The Star-Spangled Future

by Norman Spinrad

  “There weren’t any Martians, stupid,” Timmy told her. “It was just a dumb joke.”

  “A dumb joke all right,” Freddie muttered, imagining the dull morning-after throb at work tomorrow. Yet he wondered as he sat there watching the “Hollywood Squares” why he had this dread feeling in his gut that everything had changed, and not at all for the better.

  PHASE TWO

  New Worlds Coming

  Introduction

  The only thing we can be sure of is that the future will not be like the present, as American realities continue to mutate along an exponential vector. Indeed, changes seem to be coming so fast that in a way the present isn’t even much like what most people are comfortable with in realtime. This is why “Future Shock” is a common popular cliche.

  Of course the future shock of the masses is the sense of wonder of the sf-reading elite. The sense of disorientation in the face of ongoing mutational change that bothers poor Joe Prole becomes a kind of high for the futures-oriented mutant. Indeed, that is the very nature of his mutational consciousness. This positive attitude towards the future is definitely a survival factor, but it frequently tends to go a little too far.

  Too often the future worlds of science fiction draw their chrome-plated optimism from disassociation with the full range of textures of the science fiction reality of America unfolding all around them. We’d all love to live in nice clean zero-g suburban orbital utopias without ghettos or human shitheadedness or dogshit on the street. In such a sterling stellar empire, all our wars will be righteous and involve no atrocities, at least not on camera. And we all know that we good guys can handle Darth Vader in the crunch because the Force is on our side.

  Not that such optimism isn’t a valuable counter to the downbeat rhythm of bummer times. Nor can it be said that science fiction has been remiss in its creation of monumental disasters, 1984s, and post-catastrophe blues.

  But what’s missing in most of them is a sense of connection to continuity with the moral and psychic reality of the realtime reader. Lester del Rey once attempted to define “science fiction” in such a way that my novel Bug Jack Barron was excluded. What he came up with was the notion that Bug Jack Barron wasn’t science fiction because it was too obviously and smoothly an evolutionary outgrowth of the times in which it was written.

  As a formal definition of what science fiction should be, this is for the birds as far as I’m concerned, but as a descriptive definition of much of what has been written it is all too accurate. The worlds of science fiction all too seldom can be comprehended as projections of vectors we’re traveling in our own times. They all take place on the other side of some Great Discontinuity, be it a million years of time, or parsecs of space, or the great atomic war, or a Velikovsky two-cushion shot. Here the agonies and problems of our own times have been erased and cartoon heroes play out television scenarios. Dystopian warnings or logical positivist space opera, neither of them connects up to history.

  Which is why both the cry-sayers of doom and the space-age optimists miss the point. Which is that the future, alas, is going to be just more history.

  True, we stand a significant chance of blowing ourselves to bits and/or poisoning our planet through our historical tradition of assholery. But unless we do succeed in totally exterminating ourselves—always a possibility now that we’re playing with atoms—the chances are overwhelming that there will be no Great Discontinuity, no merciful annihilation of history.

  After all, any catastrophe that still left significant numbers of humans alive would also leave zillions of tons of books, magazines, videotapes, films, computer memories, home movies, comic books, records, and advertising copy for them to brood over. Even our remote descendants are likely to know exactly who they are and how they got there.

  Furthermore, the march of science is not likely to erase our time-honored species traditions of violence, oppression, psychosis, revolution, honor, justice, humor, love, fear and hate.

  Try as we will to evade the truth, the future arises out of what goes on in the present. Destiny arises out of karma, and the future we get will be the future we make.

  Realistically, we can expect to do this in our usual fashion—in the name of commerce and art and political rights and tribal hatreds, moved by love and fear and murky cravings, in a world too complex for even the best of us to fully comprehend, and in one way or another quite often in a bent state of mind.

