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Vault of Horror
May. 17th, 2016 09:57 amI have suspected that I was trapped in a satirical dystopia ever since I was a small child at Harrison Bergeron Elementary School. I read Catch-22, and the next thing I knew my government was trying to draft me into it, with the additional refinement that at least the original was set in a war it made sense for us to be in. Now I find myself ensnared in the saga of a supervillain named Donald Trump.
At first I thought he was merely Guy Grand, the wealthy sociopath protagonist of Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian, who perpetrates cruel pranks to “make it hot for them,” ending with perhaps overly literalized metaphor as people attempt to dig currency out from under vast quantities of blood, urine, and feces.
Now it seems worse, as if I am trapped in a real-life reality show where the buffoon who played a successful businessman on television is attempting to be promoted to Acting President.
Or maybe it’s The Manchurian Candidate, and one of those Eastern European wives drugged and hypnotized him. It started as a diabolical Commie plot to discredit Capitalism by gaming the system so that someone with neither intelligence nor personal charm could become wealthy. (Or perhaps they didn’t have to.) Now he is poised for even greater destruction.
I always was overly optimistic, like that alleged Barry Malzberg story that was bounced from the Bacigalupi-Watts Depressing SF anthology for being too upbeat. The last dangerous vision is that somehow he is elected and Vladimir Putin hurls a familiar epithet. President Trump steps over to The Button and shows that his finger really is long enough.
At first I thought he was merely Guy Grand, the wealthy sociopath protagonist of Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian, who perpetrates cruel pranks to “make it hot for them,” ending with perhaps overly literalized metaphor as people attempt to dig currency out from under vast quantities of blood, urine, and feces.
Now it seems worse, as if I am trapped in a real-life reality show where the buffoon who played a successful businessman on television is attempting to be promoted to Acting President.
Or maybe it’s The Manchurian Candidate, and one of those Eastern European wives drugged and hypnotized him. It started as a diabolical Commie plot to discredit Capitalism by gaming the system so that someone with neither intelligence nor personal charm could become wealthy. (Or perhaps they didn’t have to.) Now he is poised for even greater destruction.
I always was overly optimistic, like that alleged Barry Malzberg story that was bounced from the Bacigalupi-Watts Depressing SF anthology for being too upbeat. The last dangerous vision is that somehow he is elected and Vladimir Putin hurls a familiar epithet. President Trump steps over to The Button and shows that his finger really is long enough.
