Political Thriller? Dystopian SciFi? Standing on the cliff edge and looking over.... (Part I)

It's warm in Seville, Spain with fresh mornings and heat-laden afternoons. The sky is a bright blue, and the sunlight has a luminous quality that intensifies colors and deepens shadows. Stories flash out of the cool mists that bathe the cafe/bars and filter up out of the tiled surface of the Alameda de Hercules park, too tempting not to saunter into a drenching on a hot afternoon, weaving though the droplets and cavorting (no other word for it) students.

The stories that come to mind try to reflect the brilliance of light and color, but the shadows seems to insist on a tinge of menace. Snatches of conversation heard around the dozens of cafe tables echo with concern, sometimes passion and often anger: there's an election on 26 June to elect the full parliament of Spain. It's the second general election in less than 7 months and is necessary because none of the several political parties won a clear majority.  Various attempts by the major parties to form a coalition government failed, in part due to inability to reconcile policy differences and come up with compromise positions. Some of the coalition attempts disgusted once optimistic voters. "How could Party X try to join with Party Y? I can't vote for Party X again after that," a friend told me. "I don't know who to vote for now."

The PP campaigns in Seville (2016)

Corruption scandals and economic difficulties are causing further pressures on the still developing democracy in Spain. The country's deficit--claimed to have been exacerbated by a tax cut in an election year meant to draw voters to the then-ruling party, the Partido Popular (PP)--prompted the IMF to call for increased austerity which caused budgets to be slashed at all levels; unemployment stands at around 21%.

There are fewer comments about the 23 June vote in Britain on whether to stay in the European Union (tagged "Bremain") or leave (tagged, "Brexit"). For many in Europe, it's unthinkable that Britain would really withdraw. For Brits, not so much. According to the British newspaper The Independent of 11 June, among probable voters in the UK, 55% support Brexit, while 45% favor staying in the Union. The worry in Europe about Britain's withdrawal is that if Britain leaves, others unhappy with their place in the Union will follow. Some voices add that Britain's departure would spur additional splintering (in Spain, the worry is that Catalonia will increase its pressures for independence).

The imagination boggles: so many plots and counterplots are suggested by these events. Vigilante groups seem to be growing in some European countries, ostensibly to protect against immigrant incursion... except there are few immigrants of any stripe in the areas where they're forming (See "Vigilantes Patrol Parts of Europe Where Few Migrants Set Foot," by  Miroslava Germanova, Boryana Dzhambazova and Helene Bienvenujun, NYT, 10 June 2016). The extreme right in France has been gaining strength. In the aftermath of recent floods and the series of strikes that preceded the floods, further destabilization--such as what could follow a successful Brexit vote--could threaten French liberalism.

The Austrian electorate barely avoided electing a President from the  right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) who ran on a platform voicing strong opposition to “forced multiculturalism, globalization and mass immigration," essentially, "Austria First!" The election was close enough that the FPO has challenged the results in Austria's Constitutional Court. (See https://www.rt.com/news/345856-freedom-party-austria-election/)

And then there's Putin, not above using old dog's tricks on new platforms, like news agencies that are just legitimate enough to give some credence when a misinformation story is slipped in to their mix.

Gotta say: for anyone considering writing a political thriller or  one of those dystopian visions of the future, the stories available to be "ripped from the headlines" just abound!

Story Tools

            People occasionally ask me: what do you need to write?

            The stock answer is "pen and paper," or, these days, "a laptop" (or iPad or whatever of that nature).

            The honest answer is a little more complicated for some of us.

            I say "some of us," because I stand in awe at the production of King or Atwood, Gaiman or LeGuin, Stephenson or Rowling, Allende or Perez-Reverte.... They just do it. (Or so it appears, anyway.) But the "some of us" dither, and think about it, and get distracted.

Guadalquivir River, Andalusia, Spain

             I've been writing the never-ending-novel since around 1986. Writing isn't just the actual sit-down-and-write part, even for the literary giants. For this book, there was research, which involved travel. You can't get the feel of the air over Chetumal Bay (Mexico) from a travel guide, and pulling information from the Archivo de las Indias in Seville is vastly aided by persuading one of its excellent and knowledgeable employees to give you a hand. Which is more likely to happen when you're face to face with them.

