Carlson: Damned When You Do
Jul. 3rd, 2011 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteFrom the first sentences, we know Carlson will be addressing us in high “tall tale” mode en route to delivering a tidy little parable about good deeds: “It was not a virgin birth, I can tell you that much. The boy never could fly or catch bullets with his teeth, and those people who say he was 20 feet tall are full of it.” But the boy can walk (and roll) on water, a talent that comes in useful.
Albert Timothy Shofield is born a literal bouncing baby boy, emerging from his mother in the midst of an earthquake that destroys the hospital, hitting the ground rolling, and never again stopping, apart from a brief interlude when he becomes trapped in a box canyon and the world literally trembles until he’s freed. Albert’s immediately off on his journey into the world, rolling along and gathering his moss, and he won’t see his parents again until he’s nearly 8 years old, by which time he’s become something of a prodigy, having learned dozens of languages and more about science and other “ologies” than most veteran scientists ever learn in a full career. And somehow, he has the power to change the Earth’s rotation, change its climate, and remove greenhouse gases from the air while also possessing the knowledge of how to do so, even at the tender age of a few months. Scientists learn that he’s now the one orbiting the sun, a very solipsist saviour indeed, and that he’s the perpetually rolling stone who’s walking while the Earth is revolving beneath his feet, “like a man on a spherical treadmill”.
Along the long, strange road that Albert travels, people care for him until he’s old enough to care for himself, and he brings out both the best and the worst in people. For every person who feeds him, nurtures him, and thanks him, someone else tries to turn this into a media circus or persuade his parents to accept corporate sponsorships. Albert generally turns his powers of persuasion to good ends, such as convincing those who have been secretly sitting on “green” technologies while they profit from dirty coal and oil into releasing these technologies to help save the world. Yet despite his godlike powers, Albert has his limits; when he confronts the Kim dictatorship of North Korea in an effort to force them to change, plunging the country into perpetual darkness without endangering neighboring lands (clearly impossible, but go with it for the sake of the story), he meets his match. Instead of giving in, Kim sends his minions out into the world bearing vials of plague and killing millions before the nuclear powers bomb him (and, sadly, his people) back into the stone age. Albert, traumatized by this consequence, manipulates the world enough to stop the fallout from killing everyone downwind, then withdraws to the world’s oceans to ponder his sins and seek absolution.
When he returns, he uses his skills to try turning the world into a garden paradise, and he’s largely succeeding. But along the way, he’s caught some of those plagues, and he’s clearly dying. Worse, he is increasingly villified by growing numbers of people for the mistakes he’s made along the way. And in the fine tradition of “damned if [when] you do”, there’s no winning these kinds of games: no matter how hard you strive to make the world a better place, and no matter how brilliant you are at doing it, you’ll inevitably screw up something, and even when you don’t, some people will demonize you for even trying. The story’s told by Albert’s father Jack, who recounts the tale in a folksy, straightforward, unaffected tone that easily escapes parody through its sincerity. It’s probably going way too far to accuse Carlson of creating a hagiography of Albert Gore (you know, the guy responsible for “An Inconvenient Truth”), but there’s little doubt our protagonist’s given name is no accident and that Carlson is having a ton of fun riffing on the recent beatification of Saint Albert.
Tall tales don’t garner much respect, particularly when they seem to be as over the top as this one is, but in failing to take them seriously, we may be forgetting how the best satires make us stop between chuckles and think. Jack makes it clear that he, like everyone else, knew what he was doing through his old, irresponsible behavior, but kept doing it anyway because the immediate gains were simply too convenient to pass up. That’s the kind of message you can’t deliver without preaching unacceptably in any other medium than the tall tale, and it’s an unsubtle reminder that most of us are secretly hoping for some messiah to come and save the world so that we won’t have to. In that sense, “Damned When You Do” makes a clear point that would be difficult to achieve in any other way, certainly not without the author being damned for what he’d done.
Albert Timothy Shofield is born a literal bouncing baby boy, emerging from his mother in the midst of an earthquake that destroys the hospital, hitting the ground rolling, and never again stopping, apart from a brief interlude when he becomes trapped in a box canyon and the world literally trembles until he’s freed. Albert’s immediately off on his journey into the world, rolling along and gathering his moss, and he won’t see his parents again until he’s nearly 8 years old, by which time he’s become something of a prodigy, having learned dozens of languages and more about science and other “ologies” than most veteran scientists ever learn in a full career. And somehow, he has the power to change the Earth’s rotation, change its climate, and remove greenhouse gases from the air while also possessing the knowledge of how to do so, even at the tender age of a few months. Scientists learn that he’s now the one orbiting the sun, a very solipsist saviour indeed, and that he’s the perpetually rolling stone who’s walking while the Earth is revolving beneath his feet, “like a man on a spherical treadmill”.
Along the long, strange road that Albert travels, people care for him until he’s old enough to care for himself, and he brings out both the best and the worst in people. For every person who feeds him, nurtures him, and thanks him, someone else tries to turn this into a media circus or persuade his parents to accept corporate sponsorships. Albert generally turns his powers of persuasion to good ends, such as convincing those who have been secretly sitting on “green” technologies while they profit from dirty coal and oil into releasing these technologies to help save the world. Yet despite his godlike powers, Albert has his limits; when he confronts the Kim dictatorship of North Korea in an effort to force them to change, plunging the country into perpetual darkness without endangering neighboring lands (clearly impossible, but go with it for the sake of the story), he meets his match. Instead of giving in, Kim sends his minions out into the world bearing vials of plague and killing millions before the nuclear powers bomb him (and, sadly, his people) back into the stone age. Albert, traumatized by this consequence, manipulates the world enough to stop the fallout from killing everyone downwind, then withdraws to the world’s oceans to ponder his sins and seek absolution.
When he returns, he uses his skills to try turning the world into a garden paradise, and he’s largely succeeding. But along the way, he’s caught some of those plagues, and he’s clearly dying. Worse, he is increasingly villified by growing numbers of people for the mistakes he’s made along the way. And in the fine tradition of “damned if [when] you do”, there’s no winning these kinds of games: no matter how hard you strive to make the world a better place, and no matter how brilliant you are at doing it, you’ll inevitably screw up something, and even when you don’t, some people will demonize you for even trying. The story’s told by Albert’s father Jack, who recounts the tale in a folksy, straightforward, unaffected tone that easily escapes parody through its sincerity. It’s probably going way too far to accuse Carlson of creating a hagiography of Albert Gore (you know, the guy responsible for “An Inconvenient Truth”), but there’s little doubt our protagonist’s given name is no accident and that Carlson is having a ton of fun riffing on the recent beatification of Saint Albert.
Tall tales don’t garner much respect, particularly when they seem to be as over the top as this one is, but in failing to take them seriously, we may be forgetting how the best satires make us stop between chuckles and think. Jack makes it clear that he, like everyone else, knew what he was doing through his old, irresponsible behavior, but kept doing it anyway because the immediate gains were simply too convenient to pass up. That’s the kind of message you can’t deliver without preaching unacceptably in any other medium than the tall tale, and it’s an unsubtle reminder that most of us are secretly hoping for some messiah to come and save the world so that we won’t have to. In that sense, “Damned When You Do” makes a clear point that would be difficult to achieve in any other way, certainly not without the author being damned for what he’d done.