Thomas M. Disch on Newt Gingrich's sci-fi politics

Reading the fiction and non-fiction of Thomas M. Disch was one of the great pleasures of my life.  He did not suffer fools and sentimentalists and reactionaries gladly.  His ferocious novels were balanced perfectly by the deadly ease of his essays.

When Jon Stewart and MSNBC were in a lather over Newt Gingrich's Florida primary stump speech about creating a moon colony, I wondered why this came as such a revelation.  Futurism [of the Toffler, not the Marinetti, variety] and "hard" SF [note well that verb!], having been the happy hunting grounds of rightists and libertarians since the Great Depression.  Doesn't every contrarian with an anti-social personality disorder sees themselves as a space-faring superman?

I am posting Thomas M. Disch's 1996 article on Gingrich and his sci-fi glee club which originally appeared in The Nation, and which can also be found in the excellent Disch collection On SF. 

 

Speaker Hoonbeam: Newt's Futurist Brain Trust

At some point in his presidency Richard Nixon posed for a photograph in

which he can be seen holding a copy of the Modern Library edition of The

Sound and the Fury. The moment I saw it, I thought: "Nixon? Faulkner? Not

very likely."

But Newt Gingrich might just get away with striking such a pose. Here

is a politician who actually does read books; who has said "ideas matter";

who even draws up lists of required reading for his fellow legislators. OK,

The Federalist Papers is on the list, which is a bit like including the Holy

Bible. More significant is the presence on Gingrich's list of two popular

futurologists, Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt, writers who had not till

now been identified with a particular political agenda.

More significant still—though not included on the reading list or

much noted—has been Gingrich's connection with another, less celebrated

school of futurology, the writers of sci-fi and high-tech, gung-ho

military romance, who have been and continue to be his collaborators on

both nonfiction and fiction projects. Of them, anon.

Gingrich's most noticed and commendable co-optation has been his

enlistment of Toffler, the author of Future Shock and now a spokesman for

the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a Gingrich franchise. Future Shock

was published in 1970 and established Toffler's bona fides as a "futurist."

In that book and its successors, The Third Wave (1980) and Power Shift

(1990), Toffler managed to look beyond the polarizing us-or-them antinomies

of the cold war imagination to descry, with remarkable foresight,

the postmodern future we postmoderns now inhabit. He observed the

ways that advances in cybernetics and media technology had already

transformed daily life and power politics and extrapolated from there.

His books are informed, judicious, and thought-provoking.

Toffler's major competitor in the futurology business has been John

Naisbitt, author of Megatrends (1982). His work differs from Toffler's

more in style than content. Toffler is discursive and sequential; the print

in his books is smaller, the footnotes more abundant, and he assumes a

goodly attention span. Naisbitt writes in info-bites for a later, more

impatient breed of reader. His pages have the disjunctive inputs of USA

Today, with paragraphs regularly interspersed with explanatory headlines

and bulleted lines, as though to say, "Skim me, I'm an easy read."

Both Toffler and Naisbitt have worthwhile points to make. The world

is changing in ever-exfoliating ways, thanks to computers and satellite

technology and the simple yens, of people and of corporations, to do

whatever they want. These changes cannot be withstood or gainsaid, if

only because they are, so often, faits accompli. In their way, Toffler and

Naisbitt represent the chilly common sense of cyberspace: the future will

be the exclusive domain of computer-literate managers of multinational

corporations; the rest of us will be consigned to the Rust Belt.

As so often with common sense, appetite dictates what is perceived.

Toffler, and Naisbitt even more, accentuate the welling-up of nutrients in

the churning waters of history, heedless of (or indifferent to) whole flotillas

liable to sink. Thus in Global Paradox (1994) Naisbitt, who believes that

"travel is and will continue to be the world's largest industry," only once

makes significant reference to AIDS, noting how it has reduced tourism

in Kenya and Gambia. Warfare rates almost as little attention: "Escalation

of armed conflict in certain regions around the globe can have a negative

impact on worldwide tourism. The Gulf War demonstrated just how

much of an impact armed conflict can have." Naisbitt is a resident of the

ski resort and mountain fastness of Telluride, Colorado, and boasts that

he can interface with current events without ever stirring from his monitor.

Those who access information electronically have a privileged perspective

but not necessarily a clearer one. Gingrich's attitude of "Let

them eat laptops" and Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" are both

memorable for their delicate positioning between naivete and irony.

