Recently bought unabridged copies of The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After by Alexander Dumas, per, the first two of the four Musketeer books. It struck me that we need fiction of that sort today. Instead of the now-standard dystopias, why not the adventures of people fighting oppression for what’s right? Where are our defiant heroes?
A Spanish writer of international best-sellers, Arturo Perez-Reverte, has a recurring hero, Captain Alatriste, who is a Cavalier booted from the military and forced to make a living with his sword skills. He has something of a code but rules are made to be broken, and a man must eat. Interesting character, shaded and nuanced, a hero opposing corruption even as he pursues a mercenary sword-for-hire life, his plight echoes today because corruption is eternal in humanity.
Most writers of serial characters are content to create detectives. Few dig deeper or wider, such as focusing on, say, an investigative journalist. Consider the movie PARALLAX VIEW; in that we see how effective a journalist can be as an alternative to the typical detective.
Or what about those books from the Sixties and Seventies about power and malfeasance? Seven Days In May; The President’s Plane Is Missing; The Manchurian Candidate, and so on. In such work we find a host of different types leading the charge, from White House staffers to lawyers and even elected officials caught in webs of deceit and betrayal. A special prosecutor and his team would be perfect for such fiction, a compelling focal character with links both high and low.
Vigilante action works to drive plots; most comic book heroes have at least a touch of vigilantism. Batman is full-on vigilante, and is hunted by the cops for it.
Playing with genre tropes for serious purposes is tricky. One tends to sink into genre mire.
One wonders what Pynchon will write about this trumpery currently gagging us. Or Philip Roth. Or other serious, genuine writers. If alive, Mailer and Vidal would be in a froth. Gore Vidal tried to warn us, as did Vonnegut. Mailer would’ve had a trumper fist-fight already.
If true and/or the GOP manage to hide enough evidence of their treason and other high crimes and somehow prevail, we will need a Solzhenitsyn. There isn’t one on our horizon.
Then again, the world outside our cereal box may not care if any of the atrocities and crimes against humanity are chronicled. I recall when The Gulag Archipelago came out, each succeeding volume extending the indictment, the condemnation of Russia’s Stalinist legacy. The world stood appalled at what it had so blithely ignored precisely because Alexander Solzhenitsyn made it specific and human.
On the TV show BULL, a recent episode presented an impassioned defense of the right to privacy even while demonstrating the complexities today’s advanced technology and antiquated laws present as they clash. It reminded me of a Dick Wolf script for LAW AND ORDER filtered through the Dr. Phil Mary Sue show BULL.
Dick Wolf is fairly rich and relatively conservative, to employ the term in the old sense of seeking to preserve traditional institutions, but he is no neocon, no trumper, no fascist capitalist thug. He seems to be what we’d today call a centrist; he upholds a Rule of Law and defends the principles of Constitutional democracy.
Some of Wolf’s episodes are preachy-ish. Few are obnoxious about it. They are famous for twists and ambiguous endings. Criminals often prevail, sometimes due to tiny flaws in the law or missteps by the prosecutors or police. Technicality is a legitimate reason in the world of LAW AND ORDER franchises. Always, though, they speak to the need for a rule of law, for a social order based on rational compassion.
Other shows, such as the notorious ’24’ on FOX, which promoted the efficacy of torture to elicit timely intel, cleave to the oblivious neocon mindset. Not surprising, certainly galling, such delusional rant is actually agitation propaganda or agitprop from the alt-right, or extremist right wing.
Steve “race-ist” Bannon and his fellow alt-right sick fucks would call Dick Wolf’s shows neoliberal yap. Thing is, Wolf’s stance refelects the ideals of our nation’s foundation. Bannon seeks to demolish the whole country, and world, if possible. Essentially, Wolf is positive and conservative, Bannon is negative and destructive, a terroristic howling loon, the sworn enemy of stable democracy and the entire Western Canon of ideals, from freedom, liberty, and equality under the law to taking care of each other and maintaining a healthy, clean environment. He hates it all, needs to see it burn. President Bannon is a nihilist bent on annihilation.
Have any trumpers begun the suicide diving contest yet? Seems inevitable. Guilt and fear of exposure, dread of prison, or of possible execution as traitors, will drive some to take what is euphemistically called the easy, or coward’s, way out. You wait.
