Skrying Excremental Fans from Idaho and Manhattan

With the US facing a possible double dip recession, and a resurgent far right political movement poised to sweep into Congress in the Fall elections, I found myself reading two strangely complementary dystopian novels about economic collapse. The first, Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse by Survivalblog writer James Rawles, is a manual for right-wing survivalist gun-nuts dressed up like a novel. The second, Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, is an example of contemporary literature at its finest. Although from nearly opposite ends of the social universe both novels see the spiraling economic and political crisis in the United States ending in the complete collapse of the Republic as we know it.

The protagonist in Shteyngart’s novel, Lenny Abramov, is a sad thirty nine year-old Russian Jewish intellectual. Lenny works as an Outreach Coordinator for Post-Human Services, a New York firm that Shteyngart acknowledges is inspired by Kurzweil and de Grey’s books on life extension. Lenny’s job is to find and induct worthy High Net Worth Individuals for a program of “dechronification” treatments. The novel savagely satires the self-centered absorption and callous aloofness of the life extenders as the United States implodes around them.

Lenny Abramov, your humble diarist, your small nonentity, will live forever. The technology is almost here. As the Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator (Grade G) of the Post-Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, I will be the first to partake of it. I just have to be good and I have to believe in myself. I just have to stay off the trans fats and the hooch. I just have to drink plenty of green tea and alkalinized water and submit my genome to the right people. I will need to re-grow my melting liver, replace the entire circulatory system with “smart blood,” and find someplace safe and warm (but not too warm) to while away the angry seasons and the holocausts.

And when the earth expires, as it surely must, I will leave it for a new earth, greener still but with fewer allergens; and in the flowering of my own intelligence some 1032 years hence, when our universe decides to fold in on itself, my personality will jump through a black hole and surf into a dimension of unthinkable wonders, where the things that sustained me on Earth 1.0 - tortelli lucchese, pistachio ice cream, the early works of the Velvet Underground, smooth, tanned skin pulled over the soft Baroque architecture of twentysomething buttocks - will seem as laughable and infantile as building blocks, baby formula, a game of “Simon says do this.”

That’s right: I am never going to die, caro diario. Never, never, never, never. And you can go to hell for doubting me.

In SSTLS‘s future America no one reads anymore and everyone is constantly measuring their self-worth through software that tells them how they rate in attractiveness and wealth against the people around them. Credit poles line the streets which announce your credit rating, and berate you to consume more. The US government is controlled by the Bipartisan Party, who are waging an unsuccessful war in Venezuela, have National Guardsmen deployed permanently in the streets, and strive to convince the now dominant Chinese that we are still worthy of their credit. Only yuan-pegged dollars are worth anything.

Lenny is in desperate love with a beautiful Korean woman, Eunice Park, who is fifteen years younger, totally absorbed in shopping for AssLuxury and JuicyPussy brand clothes and wracked with guilt about her dysfunctional Korean family. Eunice’s story is mainly told through the emails, or “teening,” she sends to family and friends. She is bewildered by her growing affection for shlubby Lenny, with his smelly book habit and polyester clothes. But when she befriends a homeless vet who leads a encampment in Tompkins Park, or takes care of the elderly in her apartment building, we see her humanity struggling out past her shallow consumerism. The book is masterful in drawing out fully, complexly realized characters winding their way around one another in sad and vividly real ways.

By contrast the characters in Rawles’ novel were said by one reviewer to have needed two more dimensions to even achieve two dimensionality. Another said Patriots was a book about a couple hundred guns that found people to love them. The heroes of Patriots are a cell of affluent Christian survivalists who spend years getting paramilitary training, buying weapons, building a fortress in Idaho with solar power and a spring-fed well, and stockpiling it with every conceivable item from stabilized gasoline to telephone books for spare toilet paper.

When the SHTF (“shit hits the fan,” a stock “prepper” phrase), which in this case is the result of hyperinflation, a run on the banks, and then a sudden global evaporation of social, political and military order, the dozen members of the cell have to make their way from Chicago to Idaho. The chapters of the book that tell these “bug out” stories are clearly intended to impart lessons on what to pack (guns, ammunition and MREs) and how to evade marauding hordes, just as there are long tedious chapters describing how the group decided on their standard rifles, trucks and uniforms, how they installed grenade-proof doors and windows, and how they built their own land mines and thermite grenades. Half of a chapter is devoted to a lecture from a self-educated Constitutional scholar on why the government has no legal right to require drivers or gun merchants to have licenses.

In Idaho the righteous few hunker down, post a 24/7 armed guard at the LPOP (“listening post observation post”), and begin ambushing and interrogating passersby. Sometimes the refugees who pass by are good Christians with useable skills. They are solemnly inducted. Sometimes they are homosexual cannibal Communists carrying a dozen copies of Chairman Mao’s little red book and some half-eaten human carcasses. The latter are executed on the spot.

In Patriots most of the people on the coasts die, as do most people in the major population areas. In Shteyngart’s novel, after the S really HTF, the big corporations and their Arab, European and Chinese backers simply hire private security firms to drive the poor and homeless out of the cities so they can be turned into gentrified parks - “lifestyle hubs” - for the wealthy and foreign tourists. In Patriots the Christian libertarian militias in the hinterland unite to restore the US Constitution to its pre-New Deal purity, and to fight the socialist-backed United Nations troops sent to squeeze Americans for the debt they owe the global bankers. In SSTLS the US is being sold piece by piece to pay off its debts, and at one point - at an art opening in NYC of satellite photos of the nightmarish horrors taking place between the coasts - one can imagine Rawles’ Idaho guerrilas fighting Shteyngart’s hyper-capitalist mercenary Blackwater shock troops, mistaking them for agents of Euro-socialism.

Super Sad True Love Story is a great novel, and the depiction of self-absorbed libertopian transhumanism in a world going to Hell will steel the will of every technoprogressive to fight for a more egalitarian futurism. Patriots is a terrible novel, and a depressingly unrealistic manual for survivalism; as some of the survivalist blogs point out one would have to be a millionaire to pay for all the exotic gear Rawles plugs as essential. But Patriots does offer a peek into the mindset of a popular flavor of right-wing militia survivalism, where the goal is restore the US to the late nineteenth century and the most important political issue is the right to carry a concealed weapon. SSTLS inspires us to a real patriotism, a compassion for the billions of ordinary people being led to a dismal future by wealthy elites who can afford to wall themselves off and drink alkinilized water while the rest of us die of cholera. SSTLS suggests that the consolation we find in the tragically flawed and heroically striving people in our lives may be just as important as attempts at physical immortality.