  Introduction to

  The National Pastime

  As I write this, the Yankees have just beaten the Dodgers in the 1978 World Series after being 14 games out in July and down 2 games to Los Angeles. New York has retrieved some of its tarnished pride by destroying the Big Red Cheeses from Boston in their own lair and then humiliating first the mid-Americans from Kansas City and then the show-biz team from Los Angeles.

  You think people don’t take this seriously? The Dodgers invoked the astral ministrations of their late coach Jim Gilliam, who died just before the Series, before every game, and solemnly dedicated the proceedings to his shade. Reggie Jacks on owned that God might be a Yankee fan this year because a victory for the team would be a victory for the downtrodden populace of New York. Same downtrodden populace, aka the “animals” in the stands at Yankee Stadium, were the Dodgers’ alibi for booting so many plays. The ferocity of the fans admittedly daunted them.

  If this seems ominously nuts, remember that for a certain stretch—curiously enough during the Viet Nam War—football had replaced baseball as the National Pastime. It may be a measure of our relatively greater current sanity that baseball has made such a comeback. Let us hope football will not soon once more replace it as our number one tribal sports drama.

  Because when you act out the national passion-play on the football field…

  The National Pastime

  The Founding Father

  I know you’ve got to start at the bottom in the television business, but producing sports shows is my idea of cruel and unusual punishment. Sometime in the dim past, I had the idea that I wanted to make films, and the way to get to make films seemed to be to run up enough producing and directing credits on television, and the way to do that was to take whatever came along, and what came along was an offer to do a series of sports specials on things like kendo, sumo wrestling, jousting, Thai boxing, in short, ritual violence. This was at the height (or the depth) of the anti-violence hysteria, when you couldn’t so much as show the bad guy getting an on-camera rap in the mouth from the good guy on a moronic Western. The only way you could give the folks what they really wanted was in the All-American wholesome package of a sporting event. Knowing this up front—unlike the jerks who warm chairs as network executives—I had no trouble producing the kind of sports specials the network executives knew people wanted to see without quite knowing why, and, thus, I achieved the status of boy genius. Which, alas, ended up in my being offered a long-term contract as a producer in the sports department that was simply too rich for me to pass up. I mean, I make no bones about being a crass materialist.

  So try to imagine my feelings when Herb Dieter, the network sports programming director, calls me in to his inner sanctum and gives me The Word. “Ed,” he tells me, “as you know, there’s now only one major football league, and the opposition has us frozen out of the picture with long-term contracts with the NFL. As you also know, the major-league football games are clobbering us in the Sunday afternoon ratings, which is prime time as far as sports programming is concerned. And as you know, a sports programming director who can’t hold a decent piece of the Sunday afternoon audience is not long for this fancy office. And as you know, there is no sport on God’s green earth that can compete with major-league football. Therefore, it would appear that I have been presented with an insoluble problem.

  “Therefore, since you are the official boy genius of the sports department, Ed, I’ve decided that you must be the solution to my problem. If I don’t come up with something that will hold its own against pro football by th
e beginning of next season, my head will roll. Therefore, I’ve decided to give you the ball and let you run with it. Within ninety days, you will have come up with a solution, or the fine-print boys will be instructed to find a way for me to break your contract.”

  I found it very hard to care one way or the other. On the one hand, I liked the bread I was knocking down, but on the other, the job was a real drag and it would probably do me good to get my ass fired. Of course, the whole thing was unfair from my point of view, but who could fault Dieter’s logic; he personally had nothing to lose by ordering his best creative talent to produce a miracle or be fired. Unless I came through, he would be fired, and then what would he care about gutting the sports department? It wouldn’t be his baby anymore. It wasn’t very nice, but it was the name of the game we were playing.

  “You mean, all I’m supposed to do is invent a better sport than football in ninety days, Herb, or do you mean something more impossible?” I couldn’t decide whether I was trying to be funny or not.

