Counterpart is beginning its second season on Starz tonight and it's another show in which there is more than one universe. On Counterpart, there are two parallel universes which are in a state of Cold War and have diplomatic relations. The second Earth is different in various ways, but similar in many.
Now that the midterm elections are over and the Law is closing in on our President - Federal prosecutors allege that he committed a number of felonies - people of a more liberal or progressive temperament may feel that the universe is righting itself again.
Macron raised taxes on fuel and sparked the yellow vest movement which rioted and burned cars. Macron backed down.
Leftist AMLO is now President of Mexico.
Still, scientists and most on the Left are very worried about impending climate disaster. Only a Green New Deal can save us. So politics has become very serious and very depressing.
One good way in which we seemed to have slipped into a different universe is the way socialists are mainstreaming. After I graduated college in the early nineties, I identified as and became a socialist or leftist as I believe the Democrats and Bill Clinton were too rightwing. I wanted America to be more like Europe and the Scandinavian countries. I agreed with prominent leftists of the time like Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Christopher Hitchens, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky, etc. (many of whom are still around.)
So it's weird to see democratic socialists being elected to Congress and to state legislatures and funny to watch the corporate media report on it. With Trump's victory, it's apparent things aren't working. Then there's Brexit, etc. Here's NBC reporting from the above link:
"We're working under the ideology of what’s best for the working class. What’s the most human. We organize for social democratic reform," she continued. "We're organizing for reform — we want to transform the status quo, because what we know of the status quo isn't working."
Members, who self-identify as everything from communists to liberals to Marxists to socialists, vote on a platform during the organization's biennial national convention. At the most recent convention in Houston in 2016, members pushed for a focus on Medicare For All and strengthening unions — and also emphasized gaining more elected representation.
The DSA saw membership surge after Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., beat longtime incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary in June, Cohn said. It was 44,000 members strong prior to her victory, and 4,000 more people joined within a week of her win. Now, the organization has 55,000 members, Cohn said.Back to the Multiverse. The CW's DC world uses it a lot. Flash, Supergirl, Green Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow. (Guilty pleasures.) Tonight three of them have a crossover event in which they travel to another different universe.
It would be nice to see more alternate universes where things are a little better. I guess that's what many TV shows actually present in order to entertain and distract. They hide the really bad stuff. The unsaid painful truths.
Still, seems like many shows are set in worse universes. The Handmaid's Tail. In SyFy's Nightflyers, Earth's civilization is headed for collapse and our only hope is a Hail Mary-pass space mission to try to catch the attention of a passing alien ship which has so far ignored all communications.
The National Geographic channel has a dramatization of the colonization and exploration of Mars. It's pretty realistic as there are competing corporate-commercial and scientific interests.
Ready Player One was on cable and set its story in a dystopian future where people spend most of their time in a virtual reality. The plot involves a corporation's attempt to gain control of it.
As Theresa May's government falls apart in the UK over Brexit, there's a good chance a real socialist - Jeremy Corbyn - may come to power in an advanced nation for the first time in the Neoliberal Age. And it looks like Bernie may run again in 2020.
If either or both win, it would be very weird, like we were in a different universe. Of course many of us glum leftists expect Capital won't sit back gracefully - like we saw with Syriza in Greece. Still it would be a glorious victory a Corbyn win could embolden America's Left even more.
I wonder if the growing interest in the multiverse and alternate realities is - along with the need for more storylines for TV - a result with the growing acknowledgement that luck has a lot to do with where people end up in life. Our elite and conservatives, as Chris Dillow points out, seem blissfully unaware of this fact.
Better or worse luck may change things enormously for someone.
Hope Punk on NPR
While Trump's use of the ancient forces of fear and greed to win the Republican primary and beat Hillary was scary and blew a lot of minds, the reaction in the midterms was good to see as well. People got politically active and supposedly it was the largest turnout since World War I. Also the way the way the alt right has been deplatformed and pushed back by antifa, etc has been good to see. Although we should work to prevent the condition conducive to the rise of the populist right from occurring in the first place.
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