Title: Statements That Would be Shocking
Author: James Smith
Genre: Speculative Fiction
Publication Date: April 19, 1995
America, thirty years from now.
A rampaging mob pushes a large protest, summoned by a president, to its logical, violent conclusion. The crush makes its way into the U.S. Capitol Building. Windows are smashed. A police officer is killed. Representatives of all stripes flee to safety. Some have plastic ties and other restraints; they're looking, in particular, for the Democratic Speaker of the House and the Republican Vice-President. Outside, another group sets up gallows.
One man looks into a Canadian news camera and shouts, "Black Lives Matter are terrorists!" a reference to a racial justice protest group, entirely absent from the scene, whose members have suffered more violence than they've perpetrated. He and his associates then go after the reporter and cameraman, who must run. While some protesters stand back, others shriek, demanding the hanging of the vice-president for doing his constitutional duty and certifying the election.
Meanwhile, outgoing president Fauntleroy "Faunty" Duck sits alone in a White House viewing room1, eats a cheeseburger, and ignores all requests to calm his rioting followers. It's pretty clear he'd be happy if someone hanged his VP.
James Smith's new novel, a satiric look at near-future America, walks a haphazard path.
It follows Chansley Welch, a man who, at his president's urging, took place in the January 6 Insurrection. He was, however, among the more peaceful protesters. He did not go to prison, as others did, but he has now come to question the man who encouraged them to attack the Rotunda and stop the certification of the election, which Duck has falsely claimed was rigged.
In the wake of his shaken faith, Chansley Welch wanders America to learn the truth. Is Faunty Duck the future face of fascism? An opportunist con-man? Or a legitimate, if unstable, representative of American grievances? And what is the meaning of the titular "shocking statements"?
Welch's odyssey becomes an excuse to explore a hypothetical future history and the questions it raises about our own time.
Welch wanders small towns in need of hope. Freer trade sent basic manufacturing jobs overseas. Deregulation made it easier for corrupt pharmaceutical companies to flood the market with legal, highly addictive painkillers. The double-whammy devastates swaths of small-town America. We have already seen the grievances of overlooked peoples (occasionally exploding into violence) in our own time. The ghosts of Ruby Ridge and Waco haunt the fictional America, thirty years on, even though the average American, in Welch's world, has no idea what either of these events were.
The future sees the rise of the "Techno-Barons," Bill Gates-like supercaptains of industry. They have shaped America, and by more than just technological conveniences and campaign contributions. The world has become addicted to an online something called "social media" Think Bulletin Board Systems, USENET, and The Well, but with more bells and whistles and billions of users. People get their news from online posts, many of which have as much credibility as a chain letter or schoolyard rumor. Indeed, bad actors and agents of political parties and foreign governments ruthlessly exploit this fact.
So in Smith's bleak future, the World Wide Web, currently ushering in a world of free knowledge and fact-checking, becomes the preserve of tribal enclaves, people listening exclusively to slanted and often entirely fictional versions of reality. "Statements that would be shocking," in particular, go "viral," or, get reposted many times and "liked" by other users. Many of the false narratives get directed by the Techno-Barons. Others are the product of what Usenet calls "trolls" and foreign actors. Cell phones, currently the bane of public spaces, are omnipresent and can be wired into the Web remotely. People choose to have no relief from distracting games, videos, and "social media" updates. The traditional news in America, meanwhile, has grown highly biased. Most notably, we have something called "Dochs News," a 24/7 Republican propaganda machine that, according to Smith (he loves his bold predictions), will be founded next year.
In Smith's future, people care more about the latest shows and "Influencer" updates than actual world events. (It took me a while to understand this concept. "Influencers" are popular posters on the various forms of social media. Smith would have us believe that it will be possible to make money this way in the future). Nevertheless, Smith's future has some disturbing credibility here. We are not so far from a world where celebrity gossip and the cast of the next hit movie generate more interest than serious geopolitical developments.
The population walk around with their Pavlovian wired cellphones, blithely unaware of their physical surroundings. One character literally walks into an open sewer hole while following "Social Media" updates.
She dies.
