George Bush and the Littl Shynin Man.
Any Russell Hoban fans out there? If not, I'm truly sorry about the pretentiousness to follow. But I just happened to be re-reading Riddley Walker, then this great essay on "Riddley Walker and the Terror of History", right when Bush's nuclear-enhanced Middle East-oriented messiah complex comes roaring back in the news, thanks to Seymour Hersh. Talk about freaky parallels. (Donning my literature snob hat fully, I have to say that Riddley Walker, unlike, say, A Clockwork Orange to which it's always compared, actually seems a much better parable for the age of the Islamic fundamentalist /terrorist threat than for the age of communist threat -- the murkily understood and quickly mythologized threat of raids from "Outland" on "Inland" standing in for attacks from stateless or state-alligned extralegal groups on the homeland rather than the threat from a well-defined, powerful single-state enemy competing openly on the international stage. This despite that the book was written in 1980.)
So for any fellow Riddley fanatics: take Pry Mincer Goodparley as Tony Blair and maybe also as the archetypical Senate Democrat- or New Republic- "liberal hawk"; take Granser to be George Bush (Granser -- clueless, myopic, alternately caring and callous -- needs Blair and the liberal hawks' "follerme", or charisma, to make his messianic plan work); the hevvys from the Ram as Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer and the rest of the neocon pundits -- boarish, menacing, drawn to sophistic intimidation; Lissener and the Eusa folk as the angry antiwar left -- fundamentally right about the overzealous quest for nuclear/ strategic dominance on the part of politician-pundit class (the Eusa showmen) but too prone to circle-jerk and to waste time and moral strength seeking revenge to be truly effective at influencing events or winning over their enemies.
In the book, the "1 big 1" -- the nuclear explosion that brings about the fall of modern man back to a false-mystic Iron Age -- is recreated in the post-apocolyptic future as the "1 littl 1" -- the reinvention of gunpowder precipitated by a boat manned by a dead man arriving from Outland (or "otherside") with the right missing ingredient... a precipitating event paralleled by 911 if we can stretch a bit. The eventual result is that all the principle characters blow themselves up in their race to recreate the Power of explosives that will protect them from their real but vaguely-understood outside enemies, and make new enemies closer to home in the process.
Iraq could easily be our "1 littl 1" -- a pathetic clusterfuck created by powerful people panicked, driven by a warped idealism, and greatly overestimating what they knew and what they could achieve with a display of state-of-the-art power. But unlike the rulers of Riddley's Inland, whose homemade chemistry and "tryl narrer" epitomizes their pathetic fallen state and leaves them farther than ever from technological utopia and its tragic conclusion in the "1 big 1" -- Bush actually does have nukes. Eusa (Europe and the USA) could still bring on the "1 big 1"... though an attack on Iran would more likely result in something closer to another "1 littl 1"; not the nuclear apolocalypse but more costly, unnecessary embarassment for the flailing, panicked West and its messianic small men leaders, and plenty of human suffering for those exposed to the attack and its aftermath. Presumably, though, many 1 littl 1s led to the 1 big 1 in the Eura Story, with each precipitating event simply compacted into the myth. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Berlin, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Iraq, Iran... the cycle of violence and history, escalation and denouement and escalation again.
The question the book ends with for me is whether Riddley himself -- who, after substituting Punch for Eusa in the roading puppet show (sorry; you really have to read the book) begins to pick up disciples, and whose days are clearly numbered -- is supposed to be the Christ come again to redeem Eusa's precipitation of the second (nuclear) Fall. Even if Riddley fits the role, it's not obvious that Hoban believes in the redemption myth or that the humans of his imagining will even let themselves be redeemed, or that good, sensible, humane, even shamanic or quasi-divine people can make a difference (myth torn as it is between rank superstition and real stabs at grace). Riddley's power comes from rejecting two parallel temptations: the power-hungry, opportunistic, perpeutally self-forgiving mechanisms of Goodparley's class and the fatalistic nihilism of Lissener and the Eusa folk -- the cult of power-seeking and the cult of perpetual victimhood. But it's not obvious that Riddley -- the Sakharov or Mandela of his day -- will head off the quest to harness the 1 littl 1, or that he could have done anything to head off the 1 big 1 back in our day. He doesn't stop Granser; how could he stop the more sophisticated and powerful Eusa? At any rate, the danger and irony of "clevverness" and the "hart of the wud" is obvious in a world that chooses and reconfirms leaders like Bush (or, for that matter, Ahmadinejad). Arga Warga!
