Theodore Wheeler on 'The War Begins in Paris'
Celebrity journalism, propaganda, and political nihilism aren't new phenomena
2016 felt like a year that fundamentally changed the world, like what we'd lived through before had been recontextualized as this distant past and what we could expect going forward was this hazy, uncertain future. And, to me, it feels like we're still in that haze. But it's been long enough that I think a lot of us have sort of acclimated to it. Doing regular interviews, though, it’s so common that people will tell me they got into politics or they make new types of art or they rethought their whole lives in relation to the seismic shifts of 2016. And so I spoke about this on Riverside Chats with Theodore Wheeler—how that year and its anxieties led him to write his new novel, The War Begins in Paris.
Tom Knoblauch: So I want to start with the year 2016, which I think really felt like this clear divide between the past and the new present, one sort of disconnected from what seemed possible before 2016. In the press notes for this book, you talk about how it came out of anxieties from that year. So what does 2016 mean for you? And how does it become sort of the seed for The War Begins in Paris?
Theodore Wheeler: Yeah, I think that main thing was that I was working as a journalist, and it was my first year covering national politics for the outlet I worked for. So, I was going into Iowa quite a bit to cover the early debates. You know, even in the last decade, I think there are more journalists killed in the line of duty, so to speak, each year than the year before. But then thinking about Trump running for president and actively antagonizing the media, showing up for work, my first year being in the pit, doing rallies, and having people shouting at me, calling me a liar—nobody spat at me, but I had friends who had been spit upon, which was just a very odd experiences in America—and I just didn't really recognize that as the country I thought I lived in. But also, it's just bizarre to go to work and be treated like that, in some ways.
I'd actually been reading about American fascists for two years up to that point, too. In 2014, we saw a lot more extreme right wing political activity globally—specifically in in Hungary and Poland and however you want to interpret Brexit as part of that, too. So it's something that I was interested in from a time that I had done a residency over a summer in Germany, reading about American fascists. I was kind of familiar with the history of what had happened 90, 80 years before that, but it was a pretty quick introduction to, I guess, the new country that we that we will be living in and are still living in now.
Tom Knoblauch: So when you were looking at the European fascist movements or things that resembled it, you were worried about that coming over to America in the early 2010s?
Theodore Wheeler: I don't feel like I predicted anything, but I just found it more interesting at that point or maybe concerning. And especially at that point, when it's happening overseas, it's a little easier to think about it intellectually, I guess. And it's not quite as visceral. But that was kind of the seed of it—and thinking about World War Two as a phenomena.
More specifically, where so much of this stuff—the stories, the movies, the novels—just make it seem like everyone knew which side was bad and which side was good. Then we all got on the right side, and we were victorious. But, obviously, things don't work that way. It's never that clean and simple. So I just started researching American fascists, and specifically American journalists who are fascists, just kind of as a curiosity, and ended up finding out quite a bit about them.
Tom Knoblauch: So did you look at that as purely a historical phenomenon or did you see analogous journalists who are in that fascist lane in contemporary times?
Theodore Wheeler: Not necessarily propagandists but just kind of a cynicism that I think you can see in American journalism over the last 20 years or so. Once I started working political events and being in the pit or in gaggles, I could hear what reporters for Fox News were saying to their producers, what parts they would push back on or just what parts to cut out of the political speech that they were worried about that that their network was amplifying. But then, of course, that doesn't make it on the air.
So that kind of cynicism about reporters not being empowered enough to say what they actually think or maybe being so cynical that they they choose not to say what they think. Being in the in the gaggle, in the pit, you just hear a lot of that kind of stuff, which is concerning. Kind of an odd experience just on a human level, too.
Tom Knoblauch: My first radio show grew from the suspicion I had around that time that the History Channel became all those paranormal shows. I bet I could get all the Ancient Aliens guys—like they'll do press, right? And I was right that they would. And so I'd interviewed them for a while. I assumed that they were believers in the ancient alien cause or whatever. And then we'd get off the mics and they'd be like, “Oh, yeah, no, like, this is TV. This is a job on TV. And I'm an actor, basically.”
