CivilWarLand in bad decline

At some point, when you stop making things, when you stop selling things, when you stop creating things, the only thing that remains is the experience industry. Theme parks, gaming products, memory enhancements, prostitution. The product: making the client feel good about him- or herself. (Or let's face it, in most cases, himself.) Promising a unique experience to every one of the hundreds of thousands of clients being herded through. How's that for a metaphor of the American dream, hmmm?

The stories in CivilWarLand In Bad Decline are set in a US about to collapse, or shortly afterwards; not quite The Road, but not a million miles away either. Those who still have (or who can take) can buy clean consciences, either in exchange for cash, or simply by knowing how to justify themselves. And others play along, because pointing out that they're being used would be admitting that the dream is a lie, and that's worse. So you focus on yourself and your nearest and dearest, and squeeze as much as you can out of everyone else. Tell them to rely on themselves, while taking their means for doing so.

"You've known me your whole life," Joel said. "I'm your friend."
"Not a Pepsi," said the billy-club man. "Not a spoonful of relish. Not a sugar packet. The time has come for me to look out for me and mine."
"I am you and yours," Joel said. "We were schoolfriends. Remember the caroling parties? Remember when Oscar called sister Nan a tub? Remember?"
"No," the billy-club man said.

But his heroes are the no-hopers operating the rides, the ones whom the dream tells us must at some point get a lucky break and be compensated for their misery/drudgery/slavery, but whose salvation only lies in realising that it's not possible.

Have I achieved serenity? No. Do I have a meaningful hobby that makes the days fly by like minutes? No. I have a wild desire to smell the ocean. I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.

And if that sounds depressing, it is, but it's also very darkly funny; funny as in Kafka, funny as in Vonnegut rewriting Candide. Earlier this year I read Cory Doctorow's Makers which deals with a similar setting but completely misses the point of it. Saunders, on the other hand, ends it with a quiet call for resistance. One that he knows is hopeless... but still.