             And then there's the thinking: lots and lots of thinking. And rethinking. Finally you pick up your pen or equivalent and start--only to realize it's a false start... it's not right; the beginning isn't really the beginning. This can happen more than once; it can happen over and over. (Maybe I'm working from another false start now, but at 200 plus pages, I fervently hope not!)

Executioner (Palos, Spain)

            Whatever the legitimacy of the delays, I strongly suspect this book has taken so long to get well and truly underway because of doubt. The story is embedded in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, and the people who tell it come from two different cultures, neither of which exist anymore as they then were. There's some historical fact; there are a lot more holes! Can I get these people to tell me their story true?

            To the point: what do I need to write? Experience suggests the ideal is a Yucatec hammock to work in,  preferably hung outside in a warm climate, inside will do, if the weather's too hot or too cold or there are too many mosquitos; blocks of time that let me live in an era and in space molded and shaped inside my head; and relative isolation so I can hold that imagined world steady in its own reality.  

            Finally, and most importantly, I need faith in my characters, who have a story they want to tell. Because if I trust them and listen, they'll give me everything I want to know. All I have to do is write it down.

Thinking About the End of Days

            The story that's been consuming my creative life for what seems like forever involves, peripherally, Christopher Columbus. As a result, I've had to do some reading up on him.  Of greatest interest, in the context of the story, is his thinking, which reflected the thought of his time (although he was arguably far more obsessive about it than most folks).

Replica of one of Columbus' ships

            Columbus, according to some scholars, believed that the end of days was just around the corner and that he himself was a creature from prophesy. (Anyone interested in this view should check out Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, by Carol Delaney, published in 2011. It's a fascinating read.)

            Columbus' reading brought him to the conclusion that the world would end 155 years after 1502, that is, 1657 (if my math's right and I figured out his starting point correctly).   As I understand his thinking, the end of the world and the return of Christ is the whole point of everything.  To prepare, the entire world had to be evangelized to give everyone in it a chance to find salvation, and Jerusalem had to be regained by Christianity and the temple rebuilt.

            This is good, solid 16th century analysis, even if some of it is a bit biased to fit Columbus' preconceived notions.

            You might recall that around the year 2000, and again around 2012 (the end of the world according to the Maya, supposedly) there was a lot of activity focused on preparing for the end of the world. This periodic revival of millennialism suggests that a fairly large chunk of humanity is stuck in a medieval morass.

Inquisition torture chamber

            The end of days is something we're supposed to look forward to, and even welcome. Evidently, an all powerful deity has to destroy a perfectly good creation in order to make a visit back to it.

            Why an omniscient and omnipotent deity needs humankind to prepare for its return isn't clear to me. I would have thought that inherent in the idea of an all knowing and all powerful being, everything is encompassed, including self-sufficiency. But that's just me. More importantly, humankind is not well served by believing the world's going to end with a magical re-encounter because that implies we don't need to deal with real issues and solve them.

            As a case in point, as the U.S. election grinds its way through the primary season, several of the GOP candidates seem to subscribe to ideas that, if closely scrutinized, come close to variations on 16th century themes. As they all espouse their religious credentials, they seem to be insisting we all be their version of Christians. After that, they go on to take stances that seem to rely on an Old Testament mentality.

            The Donald has the makings of an erratic, self-aggrandizing sort of ruler, a sort of aged Henry the Eighth figure, without his intellectual capacity. Ted Cruz suggests, somehow, the possibility of an American version of the Inquisition. Marco Rubio, the earnest youngster in the group, says things that when probed, don't seem to have any real meaning. Maybe he's not a throwback to late medieval times, but there's not a lot of modern substance below the slippery surface, either.

            I'm rather fond of the American experiment in diversity and innovation. The possibility saddens me that it might end its days in a time warp, governed by people who look backward, to darker ages shadowed by fear and hatred. (Given my fondness for a disputatious America, please feel free to dispute!)

           

Carnivals

            Tuesday past was Fat Tuesday. Since I'm in a place where people celebrate Carnival with a lot of enthusiasm, I thought it behooved me to venture out for the final parade.

