Living in an Alternative Reality

Seriously, GOP?

I'ma write a post for my other blog today, FANSCI, and it's not even gone be about SF, I mean not directly. It's going to be about straight fiction which has left the bounds of reality so enormously that it might as well be alternate reality.

That's where the GOP is today.

I spend a lot of time in early fiction workshops -- the first several weeks I have new students, introductory workshops, convincing young writers that yes, it does matter that you get basic facts right: that you can't have people hunting squirrels with Henry rifles; that you can't make Jupiter have 1/3 Earth gravity; that no, it is not okay to have someone order a Perrier at the Cafe du Monde by the Jackson Square in New Orleans, and that yes, you really do need to get the dialect right if you are writing a book set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1952. Even if this is fiction, and therefore you are "making it all up."

Today's GOP has apparently decided they can make their entire world up, and live in it. Well, okay, that's fine. Isolated communities (I guess) do that. Cults, SCA, Conservapedia. The difference is, these folk don't usually expect the rest of us to participate. The GOP -- many of whom have been home-schooled, home-churched, educated at Christian churches, carefully isolated from the contaminating influence of modern culture's movie, TV's, wicked fiction and discourse (they shop only in Christian bookstores, read only Christian texts, are kept from the internet as adolescents) -- raised in a cultural diving bell, in other words, who have known nothing but that isolated community -- now expect the rest of us to believe what they believe: that their invented world is reality.

At least that's the only explanation I have for why anyone would think we'd believe this insane crap they're saying these days. They have no reality check -- Fox News repeats whatever they say; their candidates, preachers, senators, and blogs back them up. So far as they know, this is the real world, where using birth control makes you a whore; where wanting to use health insurance is the same thing as forcing Jews to eat pork; where the President is a Kenyan invader who wants to destroy America; where supporting universal health care is exactly like hating America; where gay marriage will destroy straight marriage; where unions are evil and OWS is filled with rapists and lunatics, but Andrew Brietbart was a hero.