Red Sector A

It seems significant that several of the most prominent television programs currently produced are dystopian.  Beyond the Walking Dead, now we have Colony and the Man in the High Castle.  While the first merely portrays the intrusion of the Real into the conventional construct we live in, the last latter two inject indicative political frameworks. Colony, despite its perhaps lackluster execution, diminishes that Real (an alien invasion), leaving it in the background. The resulting focus is life in an authoritarian occupation. Alarmist hyperbolism of the currently perceived dangers aside, these narratives seem particularly applicable to the zeitgeist.  The future certainly seems uncertain, with the ever present feeling that things could be much worse.  High Castle  (a historical/sci-fi/postmodern Game of Phones exploration of the nature of reality and Baudrillardian authenticity) suggests that the world we know does have to be the way it is, just as the characters in that world learn the world does not need to be the way it is.  Both of these authoritarian worlds go beyond the normalization of totalitarianism to show the alternatives tensions straining the family dynamic.  Colony's Will joins the occupation to achieve security for the family, while his wife Katie joins the resistance to secure a free future.  Similarly, High Castle's Juliana joins the resistance to find answers from the other world, while Frank just wants to escape the ongoing torment of the totalitarian regime.  What should one to in these situations? Both of these shows present the possibility that even as bad as things are, when change is injected they can get far worse.

Perhaps the most important outcome of these shows is how they draw our internal views out of reality for examination.  Man in the High Castle's ungrounded world of power, an ongoing Game of Thrones-esque Foucauldian contest of power centers, throws motivation and conventional right and wrong into the blender until the point that we can even find empathy for one (or even the one [1]) enforcing a Nazi establishment.  Even more striking is the ever present forum debates concerning the anarchic  Walking Dead between the vast majority supporting the pragmatic too-far-gone view of kill first over the moralistic attempt at non-violence.  This appears to me to echo the real life fight against ISIS.  The popular view is to strike hard with as much as possible before further analyzing alternatives.  Drone-strike them into oblivion.  But this ignores the fact that such tactics only increase the threat ultimately. Too-far-gone  tactics at Abu Ghraib only created a new threat, ISIS.  While a more nuanced, long-view strategy with a lighter touch might have given us a map to progress that didn't have  increasing blow-back.  The lesson revealed when we step outside ourselves and profess what these characters should do: there really is no longer an unbreakable moralistic code that we as a culture can fall back upon.  We all fundamentally adhere to a policy of pragmatic power exertion which will yield us the best advantage . Unchained postmodern relativism is the reality, despite those that claim different.  The standard charge of relativism may be an overstatement, but ethics certainly are fluid and up for debatable adaptation, but they are not unconnected to power. Ultimately, the Real we find projected in (dramatic) Nazis/aliens/zombies is much easier to confront then the actually Real we as humans inject into history. Despite what the outcomes are of our present predicaments, we only have ourselves to blame.




[1] Besides the standard Nazi inclusion in every hypothetical ethical discussion (possibly to be replaced with ISIS?), there is the question of killing Hitler - even Jeb had to weigh in on that with his far too utilitarian answer.  But, maybe, just maybe, killing Hitler wouldn't be the best possible alternative - if, say as in this scenario, the result will be nuclear war.