            The irony of  the first U.S. presidential primary falling on Fat Tuesday didn't  escape me, I admit. With apologies to those of you who take your politics or your religion, or both, seriously, I found the conjunction singularly appropriate this election season. So the New Hampshire voters slogging through the snow to perform their civic duty, weren't far from my mind when I walked to Cozumel's downtown shore drive (known as the malecón) to see the parade.

"Millenium Falcon," new owner!

            This is a pretty funky parade. As near as I can figure, anyone who wants to march in it can. So you have beat-up pick-ups pulling slat-sided flat beds with a bunch of kids in thrown-together costumes mixed up with corporate trailers sporting high-end effects. Star Wars got lots of iterations, from a pretty fancy store-bought looking costume group on a commercial float to a little kid alone in her own Millennium Falcon. There were four or five cross-dressing clown groups chased by faux bulls. More than one brass band exhaled loud notes as they passed the watching throng. Folks in regular jeans and tees  marched, but wearing those wrestling masks that cover the whole head. There was even an ancient Mayan ball team, intricately painted to look like tattooed classic Maya warriors, engaging in an approximation of the pre-contact sacred ball game.

           

            Then, what to my surprise, a jeep came trundling along with a big white piece of poster board stuck to its grill. On the poster board, written in plain old letters--no fancy calligraphy or special lettering here--it said: "Bernie Sanders" and below that: "feel the bern."

            NH wasn't yet done with me. Later, another truck drove by that immediately evoked Donald Trump, though I doubt it was intentional.

When orange is the new orange

            The next morning of course ushered in Ash Wednesday. By the church calendar, Fat Tuesday's thumbed nose at convention gives over to penance and to reflection on the follies and travails of our mortal coil. The same might be true of the electoral calendar: if the primary was a statement repudiating political convention, then NH voters opened the presidential election cycle with a lot for the rest of us to reflect on.

            (I couldn't photograph the Bernie Sanders' jeep; it dissolved into an out-of-focus blur, leaving me in its wake wondering if it was just a Mardi Gras illusion. The Trump-evoking truck, though, came through loud and clear. Do you, dear reader, see why it said "Trump" to me?)

Bird Break

            Last week I was happily adding new bits to a piece I call "the never-ending novel" (first conceived around 1987, still far from finished).

            Doing so these days relies on a Yucatec hammock hanging in a patio enclosed on three sides. The fourth side gives on to a small, grassy yard, surrounded by a vine-covered stone wall and large trees and bromeliads. There's an aging black cat who shares the patio for his food and water. The cat is inclined to open one or both of the screen doors that lead into the house from the patio. He does not, of course, then close the screens again.

            The occasional bird, usually a kind of collared dove or  a grackle, shares the cat's food with the cat's tacit consent. The birds have determined me to be irrelevant. They calmly pass under the hammock to get to the cat food without sparing so much as a glance for me.

            Perfect for concentration, right? Except when... A sudden explosion of wing lift-off from the vicinity of the cat's dish ripped me out of a  monk's cell in the 15th century. I did not see the bird passing over me toward the trees, and glancing toward the screens leading into the dining area, I saw--with a sinking feeling--that they were open.

            My characters were left to fend for themselves. Cautiously, I peered into the house, just in time to see a collared dove zoom toward a large screened window; meeting resistance, it then swooped back through the living room and ascended to a small (and like the other, unopenable) square window, high above the floor, meant to give natural light to an otherwise dark space. And there it battled the glass until, worn out, it simply perched on the sill, looking out at the Caribbean sky.

Collared Dove rests on light

            The next two hours were spent trying to devise a means to help the bird  escape. The large window had to be covered, and all of the screen doors, opened (with crossed fingers that no other birds would join the dove in the interim), along with the heavy front door which was underneath the dove's chosen roosts . Plural, because it moved from the sill to a  ceiling light, between its repeated futile bouts of trying to escape through the same small window.

            Finally, with the help of a long metal pole and at the cost of  a (to me)  traumatic encounter that involved much beating of wings and fluttering and falling feathers, the bird dropped to the floor. Where it immediately saw the open front door. With great aplomb and admirable indifference, it calmly walked out into the afternoon.

            I hadn't really provided for a bird break on my writing schedule, but sometimes life just  goes its own way, doesn't it?

