Futuristic Blues
Mills, Nicolaus
In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy's classic nineteenth-century utopian novel, Julian West falls asleep on Decoration Day in 1887 and awakens from a deep trance 113 years later at the start of...
...What has emerged is not a world filled with Robinson Crusoes but one in which a crude Darwinism sets the conditions of existence...
...For Julian West, the psychological impact of being trapped in a present that seems only likely to produce a meaner version of itself comes through in the last chapter ofLooking Backward, when in a dream he finds himself transported back to the Boston he left in 1887...
...Lenny finds himself pursuing a murderer who has used a virtual reality clip to frame him for a killing...
...Our own view of the coming millennium is very different from Bellamy's...
...Kaplan's "doomsterism," to use historian Paul Kennedy's word, was taken seriously by the White House...
...Gilliam's picture of America today, filled with crumbling buildings and crackpots carrying signs predicting the end of life, becomes our future...
...Strange Days ends with Lenny finding the real killer and turning out to be one of the film's comparative good guys...
...He is not about to start up a new species...
...People need bodyguards just to get by...
...The two set out to complete James's work, and if at all possible, stop the worst from happening...
...The question is how we can move beyond this...
...But there is no sense on the Mariner's part that these are people he wants to be with...
...For Kaplan, author of an earlier book on the Balkans, the chaos of West Africa, the immediate focus of his Atlantic article, has become "the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real 'strategic' danger...
...He is not, however, allowed to live in the isolation he seeks...
...They get their answer to the cause of the plague...
...The year is 2035...
...In contrast to the Smokers stands the ecologically pure Mariner played by Kevin Costner...
...Science and cooperative management have produced a new solidarity...
...The America of 2000 is by contrast a model of efficiency and egalitarianism...
...Writing on where all this is likely to end, MIT economist Lester Thurow has predicted a future in which "class warfare is apt to be defined as the young against the old, rather than the poor against the rich...
...We cannot for the life of us imagine a twenty-first century in which the cruelty of twentiethcentury America shocks us as the cruelty of nineteenth-century America now does when we look back on our historical record...
...Bellamy's utopian argument remains powerful...
...For us, the feeling of being caught up in a present that seems only likely to lead to a crueler and harsher future has been more gradual than for Julian West and hence less nightmarish...
...People can get any sort of vicarious kicks they want...
...He is struck by the "squalor and human degradation" he encounters on the streets, but his worst shock comes at a dinner party when he tries to explain that it is possible to have a future in which meanness and class warfare are not the rule...
...The worst happens...
...WARS ARE FOUGHT OVER SCARCE RESOURCES, ESPECIALLY WATER, AND WAR ITSELF BECOMES CONTINUOUS WITH CRIME, AS ARMED BANDS OF STATELESS MARAUDERS CLASH WITH THE PRIVATE SECURITY FORCES OF THE ELITES...
...They even fall in love...
...In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy's classic nineteenth-century utopian novel, Julian West falls asleep on Decoration Day in 1887 and awakens from a deep trance 113 years later at the start of a new millennium...
...BORDERS CRUMBLE, ANOTHER TYPE OF BOUNDARY IS ERECTED—A WALL OF DISEASE...
...Until we have a clear idea of what we want and are sure we want it," he wrote, "it would be a waste of time to discuss how we are to get it...
...Under current rates the system will run out of money by 2025, and by 2035, the year of 12 Monkeys, it will be operating at a one-trilliondollar annual deficit...
...Senator Bob Kerry has cast the demands of seniors in an even more sardonic light...
...In February 1994, the normally sedate Atlantic Monthly appeared on newsstands with a cover that showed a crumpled globe on fire and a headline that in huge capital letters declared: "THE COMING ANARCHY...
...For these, buyers will pay big money, and as Lenny pursues the man who has framed him, we are shown a cyber-sadism industry that thrives the way coke dealing once did...
...The aging of the baby-boom generation, Richard Suzman, the director of the Office of Demography, has declared, "could have an impact on our society of equal magnitude to the tidal wave of immigration at the turn of the century...
...Assuming in their essay that grandparents were out of touch with everyone but their own generation, Nelson and Cowan outlined how well grandparents were doing compared to the young and then went on to advise, "Perhaps next time you hear from the American Association of Retired Persons, you'll let them know that you talked with your grandkids and decided that you support a fair reform of Social Security...
