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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
It Can't Happen Here
by Sinclair Lewis
Chapter 11
When I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used to tell me, "Buzz, you're the thickest-headed dunce in school." But I noticed that she told me this a whole lot oftener than she used to tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to be the most talked-about scholar in the whole township. The United States Senate isn't so different, and I want to thank a lot of stuffed shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly.
Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.
But there were certain of the Heathen who did not heed1 those heralds2 Prang and Windrip and Haik and Dr. Macgoblin.
Walt Trowbridge conducted his campaign as placidly3 as though he were certain to win. He did not spare himself, but he did not moan over the Forgotten Men (he'd been one himself, as a youngster, and didn't think it was so bad!) nor become hysterical4 at a private bar in a scarlet-and-silver special tram. Quietly, steadfastly5, speaking on the radio and in a few great halls, he explained that he did advocate an enormously improved distribution of wealth, but that it must be achieved by steady digging and not by dynamite6 that would destroy more than it excavated7. He wasn't particularly thrilling. Economics rarely are, except when they have been dramatized by a Bishop8, staged and lighted by a Sarason, and passionately9 played by a Buzz Windrip with rapier and blue satin tights.
For the campaign the Communists had brightly brought out their sacrificial candidates--in fact, all seven of the current Communist parties had. Since, if they all stuck together, they might entice10 900,000 votes, they had avoided such bourgeois11 grossness by enthusiastic schisms12, and their creeds13 now included: The Party, the Majority Party, the Leftist Party, the Trotzky Party, the Christian14 Communist Party, the Workers' Party, and, less baldly named, something called the American Nationalist Patriotic15 Cooperative Fabian Post-Marxian Communist Party--it sounded like the names of royalty16 but was otherwise dissimilar.
But these radical17 excursions were not very significant compared with the new Jeffersonian Party, suddenly fathered by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Forty-eight hours after the nomination18 of Windrip at Cleveland, President Roosevelt had issued his defiance19.
Senator Windrip, he asserted, had been chosen "not by the brains and hearts of genuine Democrats21 but by their temporarily crazed emotions." He would no more support Windrip because he claimed to be a Democrat20 than he would support Jimmy Walker.
Yet, he said, he could not vote for the Republican Party, the "party of intrenched special privilege," however much, in the past three years, he had appreciated the loyalty22, the honesty, the intelligence of Senator Walt Trowbridge.
Roosevelt made it clear that his Jeffersonian or True Democratic faction23 was not a "third party" in the sense that it was to be permanent. It was to vanish as soon as honest and coolly thinking men got control again of the old organization. Buzz Windrip aroused mirth by dubbing24 it the "Bull Mouse Party," but President Roosevelt was joined by almost all the liberal members of Congress, Democratic or Republican, who had not followed Walt Trowbridge; by Norman Thomas and the Socialists25 who had not turned Communist; by Governors Floyd Olson and Olin Johnston; and by Mayor La Guardia.
The conspicuous26 fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate27 hungered for frisky28 emotions, for the peppery sensations associated, usually, not with monetary29 systems and taxation30 rates but with baptism by immersion31 in the creek32, young love under the elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the full moon, fear of death when an automobile33 teeters above a canyon34, thirst in a desert and quenching35 it with spring water--all the primitive36 sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz Windrip.
Far from the hot-lighted ballrooms37 where all these crimson-tuniced bandmasters shrillsquabbled as to which should lead for the moment the tremendous spiritual jazz, far off in the cool hills a little man named Doremus Jessup, who wasn't even a bass38 drummer but only a citizen editor, wondered in confusion what he should do to be saved.
He wanted to follow Roosevelt and the Jeffersonian Party--partly for admiration39 of the man; partly for the pleasure of shocking the ingrown Republicanism of Vermont. But he could not believe that the Jeffersonians would have a chance; he did believe that, for all the mothball odor of many of his associates, Walt Trowbridge was a valiant40 and competent man; and night and day Doremus bounced up and down Beulah Valley campaigning for Trowbridge.
Out of his very confusion there came into his writing a desperate sureness which surprised accustomed readers of the Informer. For once he was not amused and tolerant. Though he never said anything worse of the Jeffersonian Party than that it was ahead of its times, in both editorials and news stories he went after Buzz Windrip and his gang with whips, turpentine, and scandal.
In person, he was into and out of shops and houses all morning long, arguing with voters, getting miniature interviews.
