Man in the High Trump Castle

Too bad Phillip K. Dick isn’t around anymore. What would his Man in the High Trump Castle look like in terms of a picture of the United States under President Trump? Of course there would be an enormous wall running all along the border with Mexico and the complexion of the electronics gadgets that people own would also be radically changed since they would be fewer and more expensive with protective tariffs making it impossible for Chinese or Japanese products to be sold in the US. Now you would pay double for your MacBook Air manufactured here in the States and of course double for your Honda, Toyotas and Subarus. But what a good thing this would be since there would be much more intensive share-a-ride programs which would also lessen traffic. As for cellphones and computers, Americans would become much more communal and in fact large kibbutzim would open up expressly to enable middle class families to stream their favorite Amazon series. While there wouldn’t necessarily be more rich people, the same old ones who were rich would continue to get richer in order to facilitate more supply side economics. In fact Donald Trump himself would become so rich that he could employ both Polish workers and Americans on all his jobs and keep everyone happy. This would be one of the most important consequences of trickle down economics. Now on to foreign policy. President Trump's treatment of captured terrorists would rival any of the excesses of the Inquisition. Tomas de Torquemada would be proud. For every beheading, in fact, another jihadist would be placed in the Large Hadron Collider and turned into a Boson. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth would be an important element of our justice system. There would be no more problems with Kim Jong-un as North Korea would be no more. Yes, the bad news would be that the population of the country would be annihilated, but the good news would be that there would be no need to worry about whether our sanctions were taking effect. Similarly, Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda would all have virtually disappeared along with the territories in which they once operated. Oh, finally on the matter of health care. Naturally Obamacare would be successfully repealed and President Trump would be reassuring about the fact that everyone would be taken care of, though some would claim his assurances were as worthless as the paper on which some graduates claim their degrees from Trump University have been issued.

The Mexicanadian Threat

European and Middle Eastern countries are often bounded by hostile neighbors. The Battle of Britain was a turning point in the Second World War. Yet if the English had lost the Germans still would have had to cross the Atlantic to invade the United States. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle imagines the colonization of America by the Axis powers. In Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, it’s a homegrown fascist backlash that makes the country vulnerable. But before we feel a smug superiority to the geographic turmoil abroad, we should be aware of the threat of invasion from the South or the North, from Mexico or Canada, who someday may turn into the equivalent of the Axis powers. While the landmass of Mexico or Canada might not rival Russia, China or even India, they are both greater than Japan, Italy and Germany, our enemies during the second world war. Why are we being complacent? Why are we not arming ourselves against an invasion, particularly by the Canadians? Back in the 50’s there was a popular television series called Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. The series was a thinly veiled manifesto of Canadian superiority. Remember Canada boasts Alice Munro one of the greatest short story writers in the world and lest we forget Dan Aykroyd emanated from Canada. The Canadians will start by taking over organs of culture like The New Yorker, where many of Munro’s stories have appeared, and SNL which Aykroyd once dominated and before long their will be mounties and dogsleds lined up along our borders. It might seem like an unholy alliance but who is to say that one day Canadian short story writers and humorists won’t join forces with the followers of Mexican culture heroes like Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz. In a deadly pincer movement Canadians and the Mexicans will place their puppets in The White House.

Xuetong's Prince

Yan Xuetong, a professor of political science at Tsinghua University recently wrote an Op Ed piece in The Times entitled “How China Can Defeat America." Mr. Xuetong is also the author of a book entitled Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power. One can be sure his Op Ed piece was studied by our own intelligence services as Mr. Xuetong is uniquely qualified to talk about power in a mysterious country that maintains two parallel systems: one a competitive market economy and the other a dictatorship of the proletariat as represented by the continued importance of the Communist Party. Xuetong begins his piece by saying that though he is often considered a hawk, he is "a political realist." He goes on to point out that “realism does not mean that politicians should be concerned only with military and economic might.” Xuetong cites “the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi" who described “three types of leadership: humane authority, hegemony and tyranny.” Essentially Mr. Xuetong has written a 21st Century version of Machiavelli’s The Prince that is a benign prescription for Chinese dominance. “Humane authority,” Mr. Xuetong avers, “begins by creating a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad.” He goes on to conclude, “thus the core of the competition between China and the United States will be to see who has more high-quality friends. And in order to achieve that goal, China has to provide higher-quality moral leadership than the United States.” In The Man in the High Castle Philip K. Dick imagines a parallel universe where Japan (along with is fascist allies) wins the Second World War. The implication of the book is that Japan wins by military might. How would Dick describe the triumph that Xuetong envisions? How would the economic juggernaut that is modern China assert its moral superiority? Confucius say, country with population well over billion have many mouths to feed.

Parallel Universe

The notion of the parallel universe appears as a philosophical concept in Nietzsche’s Doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence. Though the concept had a long and venerable history in many religions and philosophies, the notion of the parallel universe may be one of the only philosophical concepts that went on to have an afterlife in both science (Poincare’s Recurrence Theorem) and science fiction (in the work of masters like Phillip K. Dick). Doesn’t Dick’s The Man in the High Castle suggest that the Allied victory is coeval with that of the Axis, which lives on as an alternate world? Hard science itself is forced to deal with the notion of parallel universes when it confronts the uncertainties of string theory and quanta. Yes there are successions of worlds only a millionth of a second apart, repeating themselves with minute divagations and forever bookending in conformity or complete dissolution. Isn’t Minority Report a description of a form of parallel universe in which what is meant to be is essentially coexisting with what is?

   

It’s very comforting that life is going on in some  multiverse, and that even after death we will still be living in a slightly altered form in another dimension. If only we knew how to jump from one dimension to another, we could switch horses when we were diagnosed with a fatal disease. The lights never go out. Life continues on despite the fact that it has eliminated us. We live on in successive universes as if nothing had happened at all.  For every loss, death, breakup, failed job search, failed romance, there is the parallel universe where the reverse has taken on a life of its own, and the life we know continues without missing a beat.

   

Over the expanse of infinite time, we exhaust enough possibilities so that we come back to where we started, both a second too early and three seconds too late.