I thought, “Wow, that's crazy. They don't believe that.” And I feel like every, every few years, I look in a different direction and find that that that disingenuous cynical nature of, “I can pretend to be this, and it doesn't have to match my reality.” That's really everywhere. It's politics. It's media. And that's scary.
Theodore Wheeler: I mean, just normal people do that all the time—persona and roles you play. Social media is so much in that in the same way, the kind of image you put out there, that persona—whether that's to get more likes or to get more attention or just the to feel like you are more entertaining to be around. Although people don't really profit from it, necessarily, in the same way.
I guess thinking of people being entertainers instead of journalists or that crossover happening, that's the scary thing. It was funny when Colbert did it, but, looking back, The Colbert Report really isn't all that funny.
Tom Knoblauch: It’s barely satire anymore.
Theodore Wheeler: Yeah. Right. Like he would not even be the extremist.
Tom Knoblauch: I thought a lot about the Kurt Vonnegut book Mother Night while reading yours. Was that something that was on your mind?
Theodore Wheeler: I read it when I was younger. I really liked the book a lot, even the the Nick Nolte movie adaptation, which was not so great. It's still kind of entertaining. But when I started to write, I went back and reread it to see what I could pull from it. I was thinking about this, too, that there were American propagandists—like Vonnegut's book was thinly veiled fiction for most of it, right?
Tom Knoblauch: Well, for anyone who hasn't read it, it's the tell-all from this man who has been convicted—I think—at Nuremberg for being a propagandist for the Nazis. And he says, “No, I was actually an American spy.” But then there's no tangible evidence, nobody's claiming him. And so it doesn't help them in the end as he's facing execution for what he's done.
And Vonnegut gets one of his best lines in—he says, “Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.” And I thought that's such a great line, especially when we're talking about specifically this mixture of how much of what people are saying when they have a platform even corresponds to who they are. And then it doesn't matter. I think about people like Alex Jones or Ben Shapiro and these people who really chase the big culture war issues.
Do you believe that doesn't matter who we are versus who we pretend to be? Does it blend together? I think, in your book, you kind of are playing with those same questions.
Theodore Wheeler: I mean, at some point, it probably doesn't matter if there's never any pulling back of the veil, if there's never an apology, I mean, Alex Jones is probably the best example of that—even losing with a billion dollar lawsuit to the Sandy Hook parents he’s never breaking character. So like, at that point, it's not a character he's playing, right? The the proof is in front of us. Like the Maya Angelou line, something like, “When someone shows who they are, believe it the first time.”
Jane Anderson in the novel is kind of the second main character or the second character in the book. She was a real historic person; she was one of the Radio Traitors. She did radio work for Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis during World War Two. But she was pretty skilled at that—to where she was never anti-American at all. She would be very anti-Roosevelt. She would be very anti-communist and say things that were you know, wildly untruthful all for the the point of getting The United States into the war on the side of the Nazis. But she would never say things that weren't at least vaguely patriotic to the United States.
So, after the war, when she was found and brought up on treason charges, she did have a little gray area that she left herself. She could say she wasn't a traitor, that she was genuinely trying to do what she thought was in the best interests of her country. It was not in the best interest of democracy, certainly, or in the best interest of all American citizens, but, from her point of view, she still had that argument. And ultimately she was just let go. She never went on trial for treason even though she had been charged. The State Department just let her go back to Spain where her husband was from, and she lived out the rest of her life there.
Tom Knoblauch: How did you navigate this character when deciding how sympathetic or unsympathetic you wanted her to be?
Theodore Wheeler: That was really hard. Six years before I started writing this book, I learned about Jane Anderson and her history. And, at that moment, I knew she'd be a great character in a book. She was just kind of wild, you know? A really interesting person—a big personality. But she was also pretty reprehensible in so many ways. Like, I didn't want to write a book about her. I didn't want her to be the main character. So I had to invent a protagonist who is completely fictional to balance that out.