He had expected that traditionally Republican Vermont would give him too drearily41 easy a task in preaching Trowbridge. What he found was a dismaying preference for the theoretically Democratic Buzz Windrip. And that preference, Doremus perceived, wasn't even a pathetic trust in Windrip's promises of Utopian bliss42 for everyone in general. It was a trust in increased cash for the voter himself, and for his family, very much in particular.
Most of them had, among all the factors in the campaign, noticed only what they regarded as Windrip's humor, and three planks43 in his platform: Five, which promised to increase taxes on the rich; Ten, which condemned44 the Negroes--since nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down; and, especially, Eleven, which announced, or seemed to announce, that the average toiler46 would immediately receive $5000 a year. (And ever-so-many railway-station debaters explained that it would really be $10,000. Why, they were going to have every cent offered by Dr. Townsend, plus everything planned by the late Huey Long, Upton Sinclair, and the Utopians, all put together!)
So beatifically47 did hundreds of old people in Beulah Valley believe this that they smilingly trotted48 into Raymond Pridewell's hardware store, to order new kitchen stoves and aluminum49 sauce pans and complete bathroom furnishings, to be paid for on the day after inauguration50. Mr. Pridewell, a cobwebbed old Henry Cabot Lodge51 Republican, lost half his trade by chasing out these happy heirs to fabulous52 estates, but they went on dreaming, and Doremus, nagging53 at them, discovered that mere54 figures are defenseless against a dream . . . even a dream of new Plymouths and unlimited55 cans of sausages and motion-picture cameras and the prospect56 of never having to arise till 7:30 A.M.
Thus answered Alfred Tizra, "Snake" Tizra, friend to Doremus's handyman, Shad Ledue. Snake was a steel-tough truck-driver and taxi-owner who had served sentences for assault and for transporting bootleg liquor. He had once made a living catching57 rattlesnakes and copperheads in southern New England. Under President Windrip, Snake jeeringly58 assured Doremus, he would have enough money to start a chain of roadhouses in all the dry communities in Vermont.
Ed Howland, one of the lesser59 Fort Beulah grocers, and Charley Betts, furniture and undertaking60, while they were dead against anyone getting groceries, furniture, or even undertaking on Windrip credit, were all for the population's having credit on other wares61.
Aras Dilley, a squatter62 dairy farmer living with a toothless wife and seven slattern children in a tilted63 and unscrubbed cabin way up on Mount Terror, snarled64 at Doremus--who had often taken food baskets and boxes of shotgun shells and masses of cigarettes to Aras--"Well, want to tell you, when Mr. Windrip gets in, we farmers are going to fix our own prices on our crops, and not you smart city fellows!"
Doremus could not blame him. While Buck65 Titus, at fifty, looked thirty-odd, Aras, at thirty-four, looked fifty.
Lorinda Pike's singularly unpleasant partner in the Beulah Valley Tavern66, one Mr. Nipper, whom she hoped soon to lose, combined boasting how rich he was with gloating how much more he was going to get under Windrip. "Professor" Staubmeyer quoted nice things Windrip had said about higher pay for teachers. Louis Rotenstern, to prove that his heart, at least, was not Jewish, became more lyric67 than any of them. And even Frank Tasbrough of the quarries68, Medary Cole of the grist mill and real-estate holdings, R. C. Crowley of the bank, who presumably were not tickled69 by projects of higher income taxes, smiled pussy-cattishly and hinted that Windrip was a "lot sounder fellow" than people knew.
But no one in Fort Beulah was a more active crusader for Buzz Windrip than Shad Ledue.
Doremus had known that Shad possessed45 talent for argument and for display; that he had once persuaded old Mr. Pridewell to trust him for a .22 rifle, value twenty-three dollars; that, removed from the sphere of coal bins70 and grass-stained overalls71, he had once sung "Rollicky Bill the Sailor" at a smoker72 of the Ancient and Independent Order of Rams73; and that he had enough memory to be able to quote, as his own profound opinions, the editorials in the Hearst newspapers. Yet even knowing all this equipment for a political career, an equipment not much short of Buzz Windrip's, Doremus was surprised to find Shad soap-boxing for Windrip among the quarry-workers, then actually as chairman of a rally in Oddfellows' Hall. Shad spoke74 little, but with brutal75 taunting76 of the believers in Trowbridge and Roosevelt.