...In the 1996 book-length version of his Atlantic essay, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Kaplan compares his findings to those of the eighteenthcentury English historian Edward Gibbon, who in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describes the empire as a short happy period followed by centuries of violence and chaos...
...Nowhere is this more apparent than in the movies, where, rather than learning from our mistakes or using science to improve our lives, we see ourselves doing the opposite...
...What we see in the movies is not very different in its pessimism from our "realistic" scenarios about what awaits us down the road...
...People either roam the sea like nomads or live crowded together on tiny atolls...
...When we first see him, he has been confined to a tiny cell, but in the ravaged America of 2035 being free is no bargain...
...Several months later in a Boston Globe interview Bill Clinton even spoke about Kaplan's Atlantic article in terms of our dealing with a future that looked "like one of those Mel Gibson Road Warrior movies...
...No longer believing that things are going to get better naturally or that the government can be counted on to help us (by 1992, 75 percent of all Americans said they "almost never" trust the government), we rely on making it on our own and distrust the idea of commonality...
...At the start of the new century, the vicarious thrills we want are those that give us the power of the victimizer and terrorist...
...In 1900, 4 percent of America's population was over sixty-five...
...Wild animals roam the cities, and people are the hunted creatures if they surface for long...
...And then, when he is helped to escape from the atoll by a woman and a little girl, he finds himself pursued by the Smokers...
...I can make it happen, and you won't even tarnish your wedding ring...
...The government is a Great Trust for which everybody works part of his or her life...
...NATIONS BREAK UP UNDER THE TIDAL FLOW OF REFUGEES FROM ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL DISASTER...
...The elderly are getting too much of our tax money...
...It is to give ourselves a perspective on the present that ordinary politics does not yield...
...They need to be taken down a peg...
...A few months later in a Chicago Tribune opFuturistic Blues ed piece patronizingly entitled "An Appeal to Grandma and Grandpa," Rob Nelson and Jon Cowan, co-founders of Lead or Leave, continued the assault...
...As the fears of groups like Lead or Leave and Third Millennium spread, it is clear that we are not going to have to wait long for that future...
...In 12 Monkeys, the darkness and rubble of Los Angeles in the year 2000 have been taken to a new level...
...There is no penalty to pay...
...three very different futuristic films—Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, and Kevin Costner's Waterworldbrought home this point...
...But the psychological toll it has taken has, nonetheless, been enormous...
...Treated as insane for making such remarks, Julian finds himself feeling like "an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured and brought back to his dark and reeking dungeon...
...As the music of Seal and Pearl Jam blasted from a boom box, the Lead or Leave pickets chanted: One, two, three, four We won't take it any more Five, six, seven, eight Cut the debt, cause we can't wait The immediate reason for Lead or Leave's protest was President Clinton's new budget proposals, but in targeting the AARP and driving home the differences in their musical tastes, Lead or Leave was bent on making a second point as well...
...The tapes that bring in the big money are not, however, sex tapes, but much kinkier 88 • DISSENT Futuristic Blues ones—those involving murder and rape...
...The point of looking into the future as he did in Looking Backward is not simply to give ourselves a goal...
...It is a rhetorical question that is the movie's as well...
...The time is the indefinite future...
...Destruction has taught us nothing...
...Granny bashing is here, and with 41 percent of their income on average coming from the government, the elderly are enormously vulnerable...
...They're going to Las Vegas with their COLAs—while kids don't have computers in class...
...Best of all, this transition to a modern utopia has been accomplished without bloodshed...
...Thirty-eight years earlier, a lab assistant, working with deadly viruses and motivated by a genocidal hate, loosed a plague that killed all but 1 percent of the world's population...
...The shock soon turns to joy, however...
...The history of Nazi Germany is now treated as a subject for entertainment...
...But it is the vividness of Kaplan's scenario, rather than its pessimism, that sets it apart...
...What the hell are we celebrating...
...An Orwellian sadism controls government and personal relationships...
...The Mariner has developed gills behind his ears, and as a successful mutant, he has advantages over others in the struggle to survive...
...Virtual reality headgear has become the new dope...
...As Lenny tells a husband to whom he is trying to sell a sex tape, "It's about forbidden fruit...