The Mean Streets of English

             

English ... is a thief language. We steal verbs and nouns from other languages.... It's terrible. There's this great saying about English lurking in alleyways, knocking out other languages and rifling their pockets for spare vocabulary. 

                                  from The Untold Tale (The Accidental Turn Series Book 1) by J.M. Frey

            Isn't that a delicious tidbit? The character who is speaking says she can't remember where she found that definition. Maybe Frey made it up? I went hunting for it, without success, but discovered something else: a Wikipedia entry for "thieves cant" that suggests all kinds of other things.

            Thieves' or rogues' cant, according to the discussion, was also known as "Peddler's French." English, the language that rifles through other languages to extend itself, was used by actual thieves for their own secret language, reshaping meanings to serve the purpose of the subculture.

            This idea would be more compelling if the same sort of thing weren't also known to exist in a South German and a Swiss equivalent, and elsewhere, I found a reference to a Russian version, too.

  Gran Canaria village street....

            Then, lo and behold, I found a web site titled "Thieves Guild" [http://www.thievesguild.cc/thieves-cant] which has a whole page dedicated to the English thieves' cant; you can even study it in simple form!  The site (which looks like a Dungeons and Dragons spin-off) says you can learn an advanced form, too, but you'll need a high level thieves' guild official to teach you.

            I love the concept of English as a thief language. (I've described it to English learners as a language that "borrows" but we don't give the bits and pieces back, do we? No. They've been appropriated, with or without permission.) It skulks in shadows, alert, ready to pounce... As to the "rules" of English, they're more like guidelines, with all their exceptions and options--as is proper somehow in a den of thievery, don't you think?

            It does beg the question, however: if language and culture go hand in hand, one shaping the other as they make their way through time, what might we make of the concept of English as a thief language in the context of the cultures of English speaking peoples?

           

What Story Do You Want to Be In?

            As stories go, there's a big one taking shape in the United States that every U.S. voter should be paying attention to. It's being woven out of many chapters and vignettes, by our presidential candidates. When the candidates speechify and approve their advertising, they're  each trying to create a compelling story that persuades us to vote for them.

            That's part of what political strategists mean when they talk about the "narrative" to be developed for the candidate. Basically, it's story-telling. The strategists want us to buy the story the candidate tells. But as voters, we need to do more: we need to think about the rest of the story, not just the part the candidate is telling us. We need to imagine the details; we need to consider the various ways the plot might develop. We need to ask: what will our country look like if this person is our next president?

            A political speech or advertisement is like a movie teaser. When we watch a trailer for a film, we know that we're getting bits that are meant to pique our curiosity so we'll go see the movie. We also know those bits are taken out of context. Often we imagine the different ways the piece of a scene we're shown might fit into the story.

 Hunger Games: a not unimaginable story

            A movie is entertainment.  If we guess wrong about the bits and pieces, it's irrelevant to our lives. But a presidential election has consequences. It's all very well, for example, for a candidate to thumb his or her nose at convention and "shoot from the hip." But what does that mean in the context of the real world? As an example, if we need to get cooperation from several fishing nations to secure the future of threatened Atlantic fish stocks, do ill-considered insults bring everyone to the table?

            What does it mean for governing if the President exaggerates a threat or departs from the facts so far as to completely misrepresent reality?  Frightened people are liable to accept, if not exactly agree to, suspension of fundamental rights in the interest of their safety. A candidate willing to frame the story he or she is telling in a way meant to scare folks is no less likely to do so once the presidency is attained. What does that mean for free discussion? For protest and assembly? For freedom from unreasonable search and seizure?

            History shows us some of the possible plot lines: scare stories led to the internment camps for Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor; in Germany in the 30s, Nazi propagandists made up specious claims about Jews and manipulated their gradual marginalization and final incarceration and murder, extending these tactics to  other "unacceptable" minorities; fabrication of non-existent threats from Iraq after 9/11 resulted in an invasion that began destabilization of the entire region....

            So as we watch candidates debate, as we watch campaign advertisements, we need to not only listen to the story each candidate is crafting. We need to also think about where that story might go after the balloons burst s and the votes are cast. We need to ask what the country looks like if that story is made real. We need to ask whether we want to be characters in that story. Because once it's real, it's our story, too.