  But Dieter suddenly had a twenty-watt bulb come on behind his eyes (about as bright as he could get). “I do believe you’ve hit on it already, Ed,” he said. “We can’t get any pro football, and there’s no existing sport that can draw like football, so you’re right, you’ve got to invent a sport that will outdraw pro football. Ninety days, Ed. And don’t take it too hard; if you bomb out, well see each other at the unemployment office.”

  So there I was, wherever that was. I could easily get Dieter to do for me what I didn’t have the willpower to do for myself and get me out of the stinking sports department—all I had to do was not invent a game that would outdraw pro football. On the other hand, I liked living the way I did, and I didn’t like the idea of losing anything because of failure.

  So the next Sunday afternoon, I eased out the night before’s chick, turned on the football game, smoked two joints of Acapulco Gold, and consulted my muse. It was the ideal set of conditions for a creative mood: I was being challenged, but if I failed, I gained, too, so I had no inhibitions on my creativity. I was stoned to the point where the whole situation was a game without serious consequences; I was hanging loose.

  Watching two football teams pushing each other back and forth across my color television screen, it once again occurred to me how much football was a ritual sublimation of war. This seemed perfectly healthy. Lots of cultures are addicted to sports that are sublimations of the natural human urge to clobber people. Better the sublimation than the clobbering. People dig violence, whether anyone likes the truth or not, so it’s a public service to keep it on the level of a spectator sport.

  Hmmm… that was probably why pro football had replaced baseball as the National Pastime in a time when people, having had their noses well-rubbed in the stupidity of war, needed a war-substitute. How could you beat something that got the American armpit as close to the gut as that?

  And then from the blue-grass mountaintops of Mexico, the flash hit me: the only way to beat football was at its own game! Start with football itself, and convert it into something that was an even closer metaphor for war, something that could be called—

  !! COMBAT FOOTBALL !!

  Yeah, yeah, Combat football, or better, Combat football. Two standard football teams, standard football field, standard football rules, except:

  Take off all their pads and helmets and jerseys and I make it a warm-weather game that they play in shorts and sneakers, like boxing. More meaningful, more intimate violence. Violence is what sells football, so give ’em a bit more violence than football, and you’ll draw a bit more than football. The more violent you can make it and get away with it, the better you’ll draw.

  Yeah… and you could get away with punching; after all, boxers belt each other around and they still allow boxing on television; sports have too much All-American Clean for the antiviolence freaks to attack; in fact, where their heads are at, they’d dig Combat Football. Okay. So in ordinary football, the defensive team tackles the ball-carrier to bring him to his knees and stop the play. So in Combat, the defenders can slug the ball-carrier, kick him, tackle him, why not, anything to bring him to his knees and stop the play. And to make things fair, the ball-carrier can slug the defenders to get them out of his way. If the defense slugs an offensive player who doesn’t have possession, it’s ten yards and an automatic first down. If anyone but the ball-carrier slugs a defender, it’s ten yards and a loss of down.

  Presto: Combat football!

  And the final touch was that it was a game that any beer-sodden moron who watched football could learn to understand in sixty seconds, and any lout who dug football would have to like Combat better.

  The boy genius had done it again! It even made sense after I came down.

  Farewell to the Giants

  Jeez, I saw a thing on television last Sunday you wouldn’t believe. You really oughta watch it next week; I don’t care who the Jets or the Giants are playing. I turned on the TV to watch the Giants game and went to get a beer, and when I came back from the kitchen I had on some guy yelling something about today’s professional combat football game, and it’s not the NFL announcer, and it’s a team called the New York Sharks playing a team called the Chicago Thunderbolts, and they’re playing in L.A. or Miami, I didn’t catch which, but someplace with palm trees anyway, and all the players are bare-ass! Well, not really bare-ass, but all they’ve got on is sneakers and boxing shorts with numbers across the behind—blue for New York, green for Chicago. No helmets, no pads, no protectors, no jerseys, no nothing!

  I check the set and, sure enough, I’ve got the wrong channel. But I figured I could turn on the Giants game anytime. What the hell, you can see the Giants all the time, but what in hell is this?