She does have this huge personality and people are drawn to her. But trying to still leave enough of the darkness of that or the nastiness or what's underneath the surface of it . . . I don't really go on Goodreads much for my my own sanity, but I did peek it the other week, at some of the earlier reviews from readers about it. And I was kind of shocked that most of them actually thought Jane was their favorite character and said in their reviews that they wished it had just been Jane's book, which was kind of shocking to me because she worked with Nazis, for one thing.
But I guess it made me think that maybe I didn't draw that portrait of her well enough in some ways—that she is attractive, right? That she's meant to draw people in. But at the same time, our own morality, or ethics, or our own good sense, should take over and see her for who she really is in the book. So I don't know—as an author, I think it's it's hard to answer that definitively because I don't really get to see what's going on in people's heads when they read the book. And, to me, it's done well or people should understand who Jane is, but whether that happens or not just kind of depends on who reads it and like what conclusions they draw on their own.
Tom Knoblauch: Well, I think everyone will say their favorite character in Paradise Lost is Satan. So you’re in good company.
Theodore Wheeler: Hopefully not a role model.
Tom Knoblauch: Yeah, you have a great line about her really early in that opening section. You write: “Jane Anderson was one of the most baffling, provocative women of her generation, and she knew it. Most people struggled to resist her field of gravity.” And I love that phrasing because, when you're addressing the complicity people have in the way that they're drawn to her, you describe it as almost a natural phenomenon as opposed to purely a choice, right? Like, gravity will pull you in a direction that you're not choosing—it's gravity doing it for you. How did you come to that way of framing her?
Theodore Wheeler: Yeah, in some ways, it's just natural thinking about how we all are drawn to celebrity, which, again, feeds into that media atmosphere that we're in—that it is so much more about the person telling the news rather than the news itself in the kind of decisions we make as citizens. So it’s feeding into that with Jane's character.
I think it just seemed—reading about her and more and more that a lot of the people she was friends with—like they wouldn't admit that they really liked her, but they also spent a lot of time around her. So there must have been something. Just from the historical record, it seemed to fit with that. And, in some ways, too, I think it's just what the novel needed, that my main character Martha—Mielle, as she prefers to be called through most of the book—can see through that Jane, that Jane's politics are reprehensible, that Jane maybe is not the best person to associate with. But she's also pulled in by that sense where maybe she doesn't have anyone else like Jane in her life or has never had someone like Jane in her life, which, to me, is really a human way to feel. I know that I've had friends like that in my life, especially when I was younger, where, you know, it's a situation you should walk away from, but you just can't for some reason, whatever it is, in that moment.
Tom Knoblauch: What do you see as the root of that gravitational pull, whether it's for Mielle or for the readers? Is it celebrity? Is it the things that Jane is saying? What do you attribute it to?
Theodore Wheeler: Mielle grew up as a Mennonite in Iowa, so the opposite of people like Jane, the opposite of celebrities in Paris, are these celebrity news people. The fact that Jane takes a liking to Mielle is a huge part of that, just because she doesn't feel like she belongs at all. But when she's with Jane, she does. So if she gives up Jane, she gives up all of that.
I think, in general, this idea of celebrity can be like the jokes you prefer, almost, like comedy in politics. And the news seems so tied a lot of the time. Jane doesn't say the right thing, she wouldn't be PC in our parlance today, which has a lot of appeal to people—somebody who will tell it how it is, or that kind of sense, which is not always how it actually it is. But pushing that that point of view that you're not supposed to say. So maybe for the people reading the book who really are drawn to Jane, that's part of it, where she's just that kind of person who can always say what she thinks. Or it can get under people's skin so easily. And that's something they value for whatever reason.
Tom Knoblauch: How much do you see Jane as someone who was trapped in the celebrity that she's built for herself?
