Dean Christakos« I Confess, I'm addicted to the hard stuff | Main | Reflections on July 4th »
November 30, 2006
My eyes can't handle the pain
In an article in The Stranger, author Neal Pollack once wrote, "September 11, 2001, has had all kinds of unintended consequences. One of the least tragic, but most irritating, has been an explosion of absolutely terrible writing."
Case in point: Orson Scott Card's new opus: Empire. The plot synopsis:
When the president and vice-president are killed by domestic terrorists (of unknown political identity), a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States. Other blue states officially recognize the legitimacy of the group, thus starting a second civil war. Card's heroic red-state protagonists, Maj. Reuben "Rube" Malek and Capt. Bartholomew "Cole" Coleman, draw on their Special Ops training to take down the extremist leftists and restore peace to the nation...
You know it's going to be bad. It's only a matter of how bad. The answer: worse than you think, even when you take the fact that it will probably be worse than you think into account. Behold:
What the terrorists aren't counting on, thought Cole, is that America isn't a completely decadent country yet. When you stab us, we don't roll over and ask what we did wrong and would you please forgive us. Instead we turn around and take the knife out of your hand. Even though the whole world, insanely, condemns us for it.Insert:Cole could imagine the way this was getting covered by the media in the rest of the world. Oh, tragic that the President was dead. Official condolences. Somber faces. But they'd be dancing in the streets in Paris and Berlin, not to mention Moscow and Beijing. After all, those were the places where America was blamed for all the trouble in the world. What a laugh -- capitals that had once tried to conquer vast empires, damning America for behaving far better than they did when they were in the ascendancy.
"You look pissed off," said Malich.
"Yeah," said Cole. "The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy."
"They won't be so happy when they see where it leads. They've already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders."
"I bet they're already 'advising' Americans that this is where our military 'aggression' inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world."
Cole took his grime-covered hands off his M-16 to air-quote just as he'd air-guitared to the Nuge's Wango Tango in those golden days of his youth.
Moving right along...
"And maybe we will," said Malich. "A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang.""And if we did," said Cole, "who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them."
"You're forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French," said Malich.
...
"It's weird," said Cole. "I always feel like when I get to Virginia, I'm back in the United States. Like DC is a separate country. And not just DC. Maryland along with it. Like the Potomac is the boundary line between the country I love and a foreign country where they hate me because of this uniform."
It's hard to find more stilted dialog outside of fanfic, fundamentalist fantasies, self-aware literary experiments, and bad writing contests.
Posted by Dean at November 30, 2006 9:15 PM
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