Chapter 476, "When Satire and Dystopia Collide"

I read in bed and am not patriotic

He observed, how contemptible a Thing was human Grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive Insects as I.

Part II, Chapter Three, p 93,
Gulliver’s Travels, Swift, J. 1735

With the exception of Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid’s Tale, I’ve always disliked them: dystopian novels. Most, if not all, of my current middle and high school English students love them, and because I like to stay up on their likes and dislikes, I’ll read them, and as far as I can tell with my limited knowledge, we appear to actually be living in a dystopian novel. That being said, I’m very well-versed and actually love a good satire, and about eight years ago or so, when the current POS POTUS-elect was elected for the first time, I felt almost exhilarated by the unfolding of what seemed (to this voracious reader, erstwhile librarian and avid literary critic/snob/goofball) to be a modern version of a glorious 18th-century satire. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels came to mind, and in an effort to cope with everything, I liked to imagine myself as a similar traveler — a female version of Gulliver — being manipulated by my author into and through hyperbolic absurdities — actually living in a satire. Think about Swift’s depiction of the Yahoos — humanity at its most depraved and base, mirrored by our own current cultural debates over — pick one, any one — women’s bodies, women’s roles, one’s sexual identity, greed, environmental neglect — all amplified by social media and consumerism. And then there are the Lilliputians’ — those tiny, tiny people — who are divided over the proper and “correct” way to crack an egg. The Big Enders and the Little Enders. I think of those hallowed bathrooms in the sacred halls of our Capitol, where women have been recently assured of protection — that they won’t be discomfited by a transgender female even as they are actually accosted by any number of their male colleagues (or maybe their daughters as these conservative men seem to like their ladies young).

The cast of characters digs in its patriarchal heels, gets ever more freakish, a kind of cirque d’enfer, emboldened by unpunished sexual assault, rape, graft and grift. For every social media algorithm that records and predicts our behavior, we are driven further apart in a kind of farce and certainly a weird subversion of “connectivity,” and our sense of reality, a shared reality, crumbles, erodes, collapses. Pre-election, I had an argument online with an acquaintance (that I’d just as soon forget — the man, not the argument), a perfect exemplar of the conservative white male, a MAGA mansplainer, a ridiculous excuse of a human, to tell you the truth, laughably awful, if it were funny, and another one with a woman I know from the neighborhood who ripped into progressives, projecting her own lies and ignorance, all while tying things up with condescending god blesses and a chortling gloat, glee at her perceived power to trigger and gaslight. These are supposedly the people with whom I share common values as an American, who will, of course, be the first to separate the babies from the parents whom they will lock up in cages at the border, drag out the drills and dig for oil, baby, take us back to the real America with God in charge, men allowed to be Men, and women in their place, opening their legs to the tech bros who shoot their shit and demand we bear them and then their fruit. Oh, and the guns, too, of course. Honestly, nothing triggers me more these days than those who insist on the necessity of finding common ground with people whose values are quite literally and nearly absurdly opposite to one’s own. One of the hallmarks of dystopias, I think, is gaslighting. Help me out here. It reflects a deliberate manipulation of truth to control individuals and suppress dissent.We are gaslit (is that a word?) by a distortion of reality, by history being rewritten, by denying facts. We are forced to accept contradictory ideas and question our own perceptions. Misinformation spreads, systemic issues are denied, cruelty becomes cruelty for the sake of cruelty. This undermines resistance — this kind of psychological manipulation — if I doubt my reality and lose my sense of agency, I am probably ultimately easier to control.

Or not.

Am I tied up by the Lilliputians and then subjected to suffering through their needy absurdities, or turned cold and rational, governed by tech (a Houyhnhnm), rushing through the land of the Yahoos, bogged down in consumerism, environmental exploitation, and political demagoguery. Are our shiny stones our obsession with wealth and materialism? Or am I a traveler, like Gulliver, a wondering, wandering soul?

Reader, which is it? Dystopia or satire or both?

I know I’ve ranted here, perhaps incoherently.

Onward to Mars.