Meanwhile, America itself has changed. Remember the attempted bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 by Islamist Extremists? Sometime in our future but Welch's past, they succeed at taking down the buildings, and several other symbolic (but inhabited) American targets. The resulting fear mis-shapes American society, making it more susceptible to authoritarian overreach. Smith moves from this tragic possibility to more absurdist satire. In a pointed jab at misguided military thinking, the U.S. invaded a country unrelated to the attack. Both the collapse of the World Trade Center and the subsequent invasion shakes faith in established institutions and propels conspiracy narratives. Voters start looking for someone who doesn't talk or feel like a politician.
None of these things happen in a vacuum. China, currently strengthening bonds with the west, turns back and becomes every bit the authoritarians who fired on their own citizens in Tiananmen Square (we're told that many Chinese in 2025 don't believe that the massacre happened).2 Russia has gone back to Czar-like, Soviet-level authoritarianism and, as a bonus, invaded nearby countries.3 Religious fanaticism, meanwhile, grows across the world and the United States. And a pandemic is about to disturb world events, one that will be politicized at every turn.4
Enter into this world a shady businessman and geriatric Influencer, Faunty Duck. With no previous political experience, the vocabulary and moral intelligence of a middle-school bully, and a past that should outrage conservatives, he storms onto the political scene. Duck as a character is hollow at the core. He's supposed to be a brilliant entrepreneur who will fix the economy, but he's failed at most of his businesses (he was hosting a popular TV show when he entered politics) and his economic policies prove dubious at best. He's an isolationist who threatens to invade his allies. A public servant who blames Democratic state governments for natural disasters. A family man who cheats on all of his wives, including the first lady. A lady's man who pays a porn star for sex. A supposed truth-teller for the common man who warns of "fake news" but compulsively lies. A man claiming 100% American credentials who skipped out on 'Nam, mocks other democratic leaders, and praises dictators. And finally, a convicted felon whom voters regard as tough on crime.
Duck looks for issues to exploit. Despite his long list of dubious legal dealings, he presents himself as tough on crime-- less so when it has white skin or a white collar. He focuses on brown and immigrant crime, finding a nerve with out-of-work Americans, especially those white Americans who are angry at years of progress by women, non-whites, and "queer folks."5
In 2016, he becomes the American president.
If you're getting that author James Smith has a vendetta against Republicans and the American conservative movement, you'd be right. While he makes several good points, even as satire his future feels far-fetched and his politics, hilariously one-sided. I would have preferred that Duck be an honest conservative, even a fascistic one, rather than Smith's bombastic parody. It would have given the character an air of credibility which he lacks.6
With regards to the insurrection encouraged by Duck after his loss, he should have no path back into politics. What does Smith's version of the GOP do, however? Those who were under attack claim it wasn't that bad, in spite of video showing them fleeing for safety. Some do keep their principles—and they are, in this dystopian reality, drummed out of politics and threatened with legal charges. Charges pending against Duck, meanwhile, he and his followers identify as political interference with the judicial process, and worthy of a banana republic. Duck then campaigns four years later and claims that he will use the judicial process to pursue his opponents once he is back in office.
His supporters laud him for it.
But Chansley Welch, an authentic outsider, concerned by both big government and big business, gets taken aback as "comeback Duck" forges an especially close bond with one of the Techno-Barons. Of course, the author, can't stop himself: with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, he makes this particular Baron an immigrant who set up his company while working illegally in the United States. Duck's concerns over immigrants and crime, again, show their true colors.
At another point in his rambling odyssey, Welch investigates a popular conspiracy. An anti-Democrat smear campaign claimed that several candidates are literal witches, secretly engaging in some kind of ritualistic nonsense. The conspiracy clearly echoes both the American Satanic Panic of recent vintage and historical anti-Semitic claims of blood libel. This satiric attack on the paranoia of some evangelicals leads to one of the novel's most darkly comic scenes, however, in which some redneck shlub enters a popular Washington pizza parlour, armed, in order to rescue the children that he believes the Democrats keep hostage in the building's basement. Of course, there are none. The pizza parlour doesn't even have a basement. After his arrest, the shooter deadpans, "The intel on this wasn't 100 percent." No, that would not be so funny in real life, but it also wouldn't happen, and the satire, while hardly subtle, works well in this incident.
I won't describe in detail Welch's encounter with the convicted gunman, but it's funny, surreal, and heartbreaking. One suspects that, despite his chastened attitude, he'll be back to his paranoid tricks when he gets released.
