Apparently today is the 75th anniversary of Black Tuesday, the day of the stock market crash of 1929. According to the guy I heard talking on the radio, contrary to latter-day popular imagery of stockbrokers throwing themselves from windows (cf yesterday's note about good stories), no one that day realized what a turning point had been reached; they assumed it was to be simply a market correction, since the market had been running rather hot over the past decade. The whole grim shape of what it would lead to was unseen by all or most as yet.

Through the links at the new medianstrip, I recently discovered Orcinus, the blog of freelance journalist David Neiwert, based in Seattle. He has been writing a striking multipart essay on "Pseudo-Fascism," and the nature of fascism, which is similar to the sort of thing I have recently been wondering if anyone else was thinking about.

Call it Pseudo Fascism. Or, if you like, Fascism Lite. Happy-Face Fascism. Postmodern Fascism. But there is little doubt anymore why the shape of the "conservative movement" in the 21st century is so familiar and disturbing: Its architecture, its entire structure, has morphed into a not-so-faint hologram of 20th-century fascism.

It is not genuine fascism, even though it bears many of the basic traits of that movement. It lacks certain key elements that would make it genuinely so:

-- Its agenda, under the guise of representing mainstream conservatism, is not openly revolutionary.

-- It is not yet a dictatorship.

-- It does not yet rely on physical violence and campaigns of gross intimidation to obtain power and suppress opposition.

-- American democracy has not yet reached the genuine stage of crisis required for full-blown fascism to take root.

Without these facets, the current phenomenon cannot properly be labeled "fascism." But what is so deeply disturbing about the current state of the conservative movement is that it has otherwise plainly adopted not only many of the cosmetic traits of fascism, its larger architecture -- derived from its core impulses -- now almost exactly replicates that by which fascists came to power in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and '30s.

I know it might seem pretty implausible to think of fascism taking hold in this country, but one point he makes early on is: that's part of the problem, that it seems so unlikely -- it seems like something foreign and/or historical, when in fact it is based on certain human tendencies that are universal. A new form in a new country would not use the same tropes as past forms in other places, and so it is less immediately recognizable. Hear him out; it's interesting to think about. (as in, "interesting times".) The last of his seven parts is yet to come, but I definitely recommend catching up on the first six:

Part 1: The Morphing of the Conservative Movement

Part 2: The Architecture of Fascism

Part 3: The Pseudo-Fascist Campaign

Part 4: The Apocalyptic One-Party State

Part 5: Warfare By Other Means

Part 6: Breaking Down the Barriers

[ UPDATE 11/5: Part 7: It Can Happen Here ]

Four days from now, we all (right? you're voting, right?) will exercise our right to choose our leader, with no surer idea of where these choices will take us than the stockbrokers of 1929 had about all their sell orders, 75 years ago.

One tendency I've noticed about life so far, though: nothing ever turns out quite as well as you hope, nor as badly as you fear. Hold on tight, and we'll go on ahead together with our eyes open.

contents of purple tricycle are copyright 2004 carrie lynn king unless otherwise noted.