Theodore Wheeler: Yeah, I think that was a huge part of it, where her star as a journalist, as kind of a B-grade celebrity of the day, rose pretty quickly when she was 20. She was married to Deems Taylor, who was this radio composer and had this big show in New York at the time. He was actually in the original Disney Fantasia—he was the composer in it. That's him. That's Jane's first husband. So she had that connection.
But she actually left him within a year, left New York, went to London, and became the protégé of Lord Northcliffe, who owned one of the big newspapers there. So, by the time she was 23, she was reporting from World War One. She was the first woman to write in a biplane over London. She was the first woman to go on a submarine. She was doing these kinds of adventure reporting and doing that at a time when there were very few women journalists.
By the time she was 25, felt like she was a huge celebrity, was a family friend of Joseph Conrad, all of these things. But within five years, she lost most of that, as often happens with celebrities. She had her 15 minutes of fame and then it was over. But I think most of the rest of her life was just trying to get back to that point where she was someone important. She had tried to go to Hollywood and become an actress, which didn't really work out. She had tried to write a few novels. And most notoriously was her last novel, where she was writing about the French underworld, where apparently she became a prostitute herself in this brothel for several months, and then became so addicted to drugs that she had to be rescued by some Carmelite nuns in Paris, and they kind of set her back on that track.
At that point, she she married her second husband, who by some accounts was actually lower royalty in in Spain. His family had this big estate. And by some accounts, he was also a con artist who was from Cuba. It's kind of fuzzy. But it seemed like she was kind of resolved to just living out the rest of her life in rural Spain, maybe writing, maybe not. But then the Spanish Civil War broke out. She started doing dispatches back to London for these papers, got arrested by the Republican side, which was the site associated with the Soviet Union, was imprisoned for at some days, was tortured and then ultimately rescued by the US State Department and pulled out supposedly days before she was due to be executed.
So that's kind of wild story. But, at that point, she got a lot of her celebrity back when she did this 200 day tour across North America at sold out lecture halls, talking about the evils of communism, why it was so important to defeat communism, talking about some of the stuff that was happening in Spain with churches being vandalized or burned or priests being killed, which, you know, for obvious reasons inflamed a lot of passions on this side of the Atlantic as well.
At that point, which is more or less where the book picks her up, she has this second chance at fame. And she will do almost anything to keep it. So a lot of the scholarship about her, the history books, don't really know if she believed in the politics that she was spouting, if she was actually a fascist. You know, she was very much anti-communist, for obvious reasons. But I think a lot of it was she just had that chance again—people were listening to her, people were looking at her. And she was going to hold on to that as long as she could.
Tom Knoblauch: To go back to Milton for a second, he describes hell as the person you build, brick-by-brick, until you're stuck living inside that person forever. You could have written about that specific type of phenomenon—and specifically the way media plays into it—today. Why did you feel it's important to go back to the late 30s, early 40s?
Theodore Wheeler: Maybe it’s just a comfort level for me. I like doing historical research. Out of my first two novels, my most successful one by far was a historical novel. But it's a lot more fun for me to think about things in that way, where maybe novels that are set now and talking about celebrity always seem so sensationalist or don't have that kind of grounding or perspective which, personally, I'm not a huge fan of. So there was probably a lot of it, too. For any writer, and especially with a book, you're gonna be working on this for three years or so, so, if you're not working on a project that you're really passionate about or something that you think that you would really love to read yourself, there's really no point in starting it, I don't think.
Tom Knoblauch: Yeah, I guess I was thinking about what that the more cynical, less sympathetic story might be. Maybe: how did Ben Shapiro get to the point where he's burning Barbie dolls in his third hour talking about Barbie on YouTube?
Theodore Wheeler: See, that would require me to watch Ben Shapiro all the time, which I'm not really into.
Tom Knoblauch: He doesn't have gravitational orbit like Jane Anderson.
Theodore Wheeler: (laughing) No.