So for any fellow Riddley fanatics: take Pry Mincer Goodparley as Tony Blair and maybe also as the archetypical Senate Democrat- or New Republic- "liberal hawk"; take Granser to be George Bush (Granser -- clueless, myopic, alternately caring and callous -- needs Blair and the liberal hawks' "follerme", or charisma, to make his messianic plan work); the hevvys from the Ram as Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer and the rest of the neocon pundits -- boarish, menacing, drawn to sophistic intimidation; Lissener and the Eusa folk as the angry antiwar left -- fundamentally right about the overzealous quest for nuclear/ strategic dominance on the part of politician-pundit class (the Eusa showmen) but too prone to circle-jerk and to waste time and moral strength seeking revenge to be truly effective at influencing events or winning over their enemies.
In the book, the "1 big 1" -- the nuclear explosion that brings about the fall of modern man back to a false-mystic Iron Age -- is recreated in the post-apocolyptic future as the "1 littl 1" -- the reinvention of gunpowder precipitated by a boat manned by a dead man arriving from Outland (or "otherside") with the right missing ingredient... a precipitating event paralleled by 911 if we can stretch a bit. The eventual result is that all the principle characters blow themselves up in their race to recreate the Power of explosives that will protect them from their real but vaguely-understood outside enemies, and make new enemies closer to home in the process.
Iraq could easily be our "1 littl 1" -- a pathetic clusterfuck created by powerful people panicked, driven by a warped idealism, and greatly overestimating what they knew and what they could achieve with a display of state-of-the-art power. But unlike the rulers of Riddley's Inland, whose homemade chemistry and "tryl narrer" epitomizes their pathetic fallen state and leaves them farther than ever from technological utopia and its tragic conclusion in the "1 big 1" -- Bush actually does have nukes. Eusa (Europe and the USA) could still bring on the "1 big 1"... though an attack on Iran would more likely result in something closer to another "1 littl 1"; not the nuclear apolocalypse but more costly, unnecessary embarassment for the flailing, panicked West and its messianic small men leaders, and plenty of human suffering for those exposed to the attack and its aftermath. Presumably, though, many 1 littl 1s led to the 1 big 1 in the Eura Story, with each precipitating event simply compacted into the myth. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Berlin, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Nicaragua, Iraq, Iran... the cycle of violence and history, escalation and denouement and escalation again.
The question the book ends with for me is whether Riddley himself -- who, after substituting Punch for Eusa in the roading puppet show (sorry; you really have to read the book) begins to pick up disciples, and whose days are clearly numbered -- is supposed to be the Christ come again to redeem Eusa's precipitation of the second (nuclear) Fall. Even if Riddley fits the role, it's not obvious that Hoban believes in the redemption myth or that the humans of his imagining will even let themselves be redeemed, or that good, sensible, humane, even shamanic or quasi-divine people can make a difference (myth torn as it is between rank superstition and real stabs at grace). Riddley's power comes from rejecting two parallel temptations: the power-hungry, opportunistic, perpeutally self-forgiving mechanisms of Goodparley's class and the fatalistic nihilism of Lissener and the Eusa folk -- the cult of power-seeking and the cult of perpetual victimhood. But it's not obvious that Riddley -- the Sakharov or Mandela of his day -- will head off the quest to harness the 1 littl 1, or that he could have done anything to head off the 1 big 1 back in our day. He doesn't stop Granser; how could he stop the more sophisticated and powerful Eusa? At any rate, the danger and irony of "clevverness" and the "hart of the wud" is obvious in a world that chooses and reconfirms leaders like Bush (or, for that matter, Ahmadinejad). Arga Warga!
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