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Only Fiction Can Help Us Understand ‘2Q17’

Two novels that can help you live in a world gone mad — and restore some sanity.

Bryan Carney 23 Aug 2017TheTyee.ca

Bryan Carney is director of web production at The Tyee.

George Orwell’s 1984 sales were through the roof this year. It’s still at number 7 as I write this (behind what sadly passes as self-help in 2017, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck and ahead of Solar Eclipse 2017: The Complete Kids' Guide and Activity Book) after rising to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list in January.

But Orwell’s old tome can shed no useful light on the theatre of the absurd that continues to unfold one non sequitur after another in this govern-by-tweet era. So put on a pot of covfefe, and put down 1984 (and definitely the awful aforementioned self-help volume), because I have stumbled on the two reads that will help you contextualize this last total solar eclipse year in a Trump voter’s lifetime: Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

1Q84’s title is fittingly a play of words based on the Orwell masterpiece, and both are absurd tales of mildly different alternate universes and strange characters.

In Murakami’s 1Q84, the protagonist Aomame is late for an appointment (a vigilante murder of a rapist) and stuck in Tokyo traffic. She crawls out of a cab, climbs down a strange ladder from the expressway, ignoring the taxi driver’s warnings about changes to reality that may occur, and lands in a new world. It is the same, but different. Police carry more powerful weapons, for instance, and, inexplicably, in this strange world there are now two moons. A dangerous cult has been in the news after clashes with police, and ultimately Aomame has to take her vigilante justice mission to its abusive leader.

Infinite Jest takes place in another alternate world where U.S. President Johnny Gentle is at the helm, having campaigned to clean up the now merged super-state of the U.S.A., Canada and Mexico. In this world years are given names by corporate sponsors, with the novel mainly centering around the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U).

In 1984, there was at least a formidable Big Brother behind the scenes. But in our own alternate universe year of 2Q17, no such figure — calculating, a student of the tactics of tyrants — hides behind the ego embodiment and 140-character bursts from the clowns of the great white circus ring.

It is all about the bright lights at night, the out-of-town experts who set up in your small town. They can tell your fortune and stick their heads in a lion’s mouth. The ringleader has many friends in many lands; they are strange, slickly dressed, they boast of their successes and their excellent ratings. This is just how it is now in the highest offices of the land.

Such is democracy. Great political parties, political theories — political science departments even — have fermented. Policies and traditions have evolved in the centuries-old North American version of this complex system.

And yet when someone who has been handed and broken many valuable things in life rounds a town up under a tent and claims a) they can run this democratic machine and b) they shout the loudest and c) people believe them, over go the keys to it all. We have not agreed upon minimum qualifications or even graduated licensing.

In 2Q17, Trump sticks his radioactive-coloured mane up from the swamp, then perches on the very front tip of the HMS CableTV as it makes its film-like last sinking thrust sideways and upwards. The well-heeled who commissioned the ship have long ago boarded lifeboats, their various representatives in the command room sent off the plank or on a one-way fishing trip, like brother Fredo Corleone.

It’s all turned into a massive embarrassment. The coal-fired expedition was supposed to be a showcase of the greatest old world machinery, with jobs for all. The swamp was to be drained by the expert science appointees of various petroleum producers aided by reliable Russian allies.

It is not just Donald Trump’s ego on board. It is the ego of all of those who have always loved holding and handing keys over with a smile and a handshake. Degrees and experience do not impress them, though they’ve been handed those, too. In the distance of this seemingly rising ship can be seen the sun now in the shape of a sliver of moon.

Saluting the ship’s false rise are a group of idiots in a society with the benefit of almost eight decades of study and reflection on one of the saddest and horrible events in modern times. They have taken up the ideas of the perpetrators and eventual losers against whom even sworn ideological enemies of the world had to unite. And they have chosen to march in streets that afford them the privilege.

They thought 2Q17 was their year. Or perhaps the Year of Exxon-Breitbart? Scholars of Wallace argue over whether the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment represents 2009, 2010 or 2011 in the Gregorian calendar, which are also the years that 1Q84’s three volumes were published. Coincidence?

Of course it is. It is another accident that can occur in the un-refereed game of global economics that has, for instance, made millionaires of all those who purchased a bungalow in a sleepy Canadian coastal city for a song and on a high school graduate wage in the mid 20th century. The same way an author can be canonized for books that sometimes contain many page-long itemized lists.

And accidents happen. Combine a desperate time for a political party in a complex system, a dying medium and a rising algorithm, a few wealthy backers changing horses and a joke or two gone wrong — throw in a little international meddling, and we have the equivalent of somebody’s jackass nephew getting the corner suite in the office when they should have been fired years ago.

Since we are not truly a member of Foster Wallace’s Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N), to bring matters back home, we can note that Canada needn’t be seen as an insignificant player here. The highway overpass ladder to crawl back into a post-eclipse 2017 may yet prove to be found on our side of the Peace Bridge.

After all, even the Titanic sank off of our easternmost coast. We launched and sank our own Canadian scaled-down Trump swamp expedition on Lake Ontario’s shore via an infamous Toronto mayorship that wrote much of the script for what is now playing out. We learned from it, and when the Trump-inspired Kevin O’Leary stuck his head up from a hole burrowed across the border in Boston, Quebec (whose separatists play a large role in Wallace’s Infinite Jest) whacked him decisively back down.

And on the weekend Vancouver showed how to overwhelm and reduce to insignificant a few sad, bigoted marchers by sheer number, without a single punch or bite of cake.  [Tyee]

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