This story is supposed to be a puff piece, eloquent prose to permanently elevate the people behind the Daejeon Magical Accords to the top shelf of the shrine of history. Transform unruly pines into heroic bonsai form, any deviation from the abstracted ideal carefully clipped away.
And the truth is it did happen more or less as you would have heard, with the Chiyoda Affair, the IAME white paper, and the Night of Ten Thousand Flowers. We changed the lives of billions, an impact so large I can’t comprehend.
But the truth is also that we didn’t know what we were doing. We were selfish, short-sighted, and focused on the wrong things for most of the time. We fell together. We fell apart.
The truth is that it was a slow-motion tsunami of cascading trainwrecks from beginning to end.
The first of those, the one that really made the news, was the overdose.
Because what normal people do for fun is make fake logos for fictional companies. Or rather fake Japanese versions of logos for fictional American companies.
i learned that the Twilight Zone was created after Rod Serling’s teleplay inspired by Emmett Till’s murder was heavily censored by networks and advertisers. The censorship led Serling to rethink his approach and delve into the era’s social issues through a filter of science fiction and fantasy (x)
“The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience,” Serling later said. “He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus the issues of his time.”
I’m printing this out for my wall.
It’s funny how often horror, fantasy, and sci-fi have been sanctuaries for progressive ideas despite (and because of) the world at larger considering them lesser genres.
There’s so much power in pulling back the curtain on assumptions, whether it’s tweaking a setting to show what horrors we have become too used to or by dialing up a piece just a little stronger to make readers/viewers question why the existing version is accepted.
