Billingham

You know someone named Arsenio Billingham? No.

So, just thinking aloud:  The more medieval/pastoral the setting, the more a fantasy novel/fantasy series tends towards having conservative values.  At the other end, industrial steampunk fantasy tends to have liberal - or socialistic - values going down.  For some examples:

Narnia is set in a world whose technology bogged down somewhere around King Arthur’s day.  Bows and swords and kings and queens, not much in the way of steel or gunpowder or even a crossbow.  And of course, it’s the classical example for old time values, and features the sharpest divisions between good and evil.

Middle Earth is almost equally old-timey, and very consciously set in the countryside of the hobbits rather than any particular dense urban center.  Thus does Tolkien’s Nordicist racism start to appear in the text, free from confusing modernity.

Bas-lag, from China Mieville, is aggressively set during a parallel of Victorian England, with New Crobuzon standing in for London.  You’ve got striking workers, trade unions, and a hero writing an underground newspaper for the workers while their bosses stand in corrupt legion with crimelords and the government.  That’s where you start seeing a Marxist’s touch.

Lyra’s Oxford is similarly timed, without the aggressive (magical) realism of Mieville,  but Pullman definitely gives us the steampunk signature zeppelin while at least flirting with some higher technologies.  And of course, his own athiesm.

And at the far extreme, you have the moderate Hogwarts, reveling in a just-off modern world.  I don’t know what to do with that one.

Okay, time for an extraordinarily obvious bit of news:  I’m a huge nerd.  (I’m also a huge girl) Anyway, with that taken care of, let’s talk some science fiction.

Here’s a few franchises:  Star Trek, Doctor Who, Torchwood, Fringe.  And for the most part, the science in all of these is more or less magic, what changes is how much the show pretends to care.

Doctor Who is the most magical of the four:  the Doctor seeks out mythological beasts (werewolves, say, or ghosts) to give a little bit of scientific babble to, and just lets it ride from there.   I think this works fantastically, because it changes the game away from plausibility which means you don’t get bogged down in trying to figure out whether or not it makes sense.  The Doctor can see a phenomenon, furrow his brow, and diagnose it as "magic door" without worrying about slowing down the plot.

On the other extreme, we have Star Trek.  For one thing, it’s the only one of these shows set in the future, meaning that any advanced technology is supposed to seem a lot more plausible.  And for the most part, this works, too.  Star Trek indulges in a few magic tricks: teleporting, faster-than-light travel, but they’re mostly plot-necessary and pass along without too much worry.

It’s the stuff in the middle that always gets me: Torchwood and Fringe, which are almost the same show just set in different circumstances.  Fringe, at times, will indulge in some really fanciful stuff while assuring us that it was all invented by a scientist, and we definitely have a working magician in the lab able to identify anything and usually come up with an antidote in a few minutes.  It’s often just pretty chintzy, science-wise, but remarkably, it’s rapidly becoming one of my favorite shows.  I think the reason it works is that it doesn’t actually try to explain the scientific magic to us, it just translates it to us via the explanations of Walter Bishop’s half-insane ramblings through his son.  We know just what we have to, and it’s easy to allow for any amount of discontinuity by just blaming Walter for being a space cadet.  And we get all the cool magic.

This is a carefully written chapter - Obama is definitely telling us which side he’s on, but carefully couching it in the terms of reducing partisanship and all that.  It’s an elegant position - definitively asserting his own views while trying to position them as being nonpartisan ideals everyone can believe in. 

But he’s not exclusively playing down partisanship: he endorses some of it, commenting that the American situation really isn’t that bad in terms of divisiveness, and never once backs down from any of his positions.

The interest part, I think, is his history of the political divide in America, and how pointedly he goes after Ronald Reagan for establishing the dichotomous politics of the late 20th/early 21st centuries.  He hedges by talking about how he understood the appeal of Reagan and acknowledging the failures of New Deal liberalism in the Jimmy Carter era, but it’s really just set dressing.  He saves the real attacks not for a deceased ex-president but for contemporary radicals:  Gingrich, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist.  He paints them as a conservative inversion of the New Left of the ’60s, arguing everything in terms of orthodoxy tests and good and evil. 

And he talks a good game on Bill Clinton too, portraying his 3rd-way moderateness not as a sell out to the Right, but as an attempt to undermine their core narrative.  He nearly cost the GOP their base by persistently earning the "Bubba" vote, and thus the endless barrage of attacks on him that finally hit home.  And since it was the attackers that won the day in the GOP, he tells us, they are lost in an absolutist ideology of no taxes, no regulation, and Christian fundamentalism. 

And finally, he says, he’s not coming to play hardball.  He’s not going to go on a rampage of demonizing right wingers and bullying his moderate colleagues, and cites his post defending Democrats who voted for Roberts at Daily Kos as proof.  His appeal so far seems to back this up:  he hasn’t gone nuclear on his congressional opponents, though they seem perfectly content to self destruct at the moment.

But this backs up what we’ve seen so far from Obama - he’s not trying to be a partisan, he’s trying to win  based on building a consensus and undermining right-wing tribalism with broadly appealing policies.  The stimulus had broad appeal.  So does national health care.  We’ll see how he can do it.