The best case and worst case scenarios...
2030 A.D.: Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam and Tom Metzger's White Aryan Resistance have taken over America and divided the United States between them into racially segregated regimes. When one Fred Hampton Rush Senior is charged with sedition for rebelling against this new order, his sentence is to become a human guinea pig in a cryogenic experiment. Fred Rush Sr. is put into a state of suspended animation and does not awaken until...
2410 A.D.: A time when the world is governed by L.S.D., a Libertarian Socialist Democracy, and Fred is being guided through this utopian future by his direct male descendant, peace officer Captain Huey P. Rush. But as Fred is riding in flying cars and being introduced to aliens, something is happening. Something that could destroy everything mankind has worked so hard for...
A menace from the past threatens the future...
Novel dissects racial extremism in unusual wayReview by Tony Norman, Pittsburgh Gazette
Imagine a future where blacks have been herded into a five-state territory under the rule of the Nation of Islam, while whites are restricted to the remaining 45 and governed by the White Aryan Resistance.
This is the scenario African American writer Saab Lofton introduces in A.D., an intriguing first novel about America's centuries long struggle with social and racial extremisms.
While the scenario is as farfetched as it gets, Lofton cleverly mixes elements of science fiction with social criticism.
After stumbling across an enthusiastic review of Lofton's two year old science fiction novel in a recent issue of the NewYork Press, I searched high and low for it on the shelves of the Big Apple's finest and dustiest bookstores.
Alas, my search came up empty. Still, every clerk I described A.D. to was as intrigued as I was by its premise that the United States could be divided along crude racial meridians.
Some were especially amazed that a black writer could get away with suggesting that a "homeland" found ed on the segregationist principles of Louis Farrakhan would hurl black folks into a Khomeini-style Dark Age faster than you could say "Jackie Robinson."
Admirably, Lofton isn't afraid to make necessary distinctions between a charismatic, but reactionary social/political movement like the Na tion of Islam and truly progressive black politics too sophisticated to base their legitimacy on melanin.
Fortunately, III (Three) Publishing sent me a review copy of Lofton's book so I could see for myself how he navigates the tricky political waters of black cultural nationalism.
From the first page of the introduction in which Lofton weaves his love of "Star Trek," the Black Panther Party and influential MIT linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky into an unlikely, but coherent world view, I was hooked.
Titled "Confessions of a Chomskyian Trekkie," the introduction establishes Lofton's bonafides as an intellectual whose notions of racial and economic justice are equally indebted to science fiction, Orwellian skepticism, criticism of big media and a principled search for Spock's brain deep in the heart of America's body politic.
It makes for heady reading, but is quickly eclipsed by Lofton's summary of the secret history of American reactionary movements and business interests and their collusion with European and domestic fascists in a prologue that sets the scene for A.D.'s chilling first half.
"A.D." covers topics such as Henry Ford's financial sponsorship of the Nazis in the '20s, Malcolm X's assassination and Hitler's ownership of 8,960 acres in Colorado. But nothing startles quite as much as the curious, but true, history of cooperation between Klan leaders and the leader ship of the Black Muslims.
Lofton paints the Klan and the Nation of Islam as ideological soul mates. To do so he points to strange jamborees in which Back to Africa nationalist Marcus Garvey meets Imperial Wizard Ed Young Clarke, Elijah Muhammad utilizes the legal services of Klansman James Venable and Malcolm X meets with a Klansman known as "Old Six."
Using these odd moments as a launching pad, Lofton constructs an alternative future in which the U.S. government succumbs to nuclear blackmail by homegrown hate mongers of different racial stripes working together.
"A.D.," which was written years be fore Farrakhan's now routine tours of militant Islamic states and brutal military regimes "outed" him as a cheer leader for fascists of color, exposes disturbing points of agreement between white nativists and their black counterparts.
Because "A.D." is one of the most exciting books to emerge from a young black writer in years, its obscurity is all the more shameful. Though conceptually daring and very astute about the amorality of "bootstrap capitalism, "A.D. is saddled with more than its share of stylistic inanities, useless exposition and nearly unforgivable flights of excessive moralizing. In many ways, it reads like the first draft of a book destined to become an underground classic.
Still, I wouldn't be surprised if "A.D." eventually becomes required reading for fairly hip university political science courses. Its concerns about the intersection of capitalism, racism and demagoguery stick with you a lot longer than newspapers do.
