“Chicago cops had been angry for years. In 1960, after a corruption scandal, they had inherited a new police superintendent, Orlando W. Wilson, who was a college professor, one of the founders of the academic discipline of criminal justice. They saw him as an ivory-tower puritan, obsessed with showing arrests for the kind of ‘victimless’ crimes – drinking, whoring, gambling – by which cops from time immemorial had padded their weekly pay envelopes by looking the other way. [..] They hated him for his policy of replacing retiring white commanders with Negroes (40 percent of new sergeants were black his first year); in one survey, two-thirds of Chicago cops called themselves racists. These cops hated him most especially for holding them back from busting ‘civil rights’ troublemakers. During the riots in 1966, ten thousand officers working twelve-hour patrols felt as if they were hardly allowed to arrest anyone. Sixty-four quit that June alone, thirty-seven before they were eligible for pensions.

Wilson quit in 1967. His successor continued his policies. One of his first acts had been to shut down a Ku Klux Klan cell operating within the force, with its own arsenal of firearms and hand grenades.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“The pundits said [Robert] Kennedy was a uniter. The facts showed he was a divider. But to an Establishment hungry beyond measure for signs of consensus, the myth answered a psychic need. Moderates can be seized by ideological fever dreams as much as extremists; it has always been thus.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“On Januar 31, 1967, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, flanked by eight security guards, briefed some one hundred student-government presidents and campus-newspaper editors who had signed a letter questioning the war: football players, fraternity presidents, mainstream kids, stunned into silence by the obvious lies their secretary of state expected them to believe.

A kid from Michigan State: ‘Mr. Secretary, what happens if we continue the policy you’ve outlined … this continued gradual escalation until the other side capitulates … up to and including nuclear war, and the other side doesn’t capitulate?’

Rusk leaned back, hissed forth a stream of tobacco smoke, and solemnly replied, ‘Well, somebody’s going to get hurt.’

Here, before their eyes, was the maniacal air force general Buck Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove. The room drew silent, their thoughts as one: My God, the secretary of state is crazy.

The madness was not hard to spot, if you chose to spot it. The problem was facing the wrath of all those decent Americans who didn’t want to face that their government was mad.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“Hangers-on urged [George] Romney to run in the open to build his national following and prove his grasp of the issues. His statehouse aides cringed: they knew the last thing that would help their boss was to rehearse in public. He was too damned forthright, too earnest – especially about Vietnam. He grappled with it honestly. Which would make what he said sound absurd, since everyone else was in denial or lying.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

So what would really happen after the world ends? Peter Bagge’s answer in Apocalypse Nerd isn’t very different from anyone else’s: The survivors of North Korea’s nuclear attack on Seattle would remain civilized until their first missed meal, and then turn on each other like starved animals. So maybe in real life they wouldn’t turn so quickly into desperate killers as Perry and Gordo does here, but then again I’ve never gone to bed hungry, so what do I know? The style is very Bagge: Down-to-earth slapstick with bitter humor – much more bitter than in his Hate comics. The survivors are not actually forced by circumstance to become barbarians, it’s more like they’ve been given an excuse to think they have no choice, and eagerly take it, (bemoaning what they’ve become while they rob the houses of their victims). It’s almost funny. Almost.

Btw, go read Peter Bagge’s political strips at Reason.

“Here’s the whole story of how Fain the Gardener became Fain the Sorcerer. But I’ll tell it quickly by leaving out the lies.” In my project to read everything by the satirist Steve Aylett, (well somebody should), I’ve come to his one contribution to fantasy. Fain the Sorcerer is a 90 page riff on fairy tale conventions and time travel. Fain, on escaping from the royal castle where he’s failed to revive the enchanted princess, (a local tradition because it gives people “something to think about other than what is important”), comes across a lunatic who grants three wishes. Fain wishes the ability to travel backwards in time, does so, and immediately returns for three new wishes. And so on. Through elaborate attempts to avoid the loopholes of wish-granters, (“I wish to be able to see in the dark, and by this I do not mean to be able merely to see the darkness, but to see in the darkness as though it were illuminated, though without conflagration”), Fain gains many useful powers (and some useless ones), visits remote kingdoms, fights the evil wizard, woos the princess, and goes on a reckless rampage throughout the timeline. And there’s the usual Aylettian linguistic bombshells and satirical stabs, though less than in Slaughtermatic. Read it, and read Aylett.

I know there’s something happening in David Lindsay’s 1920 novel A Voyage to Arcturus, but I don’t know what it is. Maskull travels (by improbably means) to a remote planet, a young and wild world where the local Creator and Devil still walks about, and the landscape changes by the minute. People’s bodies correspond to their different personalities, and Maskull’s body and worldview changes to match the people he meet. Compassionate people have extra organs to sense the emotions of others, while cruel people have an extra eye that projects pure will-power. He meets a sort of buddhist, a musician who plays ugly-beautiful music that kills people, and a person of a third sex. David Lindsay’s purpose is philosophy, not satire as in many such stories of fantastic journeys, but I have no idea what he’s trying to say. It’s like an ambitious art film: Someone clearly put a lot of thought into it, but don’t ask me what the scene where the clown shoots Jesus means. A Voyage to Arcturus is an unfathomable allegory of something-or-other, and that’s not for me. I like it less because I have Jurgen by James Branch Cabell to compare it to. Jurgen was published at about the same time, and walks in more or less the same territory, but is one of my favourite novels. Jurgen is a hard-hitting classic of philosophical fantasy, (and read also Cabell’s The Silver Stallion.) A Voyage of Arcturus is only imaginative.