From the perspective of the trailer park and the inner city, a free ticket to

cyberspace has all the allure of a half-off coupon for a Berlitz course in

Japanese conversation.

Toffler's take on the problem of evil isn't so blithely New Age as Naisbitt's.

His role model is Machiavelli and not Marie Antoinette, but even so

he has a penchant for finding ponies at the bottom of every dungheap.

Thus the "personal political views" of a media baron like Rupert Murdoch

are inconsequential because such giants are necessarily committed

to an "ideology of globalism... or at least supranationalism which must

operate across national boundaries, and it is in the self-interest of the

new media moguls to spread this ideology." Such a McLuhanite focus on

the medium as against the message accommodates the needs of power.

It is not surprising, then, that Toffler and Naisbitt should now be

advanced by Gingrich to the rank of official government-accredited

gurus. Their works had already been garlanded with blurbs from the

international press and U.S. senators and CEOs. Recruiting them was a

respectable sort of recent acquisition, on the order of a Monet or a

Cézanne. What is much more revealing is Gingrich's alliance with

another kind of futurist in the persons of Jerry Pournelle, Janet Morris,

David Drake, and William Forstchen. In the work of these four once-and-future

Gingrich collaborators one confronts the unnerving and sinister

shadows implicit in Toffler and Naisbitt's sunshiny scenarios.

Do their names ring bells? Probably not, unless you are a science

fiction fan. All four follow in the bootprints of Robert A. Heinlein, both

as partisans of sending Man (and Woman) into Space as the priority for a

viable future (Heinlein's first book, in 1950, was The Man Who Sold the

Moon) and as scenarists of high-tech warfare. In Starship Troopers (1959),

his seminal work, Heinlein uses the gosh-wow conventions of pulp-era

space opera to advance a political agenda that celebrates America's future

as the Rome of the space age. With the skill of Leni Riefenstahl, the

author glamorizes the trappings of military power—the uniforms and

macho rituals—while lecturing the reader, as if he were a raw recruit, on

the need to obey one's officers and to exterminate the enemy (the Bugs, in

this novel) utterly. After Heinlein, Buck Rogers and other guys with

blasters would never look the same. Space opera = NASA = a blank check

for high-tech research.

Pournelle, Heinlein's heir apparent, was an early advocate of Star Wars

technology. His inspirational tract of 1984, Mutual Assured Suruiual: A

Space-Age Solution to Nuclear Annihilation, earned him a pat on the back, and

a blurb, from no less than Ronald Reagan. That book did not elevate him

to the dignity of being an official policy guru, but it was published in the

same year, by the same entrepreneur, Jim Baen—long the principal

patron of these and other Heinleinite sf writers—as a much less noticed

book, Window of Opportunity : A Blueprint jbr the Future, which identifies its

authors as "the Honorable Newt Gingrich, with David Drake and Marianne

Gingrich." The preface is written by Pournelle, who salutes Gingrich's

(and Drake and Gingrich's) work as "a remarkable book, almost

unique in that, without the slightest compromise with the principles that

made this nation great, Gingrich presents a detailed blueprint, a practical

program that not only proves that we can all get rich, but shows how."

Gingrich, on his acknowledgments page, thanks Pournelle for introducing

him to his publisher. Baen, in turn, is complimented for "matching"

the Gingriches with "our co-author, David Drake, and Janet Morris.

Money alone could not buy the creativity, skill, and effort that Janet contributed

to the final draft. David's contribution, of course, cannot be

overstated."

Needless to say, politician-authors usually do little more than talk into

a tape recorder and let their ghosts take it from there. But they are

expected to stand by what they've signed their names to. And what Newt

Gingrich signed his name to back in 1984 is a document worth pondering.

For it shows much more vividly than transcripts of his recent

speeches, which are necessarily more circumspect, more "politic," his

sense of his constituency—who they are and what they can be sold.

Right-wing politicians traditionally offer a mix of two flavors: ressentiment

and hope. And while the Republican resurgence of 1994 employed

vitriolic attacks on the entire liberal spectrum, hope is Gingrich's special

note, as it was Ronald ("Morning in America") Reagan's. The difference

is that Reagan's optimism looked back to the idyllic past of the mythical

frontier in which he'd acted as a Hollywood cowboy, while Gingrich

places his hope in a sci-fi future. Gingrich sounds that motif at full diapason

in the introduction to Window of Opportunity: "Breakthroughs in

computers, biology, and space make possible new jobs, new opportunities,

and new hope on a scale unimagined since Christopher Columbus

discovered a new world.. . . There is hope for a continuing revolution in

biology which will allow us to feed the entire planet; hope for jobs,

opportunities, and adventures in space."

