No doubt some of you have seen An Idiot Abroad, the Science Channel Program from Ricky Gervais. In it a likable dolt named Karl Pilkington endures all sorts of embarrassment and/or humiliation, yet at the same time he gets to do some things most of would like to do (climb Kilimanjaro, hunt yetis, travel Route 66, learn make-up techniques from Thai lady-boys--you get the idea.) Yet to call Karl an idiot is really unfair. He takes most of these experiences good naturedly and he learns from those experiences.
Compare that with our own idiots at home. I, of course, refer to the GOP presidential candidates. Rick Santorum has continually revealed that what lies between his ears is like Gertrude Stein's desciption of Oakland: There is no there there. Who would have thought a presidential candidate would say that John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech about the absolute separation of church and state almost made him throw up? Kennedy's speech eased tensions and fears over his Catholicism. Santorum's comment conjure up the 19th century fears of a papal fifth column ( the Irish) were here to undermine America and make it Catholic. The author of Maria Monk, or The Secrets of a Convent, and other anti-Catholic tracts would support Santorum's positions because the Senator's remarks actually prove their fears were justified. Similarly, cartoonist Thomas Nast, who portrayed Catholic prelates as alligators (it's the hats) threatening America would see Santorum as a prime example of what he was cartooning about. Santorum reinforces bigoted ideas that I thought were dead and buried. What's more remarkable is that it resonates with religious social conservatives who a century and a half ago would have been like the torch-carrying peasant mob in "Frankstein," only on their way to burn a Catholic church rather than a monster. Of course, to those yahoos there was no difference.
Only in America can you find someone who still holds to 19th, or even 18th century Catholic dogma. And only in America can you find Protestant evangelicals who have turned to aged Catholic dogma to justify their own positions, which seems oddly contradictory. Then again, I have an old friend who noted years ago that evangelicals have been slowly recreating all the things that caused the Reformation in the first place. As Marx once wrote: "History does repeat itself; the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
But idiocy goes deeper. It's like watching second graders in a food fight exchange insults like "I'm rubber and you're glue..." or endless "Your mother is like..." cracks. The other candidates either stumble or mumble and still say things they'd have been better to keep to themselves. And somehow, Gingrich's enthusiasm for a moon-base that could become a state (Quelle surprise!) somehow suggests the man is three bricks shy of a load. And I'm a science fiction fan who supports space exploration. He makes me want to flee to the Canadian wilderness and build a bunker.
I'm hoping the current age of idiocy is the farce. Yet it makes it difficult for writers to satirize things because the satire of the past has unfortunately become the present. I think of Robert Sheckley's great short stories that lampooned television game shows. Apparently network programmers thought Sheckley was writing a game plan for them to carry out. Think about it, isn't "The Amazing Race" straight out of Sheckley? And aren't "reality" shows like "Survivor" just a version of any number of science fiction stories, just minus the actual killing of the competitors ala Sheckley's "The Tenth Victim"?
All of this makes writing near future science fiction virtually impossible. While we were all worrying about how computers would take over world and how the phone system could produce a massive, sentient super-computer overlord, what we actually got was the Internet and the World Wide Web, without which you wouldn't be reading this. We should have been reading and working to prevent the world(s) described by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth and by Sheckley. Instead of worrying about Communism, we should have worried about might replace it. Where were the stories about post-Communist Russian and China? Apparently no one could imagine China become the real engine of the world economy or a Russia run by gangsters whose actions often make Stalin seem like a pussy cat. No one, except maybe L. Sprague deCamp, thought Brazil might become a major force in the world. And India? Americans, let alone sf writers, could only see the world of Gandhi (the movie, not the man) and maybe also Apu from the Simpsons.
Good near future science fiction, which I like, needs to get beyond the parochialism that characterizes most Americans. The Founders were cosmopolitans, men of the world, and not the narrow-minded localists the Tea Party imagine them to be. Writers have to be more cosmopolitan, to imagine things beyond the neighbor's yard. We like to imagine ourselves thinking of the cosmos, of the universe, yet our social ideas are retro. We can only imagine a world that's like an imaginary small town America of the some century that never happened. Social, political and economic conservatism and libertarianism need to be supplanted by examining the trends of the real world, rather than imagining and longing for a past that never was. Good science fiction has to breakdown barriers, to image societies that are familiar, but also very strange. For example, could we imagine a future society deriving more from Polynesian or Maori cultural traditions, a society where machines have reached the point of providing everything humans need so a free market economy is irrelevant and greed is pointless and even passe', where Western Samoa or Papua New Guinea is the real power in the world.
I'm not even sure I can write that world. But I can tell you about future society almost none of us can write about in fiction because it's all too apparent. It's the world we live in, a fool's paradise and an idiot's delight. And that's because not a one of us thinks about Robert Heinlein's most important warning: "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." Now there's a real source of ideas for science fiction. And all you have to do is look around, but you can't let it overwhelm you.
No comments:
Post a Comment