The Green Dream

Years ago, a fellow named Norman Spinrad wrote a science fiction novel set in an alternative universe where Adolf Hitler had immigrated to the United States after World War I, and become a comic book level illustrator for pulp magazines in the 1920s (think Weird Tales and Amazing Stories), and later a pulp science fiction writer himself.  In this book, Hitler wrote "Lord of the Swastikas" (a not so thinly veiled parody of both Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien's leitmotifs) and won the Hugo Award (like the Nobel Prize for hack science fiction) for his efforts. In our universe, Spinrad won the Hugo for that book.

Spinrad is still around, and God help us, so is the Bush family, still meddling in national politics. Spinrad's book was supposed to be a satire of the American reactionary mind, and how much of what passed for science fiction and fantasy writing allegedly appealed to crypto-fascist dystopian impulses. One thing not addressed directly by Spinrad was how fascism itself was a sort of reactionary modernism, and how Nazism sprang from a misty, romantic German Voelkisch dreamscape of naturmensch and Lebensreform.

Now, in  our time, we have our own American Voelkisch movement full of survivalist doomsday preppers, creation scientists, and climate change deniers going up against their leftist dopplegangers of carbon creditors and eco-utopians.

In another alternative universe somewhere along the space-time continuum, there is a warming world where Karl Rove's Hillary bashing will sort of work, and she bows out of the 2016 presidential race, choosing instead a lessor glass ceiling to shatter.   Into the gaping political void, just as the West Antarctic ice sheet starts to slide off into the ocean and begin it's long liquifying journey towards Florida's coastal cities, will come none other than Albert Gore, Jr., bellowing mountebank of the eco-left, back from the political dead after making a fortune during the period his electoral adversary drove the country into the abyss, and now having free rein in his secure late middle age to seek a cosmic and poetic vindication against the man who stole a sinking Florida from him a near-generation ago.  He's actually younger than Hillary, and no less, or more, of a crook than JEB!.  In this world, Al picks Hillary, taking her lessor grandmotherly path, to be his running mate, and JEB! gets his, and his family's, ultimate humiliation. Even when compared to a con artist like Al Gore, another Bush can't put their own con over on the country again.  The last Bush Crown Prince cosmically and poetically thrashed by earth-toned Al, and a woman.

If only it was coming to a real universe near yours.

IPCC reports 'diluted' under 'political pressure' from Saudi-led coalition to protect fossil fuel interests