All Things Foreign
Shamila Chaundary Blog
Articles by "shamilach" D.C. based writer, foreign policy analyst, photographer, and former White House and U.S. State Department staffer and Afghanistan and Pakistan junkie now recovering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
"American Politics & Science Fiction"
June 20, 2018
Written by SHAMILACH
When Kim Jong Un met President Donald Trump in Singapore last week, he said their meeting was like a science fiction movie.
You know it is strange days when even a murderous North Korean dictator thinks reality is out of whack.
Science fiction warps and distorts the world we know. In doing so, it comments on a reality that we are either incapable of seeing or that we voluntarily choose to ignore. It makes the unbelievable real, if only for a fictional moment to show us how close we are to the absurd.
Fiction is Fact and Fact is Fiction
But what happens when the unbelievable actually does materialize and when the absurd becomes commonplace and familiar? Does it become harder to recognize what is unacceptable, perhaps even illegal? Does it normalize what was once sensational? Does it dehumanize those who were once our neighbors and the recipients of our welfare?
Yes.
In the Trump era, fiction is fact and fact is fiction. And while there’s no chance of human-looking robots, like the cylons in Battlestar Gallactica, trying to end our world, the administration is awfully close to cribbing from the scripts of dystopian movie thrillers, like Children of Men, where the British government imposes oppressive immigration laws, rounding up refugees and holding them in cages.
And what about Brazil, Terry Gillam’s dystopian satire probing the agony and buffoonery of a totalitarian and overly bureaucratic government? The treatment of journalists in the White House press briefing room comes to mind, as do the Trump administration’s attempts to identify civil servants that may be disloyal to its policies.
I wonder if Trump has seen the 2013 Black Mirror episode “The Waldo Moment,” in which a failed comedian runs for political office as Waldo, a cartoon bear he voices on a television show. In the election, Waldo spouts vitriol against the political establishment and publicly berates the candidates opposing him.
The writers of the science fiction anthology series did not anticipate being so prescient about America’s future…