All posts by Matthew Callan

Maybe They’ll Win

We were talking about love, we being my family, at a funeral, which is where we congregate too often now, and my mother brought up the memories of people she has loved, in the family and out of it, and feeling their presence, or rather not feeling their presence, which she says she hasn’t felt since these people passed, and she wondered if they miss her wherever they are, if they are anywhere now, and if they missed her then where are they now, and what purpose does a love serve if that love just ends when the person ends. I don’t know how to answer these questions, I barely know how to think about them or if it’s wise or helpful to think about them in the first place. 

The facile answer is of course yes that love was meaningful, even a memory can sustain you in some way, what would a life without love be worth. It is equally facile to go full Epic Atheist and say no it’s not meaningful, people are just sacks of chemicals and impulses and love is no more mystical than the bonding of one atom with another, or a star collapsing into a black hole, at the end of the day we’re all just physics in action. 

If an answer exists at all that answer is ambiguous, which does my mother no good. Her mind is either/or, always has been, perhaps a product of a Catholic upbringing, though having long since given up that faith she sometimes says she’s a victim of such an upbringing, because it has no known antidote, if you got it there’s no way to un-get it. To my mom things are good or bad, right or wrong, this or that, she won’t even watch a movie if she knows it has an unclear ending, the ending doesn’t have to be happy, it just has to resolve to a decisive FIN. Gray offends her. And so does not knowing something, and knowing that it is impossible to know.

There better be an answer, she will say, meaning to the great question of life, the universe and everything, with the implication that such an answer will be revealed in the great beyond. There better be an answer, she will say, or I’m gonna be pissed. And I, who am not sure there is a question to be asked let alone an answer, will tell her, gently because I don’t want to argue over something I am just as likely to be wrong about, I will tell her, If there is no answer you won’t know. And she will respond, No, I’m gonna know, I’m gonna know.

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Amerika the P.U.-tiful

Once upon a time, great lumbering beasts roamed the media landscape, crushing everything in their path and scoring great returns during sweeps week. These beasts were known as miniseries, and in the 1980s they ruled television’s earth. Following the success of Roots in 1977, every network strove to catch lightning in a bottle again by spending a tremendous amount of money and programming time on televisual epics. These productions were typically aired on successive nights so that it was necessary for viewers to tune in to the same station for an entire week (or longer). Many miniseries were based on popular novels, or dramatized historical epochs (or both), and they were often touted as not only entertaining but Very Important.

In 1987, ABC took a gamble and broke from this formula, banking on a miniseries that was neither adapted nor historical, but instead set in a dystopian future. This had been successfully done before—V, a miniseries depicting an alien invasion of Earth, had been a huge hit for NBC years earlier—but ABC’s production opted for a nightmarish future that seemed a little more plausible. The miniseries was called Amerika. Its premise: What if the Soviet Union took over the USA?

This fear-mongering concept might seem a McCarthyite relic to the modern reader, but while US-Soviet relations had warmed somewhat by the time Amerika was in production (glasnost and perestroika had already entered the lexicon), a fear of communist subversion on our side of the Atlantic remained. In the wake of the leftist Sandinistas’ victory in Nicaragua in 1979, many right wingers insisted that nation could be used as HQ for fomenting communist revolutions throughout the hemisphere, or maybe even act as a beachhead for a future Russian invasion. Ronald Reagan made a nationally televised address in 1986 to warn his fellow Americans that Nicaragua was “only two hours’ flying time from our own borders” and that the Sandinistas would allow the Soviets to “become the dominant power in the crucial corridor between North and South America”, which is why the US needed to give the CIA-backed anti-communist Contra forces whatever aid they wanted. (And also why the US needed to fudge the question of who was the real threat to human rights in the region.)

Amerika generated immense controversy even before it aired. Liberal journals warned it would damage US-Soviet relations, and that appeared to be quite likely when Moscow threatened to retaliate by shutting down ABC’s Russian news bureau. The network aired a Nightline-style program addressing the uproar, hosted by Ted Koppel and featuring a live town hall forum. (The miniseries became so “serious” that of course David Letterman had to take multiple shots at its self importance.)

I was recently reminded of the existence of Amerika, and the memory brought back the fear young-me felt when it first aired. I did not watch the miniseries back then, but I did see commercials for it and was vaguely aware of the hubbub around it . The idea of Amerika scared me as a sub-10 year old because frightening the public was clearly the intent of its creators, as exemplified by this promo.

Having now watched Amerika, I can say there was nothing to fear from the miniseries apart from death by boredom—even minus commercials it runs an agonizing 12+ hours yet somehow feels twice as long. However, Amerika has certain perspectives on, for lack of a better word, Americans’ ideas of American-ness that may seem eerily familiar to the modern viewer.

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Marina

Originally published in Sycamore Review Summer/Fall 2019

It was easy for Marina to spot the future people who came to kill her baby. Most were so disoriented by their trip across time they would dart their heads like lost dogs, looking for anything familiar and finding nothing. Some were overtaken by coughing fits brought on by air that did not agree with their future lungs. Some just cried, great wails of fright and want not unlike her baby’s but so much more disturbing for possessing the depth of adulthood. These cues gave Marina more than enough time to identify the future people and lose herself in a crowd, for she was in the city now and there was always a crowd nearby. She adored crowds. The future people were large of face and frame, so even the more disciplined ones who resisted the impulse to cough or cry were betrayed by their size. 

That is why Marina did not worry all that much when she ventured out in the morning to drop off her piecework from the night before and pick up the day’s load from the dress factory, with her baby clasped close to her breast in a sling, babbling and pointing with rapturous wonder at the streetcars as they clanged up and down the high street. She was sure any danger from the future people would make itself known to her with ample time to react and escape. Marina often wondered why they bothered to hide themselves at all. She wondered this much more often than she wondered how the future people came to her from the future, or why they were so intent on murdering her baby yet so helpless at the task. These realities of her new life had been established long ago and were not, in her opinion, worth pondering.

Marina was not surprised the morning she returned from the factory, her satchel full of piecework and her baby working a sore spot into her clavicle with the top of his head, when she heard a clamor coming from the other side of the front door of her tiny fourth-floor flat. She paused with her key inserted in the lock and waited for the the noise to play itself out. It sounded like a person who’d been shoved down a flight of stairs, the din of a clumsy flailing of limbs trying in vain to break a fall, oofs and ows and other exclamations of shock and pain. Then a low moan. They’ve come here now, Marina thought. Before this moment the future people had only come after her in the street, or in her father’s barn before she fled the countryside a few months ago, but never directly in her home. A new thing, she thought. What a marvel new things were! 

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