An open thread dedicated to discussing books, movies, and tv shows we love. And occasionally some politics.

Today I thought I'd talk about A Wrinkle in Time, mainly because I'm filled with disgust at the strategy the establishment is doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on: sending out beloved or respected surrogates, who have some kind of emotional or moral authority, to spread its messages.

We've seen this now with John Lewis. With Dolores Huerta. With Robert Reich, Michael Moore, Bruce Springsteen, LeBron James. With Bernie Sanders. Obviously, not all these people have the same amount of credibility, or the same kind of credibility, to spend on the cause of propping up the Establishment's crap messaging, and the list of people I give here is far from complete (Keith Olbermann. Shaun King. Bill McKibben. NOAM CHOMSKY???) Now, it appears they're even using Jill Stein, albeit with a twist (Stein isn't telling people to support Clinton, she's just taking actions that could result in Clinton securing the White House, or, failing that, portray Clinton as an innocent victim of election fraud rather than its perpetrator.) But the moral surrogacy is the same; the Clinton camp didn't take the lead, because they've got no credibility. They're borrowing Stein's and the Green Party's, and, in doing so, draining them of at least some of it.

Hillary is like a political dead zone, not in the cool Christopher Walken 80s movie sense,

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj9M34DzAKo]

Well, OK, maybe a little bit like that...

but in the holy shit there's a place in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico with no life sense. She's the Typhoid Mary of moral and political credibility. Americans identified her with corruption and deceit before she took us on this Magical Mystery Tour for ten horrible months (and counting). Because of that, her campaign kept her as much out of the limelight as a Presidential candidate could be, and sent out an array of surrogates, none of whom made any impact on Hillary's numbers at all. You can't increase Hillary's credibility by sending a beloved person to speak on her behalf. All that does is decrease the credibility of the surrogate. It's happened again and again, to the extent that I sometimes suspect the establishment of taking advantage of this horrible quality to destroy the reputations of good people.

It works on organizations too (it's a lot more difficult to trust the NRDC when they support Hillary, who used her State Department to globalize fracking; it's difficult to take NARAL seriously when they don't seem bothered at all by Hillary saying she's willing to compromise with Republicans on abortion as long as they include a provision for the life of the mother.) And, gods help us, it works to some extent even on voters. I'm convinced one purpose of this election is to divide the American people, and I've been vigilant about fighting that tendency in my own mind. But even I spent months thinking "Jesus, Hillary was against marriage equality until 2013! Why in the name of God is the LGBT community rallying behind her!" It took me a while to figure out "Oh. It's because of Pence." But even so, the enthusiasm seems pretty damned misplaced.

So what has this to do with A Wrinkle in Time?

To summarize for those who don't know the book, A Wrinkle in Time describes the quest of Meg Murray, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe to rescue her father, a physicist, from an alien planet. Her father and other government scientists had been experimenting with something called the tesseract: a way of folding space so that travel doesn't take time. Dad disappears, and three otherworldly figures come to take the children on a journey to save him.

He was trying to get to Mars. Instead, he got to Camazotz, a planet that looks like this:

At first, the children think it's an ordinary suburb. Then all the doors fly open at once, identical boys emerge from the houses and start bouncing what looks like an identical ball in perfect rhythm with each other. After about five minutes, identical mothers open the doors, clap their hands in perfect time, and the boys catch their balls simultaneously and go back inside.

There's one who bounces to his own rhythm. The children see him again later, imprisoned in a room where he's bouncing the ball--except every time it hits the floor he screams in pain. "After today, he'll never desire to deviate again," muses a Camazotz official.

So horrific police state, near-perfect conformity, all because the minds of the people there are nearly perfectly controlled by one horrible, and telepathic, being.

Interestingly, though, the horrible telepathic being, when it becomes aware of the children's presence, doesn't attempt to get at them directly. First, it tries through a surrogate, the Man With Red Eyes. But the children don't respond to the Man With Red Eyes' persuasion. Maybe the fact that he has them imprisoned in a room is a clue that they shouldn't trust him, though he does try to convince them that he's a nice guy by giving them a turkey dinner.

And here's where the business of using surrogates to spread an establishment message really gets exciting. The Man With the Red Eyes convinces the youngest, and most telepathically gifted, of the children, to open his mind to him. For the next several paragraphs, Charles Wallace spews the same talking points that the Man With the Red Eyes had before. Until finally, Calvin O'Keefe, my favorite character, says the following. He looks at the Man and says:

"OK, have your henchmen let us go and stop talking to us through Charles. We know it's you talking to us--or whatever is talking through you."

Those words have been going through my head for months. And perhaps that's why I'm rarely surprised when I see another beloved figure or trusted organization spouting the same bullshit we've been getting from corrupt sources (I have to admit the Bruce Springsteen one hurt a bit). It's not that I suspect the establishment of telepathy; L'Engle's point is that tyrants have ways of getting people we respect, admire, or even love, to spread its messaging. Sometimes even with the best of intentions--Charles Wallace succumbs to the Man With Red Eyes because he thinks he can link to his mind and find out where his father is. He wants to know his father, so he opens his mind, and gets taken over.

The deeper question is: what is the effect of this puppetry, long-term? I see it creating a wasteland where trust, faith, and affection once resided; it's a kind of cultural blitzkrieg which has its own motive, regardless of its success or failure in promoting Hillary Rodham Clinton. I think that motive is twofold: to make it impossible to articulate resistance through any vehicle, by corrupting every vehicle that gains visibility, whether that's an organization or an individual, and to sow further division by eradicating trust.

That question's worthy of a deeper discussion than I can pursue here. But, in the meantime,

"Have your henchmen let us go and stop talking to us through Charles. We know it's you talking to us, or whatever is talking through you."