entertainment – Becoming Extraordinary

Saturn I grew up reading science fiction, inspired by my father’s love of the genre and my own burning fascination with other planets. I couldn’t wait for commercial space travel (Hello 2001 A Space Oydessy), convenient time travel (even if it required a DeLorean), and, yes, Jetson style flying cars. The future looked good!

As I aged and my tastes matured, I wandered into the darker corners of the speculative fiction world. First contact stories ranged from the benign E.T. to the terrifying Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Artificial intelligence helped the human race (I, Robot) or destroyed it (Terminator movies.)

An odd thing occurred to me this morning. If you live long enough (and I have) you are going to eventually end up living in a science fiction novel. You just don’t get to choose which one.

Ah, it could have been cloning (Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.) Or we could have spontaneously developed telepathy (More Than Human.) It could have been an ecological disaster. (Actually, it still might be.) There were so many options.

Which one did we get?

The global pandemic one. Sheeesh. It would not have been my first choice.

last ship The nice thing about novels is all the boring stuff happens fast or behind the scenes. Most time is taken up by people doing something about the situation. There is a nice story arc, and whether all ends well, or a few key heroes survive, or we all get wiped out — something happens.

The problem with living through the real-life version is that it is incredibly slow and confusing and no one has much faith anything is changing. It’s not nearly as exciting to live in a time of crisis as one would think.

But here we are, each writing our own story every day. It’s no action-packed thriller, that’s for sure, and we have to face the fact that months may get condensed into a single sentence.

“She ate a disgusting number of cookies for dinner each night.”

But there will be an end, because the only thing we can count on is change, even when it is slow and we don’t see it coming.

Get ready for the next book in the series. The possibilities are endless.

(Yes, the title of this post was inspired by “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” and I recommend the novel. It will give you something new to do while you eat those cookies for dinner. You might also want to check out this year’s Nebula-award-winning best novel “A Song for a New Day,” about a culture designed to survive an onslaught of new viruses. It was written just before covid-19 hit.)

You don’t have to spend much time walking around the parks and government buildings of any city to notice that monuments are erected to warriors. Battles are commemorated. If there is a memorial anywhere to a thousand days of uninterrupted peace, I’ve never heard of it.

You don’t have to write novels like I do to grasp that humans enjoy hearing about conflict. It is exciting to watch emotions flare and buildings explode. There is a reason that “Fate of the Furious” (eighth in the Fast and Furious franchise) is coming to a theater near you and a movie about a quiet afternoon nap in a sun-dappled park is not.

But what we find entertaining is not the same as what we want in our everyday lives. I want good health, quiet moments, and easy travels for me and those I love and even for those I don’t know. So while it’s true that I like to read about a good fight, it’s also true that I want my life to be a series of soft spring mornings and cozy winter nights. I want a life that would make a terrible novel.

And that is why I believe that people in the entertainment field make horrible choices for politicians.

For a wonderful explanation of how Ronald Regan’s experience making World War Two movies influenced his behavior forty years later as president, read Rachel Maddow’s insightful book Drift.

For a look at what I mean now, well, take a look around.

Although we’ve all heard that the current U.S. president thrives on conflict, it wasn’t until a friend asked me what I thought of his exchange with Australia’s Prime Minister and his announcement of having put Iran “on notice” that it occurred to me that our foreign policy was being orchestrated by an entertainer. It had seemed obvious to me that the campaign rallies were cleverly staged theater, but I never considered the implications of having the same philosophy applied to our dealings with other nations. We all know what makes for good entertainment, and for ballads and statues as well.

So the implications for world peace have really sunk in for me. Whether you love or hate the man’s domestic policies, the fact is that he’s approaching international relations like a reality TV show. The implications of that for the chances of a peaceful four years could not be worse. I think it is fair to say that if what he does today doesn’t cause sufficient ignition, he’ll find a way to provoke others tomorrow. In fact, he’ll probably provoke others either way.

Some of my friends think he sees himself as a warrior hero, although he’s never been either one. My husband thinks he just wants to make sure that he gets a great big statue of himself erected somewhere near the Washington monument. I think he not only likes to put on a good show but he also finds the conflict itself exhilarating, Unlike most of us, he does not have peace as a goal.

The problem is that if he doesn’t enjoy world peace, we don’t get to either.