Hangovers from 2000

I'm only even writing this post because Kim Stanley Robinson has written the best political scifi out there. His best known works are Red Mars and its sequels, which played a big role in my getting political. Plenty of his other works are, if anything, even better. The Three Californias Trilogy (reprinted not long ago) and Years of Rice and Salt are absolutely astonishing, as are some of his less remembered works, like Icehenge and The Memory of Whiteness. He's written a lot of clangers, though.
I've just picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below (the middle of a trilogy on climate change) again after a break. It has some good parts, but on the whole it's probably his worst book so far. There are plenty of reasons for this, but I'm particularly struck by the asinine politics.

A good deal of it centers around a miracle democratic presidential candidate, Phil Chase, who likes to talk about getting along with the rest of the world, pays attention to what scientists say about global warming and so on; in spite of that, he feels so threatened by a hypothetical independent 'scientific' candidate "polling about five percent in the blue states" in spite of not being on the ballot or even actually existing that the protagonists feel obliged to have it 'withdraw' from the race.

It's one of the best examples of the really bizarre reactions a lot of folks on the left are still having to the 2000 election. Robinson, who is pretty sharp politically, seems to have been so traumatized that he thinks that even an imaginary third party candidate - that is, even the idea that we might be able to do better than what's on the official menu - needs a sort of ritual exorcism.

Of course, we shouldn't forget that real democratic nominees are nowhere near as attractive as Phil Chase, but that every four years millions of people try to convince themselves that they are. Before Al Gore reinvented himself last year as a born-again environmentalist, he had worked hard to kneecap the Kyoto protocol - something that I think a lot of Nader voters knew or suspected in 2000.

This is part of the reason that, in spite of some reservations, I'm still glad I campaigned for Nader in 2000 and voted for him in 2004. There is a big problem with the political culture in the US, and one small but important part of it is that so many of the people who should be trying to do something about it are too pessimistic to even think seriously about it.

---

Incidentally, there was an excellent piece by Garret Keizer in this month's Harper's to do with Al Gore and the politics of global warming. Among the many interesting points, he suggested that global warming could be a good counterpart to the "war on terror" in keeping people from thinking about everything else that's going on. That's an interesting way of looking at what's happened to Robinson.