Stevie Joins the Establishment

Stephen King kicks the Sixties to the curb because—Trump!

When he wrote this one, the Authorities weren’t the heroes of the piece…

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I’ve been a fan—latterly a critical fan—of Stephen King since reading Carrie, way back in the Seventies. That novel, for all its rookie flaws, pressed the nerve of adolescent insecurity and dread that runs along the halls of the American high school. In the background of its blood-spattered horrors was an all-too-plausible scenario of persecution and retribution: Columbine with paranormal features.

King can certainly not be called a great writer; with occasional exceptions his prose is no more than serviceable and sometimes it staggers. But he is—and this is what made him a huge popular success—a great storyteller. He gets you involved, he carries you along, his better books are compulsive page turners. And he established his brand by touching again and again on certain themes that readers have come to associate with A Novel by Stephen King.

One of those themes is Maine, his native state. In King’s telling, Maine is the American Oz, a frontier territory where prosaic reality shares the land with monsters and magic. Jerusalem’s Lot is on his map of Maine, so is Derry, so is Castle Rock. He breaks away from time to time—for a stay at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado or at Duma Key in Florida, or in Las Vegas during the mayoralty of the Dark Man. But King always returns to Maine. Those roots strike deep.

Another of King’s themes derives from the countercultural paranoia of the Sixties, a toxin that he imbibed as a teenager and a young man. But it must be said that he turned that poison to account as a writer. In the novels and stories of his early and middle period, that radical distrust of authority—economic, political, social, cultural, intellectual—recurs again and again. His lifelong devotion to the music of that period—rock when it really rocked—reflects the countercultural influences that remained with him down the years and decades.

In The Stand, (1978) King characterized Randall Flagg—the Dark Man, the Hardcase, the Walkin’ Dude—as “the last magician of rational thought.” That was no throwaway line. Captain Trips, the superflu that killed ninety-nine percent of the world’s population, was the product of rational scientific thought, developed by government scientists in a secret government lab. When the monstrous bug was accidentally released, the government suppressed the news for as long as it could, using brute military power to prevent the facts from coming out. All this happened in America—or in Amerikka, to use the counterculture’s preferred spelling. That’s what you get, King shrugs, for putting your trust in the Authorities.

Countercultural paranoia crops up again and again in King’s work: The Long Walk, The Running Man, The Dead Zone and more. In Firestarter, Charlie McGee’s frightening paranormal control over combustion is the product of an experimental drug trial conducted by a shadowy government agency, in which her parents participated. Now that agency, the Shop, is hell-bent on tracking Charlie down, gaining custody of her, and exploiting her power for its own nefarious purposes. Sprinkled throughout King’s novels and stories are mordant references to the wonderful people who gave us nerve gas and bioweapons and the Bomb. Fear and loathing of the Authorities: It’s always been bubbling up from the subterranean caverns of his imagination.

Then something changed.

Anyone who follows Stephen King on Twitter will be aware that he’s no fan of Donald J. Trump; indeed, he reviles the former president in the ugliest possible terms. This itself is nothing special. Plenty of progressively minded people get their jollies by taking shots at Trump. And given their target’s crudity, mendacity, and megalomania, few such shots, however ugly, can be characterized as cheap. As ye sow, so shall ye reap, Mr. MAGA.

Now King is a progressive, progressives like to feel good about themselves, and nothing works better in that regard than comparing oneself to Donald Trump. Also, it relieves one of the need for critical thinking: If Trump said it, then it must be wrong. These tendencies yielded their maximum effect in 2020, the final full year of Trump’s presidency, thanks partly to the ravages of the pandemic and partly to a chaotic presidential election.

The pandemic, exacerbated by Trump’s erratic behavior, polarized the country. In the eyes of progressives, this polarization was between themselves (dedicated to facts, logic and science) and Deplorable America (addicted to paranoia and lunatic conspiracy theories). Conveniently enough this polarization also separated people who hated Trump from people who loved him—or so it seemed. In reality, the situation was more complicated than that. People who questioned the efficacy of masking or the wisdom of closing down public schools for a year or more were not necessarily wearing red MAGA hats. But that’s how the issue was framed.

And all this has had an interesting effect on Stephen King, as I noticed while reading the third installment of the Gwendy Trilogy.

Briefly to summarize, this trilogy consists of a novella (Gwendy’s Button Box) and two short novels, Gwendy’s Magic Feather and Gwendy’s Final Task). The first and third installments King wrote in collaboration with Richard Chizmar; the second installment Chizmar wrote alone. They tell the tale of Gwendy Peterson, whom the reader first meets when she’s a girl of twelve, and of the sinister button box confided to her care by a mysterious stranger. The box embodies dark magic, and the task of its custodian is to keep that magic in check, lest the world be destroyed.

I’m not concerned here with the series’ literary merit, but with certain features of Gwendy’s Final Task, which was published just last month. When we meet Gwendy in its pages, she’s a sixty-four-year-old woman who has had successful literary and political careers. In 2020, she’s running as a Democrat for the US Senate—in Maine, you will not be surprised to learn—as the pandemic flares up. Gwendy had retired from politics but was enticed to run for the Senate because the incumbent is a sinister, indeed repulsive, MAGA Republican who wants to clear-cut Maine’s forests and restore to the state its long-departed, highly polluting textile mills.

In our world of reality, this was a moment when all right-thinking—which is to say progressive—people were wringing their hands over the state of the nation and their fears for its future. King and Chizmar batten on that. The Democratic political operative who wants Gwendy to reenter politics pleads with her: “People are turning away from women’s rights, from science, from the very notion of equality. They’re turning away from truth. Somebody needs to stand up and make them look at all the stuff it’s easier and more comfortable not to believe in.”

Reading on, we soon find out what the truth is supposed to be. Masks and social distancing and lockdowns work, and if you don’t believe that you’re complicit in murder. If you think that natural immunity is a thing, you’re a crazy person. Oh, and the pandemic happened because somebody bought a bat from a wet market in Wuhan, China, and ate it. So if you claim that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak, you’re a racist. Science proves all this!

Not only is the political background to Gwendy’s Last Task a solid wall of progressive boilerplate—it’s a billet-doux from the authors to the Authorities.

And here’s the thing: These are the same Authorities whom the author of The Stand drafted to destroy the world back in 1978. Captain Trips was a bioweapon, remember, cooked up in a secret American lab under the Mojave Desert by American scientists working for the American government. But oops, somehow it leaked out and killed most of the world’s population! There’s no doubt that King really believed such a thing could happen—the assumption that Authorities are not only wicked but incompetent has always been a staple of his fiction. Fast forward to 2022, however, and the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic might have been caused by a lab leak in China is dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory.

 Who but Donald J. Trump could have seduced King from away from the counterculture, to stand with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Don Lemon and the ladies of The View in their defense of Reason that wasn’t reasonable, Logic that didn’t make sense, Facts that were imaginary, and Science that did not compute? That’s dark magic indeed! He certainly didn’t do it for the money—King’s got plenty of that. But no matter how rich one might be, the approval of the elites is something that can’t be purchased with filthy lucre. You have pay up in the currency of goodthink—to borrow a word coined by another writer of note. And the binary imperative embodied in Stephen King’s hatred of Donald Trump made it easy for him to do that.