Statements also drops references to movies and television, which survive alongside the newer media. Being a science-fiction writer, Smith knows that a lot of the people holding this novel will be nerds. So, in his future, Disney owns Hollywood. Their most successful productions? Movies based on old Marvel superheroes! Star Wars and Star Trek have multiple new entries into their franchises. Japanese Manga and Anime also have a huge future following, though they're still considered nerdy. Videogames are completely mainstream, and an as-yet-unpublished epic fantasy series by nerd author George R. R. Martin will apparently be one of the most popular shows in the world. I found these things funny.7
Less amusing: Duck is able to get through three Supreme Court Judges during his term.8 After he leaves office, the Supreme Court, now stacked, overturns Roe v. Wade and declares that Duck can't be prosecuted for any official acts he committed while he was in office. In effect, they validate Richard Nixon's claim that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal." Faunty Duck takes these wins as encouragement to run again in 2024.
Chansley Welch, meanwhile, encounters a pregnant twelve-year-old, attempting to flee to a state that still permits abortion. She received a medical exemption in her own, but the state overruled it. She herself barely understands the circumstances of the sexual assault that resulted in her condition. Her state doesn't consider her old enough for sex education.
She also dies.9
The Democrats have their own problems. The man who beat Duck (fairly, despite Duck's whining), is old, and his mental acuity deteriorates over the course of his term. Phony scandals get unleashed online. A last-minute replacement by his female, non-Caucasian VP garners mixed results. She appeals to women and young people, but has difficulty getting the trust of other groups, or even clearly elucidating her policies. And, despite numerous female politicians in this future, at home and abroad, many Americans remain unconvinced that a woman should hold the top job.10
Fear that Duck might win (remember, he has something akin to a free pass from the Supreme Court) brings the Techno-Barons to heel. Or, at least, they pretend to: we've seen that they cannot be trusted. Nevertheless, the historical parallels are obvious enough, even if Smith stops short of calling Duck a fascist.
Welch's travels bring him to two different natural disasters on opposite coasts. These give the novel some suspenseful drama while underscoring the polarized nature of the future society, in case we missed it on literally every page of the novel. In the fall of 2024, a massive hurricane rages across southeastern seaboard. This Republican stronghold blames the government for not doing enough, while, simultaneously, many of its people distrust FEMA and other emergency responders. Some people-- who don't believe that humans could have anything to do with climate change-- nevertheless claim the hurricane might be the work of a Democratic "weather machine." Welch later crosses to now-Democratic California (it switched sides at some point), only to be present when a fire rages near Los Angeles. Despite a disaster displacing thousands of people from all levels of society, Duck and his followers blame the locals and the Cali government. Instead of offering support, Duck lobs schoolyard insults at the governor and suggests he might withdraw federal aid to the state if returned to office.
The novel actually ends where it might have been most interesting. We have mixed reactions, particularly as Duck suggests a bizarre range of cabinet appointees who have even many Republicans shaking their heads. Many lack qualifications-- he's looking for Yes-Men. The international community remains baffled.11 Many Americans, however, maintain that Duck, despite his failures the first time around, is the shake-up that America needs. Smith leaves the results-- like the future-- to potential readers.
As an obviously symbolic deep-cold descends on Washington, the world awaits the inauguration. Welch finds himself in the capital, still uncertain. And the novel's many questions linger, leaving us to wander what the actual future might bring.12
Notes
1. During his presidency, Duck spends as much time in a Florida estate transparently modelled on Citizen Kane's "Xanadu." Post-presidency, he smuggles out boxes worth of classified files and stows them away, warehouse like, in a lavatory. He faces no consequences, and continues to present himself as a steadfast supporter of law and order.
2. This seems possible, given China's close grip on the media. But in America? With so many sources available, it beggars belief that anyone would quickly forget about or reconceptualize the Capitol Insurrection a short time later. Nevertheless, that is the history that Smith presents. It's Noam Chomsky gone mad-- but again, Statements should be read satirically, not literally.
3. Despite post-Cold War optimism, Smith's Russian prediction is depressingly credible. Boris Yeltsin's hold on power is shaky, his country increasingly under the influence of sinister oligarchs. The world's tolerance for future-Russian actions chillingly reflects the initial response to early Nazi aggression. Of course, complacency encourages imperialist ambitions elsewhere. Duck (despite being an isolationist) even jokes about invading sovereign countries-- his own allies-- though, in Statements's topsy-turvy reality, we're supposed to ponder if he's serious.