Tom Knoblauch: One of the things that changed for me after 2016, in the Trump era, was that it was sort of easy for me to see that what is scary is not necessarily smart or even presenting as sophisticated. I think about someone like O'Brien in 1984—he’s this smart, scary guy who talks in these big, eloquent speeches, and that almost reads as sort of cartoonishly competent to me now, whereas incompetence and cartoonishness now feels a little bit more natural to me. But it's not the way that we want to tell stories because we want these complex characters and we want to write with a sophisticated tone. Do you feel like there's any tension there? Have the last few years changed any of your ways of writing about power?
Theodore Wheeler: I think writing the book did change it because I like doing the research and so a lot of the characters who worked on the Nazi side in radio were not very competent people. I mean, even the most famous fascists were all pretty cartoonish. Most of them were not super successful until they took power by force. I'm teaching Persepolis in my in one of my classes at Creighton right now, and so much of it is that sense—after the revolution and the kind of like flip of society—of the horror of the petty bourgeois class [in power]. Their old window washer is now running a hospital, their mechanic is running the legal system. and nothing against like people in working class jobs. This is the background I come from, too. But I don't necessarily think that people my dad worked with at the lumberyard should be running society.
But, thinking about the book, especially what happened in the 30s that was the terror of it, right? That you could see through these people, that their arguments were not compelling, that they were not particularly intelligent, but, by force and just by taking control of the levers of power, people were compelled to go along with it in different ways or be crushed or be killed by it. I don't feel like our threat level approaches that in many ways at all, but I can feel that that sense of terror, power, powerlessness, seeing people in power who aren't the most compelling as they rely on a politics of grievance and just playing on people's fear. It's not very inspiring.
Tom Knoblauch: So an example that comes to my mind is the press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, [Giuliani] trying to overturn the election—which is, on one level, maybe the funniest thing that's happened in politics, but also it was very close to being this terrifying historical event. It could have—I mean, I don't know that it was that far away from going either direction.
Theodore Wheeler: Right. And, especially in the moment, we weren't really sure if it was going to work at all, you know? Like it's just so ridiculous and comical. But if they take power, if they took power back, that guy would be what, like the third most powerful person in the country? Which is not so funny anymore.
Tom Knoblauch: Even though you can sort of see through it, and even though it's not really that sophisticated, propaganda works. We have this romantic view of our brains, which is that that logic matters, that rationality matters—and sometimes it does—but a lot of the time it can be superseded by something that is sensational. Why do you think propaganda is so powerful on us? Why are we so susceptible to it as people?
Theodore Wheeler: In a base way, sometimes they can appeal to the reality that we want to exist, so just someone saying that and confirming it in a loud way, in a way that has authority, can capture a lot of people, especially coming back to this idea of the politics of grievance. So like: why isn't my life as good as it could be? Or why did this kind of thing go wrong? If you're able to blame somebody else for that, or blame a third party on your behalf, that can be a powerful thing.
So much of it is just: when we talk about politics and as being more of a team sport rather than a mechanism of policy and enacting programs that help people, then you have a rooting interest. To me, that's so much of it. When you look at your team, you're gonna root for them, you're gonna cheer for your coach until they're fired, even when they do wrong, even when you can tell that they're being stupid. It's your job to keep pushing with them.
Tom Knoblauch: Right.
Theodore Wheeler: But, in politics, there is much less reckoning than we do for sports in this country, which is kind of terrifying.
Tom Knoblauch: Yeah.
Theodore Wheeler: Those kind of come-to-Jesus moments don’t happen all that much, or especially that period from 2016 to 2019, where was always us vs. them, depending on which side you're on.
Tom Knoblauch: I talked with Erik Larson about when he wrote about Winston Churchill, and he said that, maybe on a subconscious level, writing historical fiction was a way for him to process some of his anxieties about the present and that he found it grounding and sometimes insightful to situate himself within other people or other times or places. I don't know if it's exactly a catharsis, but was there some kind of healthy part of the process like that for you?
