Think Good Thoughts

Now that we have elected a frightening man-baby to become the 45th President of the United States, many commentators have observed that we are entering “uncharted territory.”

But that’s not true at all.

The territory has already been charted, in an episode of Twilight Zone titled “It’s a Good Life.”

In this episode, all that is left of earth is the tiny town of Peaksville, Ohio. The rest of the world has been destroyed by a six-year old child, Anthony Freemont, who has unlimited mental powers. Anthony is pure, uncontrolled id, and he can create and destroy at will, though he mostly enjoys destroying. He can read minds, too, so you better think good thoughts. He terrorizes the few remaining adults in the world, including his mother and father. The only frail hope of reining him in is to praise whatever latest monstrous deed he has committed. “It’s good what you did, Anthony, real good,” is the episode’s common, fearful, fawning refrain.

Billy Mumy, the orange-haired (I kid you not) child actor, gives a chilling, memorable performance.

The episode first aired in November of 1961, and here are some of the highlights:

Already, the man-baby who will be president is sending out dead-of-the-night angry tweets about the New York Times and its election coverage. He has no respect for or understanding of the First Amendment, and that’s certainly just one small example of his vast store of ignorance. And as for his seemingly bottomless anger issues, two days before the election he actually threw out of one of his rallies a wheelchair-bound boy with cerebral palsy who had the temerity of raising a Hillary sign.

Remember, until January 20th, he’s still a private citizen. What will this man-baby do or say once he takes hold of the vast powers of the presidency? I can already imagine his aides tip-toeing around him, saying as gently as possible, “It’s good what you did, Mr. President, real good.”

“It’s a Good Life” is a deeply unsettling episode under any circumstances, but in light of the 70-year old monster-child who will soon be the most powerful human on earth, it’s almost unbearable to watch, a Coming Attractions for the worst possible nightmare of our future. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that our future “leader” doesn’t have super powers, and he can’t read minds.

If you can bear it, here’s the entire episode.

“It’s a Good Life” isn’t the only prescient warning from our past. In 1998, the great Octavia E. Butler published The Parable of the Talents, which imagined the end of the United States. In the beginning of the novel one of the main characters, Taylor Franklin Bankole, says,

“I have read that the period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as “the Apocalypse” or more commonly, more bitterly, “the Pox” lasted from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended.

“I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused those problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.”

By the way, the fictional and authoritarian American president of this novel has his own motto: Make American Great Again.

Again, I kid you not.

The literary critic Gerry Canavan offers an excellent overview of Butler’s book here.

So, only a TV show, only a novel?

Think good thoughts.

Think Good Thoughts

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