-two, has not seen his parents since he was twenty years old, back in 1990, when he returned from a camping trip in West Virginia to find that his parents were gone from the house they had lived in for thirty years...
...But that is only the beginning of Frank Paglin's odyssey...
...Since clothing is strictly rationed and there is no longer such a product as deodorant, the smell in the Division of Feed Grains, Statistical Estimation Agency, Section Five, is often nauseating...
...The fall of 1983 was the time when there was great excitement about the ABC TV Movie, "The Day After:" To me, that movie showed nuclear war, clearly a disaster of unparalleled scope, but it showed no context for why we have nuclear weapons...
...as it was once called) and the USSR...
...There is hushed debate about whether the army of David Scull even exists, but merely to question it is an offense against the peace and punishable by death...
...In the fall of 1983, I was—as I still am—a columnist for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner...
...My editor was a bright, extremely aggressive woman named Mary Ann Dolan...
...For Frank Paglin, the past does not exist...
...That was your idea...
...I knew Brandon Stoddard by reputation and through an occasional social contact...
...The Ministry of Equality makes certain that Americans are always hungry by constantly shrinking rations for every kind of food except potatoes and a synthetic beer...
...Brandon smiled and nodded...
...His brother appears one night after gunfire in the capital, begging for help to escape back to David Scull's guerrillas in the Allegheny Mountains...
...I've got someone else in mind...
...Summary executions for breaches of any rules, written or implicit, take place at the rate of one hundred per night in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago...
...The Ministry of Communication explained that their chips could be stolen and used for armaments by the revanchist elements that still operate in some areas of the nation...
...Events superseded this effort, particularly my writing my book 'Ludes...
...He wants to stay out of trouble and die in bed...
...From there, after a winter of torture such as he could never have imagined, he escapes, only to be recaptured and sent to the cellars of the Ministry of Friendship for re-education and appearance on television as an enemy of peace...
...There they decide to make a gesture against the horror of Red America by joining an assassination kamikaze force against Norman McClure, who played a key part in the conspiracy which led to the downfall of free America...
...You're right," he said...
...allies, which was the beginning of Red America, but he discusses it only with his "analyst" and then never speaks the truth...
...He said, "Oh, we're going to make that...
...About four weeks later, I had a meeting with Brandon about a story of mine about mistresses ABC had bought...
...At the dinner, I repeated what I had said in my column about the need for a show about what America could be like under Soviet rule...
...Pocket calculators have been banned...
...F rank Paglin has become a member of the Workers and Farmers Party of America, as any young bureaucrat who wants to keep his job has done...
...But we are already doomed," Scull explains, "so we hide here...
...Brandon said he agreed with me and would think about it...
...Missing and Coming Home are two favorites of the Ministry of Cultural Enrichment, whose general tasks are the suppression and destruction of all cultural artifacts made before the era of Red America except those which dared to portray the capitalist society for what it was...
...I said, "Well, just a minute...
...It is the year 2002 in Red America...
...Mary Cruz is the mistress of the Minister of Equality, Raymond Chow, and through his indiscretions, she has learned everything worth knowing about how America was turned over to the control of the Soviet Union with hardly a shot being fired beyond the incineration of New York City "as an example...
...I sent him the colBenjamin J. Stein is a writer and producer living in Hollywood, California...
...Also one year before at the request of an ABC publicist, I had lunch with Brandon and later wrote a short profile about him for the Washington Post...
...Air-conditioning was a way for the privileged exploiting classes to insulate themselves from the true condition of the workers...
...In a display of bureaucratic incompetence which had become commonplace, Frank Paglin's file was lost...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 17 of Voluntary Labor, also known in whispers as the Gulag...
...Assembly by more than four unrelated persons is illegal without prior permission from the Ministry of Friendship...
...Membership (awarded on a provisional basis) has allowed Frank Paglin to have thirty grams of real coffee per week instead of the chicory which is sold to the general population...
...In addition, in order to maintain peace and comradely relations within the Workers and Farmers Republic of America, all telephone calls are recorded...
...An unsanctioned sexual connection by a Party member can be and is routinely punished by fifteen years of hard labor in the Directorate Another twenty million are in the American Gulag, which stretches across America from the forests of Maine to the cotton fields of Mississippi and from the prairies of Oklahoma to the mosquito-infested, infernally desolate tundra of Central Alaska...
