Jonathan Wolfe

Eng. 529

Oscar: A Very Sensible Savior

A Review of Bruce Sterling’s, Distraction

      He’s a real Washington outsider, capable of bringing significant change to politics as usual.   He’s smart, well spoken, and has the public interest at heart.  No, I’m not talking about Barak Obama— although, with the exception of the ethanol lobby, he seems to fit the bill quite nicely.  I’m referring to Oscar Valparaiso of course, the hero of Bruce Sterling’s 1998 futuristic political drama, Distraction.                                           

      It is the year 2044, and America has finally gone the way of Rome— a fallen empire reduced to chaos and corruption.  The country is flat broke, the environment unalterably damaged, and the government mired in Kafkaesque bureaucracy. The people have lost all respect and confidence for law and order; and in fact, have created their own versions of law and order in the form of technologically sophisticated renegade gangs who take care of their own, and rogue state governments with no compunction about stealing federal military bases or labs.  Who in the world can help bring back truth, justice, and the American way to this fallen state?  Wait, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…Oscar— a chief campaign strategist, who has just gotten his man, Alcott Bambakias, a Bostonian idealist and reformer, elected as Senator.  But Oscar’s hungry to do more.  Oscar believes that America can be reformed, and sees an opportunity for this by exposing a corrupt state-funded lab called the Collaboratory in Buna Texas— a large domed haven for biologically engineered extinct species, and a cutting edge research institution for neuroscience.  But when Oscar’s reformist agenda comes into direct conflict with a renegade governor’s plans to control both the lab and its secrets, he finds himself in a classic chess match of political warfare, with the future of America at stake.             

      Sterling’s Distraction offers a highly entertaining and dramatic glimpse into a world where political spin creates reality—a world very much like our own.  Part political satire and part political science, Sterling’s book reads like a combination between Tom Tomorrow’s satirical comic strip, This Modern World, and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.  Although Sterling has definitive political and philosophical points to make, he cleverly hides them inside of well developed characters caught up in a very compelling drama.   In Oscar, Sterling has created a Neitzschean overman of sorts, although Oscar would be the first to deny it.  First of all, Oscar is not exactly human.  The product of an illegal Columbian baby factory, Oscar was not officially born, but was created in a test tube with DNA that was mostly human and partially who knows what.  He hardly needs sleep, always runs a slight fever, and is only slightly less rational than Spock—the pointy eared alien from Star Trek, not the outdated doctor of child rearing. Oscar is a political animal, but a sensible one.  If Machiavelli’s theorized prince had a twin brother who was just as savvy but whose ends were practical reform instead of personal power, Oscar would be him.  Oscar spends most of the book outwitting his opponents at every turn, spinning situations to his own advantage in often cold hearted ways, but never loses sight of the big picture: the welfare of the American people.  As he says, “The things I do will never, ever be about me.  They aren’t allowed to be about me” (475).  Oscar’s situation is ironic in the sense that he’s both an outsider and an ardent loyalist and patriot.  Oscar will never be completely accepted within his society due to his “personal background problem”, a joke that is satirically repeated ad nauseum in the book, but he does everything he can to serve his country and advance the interests of the nation as a whole.   Oscar is like a mutant, who uses political maneuvering as if it were a special power or gift; and yet for all of his mental acumen and personal charisma, he is never fully accepted, never fully at home.

            With the creation of Oscar, Sterling might very well be offering the only realistic way of transforming society— through ruthless political action that is not motivated by personal gain but the benefit of society— which of course is not realistic at all, considering human nature (a contradiction that Sterling seems well aware of). Historically, radical attempts to change society have all too often resulted in dictatorships and demagoguery, no matter the idealistic intent.  To illustrate the difference between dispassionate political motivation and tactics, as represented in Oscar, and the kind of dangerous totalitarian, cult of personality politics of revolution, Sterling creates the character of Green Huey, the megalomaniac governor of Louisiana who controls the state as if he were “Big Brother”.   Although his rhetoric speaks to the plight of the poor and huddled masses, he is a kind of “smiling totalitarian” , who believes that he is the only one to bring law, order, peace, and prosperity to his people—even if that means altering the neural composition of their brains.  Sterling uses Huey as a kind of foil for Oscar— a way of showing where the danger of politics really exists.  The peril is not in being politically motivated, or putting a spin on reality— this is simply a fact of life, and those politicians who don’t behave politically will get eaten alive.  The true danger has more to do with being either politically naïve, or politically uninvolved— which describes the scientists in the book to a T, before Oscar is able to spur them to action.  Green Huey is able to assert power because he is permitted to do so by both his opponents, who he politically outmaneuvers, and his populace, who seek to follow rather than to lead.  Although Oscar uses the same kinds of political tactics to gain power, he is not interested in wielding it for its own sake— a terrifying prospect when taken to its ultimate conclusion ala Orwell’s 1984.  Because of Oscar’s incredibly well developed rationalism, he understands that the ends do not justify the means, but certain means are required for certain ends.  Or in other words, people need to do bend the rules to get things accomplished, but only within reason.  What is somewhat tragic about this fact is that most humans take things too far due to their very emotional, passionate, and ultimately irrational natures.   

Through both humor, and compelling political theater, Sterling shows us the absurd condition of humanity at present, and in the future.  We are required, by necessity to spin the truth to our own advantage—because if we don’t, someone else will.  But in doing so, we inevitably spin ourselves out of control, with no real direction home. Will it take a new kind of human to help show us the way?  Well, in Oscar’s words it won’t be him.  He has “too many pieces missing.”  Perhaps those are the very pieces that we can do without.