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I LOVE this guy! http://www.michaelberube.com/EE/index.phpReality-based community newsThere’s a weird new science-fiction piece by Ron Suskind in today’s New York Times Magazine. In it, a Messianic madman takes over the United States in a disputed election after a hapless time traveller accidentally crushes a butterfly ballot while hunting for dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period. Unable to distinguish Sweden from Switzerland (insisting, to one stunned congressman, that Sweden is “the neutral one” that “has no army"), the madman gradually consolidates his power, banishes all those who doubt or question him, and dispatches “senior advisers” to inform the populace that he can bend all of spacetime to his will. Suskind writes:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend—but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Basically, it’s Alex Proyas’s film Dark City rewritten as a political thriller. Derivative, but compelling. The stuff about the madman’s crazed, cultish followers is good too, though a little overdone. Throwing in a stock character who says “I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down” and “God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time” is heavy-handed, I think. But overall, as a depiction of an alternate universe inhabited by the insane, it’s pretty interesting stuff from an outlet that doesn’t usually publish much in the genre.(There's more...) If you're a blog afficiando, Michael Berube is a MUST READ. :D sw |
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