4. To prevent this review from running even longer, I won't get into how Duck mishandles the pandemic, which contributes to more American fatalities than the Vietnamese War. Again, there's simply no way that such a person would be anything but a pariah after his term ended.
5. Apparently not an insult. Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual people are now, in the 90s, "reclaiming" the word. Smith shows some prescience in imagining a future where "Queer" is a broadly-accepted term. However, the (relative) success of their movement (same-sex marriage exists in the future) also spurs backlash, often led by religious and conservative groups.
Of particular note here is Chansley Welch's encounter, in a bar, with a transsexual woman.
I admit to being unfamiliar to the broader notion of "Trans," as it gets discussed in the book. If you're familiar with the 1993 Brandon Teena/Teena Brandon murder, you're further along here than some readers might be. Biologically female, Brandon considered his gender (separate from biological sex) to be male, and was murdered when the truth was discovered. The concept has gone mainstream in Smith's future. The novel suggests that fewer than 1% of the population so-identifies-- but somehow, their existence has become a focal, vote-moving issue. Scapegoating has long been a part of politics and is intrinsic to fascism, but the future obsession struck me as a stretch. Yes, someone like Duck would target this group, but, given their small numbers, how much traction would he get here, realistically? Still, Smith's novel has introduced me to a concept of which I had been largely unaware and feel that I should now inform myself.
6. The author states, "I actually based Faunty on Donald Duck. Think about Donald. He's thin-skinned, will bully people but throws a fit if he takes even the slightest flack. In his first appearance, "The Wise Little Hen," he's immediately disreputable. Somehow, despite his ridiculous failings, he quickly gets regarded as a loveable character. He perseveres, and that leads people to get behind him. An American Fascist, or the doorway, at least, to American Fascism, would have to be like that—despicable but, to a great many people, likeable. I even folded in real-world Anatidae's notoriously rapey sexual predilections: President Duck is an overt misogynist, a philanderer, and literally guilty of sexual assault (he even brags at one point about non-consensual grabbing women's private parts). I put in an old news item with an earlier, pre-political incarnation of celebrity Duck, where he walks into a teen dressing room at the "Miss USA" pageant and stares at the teen girls. I wanted to indicate how much angry Americans would overlook if they thought they had 'their guy,' if he was a 'character,' and, presumably, if he was also a white man."
I would add that, like Donald, many of Faunty's statements are fundamentally incomprehensible.
7. To a point. Somehow, Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons are also still airing in the future. After a time, it just feels like James Smith, for all of his daring prognostications, cannot let go of his childhood media fascinations and assumes that the rest of the culture won't, either.
8. One gets approved right before the end of his term, despite the GOP preventing his predecessor from replacing a Justice even though he had a full year of his term remaining, because, they claimed, that decision needed to be made after the election. This plot contrivance amounts to another dig at the Republican Party. For them to block the predecessor's nominee, but then rush through Duck's eleventh-hour choice, would only be possible if they were utter hypocrites, lacking even a shred of decency. Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower would be spinning in their graves.
9. Would conservatives really want Roe v. Wade overturned? While it's in place, they have a rallying point, but remain secure in the knowledge that they and theirs can acquire abortions when needed. The overturning of Roe v. Wade does help draw into Duck's fold some members of often traditional, often religious communities who had opposed him the first time, largely due to his barely-dog-whistled disdain for them. He spreads false stories about South and Central American immigrants, and, in 2016, unsuccessfully tried to ban emigration from Muslim-majority countries.
10. Future America has had a Black president, who had two terms before Fauntleroy Duck. He was relatively successful, but sparked backlash on a number of fronts, and brought American racism back to the forefront
11. For a businessman whom people believe will be good for the economy, Faunty Duck shows or feigns remarkable ignorance about basic economics. He wants to invade Canada because he's sick of the United States "subsidizing" their neighbours to the north. He's actually referring to the United States's long-running trade deficit with Canada, which makes as much sense as saying that I subsidize Joe's Bar down the street because they sell me beer but don't buy my books. That the future U.S. has an infinitely larger trade deficit with China, curiously, doesn't rate nearly as much mention.
Dochs News, meanwhile, tells a Canadian guest that they should be honoured to become part of the United States.
12. Duck's pro-business and anti-environmentalist stance should boost the American economy in the short term. The long-term effects may not be known for another thirty years in this hypothetical future.