...Jessica Matthew, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has compared cleaning up the Social Security mess to cleaning up after a herd of cows in the living room and sarcastically suggested that Social Security checks should be printed in red after a retiree has used up the money he or she put in...
...Otherwise, tell them you won't be renewing your membership in AARP...
...The political tone the two groups initially adopted was reflected in a protest Lead or Leave ran in 1993 at the Washington headquarters of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP...
...Julian's trance has kept him from aging and, like Rip Van Winkle, he begins his new life healthy but in a state of shock...
...The problem could not have been foreseen when Social Security began...
...It is a dark and smoky Los Angeles, filled with crime and violence, and a population hooked on the cruel...
...The plot in Strange Days is largely a device to keep the film from grinding to a halt...
...The world of 12 Monkeys or the rhetoric of Lead or Leave becomes our vision of the future...
...And even at the National Institute of Aging, the growth of the elderly as a class has been seen in terms that put the elderly in the category of foreigners...
...Like the child who, as a time traveler in 12 Monkeys, is able to see his adult self die, we have nothing to look forward to...
...Missing from American life in the 1990s has been faith in what has historically been thought of as American exceptionalism: the belief that what distinguishes us from other nations is our commitment to an ideal of democratic equality and our willingness to be an example, a city upon a hill, as John Winthrop, Massachusetts's first governor, put it...
...But the Gibbon analogy is gratuitous, given the ruthlessness Kaplan sees in the future as the haves of the world opt to protect themselves from the have-nots...
...As Julian's host and social guide Dr...
...Dirt is bought and sold by the ounce, as if it were gold...
...Their idea of pleasure is smoking and joyriding in old cars they keep below the deck of their supertanker...
...In an article entitled "The Clash of Civilizations...
...The plot of Strange Days centers around Lenny Nero (played by the English actor Ralph Fiennes), a former cop who sells virtual reality clips for a living...
...Leading the generational war early in the decade were two twentysomething groups— Third Millennium (now primarily a New Yorkbased Generation X think tank) and Lead or Leave (a Washington-based organization, now defunct...
...Operating from the hull of a supertanker, they attack everyone who has anything they might want...
...There was no more possibility of opposing it by force than by argument...
...Below this was a drawing of a toothless old man with a Band-Aid on his bald head and a hearing aid jutting out of one ear...
...It is in this context that James Cole (Bruce Willis) is sent time-traveling by the scientists who rule America...
...Today it is 13 percent, and by 2011, when the first baby boomers, those born in 1946, start to retire, it will jump again...
...What Bellamy's and Howe's defense of utopianism cannot spare us from is the pessimism of a culture like our own, in which the meanness and spite of the present seem so deeply entrenched that we imagine them playing an even greater role in our future...
...The scientists confer with James through tiny television sets rather than face to face, and at every chance they get, they treat him with cruelty...
...A new Ice Age has left most of the globe covered in water...
...In 1995, This article is adapted from the forthcoming book The Triumph of Meanness (Houghton Mifflin...
...They want him to find out how the plague began, and because James is their prisoner, he has little choice but to go along with what is asked of him...
...Please don't tell me every American over sixty-five is foraging in the alley for garbage or eating dog food," he WINTER • 1997 • 91 Futuristic Blues told the New Republic...
...The war itself and the feelings it inspires are best described by an anonymous poster that circulated a few years ago: "Senior citizens are the biggest carriers of AIDS," the poster read, "Hearing Aids, Band-Aids, RolAids, Walking-Aids, Medicaid, and Government Aid...
...In our day-to-day lives a similarly grim and Hobbesian view of the future may be seen in our willingness to wage an economic war against the old...
...As in Strange Days and 12 Monkeys, the plot keeps events moving, but the real issue is what we have come to after our years of evoWINTER • 1997 • 89 Futuristic Blues lution...
...After helping get them settled, he decides that roaming the seas is best for him, and like a gunslinger in the old West who knows he can't be a homesteader, he takes off for parts unknown...
...92 • DISSENT...
...The villains in Waterworld are the Smokers, a gang of pirates who represent the last vestiges of a predatory industrialism...
...Julian has left behind a world of social strife in which living as a rich man among the poor made him feel as if he belonged to an alien race...
...The heart of the movie is the picture it offers of America days away from the year 2000...