Theodore Wheeler: I think so. Why I like writing fiction is that sense of being able to step out of myself, to take one step to the right, and to think and see situations in a different way—whether it's catharsis or just a way to get at a different kind of wisdom than I'm capable of. It can be a really powerful thing. Especially with history. I always take a little comfort out of the fact that people got through it, that it didn't end the world or it didn't end the country, that we did figure out a way through it.
When you think about our problems in the moment, it's hard to keep that kind of optimism, or to keep pushing towards a solution that isn't in any way visible in the moment. But, when you think about history and write about history, you can organize things in a way where it's still chaotic and dangerous, but there is a resolution at the end.
Tom Knoblauch: Talking about getting out of your own head—I think you can do that when you're working from real people who had real thoughts that are not yours. Because [The War Begins in Paris is] fictional, though, to some extent, it's always kind of working through your own brain in some ways, right? How far out of your head do you think you can get through writing?
Theodore Wheeler: Yeah, I don't know. Probably not all that far, really. I feel like, when I'm doing it, it feels very novel—like “Oh, this is just completely different from me.” But then when I go back and edit it, or if I talk to my family about it, my wife will be like, “Oh, yeah, but that's totally the same situation you did like five years before,” or “This is something that you said two months before you wrote that.” So maybe it's just some way of deluding myself to thinking that it's completely outside of my body, or out of my mind.
For other writers, I'm not sure. I think the more you learn about writers, you can connect the dots, find where it comes from, and use that kind of logic. But maybe that's part of why it feels good to do it—that we can convince ourselves that that we've had this experience and that we're larger than we actually are, our consciousness is larger than it actually is.
Tom Knoblauch: I guess the cynical implication there would be that every act of even thinking about the past, in some ways, is a mirror still, right? You're looking for yourself and your feelings and your anxieties everywhere.
Theodore Wheeler: Yeah. Which is fair. That seems really human to me, you know? Trying to be expansive? It's a good thing. I'm teaching a class now where we’re looking at adaptations, which is really interesting to think about on a technical level but also just: what is the urge to adapt something to another form or to retell a story endlessly? It's that kind of update where we can put ourselves—in our current moment—into that story. Maybe it’s a healthy thing and a good thing that helps us reflect on who we are, without having to be too brazen or transparent about what we're actually doing.
Tom Knoblauch: Do you teach the Charlie Kaufman movie Adaptation?
Theodore Wheeler: I had thought about it. It's a personal favorite, but it was cut at the last minute.
Tom Knoblauch: That scene where he's at the Robert McKee lecture [where Kaufman suggests that] nothing happens in real life, and Brian Cox screams at him, like, “Are you insane?”—he says it in a more profane way.
Theodore Wheeler: (laughing) Right.
Tom Knoblauch: “Are you out of your mind? Stuff happens all the time. Life is so dramatic.” I think that's such an interesting moment from a writing perspective because, when we think about something that's natural or realistic or feels authentic, a lot of people do seem to associate that with these very subtle works. And life doesn't really feel subtle, does it? When you're thinking about how dramatic, how subtle, and what feels real or honest, how do you decide what's too much and what's not enough based on life in a world that often feels really absurd and goofy?
Theodore Wheeler: I agree with that—at least the volume level in my own head is seems very high all the time. So this sense that domestic quiet stories are not intense or that nothing's happening doesn't really play with me, I guess, in that same kind of way. But I think why like writing stories like this, too, is that I can have bigger scenes like Kristallnacht or a Nazi rally in Germany, which can be kind of daunting, you know? What does it feel like to be there?
But it's also a fun challenge to do that. Because these things happen all the time. Like, just thinking of my experience as a reporter and the things that I went to and saw from 2016, to the end of 2020, reporting on riots reporting on these demonstrations, at least every other month there was something like that in sleepy, old Omaha, Nebraska.
Tom Knoblauch: I just think about this week—how many things have happened in the world or, depending on where you live, in your neighborhood? I don't know. We fool ourselves, I guess, into thinking things are boring for some reason.