At meetings where he did not speak, Shad was an incomparable bouncer, and in that valued capacity he was summoned to Windrip rallies as far away as Burlington. It was he who, in a militia77 uniform, handsomely riding a large white plow-horse, led the final Windrip parade in Rutland . . . and substantial men of affairs, even dry-goods jobbers78, fondly called him "Shad."
Doremus was amazed, felt a little apologetic over his failure to have appreciated this new-found paragon79, as he sat in American Legion Hall and heard Shad bellowing80: "I don't pretend to be anything but a plain working-stiff, but there's forty million workers like me, and we know that Senator Windrip is the first statesman in years that thinks of what guys like us need before he thinks one doggone thing about politics. Come on, you bozos! The swell81 folks tell you to not be selfish! Walt Trowbridge tells you to not be selfish! Well, be selfish, and vote for the one man that's willing to give you something--give you something!--and not just grab off every cent and every hour of work that he can get!"
Sissy Jessup sat on the running board of her coupe (hers by squatter's right), with Julian Falck, up from Amherst for the week-end, and Malcolm Tasbrough wedged in on either side of her.
"Oh nuts, let's quit talking politics. Windrip's going to be elected, so why waste time yodeling when we could drive down to the river and have a swim," complained Malcolm.
"He's not going to win without our putting up a tough scrap83 against him. I'm going to talk to the high-school alumni this evening--about how they got to tell their parents to vote for either Trowbridge or Roosevelt," snapped Julian Falck.
"Haa, haa, haa! And of course the parents will be tickled to death to do whatever you tell 'em, Yulian! You college men certainly are the goods! Besides--Want to be serious about this fool business?" Malcolm had the insolent84 self-assurance of beef, slick black hair, and a large car of his own; he was the perfect leader of Black Shirts, and he looked contemptuously on Julian who, though a year older, was pale and thinnish. "Matter of fact, it'll be a good thing to have Buzz. He'll put a damn quick stop to all this radicalism--all this free speech and libel of our most fundamental institutions--"
"Boston American; last Tuesday; page eight," murmured Sissy.
"--and no wonder you're scared of him, Yulian! He sure will drag some of your favorite Amherst anarchist85 profs off to the hoosegow, and maybe you too, Comrade!"
The two young men looked at each other with slow fury. Sissy quieted them by raging, "Freavensake! Will you two heels quit scrapping86? . . . Oh, my dears, this beastly election! Beastly! Seems as if it's breaking up every town, every home. . . . My poor Dad! Doremus is just about all in!"
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1
heed
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| v.注意，留意；n.注意，留心 | |
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heralds
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| n.使者( herald的名词复数 )；预报者；预兆；传令官v.预示( herald的第三人称单数 )；宣布（好或重要） | |
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placidly
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| adv.平稳地，平静地 | |
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hysterical
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| adj.情绪异常激动的，歇斯底里般的 | |
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steadfastly
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| adv.踏实地，不变地；岿然；坚定不渝 | |
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dynamite
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| n./vt.(用)炸药(爆破) | |
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excavated
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| v.挖掘( excavate的过去式和过去分词 )；开凿；挖出；发掘 | |
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bishop
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| n.主教，（国际象棋）象 | |
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passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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entice
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| v.诱骗，引诱，怂恿 | |
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bourgeois
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| adj./n.追求物质享受的(人)；中产阶级分子 | |
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schisms
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| n.教会分立，分裂( schism的名词复数 ) | |
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creeds
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| （尤指宗教）信条，教条( creed的名词复数 ) | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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royalty
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| n.皇家，皇族 | |
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radical
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| n.激进份子，原子团，根号；adj.根本的，激进的，彻底的 | |
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nomination
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| n.提名，任命，提名权 | |
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defiance
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| n.挑战，挑衅，蔑视，违抗 | |
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democrat
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| n.民主主义者，民主人士；民主党党员 | |
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democrats
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| n.民主主义者，民主人士( democrat的名词复数 ) | |
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loyalty
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| n.忠诚，忠心 | |
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faction
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| n.宗派，小集团；派别；派系斗争 | |
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dubbing
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| n.配音v.给…起绰号( dub的现在分词 )；把…称为；配音；复制 | |
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socialists
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| 社会主义者( socialist的名词复数 ) | |
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conspicuous
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| adj.明眼的，惹人注目的；炫耀的，摆阔气的 | |
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electorate
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| n.全体选民；选区 | |
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frisky
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| adj.活泼的，欢闹的；n.活泼，闹着玩；adv.活泼地，闹着玩地 | |
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monetary
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| adj.货币的，钱的；通货的；金融的；财政的 | |
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taxation
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| n.征税，税收，税金 | |
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immersion
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| n.沉浸；专心 | |
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creek
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| n.小溪，小河，小湾 | |
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automobile
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| n.汽车，机动车 | |
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canyon
