Alternate reality

It’s summertime, and I’ve taken on a little vacation-season project: I’m catching up on four seasons (each) of Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica. Now, I don’t exactly consider myself a sci-fi geek, but I do love the power of the genre to address social issues. At their best, science fiction premises and stories use allegory to point up our societal and political foibles without ever finger-pointing — because they’re set on other worlds or in alternate universes.

I had heard these two series — updates of chestnuts from cheesy decades gone by — have received some very thoughtful makeovers and were reaching a certain level of relevance. As I’ve been wending through the DVD box sets of Battlestar Galactica, I find it impressive how the political and military machinations of the series deal so unblinkingly with some of the gray areas and hypocrisies of the Constitution-shredding past eight years. The Season 2 episode titled “Pegasus” featured the torture of a prisoner (ostensibly an “enemy robot,” so inhumane treatment was sanctioned) that brought me a visceral connection to the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. It’s not that I hadn’t wrapped my head around my government’s abuses of the Geneva Conventions, but I somehow hadn’t wrapped my gut around it. Beautifully executed allegory such as this can give us the emotional understanding of a painful situation we may have been detached from. It’s not unlike the phenomenon of people who condemn homosexuals in theory until they actually become acquainted with one of “them”; we might find this happening more and more as we enter week two and beyond of California’s gay-marriage bonanza. (And if you don't think I can connect same-sex marriage to science fiction, you are cordially invited to media coverage of the man-on-man nuptials of Mr. Sulu.)

I was catching up on the revamped Doctor Who series last night, a Season 2 episode titled “Rise of the Cybermen.” Granted, the title doesn’t have the lyrical resonance of “Pegasus,” but then Doctor Who doesn’t aim for the lofty reaches of Galactica (am I now officially a geek because I referred to the show by only one name?). Anyway, in this particular episode of Who, our heroes accidentally land in an alternate universe. I tend to like the out-and-out alternate universe episodes. The other ones that stay within our universe (such as they portray it) have to remain within the parameters they’ve established, or at least be able to clean up their mess sufficiently by the end, so they can trudge onward with their established premise in the next episode. But when they plop into an alternate universe, all bets are off and they can screw around with the status quo as much as they’d like to get their points across. Gotta love that (unless it’s done by Republicans — but more about that later). Anyway, on this other Earth in Doctor Who-ville, the public was subjected to mass hypnosis from stereo earpieces they all wore; they were told the earpieces were strictly informational, just giving them the news. (If this show were done in the U.S. instead of the U.K., I’m sure they would have used the term “fair and balanced” to describe the news, just like Fox News does in their science fiction.)

This morning I read about the latest venture from the folks who brought us the “Swift Boat Veterans” attack on John Kerry. You remember that one, don’t you? It was so effective it even hatched its own verb. Swift-boating is the act of creating such a monumental lie within a real framework that its damage continues even after its accuracy has been disproven. So Kerry went from being a war hero (reality) to being a sniveling, cowardly, near-deserter (alternate reality) in the shock and awe of swift-boating.

The article I read this morning reported those wonderful folks who swift-boated all over us four years ago are planning to publish “a comprehensive, factual look” at Barack Obama. Lies are a funny thing. When you’re being bombarded by them in both ears, it’s easy to perceive the whole construct as reality and forget that you’ve been transported into an alternate one. As a country, we seemed to pull at least one of our earpieces out as the lies and deceptions of the Iraq War became incontrovertible. Will a fresh round of swift-boating impel our collective American head to pull out the other earpiece, or welcome the new propaganda in stereo?                    

Scott Patrick Wagner can be contacted at www.scottpatrickwagner.com.