Theodore Wheeler: I think about what kind of stories we tell that comfort us. And maybe it's that urge to tell a story about nothing or to tell a flat story that's more about emotional complexity. Maybe it's just as delusional as anything to think that that's what life is.
Tom Knoblauch: You describe the book as being antifascist. And I think that's another word that can have a straightforward meaning, but, in the discourse, it has become complicated in a way that has so many different contradictory meanings when people say it that it's not clear what it means or if it has as much of a meaning as you'd hope it would. What does it mean to you to be antifascist?
Theodore Wheeler: I think why I liked that phrase is just thinking about Anna Seghers, the great German writer who was in a refugee camp in France and escaped through to the south of France to Mexico in 1938. She described her two books, The Seventh Cross and Transit, as antifascist. In the epigraph to The Seventh Cross, she dedicates the book to the antifascists who were fighting against the Nazis. So some of it is just an homage to Seghers.
But it was an idea I tried to hold on to while writing the book, too—that this was a necessary thing to do, that it's necessary to stand up and make yourself heard in whatever way that that you can best facilitate, to fight against authoritarianism, to fight against that kind of single voice or any kind of system that would seek to subjugate people specifically by force. So, I think about what happened in Charlottesville in 2017. Such a shocking moment to see those things happening. As someone who grew up in the 90s, we knew that there were skinheads like, there was the Oklahoma City bombing, the Michigan militia—all the separatists in Montana. That kind of like figure is always a part of American life, I think.
The fact that it was so bold that it was so public, and maybe that people that I know, friends I had, were conflicted about which side [to take] about Antifa, specifically . . . I didn't want to go through this era not expressing how I felt about it or not expressing which side that I fell on. So, in writing this book, there was that goal to be antifascist and to present it in that in that kind of light.
Tom Knoblauch: It's probably an unfair question because it just came out, but have you had a chance to read Naomi Klein's new book Doppelganger?
Theodore Wheeler: I haven't. It looks fascinating, though.
Tom Knoblauch: It's great. She's kind of explaining the cultural present through Philip Roth's Operation Shylock—another book about Nazis and spies and the dubious nature of the self. But she talks a lot about what she calls pipikism, which is taking words like fascist or antifascist in what she calls “a cultural appropriation of manufactured propaganda” by people like Steve Bannon and Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin. Essentially, if you say antifascist, it has a specific sort of historical context, but Steve Bannon says, “Well, actually, you know, Joe Biden is fascist, and we're going to call [Democrats that].” And what happens is the word doesn't have much of an impact after enough time.
There would be a point when fascist was a scary word, but if propaganda can dull the meaning, it's like, “Oh, both sides call everybody fascist? I don't know. It's just another word you say to say, ‘I don't like this person.’” So, for you as a novelist and as someone who teaches writing and exists in this landscape, what do you do in the in the ecosystem of weaponized language and confusing meanings?
Theodore Wheeler: Yeah, it's a really tough one. Maybe especially writing in the moment, it's easy to get caught up in that. We want to label people as certain things. But, again, why I like writing historical fiction is that it gives you that space to define things in a historical sense—or my favorite is when people describe Biden as both a communist and fascist, which, like, that's not what those words mean. It’s not possible to be both.
Tom Knoblauch: Right.
Theodore Wheeler: Why I like being a teacher is that I can tell students these kinds of things so that the words do matter, that you have to know the historical context of it. And maybe to fight against that sense of what Bannon is doing to make the words have no meaning, right? So there's a sense of calling a spade a spade, but I think restraint can also be a good thing within this, particularly in the moment when we're talking about what's happening now just so that the words don't lose their their power.
When I started writing the book, I like told myself I wouldn't really use the word “Nazi” all that much. I said, “Hitler will not be in the book” and all these things because I think I maybe didn't want it to be cliche or like every other World War Two novel or something like that. But I think it was important as I went into it, just for these reasons, like what do these words mean? And what are these terms? And where did they come from? It was important to not shy away from that so much, even if it did feel a little cliche.
