Why dystopia has an odd appeal these days
On the day before President Trump hit his first 100 days, I woke up to a CNN headline saying that we could end up having "a major, major conflict with North Korea."
I was tempted to go back to bed, but I persisted.
The news didn't make persistence easier. In another 100-days interview, this time with Reuters, the president wistfully lamented that his new job is "more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier." Now he tells us.
I could not help but draw a connection between this news and another story I was working on, an announcement by George Washington University that Sen. Rand Paul will be teaching a class in the fall. The subject? "Dystopian Visions."
Is that an appropriate topic for these times or what?
In the relentless crush of daily news, I am not surprised by the notion that many readers would seek refuge in the works of writers whose perspective is not limited to the factual world.
Think of dystopia as the opposite of utopia, a very unpleasant place where people lead dehumanized lives under the heel of autocratic elites who profess to be creating a utopia.
After Trump's election, booksellers reported a surge in sales of such perennial favorites as "1984," "Brave New World" and "The Handmaid's Tale" -- a movie version of which happened to begin streaming on Hulu this past week. Recent years have seen a wave of new dystopian fiction, such as "The Giver," "The Hunger Games" series and the "Divergent" series in the young adult book and movie markets. Novelist Junot Diaz calls dystopia "the default narrative of the generation."
Yet the dystopian wave began long before Trump's election. As John Feffer, author of the dystopian novel "Splinterlands," recently wrote in The Nation, there was an apocalyptic mindset on both sides of the recent presidential election. On one side, Trump "tapped into the end-of-days impulses of Christian evangelicals, anti-globalist and white power enthusiasts." On the other side, Hillary Clinton supporters warned of a "Trumpocalypse" with more severe climate change, economic collapse and the outbreak of race wars.
But Sen. Paul's interest began long before the recent presidential race.
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