...Today, life expectancy has reached seventy-six, with the average worker spending 26 percent of his or her adult life in retirement, compared to just 7 percent in 1940, when Social Security benefits went to under 1 percent of the population...
...As in 12 Monkeys, life is brutal, and society provides no relief...
...But the key to this Los Angeles is virtual reality headgear that taps into the brain and touches people's feelings more deeply than anything they experience directly...
...From his wind-powered ship to his filter for turning urine into drinking water, the Mariner pushes the resources at his disposal to their utmost...
...This act does not offer anyone an easy life," Franklin Roosevelt observed of Social Security in a 1938 fireside chat, and amending Social Security in the spirit with which it was described by Roosevelt in the thirties would certainly make sense in the coming years...
...asks an anonymous caller to a radio station...
...The answer is, not much...
...In defending Looking Backward against its nineteenth-century critics, Edward Bellamy observed that at certain points in history a vision of the future is often more important than practical advice...
...It is a situation that will put Social Security, which currently is producing a $65 billion surplus (thanks to adjust90 • DISSENT ments made to it in 1977 under Jimmy Carter and in 1983 under Ronald Reagan) in deep trouble if nothing is done to change present law...
...What's the point...
...But the key to the Mariner is his ability to live with nature and waste nothing...
...A PREVIEW OF THE FIRST DECADES OF THE TWENTYFIRST CENTURY" The Atlantic headline did not exaggerate the findings in Robert Kaplan's cover story, "The Coming Anarchy...
...It is a task that lands James in a pre-plague insane asylum, where he meets Kathryn Railly, a psychiatrist played by Madeline Stowe, who eventually comes to believe his story of time travel...
...You'll save yourself $5 a year and a fortune in your children's future...
...When he stops at an atoll to do some trading, he is imprisoned by its citizens for being a mutant...
...But as New Year 2000 is being celebrated in the film's final scenes, what emerges is pure gloom...
...The labor strikes and social unrest that caused Julian so much worry in 1887 are gone...
...In each film the message was unmistakable: dystopia, not utopia, is what we can look forward to...
...The ideas of Lead or Leave and Third Millennium are still central to our discussions of the elderly, where we continue to be haunted, as economist Peter G. Peterson puts it in his new book, Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old?, by the fear of being a "nation of Floridas...
...In Strange Days, the setting is Los Angeles in December 1999...
...Those who survived are living underground...
...that appeared in Foreign Affairs a year before Kaplan's essay, political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted a bleak future of worldwide conflict based on cultural differences, and two months after Kaplan's article, Edward Luttwak, in a London Review of Books essay entitled, "Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future," predicted that growing prosperity among the elites, in combination with growing middle-class insecurity, would provoke the same kind of political reaction that in the years after World War I brought Hitler and Mussolini to power...
...In the face of such pessimism, it is, as Hollywood shows, dystopia, not utopia, that emerges as the predictor of our fate...
...After an epic battle with the Smokers, the Mariner is able to guide the girl and the woman to land...
...In a nightclub the featured act is men in brown shirts burning books...
...We imagine the meanness and cruelty of the present, magnified beyond anything we have known, coming with us...
...Leete explains to him, "The change had been long foreseen...
...But what has happened in the course of the nineties is something much crueler: a generational war that in its spite makes the youth slogan of the sixties, "Never trust anyone over thirty," seem like a joke...
...What lies behind the poster and the resentment it embodies are fears about the future of Social Security...
...Sadism, only of a much more primitive variety, also defines the lives of the earth's survivors in Waterworld...
...Public opinion had become fully ripe for it, and the whole mass of people was behind it...
...Among historians, doomster scenarios in which cruelty and warfare are the norm have become routine...
...And demand that they pass the word along to Congress...
...Such imaginings, as Irving Howe observed in his 1993 essay "Two Cheers for Utopia" (Dissent, Spring 1993), remind us that nothing is more mistaken than acquiescing to the given just because it is here...
...In 1935 life expectancy was just sixtytwo— three years less than the age at which workers now get full benefits...
...Even more important, in the end there is nothing to relieve the bleakness of underground America in 2035...
...By 2020 one in every six Americans, compared to today's one in eight, will be eligible for full Social Security benefits...
...But no one in 12 Monkeys has the power to alter the world's fate...
Vol. 44 • January 1997 • No. 1
