Noted added, Oct. 2106 - If the rhetoric of the 2016 presidential campaign has surprised you, then you haven't yet read To Be. You need to do so, and soon (see clock tower, at left).
Having elected to write of a coming grim social landscape, the draft edition of 2013 was considered by several to be outright fantasy. I did not agree and made only literary improvements, and a few date specific corrections, for its 2016 release. The more telling changes, during the intervening 39 months, appeared in the political/social, real world in which we are now immersed. As in the popular series "The Hunger Games," To Be portrays a domestic dystopia. In contrast to the former, however, its anticipation of a neofascist revival is not outlandish escapism. To illustrate this I offer the words of David Duke: "The Trump election is not a onetime event," he recently said. "I’ve won. My principles are moving forward...."
Sadly, in the novel To Be, I hint at but provide no concrete scenario for a reversal of that trend. Too many forces are aligned. However, my hope is that we will see a similar alignment of forces in opposition.
I'd be interested to know what you think (email link below).
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Originally crafted as a novel of potentially difficult times to come, recent events have made To Be a novel of today. Its characters, situations and vignettes, the specific details of the critical issues facing its protagonist, are fictional. But these have come to echo, indeed to have anticipated, what is now evident in the media every day – the nature of the people clamoring for power, the malignancy of extremism, the overt and covert threats to the very basis of our democracy. To Be is chilling as well as prescient.
THE STORY - In To Be, Barnard Cordner, retired academic economist, is confronting more than aging. The loss of his retirement funds was unavoidable, perhaps even predictable, because the financial markets are in serious decline, as is America's global stature. Mountebank politicians have made even U.S. sovereign debt suspect. In an effort to trim federal entitlements, the transfer of seniors to attractively presented but remotely located Elder Edens is underway. Relocation, as this newly implemented policy is called, thereby provides for better utilization of the retirement assets they had put aside. Barnard fully understands the country's economic realities and is not surprised by the dramatic ascendance of the far right theocratic political ideology that has envisioned Relocation. Nonetheless, he resists the call for him and his peers to relocate to the more efficient, designated retirement communities. Despite the detailed presentations, he is suspicious of their true nature. Barnard and his close companion, Sallie Bass, must contend with a present that is not the future they had planned and saved for.
THE REALITY - We are accustomed to thinking of history as fixed, its record of events diverse and dispersed. It formerly took much time and effort to restructure the whole of it. However, now – with centralized information management and the intensity with which we are dependent upon it – reconfiguring the past to justify a singular, desired future has become a matter of editing not rewriting, a matter of moments not years. To Be, the novel, explores how this potentiality has changed and will continue to change our lives. To Be makes of what we now see and hear a chilling preamble to what the future could be.
Available now on Amazon
INTRODUCTION TO TO BE
To Be is surreal yet serious; much of it is extrapolation. That one can be misled as to what is historically accurate, even with respect to one's own life events, is as much THE STYLE of the story as it is THE story itself. The introductory chapter uses the puzzled protagonist's viewing of a seemingly familiar old film to set that tone. The intent is to have the reader share, not merely be informed of, Barnard's uncertainty.
The theme, the dramatic framework of To Be: ... is dispensing with the old, the few, in favor of sustaining the many. Made plausible by ongoing events – political as well as societal, international as well as domestic – the content and projections of the novel are chilling, especially so since, as envisioned, To Be had to be credible.
The first question was: How could the social landscape, within which the story would evolve, become so harsh? Could it derive from a climatic misfortune or an extraterrestrially ordained catastrophe? That is the fertile field of science fiction. Could it be the consequence of political upheaval? History does provide many instructive examples. But this merely displaced the issue: What could rationally be the origin(s) of such a domestic drama?
Academic formalisms are not needed to posit that most, if not all, social-political turning points hinge upon basic economic issues – having less than one, or a class, or a country needs or wants. Extreme economic disarray, therefore, was adopted as the origin of the dysfunction that is the armature of the novel. The widespread anxiety accompanying the previous decade's financial collapse provided a more than sufficient model. Indeed, many pundits had, at that juncture, voiced their fear of a doomsday scenario for the world's financial systems. Nevertheless, the US and the world economy did recover.
But what if they had not? Were an even more dire panic to come again, in which direction would the popular will turn?
History, again, is the place to look for hints of a possible future. What it reveals is that anxiety is often used by a few to foster extreme reaction from the many, a reaction that is usually less than thoughtful, less than generous, and a departure from the prior prevailing ethic.
The title of To Be: ... as should be obvious, refers to (mocks, perhaps?) Hamlet's terse query. While not meant to be a detailed elaboration of the fictitious character's well known soliloquy, the novel does offer a parallel to its substance. Indeed, one of the chapters carries the title " ,,, Or Not To Be."
The book's subtitle ("The Rise of Misplaced Power ...") comes from then President Eisenhower's farewell address to Congress of well over a half century ago (January 17, 1961). He was facing an audience of legislators, but, without doubt, his warning was meant for all to hear and consider. We are now clearly immersed in a world of "misplaced power" – in the media, in bureaucracy, in hyper-funded special interest groups, in corporate and financial consolidation, in the internet – much of which we have delegated and abetted. We have been too willing to ignore the degree to which this delegation could be fundamentally deleterious despite superficial benefit. Prognostications often prove to be misdirected. Yet, as expressed by Dickens' Scrooge, "Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead."
