Remarkable World of Therefore

It’s a thought-provoking exercise, to alter a fundamental given and play out the contingencies of that strange new world.  An invitation to absurdity, certainly there are no shortage of comedic opportunities in a world where characters confront altered circumstances they, like we, had always taken for granted.  Holding the tension and artfully filling out a full vision for all this creation requires a three-dimensional imagination and subtle draftsmanship. 

Twenty years ago or so I was reading Roderick MacFarquhar’s “The Origins of the Cultural Revolution.”  This was his third and final volume that was finally published and I marveled as Mao ominously played with Liu Shaoqi suggesting: “you be Qin Shihuang.”  A “Danger Will Robinson” moment there, lao Liu.  And it was at that time that I got it into my head to concoct a tale, a screen play in fact, about what would happen to the Beijing of 1999 and the leadership of that time where Chairman Mao to wake up.  I think the first half was angular and funny as helmsman confronted the current leadership and struck out into the countryside in a huff.  But the second half waxed melodramatic, as I recall.  It wasn’t easy to sustain the gag, all the way through, until his end in front of a county prison firing squad. 

Geroge Schulyer developed a simple idea, and built out a remarkable world of therefore, which takes liberties, skewers the pantheon and pins truths into strange corners.  “Black, No More” written in 1931 is based on the premise that an African American doctor has developed a treatment that changes blacks to whites, so that no one can tell.  African Americans all stop spending their hard-earned lucre on whatever they had been spending it on and splurge for the treatment.  The only catch, is that children, when they are born still resemble their parents original complexion. 

Our Harlem native hero who is cruelly spurned by Hellen, the fantasy white woman, is the first to get the treatment.  He talks his way into a leadership role in the KKK stand-in "The Knights of Noridca" and eventually manages to marry the Grand Wizard’s daughter, who conveniently turns out to be dream-girl Helen.  Schulyer keeps his toes on the precipice as he imagines a decisive election, the wholesale sellout of the black cognizanti, and disruptive research to show that most heretofore confident Anglo Saxon American elites have black antecedents.  It’s rare that it happens to me I’m afraid, but I threw down my book and laughed aloud at on many occasions. Schulyer's own life played out some interesting intellectual pathways that were just as hard to ultimately believe in. 

Thursday, 07/23/20