The writer is an author.
THE unthinkable seizure of the US Capitol building on Jan 6, 2021, has an analogy in Leonard Wibberley’s book The Mouse That Roared (1955). The Irish-American author Wibberley wrote a series of satires on US and Cold War politics, but none of them fits as neatly with the events of that day, the day that witnessed American democracy genuflect to home-grown anarchy.
Wibberley’s parody, like all literary deflations, is premised on an implausible possibility. A small band of invaders, dressed in chain-mail and armed with mediaeval weapons from the tiny Duchy of Grand Fenwick, crosses the Atlantic in a galleon. The invaders land in modern New York on the very day the city is undergoing a curfew drill. Wandering in an empty city, the soldiers chance upon a secret laboratory. There, they unwittingly capture the dreaded Quadium Bomb, a WMD more powerful than the combined nuclear strength of the United States and the then USSR. The United States surrenders immediately to a now superior power.