...In his office, which is simply a cardboard walled cubicle, there are no windows...
...In those ghastly cellars, he meets his mother, who has been a prisoner in the Gulag and in the cellars for twelve years, who has been a prostitute for criminals in the Alaskan Gulag, who has been raped, beaten, and drugged so often that she no longer knows her own son...
...It was destroyed by six Soviet hundred-megaton bombs as a demonstration of-what the United States could expect if it resisted further implementation of the "Treaty of Perpetual Peace and Friendship" between the United States of America and Soviet Russia...
...The execution of the staffs of the New Yorker and CBS News was the Ministry of Equality's way of demonstrating that it intended a true decapitation of the former society...
...He learns that revered men and women of the old society were in fact working for the Committee for State Security (KGB) for decades before the triumph of Red America...
...There was every chance that a different person was executed instead, to keep up the reputation for vigilance of the neighborhood committee...
...Frank Paglin does not discuss it...
...Membership has also allowed Frank Paglin to see occasional movies in special Party theaters...
...umn, which he had already seen, as well as the treatment for the book In Red-America...
...We'll involve you in some way" "How about as writer of the script...
...He does not want to be the featured player on a Ministry of Friendship televised trial...
...The Ministry of Communications makes certain that those Americans 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 who have survived are completely cut off from one another...
...In the confrontation between Paglin and McClure, before the Friendship Police find them, we learn just what would have made McClure and his colleagues so hate the United States that they would conspire to turn it into a police state, and why the very most privileged persons in the formerly free society were often the easiest to convert to the struggle for a Red America...
...His grandfather, who had been a famous journalist in the 1960s, had been executed after a lengthy show trial in which he sat in a dock along with people whom Frank Paglin barely remembered, such as John Chancellor and William Safire...
...The Ministry of Friendship plans to put them both on trial as enemies of peace and renegades against the Ministry of Family Life...
...Those included almost all lawyers, doctors, accountants, university teachers, businessmen from anything larger than an auto repair shop, and so-called intellectuals of whatever political coloration...
...McClure had used his leverage as a minister of one of America's most prestigious churches, the National Cathedral, to destroy America's ability to remain free and independent...
...Ventilation is through a ceiling fan in the summer and winter...
...I was also deprived of the credit I was promised and given money instead, a bargain of which I am not proud, but which also has a context which requires explanation at a future date...
...At that time, I asked him what he was doing with In Red America...
...Through another bureaucratic error, Paglin is shipped to a Gulag camp instead of being executed...
...Twelve million persons have disappeared into mass graves in the Utah desert and the Louisiana swamps...
...These sessions have gotten down to a routine in which Paglin is careful always to denounce only those already arrested or, to his secret delight, those who are the most servile and fanatical followers of the WFPA...
...There is no more New York City...
...The United States government has now been divided into several large ministries, each one overseen down to the smallest level by Soviet officials from the Committee for State Security (KGB...
...Frank Paglin lives in a one-room apartment off DuPont Circle, as it was formerly called, now called "Just Revenge of the Workers Circle...
...In twice-weekly sessions, Frank Paglin is obliged to tell his "analyst" everything he has seen or heard or even thought about which might touch upon the maintenance of the America that we now know as Red America...
...I also took Brandon Stoddard and Mary Ann Dolan to Morton's restaurant for a dinner to mark their engagement...
...After another session of "re-education," Paglin is arraigned along with his lover Mary M. Cruz, who has avoided execution because of her connection with Raymond Chow, although she has been tortured and drugged...
...This man, Paul Hyman, is not a medical doctor, but an interrogator, an employee of the Ministry of Friendship (WFPA Division...
...The occupying "Soviet Peace Army" is empowered to arrest any American on any grounds it deems proper...
...Frank Paglin recalls, but only barely, that his family once lived in an entire house, separated from other houses, in which a family had total privacy...
...The real story of `Mmerika" and how it became the nightmare it was to become will have to wait for a later date, when time has put some distance between me and the people who hurt me and my concept so badly...
...They must keep their feelings hidden, since all romantic liaisons must be cleared in advance by the Ministry of Family Life, whose main function is gradually to eliminate all romantic feeling from the ordinary citizen's life so as better to focus attention on the needs of the Workers and Farmers Party of America to build a permanent structure of peace and socialism...
...LI rank Paglin wants to live...