Some will note that the novel is harsh on the young, a tedious polemic, perhaps. They are not being blamed, however. It is simply that it is for them and by them that serious redirection of the course of our lives takes place. The older generation, wise as it may be, is too conditioned by habit and established circumstance to embrace change as does the younger. Could the latter be a harbinger of the decline of democracy not by force but by disinterest? It is my hope that the subtext of this novel is merely a reflection of the potential for the elaboration of a form of tyranny by default, that the whole of it is only a frightening entertainment far from present reality, one much like an extraterrestrial invasion adventure film. However, neither is a new nor inconceivable concern. In the sound track (1984!) to Metropolis, Music by Giorgio Moroder, Lyrics by Pete Bellotte, we have already heard:
How do we see clear?
Answers can change the question line
Every time
And now the truth in confidence
Tells a lie ...
What's going on? I wanna know
Anomie: To Be was conceived with no overt philosophical agenda. However, while immersed in the task of crafting that fiction, I became increasingly sensitized to the realities of current trends. After typing "The End" and beginning the serious literary editing that any decent novel deserves, I realized that the work had evolved into an exploration of the anomie that is increasingly detected in the media and in the mores of society at large. That term, anomie, refers to a readjustment, perhaps even a breakdown of established social norms, a "moral deregulation" if you will, accompanied by "alienation and purposelessness" (Wikipedia), and a diminution of the integrity of the self.
This increasingly evident anomie is, however, more than a subgroup's incidental trend brought on, as in Durkheim's view, by the shift to a mechanized, industrial society. In its current form, it is the unintended(?) consequence of a designed, post-industrial transition to consumerism, with fake, diligently inserted needs thereafter satisfied by fake, ephemeral rewards. (Note added: Is there a better example than Pokemon GO!?!)
Why To Be is divided into six sections: Experience comprises sequential action. At every moment many options are possible, but, as individuals, a single path will be taken, a unique future instantiated. The simplest creatures have only external physical stimuli and their own structural attributes to make the difference between success or failure, living on or dying. We, at the opposite pole of evolution, are more richly endowed. However, thoughtful action may be compromised by chance or overridden by reflex; social norms may be disregarded in favor of instinct. Our paths are rife with confliction.
Categorizing the basis or cause of an act is not an easy task. Aiming more for literary symmetry than philosophical precision, the novel is arranged around six distinguishable attributes: innate, instrumental, accidental, idealistic, reflexive, or institutional. Yes, these may not be fully separable. A more meticulous analysis of the nature and identification of choice is for others to attempt. It is sufficient for the narrative that the etiologic hexad is intuitive and illustrative.
What Barnard Cordner – former physics student, one time Naval officer, retired academic economist – would like to believe is that it is a deterministic (hence, controllable) world. Knowing that there is always some preceding cause, some reason to consider if not to assign, provides a secularist with a measure of security. This is Barnard's history and he would prefer that what he does, he does for some discernable reason. In each of the novel's sections – using the device of spiders and their webs – he observes and considers in turn one of the above six (loosely distinguished) aspects of "Why?" Likewise, each major character's motivation, while not monadic – again, in submission to the needs of narrative flow – is similarly constrained.
Introspective to a fault, Barnard must contend with choice having a multiplicity of dimensions, with primacy often undecidable. That there are many ways to assign causality, with none of them definitive, may mean that the attempt to do so is inherently futile. Worse, by the end of the novel, he comes to feel that the effort to understand has become irrelevant, that to know Why no longer has significance. He is faced with an indeterminacy as conceptually unresolvable as are the contradictions of quantum physics, which he had found so disorienting as an undergraduate and had wanted so desperately to be able to grasp.
In sum: The novel toys with the appreciation of reality and what may lie behind any administrative alteration of it. While To Be is not fully factual, it is plausible, increasingly so with every news report. Chapters 1, 13, and 18, for example, are essentially unchanged from the "final draft" of 2013, yet they read in 2016 as if they were commentary on current events. Hopefully, the protagonist's uneasy present will never become our own.
Camus is now passé. Few would claim to be existentialist in that manner. Yet, there is a great deal of similarity between what he set down (in The Stranger, for example) and what To Be dramatizes. We are beyond that now, however. "Live for the moment" is no longer simply a hippie's slogan, an expression of ennui. It has become commonplace, neither erotic nor remarkable. From the polar opposites of existentialism's self-focus and industrial capitalism's acquisitiveness has come the synthesis of a new social imperative - consumption for its own sake. What exists for many – and will become progressively more acute with the onset of awareness – is a mismatch between what is implicitly promised and what can be explicitly attained. Wide spread and deeply rooted anomie is the inevitable result of this economic dialectic. Where this may actually take us is difficult to ascertain. We do know, however, where it has led in the past.
Or do we?
