I made my living writing. I'm writing at this very moment. Words matter to me. Words matter.
DYSTOPIA
Nuclear war, climate catastrophe, unbridled overpopulation, all make for absorbing reading and engrossing cinema. Think of the Mad Max series of movies or The Book of Eli or Blade Runner. Think of books like The Hunger Games or The Stand or A Canticle for Leibowitz, so compelling that many such books have been adapted for the big screen. The dystopian worlds in these works are characterized by struggles to
obtain the simple necessities of life - food, water, clean air.
Governments, such as they exist, are fascist and whimsically cruel. These are futures to be feared.
These are futures that are here, in the present.
COVID, SARS, Ebola, Measles, cyclospora infected lettuce, necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating bacteria), all in the news right now, as we speak.
Super El Niño, drought throughout Europe, fires in Spain and France and the USofA and Canada, downtown Miami flooding at high tide, the wetlands in southern Louisiana getting wetter, Pacific Islands at risk of disappearing, all in the news right now, as we speak.
Around the world, 3,000,000 children die annually from starvation and malnutrition-related causes while 20% of all world food production goes to waste. Even though most of the loss is from household waste, there would be enough wasted between the farms, the shippers, the wholesalers, and the retailers to feed all of the hungry children AND adults in the world. Coca Cola can find its way to every corner of the globe. Food cannot.
So, a dystopian world is science fiction? Ain't necessarily so.
REALITY
When discussing a self-evident fact, I'm known to say that 2+2=4 and not some number approximating 4. Of course, a case can be made that, in a world whose inhabitants have three fingers, 2+2=11.
Try this one out. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That quote comes from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. A journalist interviewing the distinguished US Senator played by James Stewart learns that the Senator's reputation was based on a lie, the lie that he was the one who shot Valance (Lee Marvin) when it was actually the John Wayne character Tom Doniphon who did the shooting. The journalist doesn't print the interview.
And finally in Orwell's 1984, O'Brien holds up four fingers, asks Winston how many fingers he sees, and tortures Winston until Winston sees as many fingers as O'Brien - and the Party - want him to see.
Of course 2+2=4 unless you specify a different numerical base system. Anything else is trickery. Even if the journalist decides not to print the true story as told by Stewart, Wayne was actually the one who killed Marvin. It's on film. And no matter how a tortured mind perceives reality, four fingers are four fingers. So I believe in a form of objective reality. I don't care if electrons are actually some form of field or are vibrating strings or are bits of salt cod. The desk upon which my computer lies is substantial - made of wood and sufficiently solid that my my computer doesn't sink into it. If you can prove to me that we live in a simulation, that none of my life has been the lived experience of an evolved Earth-bound human one chromosome pair away from a bonobo, I might be persuaded to think differently.
That having been said, I concede that narrative can at the very least color reality, can create a form of reality that can disguise itself as truth. We are learning that truth every day.
NARRATIVE
Alternate facts create false narratives.
The Reflecting Pool was vandalized, specifically by activist Democrats. Repeated and repeated and repeated. There are pictures. Until there weren't. Case dismissed. Sometimes, false narratives are relatively easy to debunk.
Some false narratives persist in spite of a complete lack of evidence. Democrats are rightly worried that significant attempts by the Trump administration might succeed in suppressing voter participation during the coming mid-term elections. Such attempts are based on repeated assertions that voter fraud is widespread and led to Joe Biden's fraudulent election victory in 2020. It makes little difference that Trump's own Attorney General reported that a DOJ investigation could find no proof that significant voter fraud took place, certainly not enough to sway the results. That has not stopped the ceaseless repetition of the claim to the point that only one-third of Americans trust that the coming mid-terms will be conducted fairly, some expecting fraud, some worried about suppression.
Here's where I lose some friends.
Some false narratives survive because pushback is ineffective or, as in the case that I'm about to cite, non-existent.
In October of 2023, Hamas soldiers entered Israel, killed 1,200 Israelis and others, the vast majority unarmed civilians, and returned to Gaza with 250 hostages, more than one-third of whom died in captivity. Commentary took two paths simultaneously. The killings and hostage taking were condemned. At the same time, the acts were seen as resistance rather than terrorism. The narrative became: What did the apartheid country that is Israel expect?
The narrative that was not put forth seriously by anyone, even by Israel, was that Hamas had declared war. My assumption is that Israel didn't feel the need. Hamas had been firing 1,000 rockets, mortar shells, RPGs and other ordinance annually at civilian targets in Israel since its election in 2014. Israel and Hamas were already at war. What made this different was that Israel decided to take the war into Gaza instead of allowing the war to be fought primarily on its own territory.
It didn't take long for the word genocide to enter the conversation. Eventually, genocide became the accepted description. And without pushback, and given 80,000 Palestinian Arab deaths, what else could it be? The answer is that it could be exactly what it is. Urban warfare.
The harsh reality of urban warfare is that 3 noncombatants die for every combatant. As the Allies pushed east from Normandy, they killed 1,000,000 German soldiers. 3,000,000 civilians died. Men, women and children. That ratio held true for the Allied push north through Italy. I'm not talking about the industrial-level murder that the Nazis perpetrated. I'm talking about civilians caught in the middle of bombing runs, artillery fire, and urban street fighting. 3 noncombatants for every combatant.
The Palestinian Arabs report 80,000 Gazans dead without distinguishing soldiers from civilians. The Israelis report up to 20,000 Hamas soldiers killed. 3 noncombatants to each combatant.
Genocide? Urban warfare.
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