Which Dystopia Best Describes Bushco's America?

Whether the issue is USA PATRIOT Act, TIA, terrorism futures markets, or any of 1000 assaults on liberty and sensible thinking, Bushco has proposed a governement agenda that most closely resembles the dark, critical visions of science fiction writers. We've heard Orwell cited by candidates like Moseley Braun, by Al Gore and others. Kucinich has referred to Kafka.

Which dystopic novel best captures Bushco's vision for America's future?

And...

On its way to A Handmaid's Tale, if Shrubco wins in '04.

Animal Farm, Animal Farm,

Never through me shalt thou come to harm!

Have you seen the little piggies
Crawling in the dirt?
And for all the little piggies,
Life is getting worse;
Always having dirt to
Play around in.

Have you seen the bigger piggies
In their starched white shirts?
You will find the bigger piggies
Stirring up the dirt
Always have clean shirts to
Play around in.

In their styes with all their backing,
They don't care
What goes on around.
In their eyes there's something lacking.
What they need's a damn good whacking.

Everywhere there's lots of piggies
Living piggy lives.
You can see them out for dinner
With their piggy wives.
Clutching forks and knives to
Eat their bacon.

.

I voted for The Handmaid's Tail, but realistically, in the Bush
decline and fall of American civilization, there are elements of all
the dystopias that you mentioned, and more.

The 1984 tie-ins are obvious.

Meanwhile, the American populace strongly resembles the denizens of
Huxley's Brave New World, but we don't just have Soma, we have
500 channels of TV PLUS WWE, NASCAR, raves, nineteen hundred
and eighty four varieties of religions, and new designer drugs each
month. We breed lots of people to be Delta Minuses (and a few to be
Alpha Plus), plus a few more cheat, get into Yale on legacies, and
come out branded Alpha although we all know they're no better than
Beta Minus at best; they simply toasted their brains with alcohol
AFTER being decanted instead of before.

Farenheit 451 has obvious analogies back to the "dumbing down"
of America that has so-facilitated the Right's grab of the now-more-
ignorant masses.

The Handmaid's Tale hasn't quite arrived, but it's obviously
the end-goal of a large part of the Bush faction (which is why I chose
it). The Bush Commanders definitely want to have wild sex with whores
at the Hyatt while portraying an outward image of Republican
Religious Rectitude. And George seems to get a real hard-on from
executions, so I can't imagine that "public salvagings" and
"particicutions" are that far off. (There's a pretty big crowd
right here in DU that seem to be ready to "particute" more than
a few men.)

I'd also add to your list King's The Stand, Peter Bryant's
Red Alert (which became the movie Dr. Strangelove),
Failsafe, David Brin's The Postman, and Burgess's A
Clockwork Orange.

If you were willing to go farther afield into really speculative
fiction, I'd add Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country,
McCammon's Swan Song, and, on a much-more-hopeful note,
Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing.

Atlant

and fled the east coast not too much later, Clockwork Orange was much on my mind.

In my block of 4th St N.E. not far from Union Station I started to see things that scared me. And I've lived behind voluntary (window) bars in "marginal" neighborhoods for probably the prior 15 years at the time.

First was a group of young kids (probably < 16) sort of bopping down the street singing some hip-hop nonsense outloud. A DC police cruiser came down the street and one of the kids starting beating out a drum rythem to the song on the police car fender. The cops ignored it and cruised on.

Then there were some brutal crimes within a block of my house that were simly senseless. I felt very much that the at least part of Clockwork Orange was unfolding around me, and decided it was time to give up the urban life style.

From a political point of view, the control of speech and media is certainly Orwellian, but also has strong echo's of BNW. When I think about the deification of Ford and the way the media treats celebrity now, that is rather haunting (if not frightening).

But we are not living between the pages of a book. We are living in the real world. More important is convincing people that we are in fact living in a dystopic world. When Steve Jobs commisioned the famous 1984 Macintosh introduction commercial, he gambled that a significant portion of the potential computer-user elites would recognize 1984 in the commercial.

