Dyspeptic Dystopia

After watching the film Children of Men, which opened here this past weekend, I turned to my fiancee Penny and commented that director Alphonzo Cuaron made England of the year 2029 look a lot like the United States will look about halfway through President George W. Bush's fourth term in office.

She just turned to me and said, "Don't even think that!" I knew from the tone of her voice that it wasn't my speaking ill of the president that distressed her.

As science fiction fans, the two of us make a point of seeing all of the science fiction films that come out -- or at least make it to theaters in Champaign. (This last point is worthy of its own screed on this blog and probably will get one sooner or later, but not tonight.) This policy means that we see some unbelievably great films and some real dogs. Children of Men fell somewhere in between.

Children of Men is representative of that vast subgenre within science fiction called dystopian fiction. This is where the author tries to come up with the most horrible future he or she could imagine and sets it to paper or celluloid, often as some sort of warning to the reader or viewer -- "if you keep letting this trend go on, this is what's gonna happen to you." There often is a little bit of preachiness to it, a bit like what your parents were always warning you about, but maybe a bit more serious than getting in an accident on a day when you have no clean underwear. 1984 is probably the number one example of dystopian fiction -- and also, incidentally, was made into a gut-wrenchingly powerful film back in the 1980s (appropriately enough) starring William Hurt and Richard Burton. (Richard Burton played the role of O'Brien, his last film before he died, made while he was dying of cancer -- you could sort of tell this, and it made the movie that much more terrifying to watch.)

Cuaron, who directed the most recent Harry Potter movie, chose to shoot the film with something like 60% to 80% of the color leached out of the stock during the developing process. This is a technique, pioneered in Saving Private Ryan, that I often object to, mainly because I like bright, loud, clashy colors. (That alone endeared Moulin Rouge to me.) In this case, though, it worked rather well with the tone of Children of Men, which was unrelentingly bleak and got bleaker by the minute. At some points it made me recall this large animal veterinarian magazine I used to get on a previous job -- you wound up being rather thankful that the autopsy photos of hogs that died of some bowel disorder were in black and white rather than color.

My rule of thumb is that if it's shown in the trailer, it's fair game for me to discuss without warning in the review. As is often the case, the trailer revealed too much of the plot in my opinion, but that's another issue. If you've seen the trailer, you know that the film is set in England in 2029, and worldwide, no children have been born since 2009 -- women have been universally infertile. In my more W.C. Fields-like moments, I'd say this sounds like paradise to me, but to novelist P.D. James, this is the stuff of dystopia, and in my more sober moments, I have to admit that he probably has a point. Life has become a bleak, hopeless existence for most people, and the world is falling apart. According to the film, England is that last place on earth where civilization hasn't collapsed, and you have to wonder whether or not the collapse of civilization might not be an improvement -- the country's residents are beset by an increasingly totalitarian and violent government on one hand, and a bunch of violent revolutionary terrorists. The government is mainly obsessed with protecting Britain from illegal aliens. Jake, the main character, is a former political activist who is now a nondescript civil servant (shades of 1984) who leads a depressing and dull life.

One day, Jake is kidnapped off the street by an ex-girlfriend who wants him to help someone get to the coast to be picked up by a boat from the Human Project, a maybe mythical group of scientists who are working to find a cure for the human race's infertility and ways to restore civilization. The person to be helped is an illegal alien, but more importantly, a pregnant woman.

The story goes on from there, and it doesn't reveal a whole lot to say that for virtually all of the characters, everything gets worse and worse, and just when you think things can't possibility get any worse than that, they get worse yet. (I have to say, that takes a certain amount of imagination from the screenplay writer -- maybe sick imagination, but imagination nonetheless.) This is not a movie to see when you're depressed to start with. Unlike some movies in the dystopian genre, most of the characters here are likeable or at least have some likeable aspects, which makes what happens to them all the harder to watch.

I particularly liked Sir Michael Caine, who played this old hippie friend of the main character who basically smoked a lot of marijuana and philosophied. Of course, such a character is usually destined for a bad end, even in much less gloomy movies, and he was no exception, and that was particularly hard to watch.

So we will see what happens, and half way through the fourth term of George W. Bush, we will know if I was right. If we're not all dead in unmarked graves in concentration camps by then.

Speaking Ill of the Dead: Part I

Well, the feds got a holiday today, but I didn't. I just got a long frustrating day at work. My guess is all those bureaucrats and functionaries didn't stay glued to CNN covering the funeral of Gerald R. Ford, either.

For the record, the late president almost cost me my first job out of college.

It was 1976, I was finishing up my junior year at Michigan State University, and Ford was running for re-election -- well, technically his first election -- as president. I knew that I needed some practical experience as a professional journalist in order to make a career in the field, so I was scrambling to land some sort of summer internship.

