2000x/Beyond 2000: The Thing Happens (Based on a story by George Bernard Shaw)

[james_davis_nicoll]

The Thing Happens part 1
The Thing Happens part 2

In an England effectively run by seductive Negresses and cunning Orientals, functionaries near the top of the government struggle to deal with the revelation that a very small fraction of the population lives many times longer than the average person.

You know, I honestly cannot recall the last time I read or heard something that included the sentence "If the white race is to be saved, our destiny is apparent."

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Well, Pat Buchanan said something all too similar just recently:

"In demographic terms, more white Americans died in 2012 than were born. Never before -- not during the Civil War bloodletting, not during the influenza epidemic after World War I, not during the Great Depression and birth dearth of the 1930s -- has this happened.

"In ethnic terms, it means that Americans whose forebears came from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, Southern and Eastern Europe -- the European tribes of North America -- have begun to die.

"The demographic winter of white America is at hand, even as it began years ago for the native-born of old Europe."

etc., etc., oogity-boogity-boo

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Shaw said this? do I haved to read it now?

I don't want to listen ot the radio play

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Yes, no, your life probably won't be any worse if you don't.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

"The demographic winter of white America is at hand, even as it began years ago for the native-born of old Europe."

But... white america is only dying because you've arbitrarily put a line between white america and hispanic america.

And Europe (old or otherwise - did somebody discover a new europe somewhere without telling me?) hasn't reached the same tipping point the US has so what are you talking about pat?

[txanne.livejournal.com]

GBS, okay, of his time...but why would anybody do all that work to make a play out of it IN THIS CENTURY?

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

"scotch logic"

Wait wait, they're not just inscrutable orientals, they're inscrutable tory orientals.

What the fuck am I listening to? Wait, this was really made in the year 2000? Black people can't survive on the east coast of the UK? Wut?

Also: people living to only 60 or 70...wut?

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

It's the usual symbol-reference collision.

"White" ought to be "phenotype with ancestral demyelination, an unhelpful condition unless you, like the ancestors you got those genes from, are living on oats in the rain without access to vitamin supplements".

Instead it's an awful mix of "good" and "right" and "important".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

This was apparently the middle section of Back to Methuselah:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_Methuselah

In some ways it seems that the central idea here was a precursor of Niven's protectors or Wilson's "second adulthood", and at the end he introduces the beloved SF idea of eventual progression to bodiless energy beings. There's lots there that is queasy-making in a modern context, of course.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And Heinlein's Howard Families, of course. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that Heinlein got it directly from Shaw.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Huh, he apparently directly mentioned Back to Methuselah in one of his stories, though either Heinlein or the character had gotten their quotes mixed up, and is actually referring to the preface to a different play:

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/40682297?uid=3739696&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102111889803

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

+

Rather a complicated play, apparently. We should definitely take one sentence by one character as indicating something ominous....

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, anything written in the 1920s or '30s about the future of humanity is bound to have some questionable or horrifying bits in it somewhere: see the first several chapters of Stapledon's Last and First Men. Shaw was probably doing better on the whole. Still, I can see how listening to the third section of this, removed from its context and produced as a radio play circa 2000, would be a disconcerting experience.

(Repeatedly edited because I was unclear on when the recording was actually made.)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Well, I just looked up Shaw's version (gutenberg.org/ebooks/13084). It's Shaw's usual epater the English, contrasting their immaturity with everyone else, including Scots. The character who wants to 'save' the white race, is one of its rare long-lived mutants, who is proposing marriage to another long-living one, to produce long-living children -- who will live long enough to develop some maturity of their own, thus improving the English race toward the level of all the other races.

I'm not sure I could handle the disconcertingness of what c. 2000 probably made of this.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

America has passed peak honky, and Pat Buchanan is in a tizzy.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

May be just a statistical blip. Iconically, Bill Clinton has heart events and a bucket list -- but Chelsea (now 33, born when Bill was 34) has not yet given him a grandchild.

[armb.livejournal.com]

I did hear "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be-will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved" today, but it was written in 1925.