The Vine: May 21, 2010
Hey gang!
This is about a story I read in a political-science class in college. I am usually strong with the Googling, but my yearly searches have turned up nada.
The basic premise was that a group of aliens (of the extraterrestrial variety) turned up one day and offered humanity the solution to all of its problems: war, famine, disease, etc. The catch (because there’s always a catch) was that every black person on the planet had to be turned over to the aliens, who refused to explain what would happen to them afterward.
Things I vaguely remember, although I was indulging in a number of substances during those years, so: grain of salt — ultimately the planet did decide to go for the deal, and that all the people had to gather together to be rounded up on MLK Jr. Day. And that there was much propaganda that really they would be taken somewhere with puppies and unicorns and awesomeness, although of course nobody knew this for sure.
Wish I could remember how it ended…
*****
Hi Sars,
I’m hoping your readers can help me identify not a book or movie, but a print advertisement.My Google-fu is usually pretty good, but image search is doing nothing for me and I haven’t seen it on any of the vintage ad sites.
The ad was for some type of alcoholic beverage — I think liquor, but possibly beer.It had two frames of photos. Top frame was of a car rearview mirror showing a car with a ski rack on the top, bottom frame was the same shot but instead the car in the mirror was a police car with a flat light bar. The tagline was something to the effect of “Here’s to small differences.”
I saw it just once in one of the magazines my parents subscribed to, probably either Newsweek or Sports Illustrated. I was old enough to get the joke, but not old enough that I was saving booze ads to hang in my college dorm (ah, Absolut ads of the ’90s), so it was probably sometime in the 1990-93 range.I remember thinking at the time I saw the ad that it seemed like it was almost promoting drunk driving, so I’m not surprised I never saw it again.
Part of me just wants to know I’m not making this memory up in my head, and part of me really wants to find a copy of this ad to hang in my college-apartment-with-ski-décor-themed basement bar!
Small differences are too small for Google
*****
Hi Sars!Some years ago, I read a poem in the New Yorker magazine that I’m hoping some of your readers will recognize and point me towards again.
It was written from the POV of a young girl whose family has pulled their car into a full-service gas station on a hot summer’s night (maybe in the ’60s?), and the gas station attendant is kinda flirting with her, talking to her playfully, brushing a piece of lint off the front of her sweater…not in a creepy way, though.
The poem is just really innocent, and her flustered reaction to his mild flirtation stirs some deep and unfamiliar feelings in her, and it’s just the best poem I’ve ever read.I got “The Complete New Yorker” on DVD, which covers up until 2005, and it’s not featured there, so it must’ve been printed after ’05.
If any of your readers recognize this poem, I’d love to find out who wrote it, and read it again.Anyone?
Brier Random
Tags: Ask The Readers popcult
The first story is “The Space Traders” by Derrick Bell and you can read it here.
I have to recommend people follow that link, the story is kind of hilarious and not at all subtle.
they spoke in the familiar comforting tones of former President Reagan
Yikes.
Wow, it’s…not good.
So I’m reading that story mentioned in the first letter and….wow, indeed.
Wow, indeed.
I have to join the others in saying ‘wow’ to the alien story.
If the original letter-writer would like to read a story with similar themes but which is totally awesome, I recommend “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula Le Guin.
Pretty sure the ad was for Corona Light, but only because I am a slogan glutton.
“Not at all subtle” is putting it quite kindly!
I couldn’t get through more than a few paragraphs. Then I skipped to the end. Wow. Really, now.
I… think I sort of wish I hadn’t read that story. Wow.
Joining everyone in the wow at the story. I particularly like how the aliens concentrate on the US only. It does make me wonder what the rest of the world was doing during all this.
Did anybody else notice that the Space Traders story is resides on the Tuscon Unified School District site?
The story raises some richly debatable issues, but I have to ask: what the hell is in the water in Arizona?
Brier: if you think you would recognize it by title and first line, go here: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/search That gives you the title, author and first line of poems back to 2007 (at least it can help you narrow your search.)
Oh, thank you thank you THANK YOU from OP #1. This has been driving me ba-na-nas for the last seven years! I knew I could count on the Tomato Nation!
To be fair, Derrick Bell is not a creative writer, but rather one of the foremost (if not the single foremost) critical race scholars in legal academia. I think he was trying to make a point more than he was trying to produce quality fiction.
As a college professor whose colleague has used the Space Traders story with college freshmen: there’s a reason it’s not subtle. Trust me, I made the mistake of trying to teach the very subtle “A Modest Proposal.” Subtlety is not a virtue when you teach 18-year-olds.
@LaSalle: Heh — I totally fell for “A Modest Proposal.” I was 15, but still.
Wow, subtle, it is not. But this is America. Subtlty only gets noticed if it paints itself purple and tapdances atop a harpsichord.
As for A Modest Proposal, I’ve argued fiercly for years that it would not work because human gestation is too long. Yes, we could eat the people around now, but they’d taste terrible due to their diets, habits and environment. The only way to get humans to taste good is raise them like Kobe beef–fed beer, massaged, than bonked on the head. So we’d have to wait nine months for the babies to be born, than hand-coddle them a couple years, and let’s face it, a toddler doesn’t provide that much meat, so this would definitely be a luxury item, which in no way solves that hunger problem… what? What are you looking at??