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| n.峡谷，溪谷 | |
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quenching
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| 淬火，熄 | |
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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ballrooms
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| n.舞厅( ballroom的名词复数 ) | |
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bass
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| n.男低音(歌手)；低音乐器；低音大提琴 | |
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admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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valiant
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| adj.勇敢的，英勇的；n.勇士，勇敢的人 | |
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drearily
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| 沉寂地，厌倦地，可怕地 | |
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bliss
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| n.狂喜，福佑，天赐的福 | |
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planks
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| （厚）木板( plank的名词复数 )； 政纲条目，政策要点 | |
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condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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toiler
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| 辛劳者，勤劳者 | |
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beatifically
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| adj. 祝福的, 幸福的, 快乐的, 慈祥的 | |
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trotted
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| 小跑，急走( trot的过去分词 )； 匆匆忙忙地走 | |
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aluminum
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| n.(aluminium)铝 | |
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50
inauguration
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| n.开幕、就职典礼 | |
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51
lodge
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| v.临时住宿，寄宿，寄存，容纳；n.传达室，小旅馆 | |
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52
fabulous
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| adj.极好的；极为巨大的；寓言中的，传说中的 | |
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53
nagging
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| adj.唠叨的，挑剔的；使人不得安宁的v.不断地挑剔或批评（某人）( nag的现在分词 )；不断地烦扰或伤害（某人）；无休止地抱怨；不断指责 | |
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54
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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unlimited
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| adj.无限的，不受控制的，无条件的 | |
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prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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catching
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| adj.易传染的，有魅力的，迷人的，接住 | |
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jeeringly
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| adv.嘲弄地 | |
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lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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undertaking
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| n.保证，许诺，事业 | |
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wares
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| n. 货物, 商品 | |
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squatter
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| n.擅自占地者 | |
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tilted
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| v. 倾斜的 | |
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snarled
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| v.（指狗）吠，嗥叫， （人）咆哮( snarl的过去式和过去分词 )；咆哮着说，厉声地说 | |
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buck
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| n.雄鹿，雄兔；v.马离地跳跃 | |
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tavern
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| n.小旅馆，客栈；小酒店 | |
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lyric
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| n.抒情诗，歌词；adj.抒情的 | |
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quarries
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| n.（采）石场( quarry的名词复数 )；猎物（指鸟，兽等）；方形石；（格窗等的）方形玻璃v.从采石场采得( quarry的第三人称单数 )；从（书本等中）努力发掘（资料等）；在采石场采石 | |
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tickled
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| （使）发痒( tickle的过去式和过去分词 )； （使）愉快，逗乐 | |
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bins
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| n.大储藏箱( bin的名词复数 )；宽口箱（如面包箱，垃圾箱等）v.扔掉，丢弃( bin的第三人称单数 ) | |
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overalls
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| n.（复）工装裤；长罩衣 | |
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smoker
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| n.吸烟者，吸烟车厢，吸烟室 | |
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rams
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| n.公羊( ram的名词复数 )；(R-)白羊（星）座；夯；攻城槌v.夯实（土等）( ram的第三人称单数 )；猛撞；猛压；反复灌输 | |
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74
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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brutal
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| adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的 | |
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taunting
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| 嘲讽( taunt的现在分词 )； 嘲弄； 辱骂； 奚落 | |
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militia
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| n.民兵，民兵组织 | |
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78
jobbers
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| n.做零活的人( jobber的名词复数 )；营私舞弊者；股票经纪人；证券交易商 | |
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79
paragon
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| n.模范，典型 | |
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80
bellowing
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| v.发出吼叫声，咆哮（尤指因痛苦）( bellow的现在分词 )；（愤怒地）说出（某事），大叫 | |
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81
swell
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| vi.膨胀，肿胀；增长，增强 | |
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82
groaned
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| v.呻吟( groan的过去式和过去分词 )；发牢骚；抱怨；受苦 | |
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83
scrap
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| n.碎片；废料；v.废弃，报废 | |
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84
insolent
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| adj.傲慢的，无理的 | |
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85
anarchist
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| n.无政府主义者 | |
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86
scrapping
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| 刮，切除坯体余泥 | |
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