Adventures in space turn out to be a major component of what we are

to hope for. One can't help but sense the influence of Gingrich's sci-fi

collaborators, especially at such moments as this: "Congressman Bob

Walker of Pennsylvania [now Chairman of the House Committee on Science,

Space, and Technology] has been exploring the possible benefits of

weightlessness to people currently restricted to wheelchairs. In speeches

to handicapped Americans, he makes the point that in a zero-gravity

environment, a paraplegic can float as easily as anyone else. Walker

reports that wheelchair-bound adults begin asking questions in an

enthusiastic tone when exposed to the possibility of floating free,

released from their wheelchairs. Several have volunteered to be the first

pioneers."

This "Arise and float!" is evangelism with a canny subtext, not unfamiliar

to sci-fi professionals. Space is envisioned as that New Frontier

where the indignities of ordinary life—onerous no-future jobs and low

status—are to be remedied, as they were by an earlier expansion into the

American West. Space is Texas, only larger. In the twenty-first century,

Gingrich (or his ghosts) declares, a third-generation space shuttle "will

be the DC-3 of space. From that point on, people will flow out to the

Hiltons and Marriotts of the solar system, and mankind will have perma-

nently broken free of the planet." In short, vote for me and someday your

children will inhabit the Star Trek of their video dreams.

As hopes go, that might seem to be on a par with the Rapture awaited

by fundamentalist Christians, and indeed, the demographics are not

mutually exclusive. The same audience/electorate that polls tell us

expects the Third Coming sometime soon might well settle for a visit to

the Venus Hilton as a good second-best. It's only a fantasy, after all.

But people buy fantasy, as Gingrich's ghosts well know. And the fantasies

they can be sold are by no means limited to space as the last frontier.

All four of the Gingrich ghosts have specialized in military fantasies

that skillfully meld high-tech weaponry with the kind of gung-ho glamour

one associates with recruiting posters. Indeed, the cover of Star Voyager

Academy, by William Forstchen (the contracted collaborator on Gingrich's

much-tsked-over forthcoming novel, set in 1945 and featuring a

"pouting sex kitten"), takes the literal form of a recruiting poster, including

the pointed finger and "We Want YOU!" Aa its title suggests,

Forstchen's novel is a lineal descendant of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, a

young-adult-level paean to the joys of military life. The enemy now is not

hive-dwelling "aliens" (Heinlein's shorthand for the Communist menace)

but the United Nations of Earth (shorthand for government bureaucracies

other than NASA). In this, Forstchen reflects the dilemma faced

by the right wing as it searches the landscape for an internal enemy to

replace the Communist menace.

David Drake, a co-author of Window of Opportunity, had his first notable

success with the Hammer's Slammers series, begun in 1979, which is a

hybrid of TV's Star Trek and Soldier of Fortune magazine.

 

Janet Morris, likewise, has specialized in future war scenarios from

the perspective of a female guerrilla. If women are not suited to foxholes,

as Gingrich recently suggested, they may still wreak havoc from behind a

computer monitor. With her husband, Chris, sometime co-author and

once-upon-a-time partner in a jazz-fusion band, Morris also works as a

consultant in weapons development, specializing in "weapons of mass

protection"—like the sticky foam that can be sprayed on demonstrators

in lieu of bullets.

The bibliographies of Forstchen, Drake, and Morris are as impressive

as that of Balzac, but Pournelle, their senior by a generation, has outdone

them all in his ability to cater to their target audience. He is, quite simply,

the best writer of the lot, and if not the most prolific (only a computer

could crunch those numbers), surely the most successful.

Characteristically, Pournelle's best books are collaborations. Drake,

Forstchen, and Morris have collaborated not only with Gingrich but with

one another, and others still, in a manner as complex as a cable-knit

sweater. They have not as yet had the good fortune to collaborate with

Pournelle's regular partner, Larry Niven, with whom Pournelle has produced

some classic sci-fi titles, including Inferno (1976), a modern recension

of Dante's book of the same name; the best-selling Lucifer's Hammer

(1977), a futuristic disaster novel; and Oath of Fealty (1981), the tale of a

right-wing Utopia that seer Gingrich himself would be proud to set his

name to.