@Sarah and @Brigdh: Yes, totally. @JenS: hilare. and a little scary.
Ah, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” I can block some memories of college but not that.
Is “A Modest Proposal” the one about using babies to solve Ireland’s famine problems in the 1800s? I think I first read that in 10th grade and even though I knew it was satire, my brain was still getting stuck on the “….hang on, WHAT?!” part.
Then again, I’m not that smart so…don’t go by me.
@JenS – yikes, yet hilarious!
I am sorry I cannot be of more help with the rest of the questions. For few additional fascinating dystopias by LeGuin, there are the short stories in her collection ‘The Birthday of the World.’
The one high-school ZOMG!twist!/dystopia which I always remember (no matter how cliched) is ‘The Lottery.’ There is not one word wasted in it, unlike ‘The Space Traders.’ (JMHO, but I think Prof. Golightly may be a bit of a Gary Stu.)
Read the Derrick Bell story and resisted the STRONG urge to flip to the end. Holy Christmas!! It’s been haunting me ever since. I know its a story but, hypothetically, how did the most of the country NOT commit suicide from the guilt? I wouldn’t have been able to live with it.
Vapr, thank you for finding the story.
Aww. Don’t be hard on yourselves. Studies have indicated that adolescent brains are simply not developed enough to ‘get’ satire like Swift’s. Prefrontal lobes need more time, yo. If you’re still oblivious in your late twenties, [i]then[/i] you can be hard on yourselves.
But as anybody who has spent any time on the internets can tell you, some folks never ever ever get satire.
Oh god, “The Lottery”. How I hated that story. We were given that story as our end-of-term assignment and told to give an analysis of the story in our Advanced Composition class (yes, comp, not literature). I remember I got to the end and actually said out loud, “the HELL?”. The teacher just smirked. Anyway, I hated it so much that I just scribbled off a quick essay about tradition and so on and so forth, and didn’t give a rip about the actual grade. I just wanted to scrub that story from my brain forever (didn’t work, unfortunately). But apparently I was the only one in class that “got” the story, and ended up with an A, despite the fact that I just wanted to forget the damn thing and didn’t care what I wrote.
@Anlyn, that would have made Shirley smile, I’ll bet.
Yeah, we read “The Lottery” in junior high (isn’t it neat being “gifted?” that also meant I got to read “The Lord of the Flies” in 5th grade. Sometimes I think they were deliberately trying to scar us). I was absent the day the class read it and wrote essay responses about it so I was supposed to make it up. The story so disturbed me that I never did write the essay making that probably the only assignment in junior high I never turned in. Shirley Jackson is one of the scariest writers I’ve had the pleasure to read. After seeing the absolutely terrible “The Haunting” movie (What can I say? It was a double feature at the drive-in with “Mystery Men.”), I read her book that inspired it and was blown away by how much better it was. Still hate “The Lottery” though despite acknowledging the fact that it’s fantastically well done.
@Bkwrm7 – I wouldn’t call my junior high gifted, but along with “Lord of the Flies,” our … unusual … 8th grade English teacher had us read Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaiden’s Tale.” (Which I never told my parents.) He also showed us the movie “The Stepfather.” (I’m not sure how any of this fit into the curriculum.)
I remember “The Lottery” vividly; it was my first Shirley Jackson story. But that one didn’t creep me out nearly as much as one that I think was titled, “Y and I”. All I can say is, if people go into a room and disappear, STAY THE HELL OUT OF THAT ROOM.
I’d like to read this Derrick Bell story everyone’s talking about, but judging from the comments, it sounds pretty painful – I’m still freaking out about what I read about that freak-show movie, “The Human Centipede” (and that has nothing to do with race and everything to do with grossness and ick and please please please erase that image from my brain).
High school English teachers have a disturbing inclination toward teaching dystopian fiction. Discuss.
I skimmed the Derrick Bell story (which is as much as can be asked of any of us), and I’m just so embarrassed for him. He’s a respected legal scholar, and that story reads like something I would have written when I was fifteen: didactic, terribly structured and written, lacking any nuance, and mostly meant to instruct in the most condescending way possible. God. Awful.
My most scarring story was definitely “The Metamorphosis.” Read, I believe, in junior high. Meaning almost no one understood it and it super-grossed everyone out.
@Stanley: yes, skimming was appropriate. I sort of read “The Metamorphosis” but – although I’m pretty sure I’m reasonably intelligent – I never did figure it out.
@Michelene – I remember the required high school reading (NOTE: I was a NYC public high school student) as including the following:
“Romeo & Juliet,” “Of Mice and Men,” “The Color Purple,” “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” and I’m sure there was more but it was a long time ago, and I don’t remember actually reading anything for class from 10th grade – 12th. (Except “Hamlet” in 12th, and that was a Psychology class.)
I second the Le Guin recommendation, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. Unless kategm seconded it — it’s a little hard to tell — in which case I third it. Either way, I think the story elegantly asks just how far we can ethically take the notion that “the good of the many outweighs the needs of the few”. And more importantly, when you’re part of the many, but disagree with them, what can or should you do about it?
Read it here.