Dan Chabot’s novel of political satire, EMMA’S ARMY (How Millions of Angry, Marching Seniors Saved Their Vanishing America), finds 86-year-old Emma O’Doud, a “fierce, feisty patriot grandmother,” battling the sinister forces of woke culture and liberalism in a dystopian future America that has rejected traditional values and become a totalitarian socialist state. Having been consigned by her son to a retirement home (that she dubs “Arthritis Acres”), Emma is subjected to an unending parade of left-wing indignities, including prohibitions on offensive speech and oversized sodas, and a book club that discusses volumes like Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and Marxism for Dummies. Surrounded by America-hating socialists, Emma becomes increasingly discouraged and alienated until she starts a blog to express her frustrations, which draws a growing audience of like-minded souls. Emma’s following soon grows to millions of readers desperate to save a vanishing America from erasure by politically correct socialists and communists who despise democracy and freedom, ultimately mobilizing to march en masse upon Washington, D.C. and the Capitol Building, a “gray senior tide” intent upon restoring their generation’s values.
EMMA’S ARMY is not exactly subtle in its jabs at the excesses of left-wing wokeness. In this America, the dominant “Ninnie Party” (which stands for “Nurturing National Needs,” though Emma considers it a “shortened form of ‘nincompoop'”) is a liberal Big Brother that has opened its borders to a flood of immigrants, abolished free speech, and gives away health care and “free quinoa, tofu, and kale” while banning books like Huckleberry Finn and The Iliad. (To Kill a Mockingbird, thankfully, is spared once “PC fanatics” determine that “no mockingbirds were killed in the production of the novel.”) The Ninnies attempt to tax nostalgia to discourage talk of the “good old days” and even tax “excessive tail-wagging by dogs” for fear that the butterfly effect could adversely affect weather around the globe.
While many of the novel’s intentionally silly gags are amusing in their over-the-top goofiness—such as a costume party at Arthritis Acres at which feminists slam “Clementine Cadwalader” for dressing up as The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe—its send-ups of left-wing issues are so implausibly hyperbolic that it is unclear whether Chabot is lampooning leftists or poking fun at the wildest fears of reactionary right-wingers. In either case, EMMA’S ARMY doesn’t quite work as political satire. Emma’s confinement at Arthritis Acres is little more than a pretext for a parade of woke-culture caricatures (such as journalist “Slant Greeley,” who publishes blatant lies about Emma in the retirement home newspaper, or home administrator “Josef Stallingsky”) with the barest minimum of plot progression. Despite its narrative and satirical limitations, however, EMMA’S ARMY offers its (presumably) intended audience of paleoconservative Facebook Boomers a cathartic and anodyne fantasy of the country’s return to “traditional values.”
Too broadly absurd to offend progressives and too simplistic to provide a meaningful critique of the left, Dan Chabot’s EMMA’S ARMY (How Millions of Angry, Marching Seniors Saved Their Vanishing America) isn’t much more than a framework for an extended conservative tirade against “woke culture.”
~Edward Sung for IndieReader