...In one such building, in the Agency for Statistical Estimation of the Feed Grains Division of the Ministry of Equality, Franklin Delano Paglin labors at a steel gray desk into the night adding up crop estimates for the states of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware...
...Membership in the Party has also subjected Frank Paglin to the necessity for frequent sessions with his Party "analyst...
...Not as producer either...
...Before the WFPA had explained that the grouping of insane family members in "private" (the word had come to be synonymous with "criminal") housing was a dreaded way of provoking the Soviet ally and stirring up revanchist fantasies...
...It was to be a novel called In Red America, the title playing off one of my favorite stage play titles, In White America...
...He does not want ever to see the cellar rooms of the Ministry of Friendship...
...For the officials of the Workers and Farmers Party of America (WFPA), which had supplanted all other parties, there are special stores and the mansions, homes, and yachts of the long dead members of the anti-peace, exploiting, parasitical classes...
...Frank Paglin always believed that his father had also been shot, and that he himself had escaped being shot only because the neighborhood committee had already been purged twice before he got out of jail...
...In Washington, D.C., the Washington Monument has been demolished, as have the White House and the Capitol...
...As you will see, the story borrows heavily, and intentionally, from 1984...
...If thoughts come into his mind about his mother and father, or about his brother, who was supposedly with the last United States Army group that was tracked down and annihilated outside Denver by the selfless allies of the Red Army in 1993, he shares them with no one...
...For the meantime, after the dealwas made, I was assiduously and purposefully kept away from the man who wrote, produced, and directed the miniseries, `Mmerika...
...He compares his life in 2002 with the life he remembers from his childhood, before the European crisis that led to the eternal treaty of peace and friendship which led directly into supposed mutual disarmament and the end of the arms race, which in turn led to Soviet Peace Monitors and their U.S...
...He asked me to send him any material about it...
...They were all hanged on nationwide television in Eternal Peace Square, which was once the Ellipse, with spectators watching from the ruins of the Jefferson Memorial...
...At about that time, she became engaged to Brandon Stoddard, the head of ABC movies...
...There is no long distance telephone service and no mail service at all except for the mailing of communications from the WFPA...
...The routine changes dramatically when Mary Margaret Cruz enters Frank Paglin's life...
...I wrote an article for the Herald-Examiner about what we are defending America against...
...He does hiswork with his abacus, thinks about whether there really are bands of rebels trying to restore the old capitalist, antidemocratic society, and keeps his mouth shut...
...The Ministry of Friendship enforces the occupation by summary executions, mass deportations, endless show trials of Americans who conspired against peace, and unspeakable torture of random individuals, selected to keep the populace terrified...
...There is no air-conditioning in the summer...
...But we'll make sure you get some money and some credit...
...The last President, Walter Mondale, was executed by a firing squad of the occupying Red Army back in 1990...
...Frank Paglin is repeatedly obliged to denounce his co-workers, to recall the horrible days of capitalist America for the names of anti-Soviet, war-mongering revanchists who might have escaped detection, and to suggest ways and means of keeping even tighter control on the society through the tireless sacrifices of the Ministry of Friendship...
...Calculations are done with abacuses...
...No way" Brandon said...
...Through his adventure with Mary Margaret Cruz, Frank Paglin begins to learn about the real nature of the WFPA and how a free, prosperous, happy America came to be the vast prison known as Red America...
...That was my idea...
...Mary Cruz dies, and Frank Paglin must fight on alone, knowing that he is dying of radiation sickness, that the struggle is hopeless, and that McClure has told him that his own father was one of the main leaders of the plot to bring about a Red America...
...In the meantime, here is the original treatment I wrote for In Red America...
...Paglin was himself arrested and imprisoned for two months when he inquired about their whereabouts...
...Another twenty million are in the American Gulag, which stretches across America from the forests of Maine to the cotton fields of Mississippi and from the prairies of Oklahoma to the mosquito-infested,infernally desolate tundra of Central Alaska...
...Of course, that was a long time ago...
...Instead, in endless rows of hastily constructed, quonset hut-like buildings, the bureaucrats of the various ministries toil to bring the new order to America...
...Movies about sports and about the repressiveness of the previous regime are particularly favored...
...I sent it to a few publishers, one of whom made an offer to publish it if I wrote it...
Vol. 20 • May 1987 • No. 5