Tom Knoblauch: And words only really have meaning if we all agree on the meaning.
Theodore Wheeler: Well, true.
Tom Knoblauch: And that's its own problem, right? Are you worried about language’s efficacy in the future?
Theodore Wheeler: Just generally? A little bit, I guess. I don't know. It's been two years since I retired from journalism. It's kind of nice to be out of that and not to be so plugged in or just seeing how much is out there. There's just so much media now, and I feel like we're talking all the time, but do things mean anything anymore? I don't know. It's not something I've thought about all that much, maybe.
Tom Knoblauch: It’s maybe something people should think about.
Theodore Wheeler: Yeah.
Tom Knoblauch: It's a cliche that every guy at a certain point becomes obsessed with World War Two. I'm not accusing you of being obsessed with it, because you're you're channeling it very productively—but what is it about World War Two and that time period that has its own gravitational pull?
Theodore Wheeler: I think a lot of it is just the sense that the country was unified, and we were fighting for good—and it can be framed in this simple way. And I think generally that's why people like it. But it's also why I wanted to complicate that narrative a little bit more and think about how these choices were not as clear for a lot of people in the moment. Although it's hard to say—World War Two is such a vast industry in itself. So I'm sure there's a lot of people who who like it for a lot of different reasons, too.
It is kind of easy to glorify it and feel that sense of sacrifice in the country pulling together. But it was something we talked about, at least with my wife a lot in the early days of the pandemic, too, where we had never been asked to sacrifice anything in our lives in this country. Like in with the Iraq War, you know, we were supposed to buy more stuff, right?
Tom Knoblauch: Right.
Theodore Wheeler: Like, that's how we win the war—with consumerism. I feel like even my parents, in their life, had never really been asked to [sacrifice like in World War Two], where they didn't get new shoes for five years or something like that, which can seem kind of trivial, but, at the same time, we never even had to do that, right?
Tom Knoblauch: We romanticize the past in the sense to that I think we're told that, when there were rations or we had to give up something for the greater good, people bought into that greater good. Clearly there were a lot of people who did and there are a lot of people who still think that way. But I don't know if it was more of a fight than we maybe think it was when we talk through the simplified versions of history.
Theodore Wheeler: I think it was. Pearl Harbor really calcified the efforts in so much in this country, at least from what I saw. I'm sure there were people who didn't participate in the metal drives and all of that or kept more food than they should have or there were certainly a lot of people who still protested the war all the way through it. But it seems to me that we're still maybe a little more selfish in this age. That's my perspective, anyway.
Tom Knoblauch: So there was there was the unifying factor of Pearl Harbor—do you think we have the capacity to be unified on that grand scale today?
Theodore Wheeler: I think we do. I don't know what would cause that.
Tom Knoblauch: Well, it wouldn't take a global pandemic. We can cross that off the list.
Theodore Wheeler: Yeah, and I think there are a lot of those moments where we keep crossing those lines, and it just keeps going further and further into that kind of grotesque situation where it seems like it should be comedy, but it's not, right? Maybe I just choose to be hopeful that, at some point, it'll just kind of turn and people will just get tired of the status quo as it's been for a while. So maybe that's a big event that causes it to happen. Or maybe people just kind of quietly drop it. I don't know.
Tom Knoblauch: It’s nice to end on a hopeful note. Before I let you go, are there any events you want to plug?
Theodore Wheeler: I'll be doing my my book launch event at The Bookworm on November 14 at 7pm. Then I'll be at my own bookstore, Dundee Book company at 50th and Underwood. The Wednesday evening before Thanksgiving, I'll be reading with John J. Waters, who's a local novelist has his debut novel out then.
Tom Knoblauch: And is there a place you want people to buy your book from?
Theodore Wheeler: If you do want to come into the Dundee Book Company, I'll sign it for you. The Bookworm is great. The Next Chapter on Farnam Street. Supporting local bookstores is amazing. But, really, if you want to request it from the library, too, that's awesome. Whichever way you find it is fine with me.