Wasteland Wrap-up #60

The state of the world, a high-profile book review, a quirky museum, survival vs. Survivalist narratives, Marvel zombies...

Every week seems to bring fresh new awfulness in the news, and, to me anyway, it shows no signs of abating anytime soon. I say this not to be a “doomer,” but to simply state the obvious: the Trump administration does not feel “checked” by being unpopular, by alienating its allies, by doing immense damage to the United States. If it is self-interested, it is narrowly self-interested along lines that do not reflect well for the United States or its interests.

At least things have warmed up here a bit, and the Sun has come out…

What the bodes, I don’t know. Will there be a point of turning around in the near future? Occasionally news articles come out suggesting this — that the unpopularity of these policies is hitting such a critical point that even Trump’s supporters are uncomfortable with them, and the people who have been “on the fence” about Trump are being forced to concede that the warnings about him have been largely shown to be true. I know there are people who put a lot of hope on the midterm elections being such a possible turning point. Well, that would be wonderful.

Personally, I have been trained by experience to not to be too optimistic: people saying they disagree with Trump is not the same thing as saying they’d vote for his opposition (or even refrain from voting), I have little faith in the (heavily gerrymandered) electorate, and I also have very little faith that the Democratic opposition, what there is of it, would be willing to actually take any bold steps against Trump even if they did come into power.

Lyndon and I walked over the Paris Observatory, which is interesting but looks quite empty.

This isn’t an argument for fatalism or non-voting or depression or anything like that. One has to fight the good fight. I don’t claim to be an expert on US domestic politics, either, or to have any special insights. But it is what I think about it, if I’m honest about it. I would, as always, love to be proven wrong! But we’re in the bad place right now: paramilitary agents have been literally murdering people in the streets, have been promised absolute immunity for any crimes they commit, and, as if that isn’t enough by itself, the US president is demanding that his European allies allow him to capture territory on the most spurious of pretexts.

I have always tried to be pretty realistic about Trump’s abilities to embrace terrible ideas, but I really didn’t have “threatening war with NATO” on my bingo card. (I did have “shooting American citizens in the street” on my bingo card, however.)

Paris time, bottled at the source. The caption says this is the legal definition of French time based on an atomic clock in the Paris Observatory.

Well, enough on that. In “book news” this week, my new book received a very friendly review in The Wall Street Journal last week. That was heartening. I also did a very fun interview with my friend Ankit Panda for the War on the Rocks podcast about the book (which is only available to their subscribers). And I did a few other interviews/podcasts which have not yet come out.

It’s been fun to talk about the book in the podcasts, although I feel like I am confronted with the same problem each time, which is: a) how do you explain the argument of the book in a way that people would find even a little persuasive in a very short amount of time, b) how do I signal to people that if they don’t find my brief discussion of it persuasive — which I understand!!! — that they should read the book, because that’s where the evidence is, and c) the book really covers three separate periods/arguments (WWII, postwar, Korean war) and how does one adequately gesture towards each of these (if one does at all)? Even when a podcast runs an hour or so, it feels hard to really fit that all in, but if an interview is only 15-20 minutes or so, it feels somewhat absurd. But that’s the nature of these things, I suppose.

In other, non-book, non-depressing news, a friend of mine was in town and we went to the Le Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Museum of Hunting and Nature), which is accurately described online as “quirky.” It’s about half taxidermy and guns, half art inspired by taxidermy and nature. It had some shades of the The Museum of Jurassic Technology, but more emphasis on nature than high-technology. Above is a short video of one of their, er, exhibits — in a room full of “big game” heads, one them a ferocious wild boar, occasionally comes to life, animatronic-style, and growls loudly and menacingly. Huh. Well.

We had a nice time, but we do like strange things, and I do like nature (even if it has been dead and stuffed, which is probably not as good as being alive, but I don’t actually want to be that close to a polar bear or a wild boar). I enjoyed learning the French words for different kinds of animals. The art was, well, something different.

An artic fox, with plaid. What does it mean? I don’t know.

For Doomsday Machines, I did write up a lengthy post about a very odd — but thought-provoking — “Survivalist”/”Prepper” novel from 1983, Pulling Through by Dean Ing. If you didn’t catch it, I recommend it — I was happy with how it came together:

What I enjoyed about writing it was not just that the book gave me a lot of fodder for critique (which was inevitable given the presence of, I don’t know, a flying car and a cheetah), but that the critique that came to me felt like more than just pointing out its absurdities. That is, it got me to think a lot about the essential problem with the novel, which is not that it was very silly in many ways (it was, but I can enjoy very silly books), but that there is, at its heart, a tension between being a “survival” story (which has specific narrative expectations, notably the need for the survival to be nearly impossible and barely won) and it being a piece of “Survivalist” literature (which has its own logical expectations, like being able to show that nuclear war is in fact generally survivable, if you’ve prepared correctly).

The book wants to be both, and ultimately that makes it self-contradictory: as I put it in the review, if you need a flying car to survive nuclear war (which the protagonist does, several times), then nuclear war isn’t all that survivable, is it?

Post-apocalypse at the Jardin du Luxembourg? No, just the bee-keepers in their garb at the apiary…

Is it possible to balance both? I think so — one of my favorite bits of both “survival” and, in its way, “Survivalist” fiction is Max Brooks’ World War Z, which I have written about before. It is a “survival” story in that many of the individual stories are about narrow odds and clever actions; it is a “Survivalist” work in that its ultimate argument is that certain types of mindsets and approaches are more likely to succeed in dealing with global-scale catastrophes than others. It is, of course, a very different kind of book (and threat) that the one in Pulling Through, and its narrative choices are really different. I don’t think World War Z would have worked in this way if it had an “author-insert,” Gary Stu protagonist the same way Pulling Through did — and, indeed, that is the biggest flaw of the (extremely poor) cinematic adaptation of World War Z.

What do we have in store for next week on Doomsday Machines? I’m not 100% sure; I have a few things in the works, and we’ll see which of them comes to fruition.