I think we need our own 1984 commercial, and our own manner-weilding hero.

I really should read some more of the posts before voting. I picked 1984, but the aspect of BNW I found most familiar was the part where the regime repeats over and over what they'd have us believe until we all accept it as fact.

Call it what you will, but more and more people around me are on some sort of drug prescribed to alter the mind. While I won't go so far as my father does in his "ritalin librul brainwashing scandal," there are a lot of people on prescriptions.

What has led me to question all this prescribing is a freind of mine who worked in a family violence situation. She had to deal with a large number of people on drugs. A lot of these people did not need the drugs; doctors prescribed the drugs to avoid having to work with them. I know a lot of people out there need their prescriptions, and I think they should take them as prescribed. But a lot of others are on them who are on them because they are the easy way to cope.

Another term I learned from my freind was "self-medicate." Maybe I am naive not to have heard the term until recently, but a lot of people on their own go for the "soma" and get meds illegally or use illegals and alcohol to self medicate. I know I have used alcohol as a medication-to make myself feel better. I am not trying to be judgemental here, I am jsut trying to point out how much "soma" there is in today's society.

For all of those who think that we would never do what the Nazis did, be advised that the worst abuses of the regime occurred toward the end of it. The build up was slow, a gradual erosion of rights and of eliminating any dissension from policy, by press, government officials and the effective use of propaganda and scapegoating.

I've been reading a lot more about fascism myself, and the ascent of the Nazis.

It's difficult to compress though. You can step a lot of toes talking about the holocaust. And the arguments about civil liberties, constitutional government and the core issues need to be discussed in depth to get the point across. You also run into a sort of corollary of Godwin's law, which is that as soon as you mention Hitler people tune you out.

These dystopic fictions are handy because in many cases the authors are very aware of the dangers of totalitarianism, of emerging forms of social injustice and political decepetion. They have done the hard work of compressing the ideas into memorable characters, events, and slogans.

Similarities:

Government is privatized. Private cops,
private mercenary armies for hire.

Cable TV owned by nutcase who runs
religious cult that pushes mind-altering,
zombifying drugs on its adherents, and
who is also a major software contractor
for what little is left of the government.

America colonized like some third world
country.

Mafia legalized and above ground.

arendt

I'll check that out.

Some nifty links to intellectual discussions of Snow Crash, more cyperpunk theory.

...and it's a good choice. But I still say VALIS by P K Dick (see below) is closer.

the sheep look up. excellent though somewhat dated
STOP KILLING ME!

Great movie

But the people who say that Imperial Amerika has some defining features of each of these books is also true.

And these are the "Good Old Days". Things are about to get worse for most, much worse for the bottom half.

And the Busheviks, their Capos, aliies, lackeys, will enjoy as the whole shitstorm goes down around them in their air conditioned bunkers with their Poor Man "bodyguards".

Nothing a Bushevik likes better than using some Serfs to beat or kill the others.

soylent green for the huge income disparity and class society.

Rollerball for the 5 corporations ruling the earth.

Not realistic, but close in its cinematic mark: "equilibrium" in the dehumanization of the new police state

Pink floyd's "the wall" is easily a bushco' history documentary.

That was a real product of 1970s culture...

As you mention it, it would make for an outstanding remake. That classical music overture and the intensity of Mr caan, really would take some creative remaking....

To be honest, i miss 70's culture. It was america before the "neocon wars."

unfortunately, it kinda sucked

If you're diverging into movies, then Soylent Green is a good
pick, but add at least:

• Robocop With Omni Consumer Products controlling
  EVERYTHING!
  
  
• Starship Troopers Not the bug stuff but the whole
  pro-fascist "failure of Democracy" and "Service brings
  citizenship" leit motif. (Also a Robert Heinlein book, but
  did the book have the same ironic sense of humor? I think not.)
  
