Alternatives

Finished Philip Roth's brilliantly imagined The Plot Against America today, positively zooming through the final third. As I mentioned in a previous post, at points I'd felt a curious reluctance to read on, regardless of the entirely gripping nature of the novel, since its dark vision of the way a 1940s fascist United States might have been was just a bit too real, just a bit ever so likely, and just a bit too dark in its utter reality. I don't know how Roth does it. The level of plausible detail is such that I needed to remind myself that FDR did win through to a third term (and a sadly curtailed fourth) and that's there's still much to admire about the US.

The fiction has left me feeling sort of vulnerable though, or rather given me an enhanced sense I really didn't need at this particular point in history of the vulnerability of what we might see as civilisation. I've never been much of a one for manifest destinies, or conspiracy theories that suggest that someone, somewhere knows whence it's all headed. The cock-up theory of history seems to me intuitively reflective of what I know of human beings generally and reflective of the way the world looks at the moment.

Mind you, that's all the more reason for us as individuals to try and push things in directions that seem reasonable and sane, limited as any of those efforts might be. Because you just don't know - and maybe things can quite illogically turn out to be reasonably okay after all.