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“Make America Great Again,” 1998 version

From Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents (1998), in which the narrator Lauren is describing the United States in 2032:

. . . my least favorite presidential candidate, Texas Senator Andrew Steel Jarret.

Jarret supporters have been known, now and then, to form mobs and burn people at the stake for being witches. . . .  Jarret’s people have been known to beat or drive out Unitarians, for goodness’ sake.  Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear.  As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of “heathen houses of devil-worship,” he has a simple answer: “Join us!  Our doors are open to every nationality, every race!  Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us.  Help us to make America great again.”  He’s had notable success with this carrot-and-stick approach. . . .

I have a fascination with the places in science fiction (especially those stories set in the future) where the author invents a phrase that coincidentally ends up becoming part of our own world.  “Make America great again,” in a 1998 novel.  Go figure.

Words Change and Change Again

This sentence from The Female Man (Joanna Russ, 1975), made me pause when I came across it:

There’s no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted.  You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers — the web is world-wide.

I think Russ meant “kinship” when she refers to a “world-wide web.”  But this is one of those pleasantly puzzling cases where today’s reader will automatically impose an unintended meaning on a phrase, and it’s necessary to pause and make a deliberate attempt to reconstruct the meaning the author intended.

Hiking the Hoosier National Forest

Dog in forest

I’m trying to hike in the Hoosier National Forest at least once per month this year.  My dog Sophie loves the forest and so do I.  Here she is on the northern portion of the Nebo Ridge Trail.  The creek bed was mostly dry, but there were a few pools of water.  She found one and splashed about for about five minutes, cooling off.  Temperatures were in the low 70s, but we’d been walking for an hour by this point and she’s wearing a fur coat.

As we hiked for three miles through a green world, I was struck by how many insects were in the forest, and how few the signs of mammals.  Sophie ran up to the foot of a tree once or twice, behaving as if she spotted a squirrel, but I never saw them.  Or any other animal.  I didn’t even see pawprints.  In contrast, I spent a lot of time brushing insects off of us.  Not necessarily bothersome insects — just a lot of them.

We also passed a section of the trail where a number of healthy trees had come down recently — maybe four or five, all in close proximity to one another.  An intense gust of wind?  A small tornado?  We were on a ridge along the east side of a ravine, and the storm would probably have come from the west.  Whatever brought the trees down probably struck about a week or so ago, because their leaves were darkened green and well curled.