"Now that the town halls have blazed with vituperation, and fantastical patriots are . . .

[OneBlueSky]

girding themselves for fascist/socialist lockdown, Americans of a certain vintage must be feeling a familiar circumambient thrill. Boomers, you know what I’m talking about: cranks empowered, strange throes and upthrusts, hyperbolic placards brandished in the streets — it’s the ’60s all over again! Once more the air turns interrogative: something’s happening here, but we don’t know what it is, do we, Mr. Jones? Stop, children, what’s that sound?"

something from Huffington's site? . . . dailykos, perhaps? . . . or maybe BuzzFlash? . . .

would you believe last Sunday's New York Times Book Review? . . . and in the lead review of Stephen King's latest, no less? . . .

I don't know, that paragraph kinda grabbed me, enough that I actually read the review . . . not a King fanatic by any means, but have enjoyed several of his books . . . and this one looks, um, interesting . . .

In Stephen King’s new novel, “Under the Dome,” the people of Chester’s Mill, Me., get a letter from the president. Typically exalted in its rhetoric, it wrings a tear from at least one grateful citizen. But Big Jim Rennie, the town’s second selectman, is disgusted. He scowls at the printed sheet. Yep, there it is in black and white: “The bastard had signed it himself, and using all three of his names, including the terrorist one in the middle.”

Why is Obama writing to Chester’s Mill? Because an enormous transparent dome, not breachable by prayer, bullet, laser beam or cruise missile, has suddenly and unaccountably descended over the town. Its provenance is uncertain (aliens? North Korea?), but its effect is incontrovertible: no one gets in, no one gets out. Some kind of energy field is attached to it; at close range it blows up iPods and (bad news for incautious oldsters) pace­makers, and sends a gust of “horripilation” through the human nervous system.

Bummer, right? Not for the tyrant-in-waiting Big Jim and his pet goon squad. For them this is Christmas Day in the morning. Secession has occurred! The “thug in the White House,” the “Blackguard in Chief,” is on the other side of the dome, and Anytown, U.S.A. — with its meth factory, its profusion of religious denominations and its atavistic police department — is about to, as the phrase has it, “go rogue.”

- more . . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/books/review/JParker-t.html?_r=1&ref=books

[Warren DeMontague]

1. Wasn't that sort of the plot of the Simpsons Movie, too?

[eShirl]

3. "According to an author’s note, King took a first crack at “Under the Dome” in 1976

but gave it up “after two weeks’ work that amounted to about 75 pages.” An interesting sequence of expressions must have crossed his face when he watched “The Simpsons Movie” in 2007: here, in glowing animation, was a great glassy dome landing on a clueless municipality, a civic meltdown, etc."

[OneBlueSky]

4. so which came first, the novel or the dome? . . .

thanks for the Simpsons connection . . . I don't watch "The Simpsons" so wouldn't have known . . .

"One never knows, do one?" . . . Fats Waller . . . :hi:

[Warren DeMontague]

5. Yeah, that fact wasn't lost on the author of the article.

He also references the Butthole Surfers song "Pepper"... my kind of newspaperman. :thumbsup:

[Aviation Pro]

2. You mean like this?