"Pretentious attention
Dismissive apprehension"
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"what was sadder for a man of heart was the sight or the canting humbugs, who, from fear of blows, kept at an equal distance from the two camps, and who, although they allowed their selfishness and cowardice to be visible, claimed admiration for the generosity of their sentiments and the nobility of their souls. They rubbed their eyes with onions, gaped like whitings, blew violently into their handkerchiefs, and, bringing their voices out of the depths of their stomachs, groaned forth: “O Penguins, cease these fratricidal struggles; cease to rend your mother’s bosom!” As if men could live in society without disputes and without quarrels, and as if civil discords were not the necessary conditions of national life and progress. They showed themselves hypocritical cowards by proposing a compromise between the just and the unjust, offending the just in his rectitude and the unjust in his courage."
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"There was no room in the same world for men who belched and men who wouldn't tolerate belching."
Philip K. Dick - The Chromium Fence
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"I just wanna say, y'know, can we, can we all - get along? Can we, can we get along? Um... can we stop makin' it, makin' it horrible for, for the, for the older people and the, and the, an' tha keeds?..."
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Due to it so thoroughly embracing the short story format and Poe's "one effect" I find myself able to recall the exact endings to Science Fiction more than any other genre, the moments when our expectations of a sappy ending are turned, if not upside down, at least sideways. George R. R. Martin in particular provided some delightfully hard-hitting ones before getting himself bogged down in the fantasy epic with no ending in sight, so for the purpose of this rant let's mention Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels. Without spoiling too much, we hear tell of a far future where the human race has diverged into eloi and morlocks space men and tunnel men, on one side technocratic malaise and on the other brute primitive vitality. Then <something happens> and though it's a humdinger of a finale* I only recently noted an irksome detail. The story presents us two narratively and existentially equal breeds, yet we wag our finger directly at the educated space-man. There's really no expectation that the ignorant troglodyte in turn should have predicted error or tamped down its impact, or even had the foresight or developed the means to make the crucial overture to begin with. So why then are they still presented as matching halves of a conundrum? If you expect better from one side, then you implicitly admit it is better. Superior. And not just because it lives in the sky.
But sometimes both sides truly are equal(-ly stupid) and so often what was phantasmagorical reductio ad absurdum seventy-five years ago reflects all too aptly on a culture wallowing in its decay. As Hollywood has maladapted every single other PipKDick story they could get their grubby mitts on, I find their avoidance of The Chromium Fence rather glaring, especially as for a SciFi story it's inordinately easy to illustrate with make-up effects and one animatronic psych-bot. In the near future this time, American society has diverged along a political divide in... cosmetics. No shit. Actually, no sweat, or mussed hair, or bad breath, or most any natural bodily functions, unless you're on the "natural" side of the argument, in which case you make a point of being as grubby and smelly as you can be. This glorified debate over legally enforcing deodorant grows so deeply divisive that it becomes apparent whichever side wins will either forcibly convert or violently purge the other half.
Sound ridiculous? Then I'd like to remind you that countless individuals in the West now risk being fired as hostile in the workplace environment for refusing to address a self-important eunuch or virago by the royal "they" and conversely
your right to buy a cake depends on whether you like hot dogs or tacos. And just like a supernumerary nipple might get you executed as a witch, it seems to matter little how little the pretexts really matter. Each new or old cause merely serves its fanatics in attacking targets of convenience, convenient means of competition for social apes obsessed with social standing. After all, it really doesn't matter why your neighbours disappear so long as you get their TV, right? If any woman has the right to order her male superior fired and move into his office by merely accusing him of <something sexual> then crime shall be supplied to fit that market demand for social "justice" by whatever definition seems most convenient. We purge the faithless and immediately forget past purges, but the opportunistic scum
that got their coworkers fired and threatened lawsuits to move up
corporate ladders will never be punished, and the politicians who rode lynch-mobs into office need never fear legal pursuit.
You say we should refocus on more important issues than the culture war, more practical ones (the economy, stupid) but if the fanatics are willing to murder or at least fire us for the sake of their fanaticism, that concern is quite practical. There's a universal and very real fear underlying cases like Dreyfus': that rulership willing to chase scapegoats threatens everyone, and there are no two sides to coercion or proscription enacted on imagined pretexts. It is not a debate between catholics and jews, but self-preservation in the face of such delusion as leads to walking off cliffs expecting to float.
The willingness of the left wing to embrace mass delusion has led exactly to where I predicted, all these years I've been telling you the right wing simply does that better than you, feeding back into the older mass delusions of troglodytic degenerates who literally believe that electing a grifting nepotist robber baron to destroy the government from the inside will somehow summon up a two-thousand-year-old zombie rabbi to lead them all to the land of milk and honey.
There are endless conflicts fabricated solely to supply false pretenses for powermongering, countless cases where we should get along. The trick lies in selecting the right criteria, knowing when a rat is just a rat. In particular between reason and make-believe though, the choice is life or death.
You've been picking the wrong one at every turn. How long did you think your luck would hold out?
It'll be your turn to play Dreyfus soon enough.
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* This is at minimum the third time I'm ripping off Martin's parting words just on this site.