  
• The Running Man with its whole media-as-everything
  culture. (Also a not-very-related Stephen King book.)
  
  
• On the Beach (also a Nevil Shute book) as a possible
  outcome of the Bush Doctrine.
  
  

Atlant

because the people who are oppressed didn't know it because they were distracted by feel-good entertainments.

Never really thought of Kafka as dystopian, but there is sort of this sense of depsair in his books that I can feel too, in Right Wing America. More of a pyschological and spirtitual dystopia than a poltiical or economic one.

Not the Ahnold movie but the book by Stephen King.

Yes, this was generally a fun sci-fi movie, but i think u could see it as a dystopia of sorts.

I suspect it wont be that repressive (ala 1984) in that the state is the repressor.

I think the Brave New World analogys are maybe more apt, with various kinds of things for people to "self medicate", as well as being under control of "the boss" where u work having its own kind of repression. ...this is sort of the opposite of the "Handmades Tale" theocratic repression. I dont see that as its too "expensive" ..."Soma" is cheaper than "jihad".

...or the proto-version, Radio Free Albemuth

Ferris F. Fremont, aka the metaphysical avatar once and always of Dick Nixon is president (look how many of Dickie boy's proteges are high in W's artillery), and rules the US in a skull-crushing totalitarian regime....

If you haven't read it (and obviously you haven't since it's not on the list) it is far and away the most accurately prophetic SF dystopia pointing to exactly where we are now, from direct moral/spiritual/mystical observation of the same players--or their moral offspring.

"The Empire never ended"
--a phrase I and a number of other DUers used to use as a sig line, not so long ago. Haven't seen it recently.

You're right I haven't read it, but from the way it's described, I'd better. Over the years I've enjoyed Dick's stories, and of course the movie adaptations. Now I'm stoked.

Next poll dystopias on film.

...is the way he captures the air of normality, the fact that the signs that a fascist takeover has occured are occluded from most people by their own denial, their assumption that basically everything is okay. Might be even clearer in the Radio Free Albemuth version, though VALIS interests me more in lots of ways.

It's comin .... we just gotta hang on until more duckies start lookin' thru the window at what the swine are really up to.

:hippie:

:hi: Hi, Lisa! I actually just recently re-read Animal Farm and was stunned by how similar it was to our current situation. Take, for instance, the chief pig Napoleon who cowers in the back of the battle and afterwards invents medals for heroism which he confers upon himself alone - sound anything like a certain AWOL misfit we know being flown to an aircraft carrier safely off the coast of California, halfway around the world from where his policies resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands? Or how about the farm meetings, at which dissenting voices are immediately drowned out by sheep (how appropriate) bleating patriotic slogans, backed up by the menacing growls of Asscraft's, excuse me, Napoleon's killer attack guards? Or the arch nemesis of the people, Snowball, who receives the blame for everything that goes wrong and serves as the justification for every repressive measure and who, according to undisclosed intelligence sources, is one day to be found at the farm of one neighbor, and the next day is reported to be lurking in Iraq, excuse me, at another neighbor's farm? I tell you, you could pretty much take the text and do a simple search and replace for names and you'd have Faux News.

Too many parallels to list, but here's a few:

The Great Loyalty Oath Crusade - reminds me of the constant cries of the "moderates" to vote for anyone nominated by the Dems.

Yossarian's complaint about the Germans trying to kill him just because he drops bombs on them. Reminiscent of what's going on in Iraq now. Why don't those durn Iraqis love us?

Milo Minderbinder's endless war for profit. Very obvious parallel.

The endless "Catch-22"s proposed by the pro-war advocates: "If you're against the war - then you must be for Saddam Hussein". "If you're against the war - then you don't support our troops." "I voted for the war because I was against the war." - And variations as used by several of "our" candidates.

"That's some catch, that Catch-22." - Yossarian