After a great deal of work and worry, about three weeks prior to the end of the spring quarter, I landed an interview with The Lapeer County Press, a big weekly newspaper in Lapeer, MI, about 70 miles northeast of East Lansing. I had a 9 a.m. appointment on a weekday, and I knew that the trip would take between an hour and 15 minutes and an hour and a half. So I got up plenty early, about 6 a.m., and headed for my car. As a student living in a dormitory, my parking options were limited to a remote lot far to the south of the main MSU campus, across the old Grand Trunk Railroad line that cut across the southern part of campus.

What I didn't know (or maybe just didn't pay attention to) was that day was the same day that the Ford campaign chose to charter a train and put their candidate on a whistle stop tour across the State of Michigan. Ford boarded the train early in the morning in Port Huron, at the eastern edge of the state, and rode it all the way west along the Grand Trunk line, with a few speechifying stops along the way, ending up that night in Chicago. Yes, that same Grand Trunk line separating the campus from my car.

My intention was to leave the parking lot, drive east over to Hagadorn Road, and then north along the east edge of East Lansing to connect up with I-69 and head out to Lapeer. I followed this plan until I turned onto Hagadorn Road and into a huge traffic jam. I was a few hundred yards from the railroad crossing, and I could see there wasn't any train blocking it. I wondered whether or not there had been an accident, so I turned on my car radio to a station that had frequent news broadcasts.

No, there hadn't been any accident. There was a whistle stop tour. In honor of the president, and just in case someone might wish him ill, the Secret Service had gone across the state and blocked off every single goddamn railroad crossing along the Grand Trunk and was set to keep them blocked until the president's train had passed. I was stuck in a huge mass of cars, with no way to turn around.

So I waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. About 2-1/2 hours later, the president's train passed by, a three car Amtrak affair. I may have caught a glimpse of Ford -- there looked like a couple of dudes in suits on the back end of the last car. Or it may just have been more Secret Service agents. I was too far away to tell.

After the train passed and they finally reopened the railroad crossing, I drove as fast as I could get away with up to Lapeer. There weren't any cell phones in those days, except for extremely rich people, and I didn't have enough money on me to pay for a toll call. But I did get to my job interview, two hours late.

About a week later, Editor Lloyd Stoyer called me up to offer me the position. Later, he told me that I'd lost a lot of points with him by showing up so late with such a lame excuse as being detained by the Secret Service, so frankly, I was the second choice for the internship. I only got the job because I had a car and the first choice didn't.

That was my first personal experience with the extreme disruption that is caused whenever The President Of These United States condescends to go out and grace the Little People with His Presence. I remember hearing back in the 1990s about how President Clinton and his family decided to take a winter vacation out in Jackson Hole, WY. Naturally, the Secret Service forced the resort owner to cancel every other reservation in the hotel for that time period, some of which were paid in advance and for which no compensation was offered. No compensation was offered to the hotel owner, either.

But at least he got a photo with the president that he could mount on the wall. Which was more than the owners of all the adjacent hotels got, because the Secret Service ordered all of those hotels emptied, as well.

And people wonder why I'm an anarchist.

Needless to say, Gerald R. Ford did not get my vote in November 1976 (as usual, I voted Libertarian). I won't pretend that my single vote turned the election, although Ford did lose to Jimmy Carter.

In fact, the main reason Ford lost, according to the history books, had nothing to do with any whistle stop tours in Michigan or anywhere else. It had everything to do with the presidential pardon he gave to Richard Nixon for his predecessor's crimes against humanity, one month after Nixon resigned from office.

Now I happen to believe that Ford was an honest and honorable man, at least for a U.S. president, relatively speaking. I believe he had the very best of intentions when he pardoned Nixon -- to heal the country after the turmoil surrounding the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, and because he feared the country would be ungovernable if he did otherwise. (Personally, I prefer my country ungovernable.) I even kinda sorta believe that there was no deal made for him to pardon Nixon when Nixon appointed Ford vice president, at least not in so many spoken words.

But I also believe Ford was absolutely dead wrong to pardon Nixon.

The reason it was dead wrong was that it set a horrible precedent. Nixon got away with horrible crimes against humanity -- the monstrous Christmas bombing of Hanoi, for example, and his attempt to destroy the Constitution. Instead, he went on to collect his massive government pension and make thousands and thousands more on the speaker circuit. Eventually, he had a stroke and died peacefully in his sleep.

And every president who came after Nixon knew he had an out, no matter what he did. And each president abused his position worse than his predecessor did.

Ford's pardon of Nixon made the horrors of the current administration -- "our long national nightmare," to use Ford's own words -- possible. Today, the White House is occupied by Nazis for Jeezus, mass murderers and war criminals all, and under the Military Commission Act, they will never be prosecuted for their crimes under U.S. law.

Thank you Gerald R. Ford. Rest in peace.