  New York kicks off to Chicago. The Chicago kick-returner gets the ball on about the ten—bad kick—and starts upheld. The first New York tackler reaches him and goes for him and the Chicago player just belts him in the mouth and runs by him! I mean, with the ref standing there watching it, and no flag thrown! Two more tacklers come at him on the twenty. One dives at his legs, the other socks him in the gut. He trips and staggers out of the tackle, shoves another tackler away with a punch in the chest, but he’s slowed up enough so that three or four New York players get to him at once, A couple of them grab his legs to stop his motion, and the others knock him down at about the twenty-five. Man, what’s going on here?

  I check my watch. By this time the Giants game has probably started, but New York and Chicago are lined up for the snap on the twenty-live, so I figure what the hell, I gotta see some more of this thing, so at least I’ll watch one series of downs.

  On first down, the Chicago quarterback drops back and throws a long one way downfield to his flanker on maybe the New York forty-five. It looks good, there’s only one player on the Chicago flanker; he beats this one man and catches it, and it’s a touchdown, and the pass looks right on the button. Up goes the Chicago flanker, the ball touches Iris hands—and pow, right in the kisser! The New York defender belts him in the mouth and he drops the pass. Jeez, what a game!

  Second and ten. The Chicago quarterback fades back, but it’s a fake; he hands off to his fullback, a gorilla who looks like he weighs about two-fifty, and the Chicago line opens up a little hole at left tackle and the fullback hits it holding the ball with one hand and punching with the other. He belts out a tackler, takes a couple of shots in the gut, slugs a second tackler, and then someone has him around the ankles; he drags himself forward another half yard or so, and then he runs into a good solid punch and he’s down on the twenty-eight for a three-yard gain.

  Man, I mean action! What a game! Makes the NFL football look like something for faggots! Third and seven, you gotta figure Chicago for the pass, right? Well, on the snap, the Chicago quarterback just backs up a few steps and pitches a short one to his flanker at about the line of scrimmage. The blitz is on and everyone comes rushing in on the quarterback and, before New York knows what’s happening, the Chicago flanker is f
ive yards downfield along the left sideline and picking up speed. Two New York tacklers angle out to stop him at maybe the Chicago forty, but he’s got up momentum and one of the New York defenders runs right into his fist—I could hear the thud even on television—and falls back right into the other New York player, and the Chicago flanker is by them, the forty, the forty-five; he angles back toward the center of the field at midfield, dancing away from one more tackle, then on maybe the New York forty-five a real fast New York defensive back catches up to him from behind, tackles him waist-high, and the Chicago flanker’s motion is stopped as two more tacklers come at him. But he squirms around inside the tackle and belts the tackler in the mouth with his free hand, knocks the New York back silly, breaks the tackle, and he’s off again downfield with two guys chasing him. Forty, thirty-five, thirty, twenty-five, he’s running away from them. Then from way over the right side of the field, I see the New York safety man running flat out across the field at the ball-carder, angling toward him so it looks like they’ll crash like a couple of locomotives on about the fifteen, because the Chicago runner just doesn’t see this guy. Ka-boom! The ball-carrier running flat-out runs right into the fist of the flat-out safety at the fifteen and he’s knocked about ten feet one way and the football flies ten feet the other way, and the New York safety scoops it up on the thirteen and starts upfield, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, and then, slam, bang, whang, half the Chicago team is all over him, a couple of tackles, a few in the gut, a shot in the head, and he’s down. First and ten for New York on their own thirty-seven. And that’s just the first series of downs!

  Well, let me tell you, after that, you know where they can stick the Giants game, right? This Combat Football, that’s the real way to play the game; I mean, it’s football and boxing all together, with a little wrestling thrown in—it’s a game with balls. I mean, the whole game was like that first series. You oughta take a look at it next week. Damn, if they played the thing in New York, we could even go out to the game together. I’d sure be willing to spend a couple of bucks to see something like that.