Turning state’s evidence, as the saying has it, is more a trumper’s style, perhaps. Spilling guts, selling out, and squealing like a whiny baby suits trumpers, and accusations and testimony in exchange for rough-cut deals is the sewer rat’s way. Some wont have useful information, though. Some will feel cornered. They should, and they’ll crack. Suicides are unavoidable among this crowd of incompetent losers as the heat closes in on them.
Watergate comes to mind and has been mentioned even in high-piled places. What if the never-uncovered depths of dark secrets of Watergate dealt with Nixon planning to sell out America to China or Russia? What if the trump treason is merely a fulfillment of a long-term GOP plot to stage a slow, piecemeal coup?
It is feasible.
The GOP is the worst threat to not only American democracy but to mankind in history. How’s that for trumping trump’s hyperbole? The GOP is an ideological cult of nihilistic greed stuck in a zero sum mentality. If they can’t have it all, none will be left or allowed for anyone. They will smash what they can’t grab. They’re crazy millennialists driven by an evangelical zeal to kick in an end game. They are extremists bent on a scorched-earth gambit to bring about Armageddon and the return of their imaginary super-duper hero, jebus. They lust for the promised thousand years of the chosen ones, them of course, getting ring-side seats to watch us left-behinds suffering hellish torture here in post-Armageddon Earth’s ruins.
Imam Mike Pence buys into this. All the C Street Dominionists and Promise Keepers swallow this whole. You thought Scientology or Mormonism is a threat, try the GOP’s sick C3 religion of blind faith Conservatism, Capitalism, and Christianity of the extreme fundamentalist stripe. Their Prosperity Christianity is greed and racist white entitlement rampant. They depict their magical super-duper hero jebus as a blond, blue-eyed body-builder of the romance novel cover varietal wearing twin bandoliers and carrying twin .30 machine guns for mowing down the infidel. They pretend wealth equates with a god’s blessing and poverty, a god’s curse.
This mentality is why the GOP can be so callous and sadistic to women, children, and the poor. They think in terms of those groups being downtrodden because their god disapproves of those groups. It old you it was sick fuck shit.
Their insanity makes Charles Manson’s wild delusions about Helter Skelter race war a realty; they wear suits and ties and act like human beings in public as they strut and preen in Congressional hubris, barking orders, arrogantly passing sadistic laws to punish everyone but themselves. They uphold the rape culture enthusiastically, viewing women and children, the weak and the poor, as monetized commodities to keep in the useful leverage of debt. They commit incest, spouse abuse, and worse so regularly it’s barely worth reporting any longer; a GOP pervert caught again? Ho hum.
Our rational move is to use trump for leverage to eliminate the GOP and eradicate their twisted ideology in a way similar to how Germany handled Hitler and Nazism.
It is not advised to hold one’s breath waiting for this to happen. Inertia and apathy define the silent majority of sheep and cattle we call American citizens. They’re actually not citizens at all when they don’t participate in democracy, they are by-standers and corporate property.
My expectation and fear is the media eagerly pursuing the course of normalizing things as quickly as possible, as it did with the JFK assassination, post Warren Commission white-wash. Once trump falls, they’ll try for everything going back to business as usual, as if by blinking they can revert to the corrupt system that gave us trump in the first place. No one will want to do the hard, tedious, and complicated work of constructing a new system that will function well while excluding big money, lobbying, featherbedding, gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and so much else brought to us by the 1% rich white old males.
This normalizing will be a huge, obscene lie, yet again, and yet again the rot will fester even as it is being mythologized again, probably lying dormant but growing for another 44 – 50 years before another trampish pustule bursts to poison everything and everyone.
We probably don’t have that long, given climate change and plague, so it is now or never.
/ Old 815
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Addendum:
As changes grow more violent we’ll see people adapt. Look at Holland or Venice. Look at the Inuit or the jungle tribes, the runners of the Serengeti or the high-altitude Andean mountain people; we adapt to some amazingly varied conditions.
Increasingly, we’ll see habitat shrink. We’ll see desperate measures, from underground enclaves to undersea bubble cities, probably attempts to lodge self-sustaining colonies on The Moon or Mars or at the LaGrange points, maybe cities floating on oceans or in the air.
Fuck, maybe we’ll make it. As Ian Anderson sang, “Don’t think I’d make it but I bet I might.
Being optimistic and trusting change, adapting to it, are the best ways to face up to what’s here and what’s coming.
Green power will become basic; necessity itself will kill big oil and probably big energy as a whole. Question is, will it do the necessary deed soon enough to give us a fighting chance?
/ ers
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