In this dark comedy the USA has incorporated into a global corporate nation. Sub-divided by a great, brick wall into northern Bluefish and southern Redfish States, AmericA, Inc. is run by President Travis Bash. Perpetually at war, its Supreme Court disbanded and riddled by lobbyists, Bash drafts Bob, a destitute Yale poet, to transform AmericA, Inc.'s corporate culture. Bob's job is to market the bewildering and vulgar culture of this corrupt corporate nation.
Nothing is sacred in corporate America or American culture in this hilarious cautionary tale about a "corpornation" gone berserk in relentless pursuit of profit. AmericA, Inc. rings true in a witty, merciless lampoon of the omniscient intrusion of the savage greed of big business into culture, politics, law, religion and everyday life.
Lentz innovates with an accessible narrative style in stream of voice to bring characters to life by their dialogue in AmericA, Inc.
Soon after George W. Bush was re-elected under extremely suspicious circumstances at polls in US swing-states for a second time, I became alarmed that my country had been usurped in a velvet coup by special corporate interests. It seemed to me that Congress had been bought wholesale by corporations whose lobbyists were dictating laws to legislators. The net effect was that our democracy had disenfranchised the majority of its own people: it was only actually governing for an extremely narrow, wealthy and powerful minority. This truth became evident in legislation repeatedly passed, for example, to benefit oil companies in US energy policy and in the companies which have prospered beyond all reason from endless war. I saw corporate intrusion into the national culture in music, cinema, theatre, journalism and literature in which artistic merit had become sacrificed to create popular sales. I saw the corporation in religion in the rise of the Mega-Church with sanctuaries accommodating many thousands to make rock stars of its pastors many of whom articulate a radically conservative, political agenda. I saw it emerging pervasively in American life and wondered what the premise of the rise of the "corpornation" would mean for America and the fate of democracy. The logical extension of this premise had enormous implications for hundreds of millions of people and it is not an overstatement to say that a corrupt corpornation is a potentially fatal threat to our cherished, democratic way of life: corporations are motivated exclusively by profit and lack virtually any moral sense of direction. So I wrote this novel as cautionary tale: if America and other great democracies continue to follow this same path to become corpornations, then our national decline is almost certainly assured. I hope that this novel sheds new light on how important it is that people, not special corporate interests, genuinely govern within democracies.
