Usually when traveling, if you find a volume left in your hotel, it’s along the lines of a dog-eared copy of Frommer’s “Europe on Five Dollars a Day.”
But last week, while getting a Renaissance education in Florence, we booked a room that had a shelf-full of everything from Noam Chomsky tracts and Seamus Heaney’s “Beowulf” translation to a paperback novel I hadn’t picked up in years: Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” I grabbed it and headed out to the garden terrace to see how the famous story, basis for “Blade Runner,” held up.
Pretty well. But here’s the kick in the head: When Dick, who a critic called “a kind of pulp-fiction Kafka,” back in 1968 published the book and set it in a future California, the faraway year he picked was … 2021. (The movie just cuts to the chase and calls it 2019.)
I guess half a century ahead logically seemed far enough out, at the time. But, babe, that ain’t the future — that’s us.
When anti-hero Rick Deckard goes up onto his apartment building roof to check on his electric sheep, this is what he is greeted with: “The morning air, spilling over with radioactive motes, gray and sun-beclouding, belched about him, haunting his nose; he sniffed involuntarily the taint of death.”
After World War Terminus, everything is execrable. Most people have “emigrated” — left the more-or-less uninhabitable Earth for greener pastures. For those who stayed, like Decker, “the dust, weaker now, and confronting the strong survivors, only deranged minds and genetic properties.”
Well, thanks for small favors. Still, “Emigrate or degenerate! The choice is yours!” read the government propaganda billboards.
It’s the kind of dystopia that positively gives one hope for the present, and even the future, what? Relatively speaking.
And so for me did many of the results of the European elections that were being held a week ago today as I scarfed up that pulp fiction.
Yes, some of the balloting was of a dismal sort that makes one want to head off-planet. Right there in Italy, though not in sensible Florence, citizens gave Matteo Salvini’s far-right League Party a third of the votes, making the “populist” the most powerful pol in Italy, a baby Mussolini for today.
Ever the optimist, I think this whole business is based on a simple misunderstanding of the word “populism.” Soon as it becomes clear there is nothing people-persony about demagogues who favor authoritarianism, despise democracy and yet preach against “elites,” the movement will go back into its hole for awhile until the next Peron emerges.
No, the good news in the European Parliament elections, the victory for the hope against hope of possibly preventing the nonfictional dystopia on our horizon, was the stunning success of Green Party candidates continent-wide.
Out of the blue, the formerly tiny environmental party came in third place in many countries — which is not like an American third, because there are so many factions. Following months of street protests from students demanding action to stop global warming, much of that vote came from young people living in cities: from our real future. The losers were the head-in-the-sand establishment parties — in Germany, the center-left Social Democrats even dropped to third place behind the Greens and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats. A Merkel ally calls the wildly unexpected vote “a wake-up call for politics.”
You know when you’re fighting on the side of the Lord? When Alexander Gauland, co-leader of the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany, now declares the Greens “our main enemy.”
Larry Wilson is on the editorial board of the Southern California News Group. lwilson@scng.com.
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