Letters to the Editor
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ok...uh...where's the man-beef?
There are many more important points that could have been made in this story. For instance, how is it that the now traditional annual sci-fi SOTU freak out has been initiated by a dim witted, close-minded, anti science president who some how proposes to accelerate science education while simultaneously cutting educational funding and undercutting the teaching worldwide accepted theories on evolution and climate change. I'm a little dissapointed that the article turned out to be merely a synopsis of current television shows and a wierd tangent on people of mixed races. What is truly interesting and terrifying is that the administration seems bent on gradually dumbing down the populace while at the same time whipping up fear about things the average american is no longer intellectually equipped to understand. What I hoped this article would have said (and its my fault for feeding off of anti-bush articles, my new addiction) is that genetic engineering is an extremely important issue with serious and far-reaching consequences that people should understand and be talking about it yet Mr. Bush is probably the last person on earth who should be proclaiming himself spokesperson to the American people on this type of research. Its even worse that when he does pontificate on issues relating to science and ethics it gives him a false aura of authority, as is if he actually could tell a gene from a chromosome. The man has nothing but contempt for science, researchers, and "factieness" and yet here he is presenting his third grade book report version of scientific research to the nation. The average undereducated American watches this and naturally assumes that if Bush is going on about human-animal hybrids he must also understand the equally important issues of cloning, global warming, stem cells, hydrogen cars, and so on. Thus, they end up trusting a man who believes the Earth is only 5,000 years old with topics far beyond his intellectual capacity. Finally, the author could have brought up the point that Bush can try and pass all the laws he wants in this country but the rest of the world is free to start mating people, pigs, and C. elegans all over the rest of the planet, which could put us seriously behind in a genetic arms race unless some kind of global treaty can be agreed on...kind of like Kyoto and the other treaties Bush has spent his presidential career pooping on.
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But when science fact is ignored....
Bush's (almost casual) mention of human-animal hybrid research in his latest speech could cause the equivilent of a 10 ton concrete block in front of the biological research train. On it's face, any rational person would go "Of course!" while visioning human bodies with the heads of Dobermans. The reality is: if you knew a loved one could be saved by a heart transplant, even if that heart was grown inside of a pig, you'd JUMP at the consent form. But our current government is not big on reality, or information.
Yes, Battlestar Galactica is amazing, and its not so subtle storylines regarding torture, racism, and terrorism show what good science fiction is supposed to do: make viewers reflect, and think.
On another note, why hasn't Salon.com covered what is currently happening at NASA?! The censoring of scientists who refuse to support the Bush agenda, the theft of intellectual material costing close to 2 billion dollars, the intimidation of whistle blowers? COME ON ALREADY!
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Human After All?
I really enjoyed this article. Although I don't watch any of these shows (except the wonderful BSG), I can get a sense of the common thread of anxiety running through them all.
I wondered about Miller's conclusions, though. I'm not sure I could do better, but it did get me thinking. Isn't there a way in which these shows are also responding to the broadest of philosophical problems: the realization that's been coming on slowly for the last 200 years, that humans aren't unique? We get more evidence every day: we're animals; we're genetic programs; we're also stardust. These are no longer metaphors, but "scientific facts," proven and re-proven, and kind of hard to get our minds around (well, my mind, anyway). How can our cultural myths absorb this information, as metaphor and science increasingly overlap in our cultural imagination? The human hybrid narrative seems to reflect even as it performs that slippage between the categories, "metaphor" and "science".
I've been noticing this broader trend for a while: the "new" speculative fiction is less and less about contact with "the other," and more and more about discovering that the self *is* other. (*Buffy* was ahead of its time and its genre in addressing some of these questions through the vampire narrative.) But the questions remain: what makes us uniquely human, and how do we tell the story of our humanity? If Nature or God or a virus or whatever the hell put us together out of spare parts in the first place, could we potentially manipulate the formula? What would be lost, and what gained? Could we find answers to our deepest existential questions? A cure for cancer? Would our "reptile brains" be reactivated, somehow, and take over? Would we be able to transcend our physical limitations, and what would be the "spiritual" cost? It sounds like all these shows, to varying degrees, are cynical about even *asking* these questions, given that the answer to the most important question -- "Can we still think of ourselves as the pinnacle of creation?" -- seems to be a continual, resounding, "Nope."
Mainstream speculative fiction *is* the new western mythology, as BSG snarkily reminds us with its references to the Classical pantheon. Human hybrids are hardly a new metaphor for invasion, cultural identity crisis, etc., but as the gap between metaphor and "scientific reality" increasingly closes, our own vision of ourselves as *creatures* goes all screwy (especially since we are increasingly masterful creators in our own right). The new human hybrid narrative is ambiguous: human hybrid characters aren't simply *evil*, after all, and they may even hold new, as yet unknown ways of seeing ourselves. This is an identity crisis in its later stages, and I hope, anyway, these shows demonstrate that we're coming to grips with it, at least on mainstream American television.