“Do you, uh, really think we can convince the Americans that Marxism-Leninism might have a live dinosaur on its payroll?”
It’s really an alien intelligence slash kaiju that goes by the name of Messenger, and it’s wreaking havoc on this alternative history tale in which it eats Bob Hope on the way to a USO show in South Korea. (Okay, I snickered.) Things just keep getting juicier, until
“At the next World Science Fiction Convention (in Cleveland), Harlan Ellison is arrested for punching Robert Heinlein, who is arrested in turn for knocking Harlan unconscious with a large bag of jelly beans. Nobody pays any attention. That night, Messenger knocks the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco Bay.”
Would totally pay to see Heinlein show Ellison how to grok in fullness with jelly beans. I hope Connie Willis was there to draw a dick on his face while he was out cold. A red one.
Finally we make it into the Nixon administration, in which Messenger finally starts talking. It demands everyone embrace the ‘60s-esque philosophy about which John Lennon sneered “we’d all love to see your plan.”
Then a smart woman steps up to talk to Messenger, and harnesses it to capitalism, and there’s a Nixon mea culpa in there, and I kind of spaced out, because Watergate happened when I wasn’t even dealing with puberty yet, and I didn’t particularly feel like refreshing my memory with regard to late 1900s history just so I can catch all the hyper-detailed Boomer-era references.
Yup, you guessed it, this is a story for my parents’ generation, not mine. Even if it does have one excellent sentence, speaking as someone who instantly took such a strong dislike to Ellison (from Boy And His Dog) that I refused to ever buy anything involving him and only read his compilations from libraries or used book stores. Guess you could say he inspired me vis-à-vis political outrage.
And there’s that word again, “political.” I’ve spent the last week looking at memes about how fact-checkers are evil and every bit as bad as Epstein … and I’m a professional fact-checker. And I kept looking at it thinking about how I didn’t block all those family members who got suckered into voting for that pedo so I could stand on the same side with people who despise me for what I innately am (a fact-checker -- plus it’s my career, my hobby, and my passion).
I have spent a good many years participating in the legal system from an angle that encourages fairness and Universal Healthcare, and discourages institutional discrimination, and the healthcare system we have now. I’m within a degree or two of acquaintance-separation from a lot of liberal politicians due to my work, which is why I don’t talk about it.
I really think Universal Healthcare could solve a lot of our problems, but I also don’t think we’re going to get it until a smaller share of our population derives outrage with regard to brown people getting free stuff. We have a lot of those people in our country. I don’t agree with them, and that’s why I’m over here where assholes spit on me for being a fact-checker, and frequently try to paint me as some kind of right wing conservative for disagreeing with them about things like pop music and whether ‘60s utopianism is too sacred to criticize (and Harlan Ellison, him too). Both sides of the culture war have plenty of assholes, and I tend to clash with assholes because of that fact-checker thing, so I’m going to run into it either way, but at least this side has the music, so that’s where I’m at politically: pro-music, especially if it’s diverse music and not the shitty kind that’s mostly white people who dislike dancing, and pro-Universal Healthcare, and anti-people who dislike brown people, as well as people whose skin is other colors which are neither white nor comparable to food.
With regard to the ‘60s utopianism, parts of it were great and parts split off into directions like anti-vaxxerism, because it wasn’t centralized, and full of visions about each individual ruling their own universe (and I’m not going to go off on that tangent like I did with Jack Parsons and Scientology again).
I used to date this guy who was into Buddhism and he was always dragging me to classes and lectures. There was one where the speaker, a monk with lots of credentials in studying this sort of thing, was discussing symbolism in an ancient tapestry which had animals representing vices. One was a pig, which made me think of Nine Inch Nails songs about all the pigs lined up to face their dystopian ending. So I asked why the pig was there.
The lecturer said that it was because the pig consumes everything indiscriminately. Because of that, it will thrive under degrading conditions without objecting. Unlike other creatures like horses and chickens, which require competent husbandry if they’re going to thrive. In his culture, pigs weren’t so much the fat greedy hoarders that they are in Western mythology as much as ultra-complacent consumers, willing to live in shit and eat garbage. Therefore, in order to avoid the vice symbolized by pigs, one should be selective about what one eats, and reads, and wallows in.
At the time I wasn’t buying it; the information age had just started and I was wallowing in information. In retrospect, yes, lots of that information was really awful. But the information age grew expansive enough to accept misinformation, half-truths and things you really wish were true and maybe if you wish hard enoug they’ll happen. And lots of us, including myself, turned into pigs, happily wallowing in whatever Facebook and Instagram and Reddit had to offer.
Like the whole sixties utopian thing. Parts of it are gold. Not being a bigot. Letting everyone see a doctor. More trains; less billionaire jets. Other parts got compromised, like the organics movement moving into anti-vaxxer territory, and some of it was built on bad foundation, like the Freudian references that constantly surface even though modern science is fully aware that things like schizophrenia and autism are not caused by incorrect toilet training. I’m not a pig, and there are quite a few items in this trough that disagree with my digestion.
And that means I can be a liberal while still disagreeing with other liberals. Such as Harlan “Public Sexual Assault” Ellison, for one. He’s adequate nutrition for some, and others even find him umami, and he might even taste like pumpkin pie to a select few.
If you’re a liberal who was into politics during the late 20th century, you’ll probably get a lot more out of this story than I did. It reminded me of Godzilla Minus One, a film I thought was wonderful, even though I’ve turned into a very picky eater with regard to films as well as books (and friends, and internet memes).
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