Oath of Fealty is unique in the annals of Utopian literature in offering a

plausible depiction of the Orwellian nightmare from the point of view of

Big Brother. In its blueprint of a privileged Fortress America—called

Todos Santos, a self-sufficient "arcology" plunked down in the middle of

a feral Los Angeles, where the wealthy can live protected from the

promiscuous mob of undesirable anarchists, terrorists, and other paupers—

Oath of Fealty echoes Jack London's The Iron Heel of 1907 and foreshadows

the "custodial state" commended in The Bell Curve.

The plot pits the arcology's security chief against ecoterrorists who

will go to any lengths to monkey-wrench Todos Santos. As one terrorist

explains in her confession to the TS police, "Todos Santos is beautiful,

Tony, but it uses too many resources to support too few people. The more

successful Todos Santos is, the worse it will be for everyone else. . . .

Don't you understand that technology is not the answer, that using technology

to fix problems created by technology only puts you in an endless

chain?" Tony, the security chief, has a clearer view of what is at stake: "If

Todos Santos goes broke then it can't run any longer, expenses,

expenses, expenses, it's property rights against human rights, money

against lives and I'm defending the money. I'm defending my city!"

Pournelle regularly uses the medium of his fiction to take revenge on

his ideological enemies. That is, after all, a novelist's prerogative. In

Inferno, he and Niven have a field day in devising suitable Dantean torments

for such enemies of the corporate state as the woman responsible

for banning cyclamates (an early alternative to saccharine); another

woman who, for reasons like those of the "ecoterrorist" quoted above,

prevented the building of power plants and oil wells; and a man whose

sins were vegetarianism and jogging. Pournelle's enemies list, like Rush

Limbaugh's, includes anyone who would keep the rich from getting

richer as fast as they can. But he understands that more is required than a

loser's vindictiveness. One must offer hope, and what can that be in a

future in which, as even he is willing to admit in his darker fictions, Third

World immiseration must be imported to America by the rigors of corporate

logic?

It must be Outer Space, the final Utopia, where the Rapture is to be

achieved by the wonders of modern technology. Whether the promise is

a conscious or unconscious scam on Pournelle's part, or on Gingrich's,

can be known only to their confessors. It is probably intended as a benign

deception, as when a faith healer promises to cure afflictions of all kinds.

He knows that for a certain percentage the placebo effect will kick in. As

for the rest, well, it's their own fault if they still need crutches. They

didn't believe hard enough.

Whatever happens to the cripple, the faith healer's coffers will be

filled. In that regard it is interesting to learn that there is a new collaborative

novel on Pournelle's hard disk, and this time his collaborator is none

other than Newt Gingrich. This new collaboration is to be a Tom Clancy

Yellow Peril adventure, an account of a future war between a perfidious

Japan and a guileless USA.

When the book does appear, it is guaranteed a large-scale commercial

success. Window of Opportunity flopped eleven years ago because Gingrich

wasn't yet a media star and because it's basically no more than a very

long-winded speech. But a sensational premise and the professional polish

that Pournelle can supply could make the novel a bestseller such as

even popes might envy. The recent film Bob Roberts hypothesized a fin de

siècle demagogue who uses folk-rock music as his entrée to high office.

But for an electorate with sufficient reading skills and attention spans,

the novel is probably still, as it was for Disraeli, the art form best adapted

for political propaganda, if only because it has built-in deniability. A

politician will get in trouble by calling Barney Frank a fag; a novelist

always has the excuse that it is his characters who say all those terrible

things. A collaborative novel offers a further margin of deniability.

After the Yellow Peril has been dealt with and we've all seen the movie

version, what then? In an era of franchised fiction there is really no limit

except what the market will bear. There must be dozens of other authors

as eager as Pournelle to join their craft with Gingrich's marketability.

But why stop there? Andy Warhol was a master franchiser. He solicited

ideas for pictures from people with a knack for ideas and had them silkscreened

by people with a knack for that. Gingrich could do the same. He

could merchandise, under his own trademark, sandwich spreads, skateboards,

mousepads, bullets, aftershave.

Marketers, this is your Window of Opportunity. Offer him millions

and promise the Moon.

 

"Speaker Moonbeam: Newt's Futurist Brain Trust"  The Nation (260, no. 8) [04/05/1996]

Collected in On SF, 2005.