There are times when you look at what’s going on around you, and you start swearing because there’s no way you could put it into fiction and have people believe it. At least, not without a hell of a lot of foreshadowing and setup. This last few months qualify. Actually, they blew the qualifications into dust then zoomed off into a horizon which leaves you wondering where your life took a sharp turn from the way things are supposed to be.

Let’s see… Abusive regimes are supposed to be unremittingly nasty. Instead we’re seeing the reveal of an abusive regime pretending to be one of the good guys – and even more bizarrely it’s unfolding over twitter and facebook and alternative media. Try writing that in a novel and watch the claws come out. “No way! That kind of thing would hurt the journalists. Why would they ignore it?” “Where’s the rational self-interest here? They can’t all be brainwashed zombies.” Worse, the level of abuse going on under the business as usual facade is enough to have paranoids every going pointing fingers going “I told you so!”. Unless you’re writing conspiracy thrillers, it ain’t going to fly.

(In actuality, I doubt there is a coordinated conspiracy – what’s far more likely is a whole lot of people with the same general mindset who have an implicit green light from their bosses. That gets you to the same place without the evil conspirator thing – and let’s face it, it’s human to want to boost the chances of something you agree with and push something that offends you off into the outer darkness. If you happen to believe that someone who disagrees with you is evil, it’s even easier to push them off into the darkness. Now, listen to the rhetoric, and ask who thinks who is evil.)

It’s incredibly frustrating to watch this unfold and see the most amazing story fodder emerging… and not being able to use it because I’m totally useless with the grand conspiracy line of thinking. My mindset runs much more to the strong personalities with conflicting goals (although I will concede that there’s usually a heavy dose of evil bastard in there too – on all sides).  I don’t know that I could manage the flipping setup to make something like the current round of revelations seem reasonable.

Now sure, part of this is how people think. We’re mostly pretty bad at dealing with things where something starts as one thing (say, a seed) and ends up as something else (a tree). To deal with those we draw boundary lines. When it sprouts it’s a seedling. When it’s a bit taller and stronger it’s a bush. When it’s tall enough it’s a tree. Of course, those boundaries get pretty fuzzy and never happen in exactly the same place twice (just the same way Colorado natives will usually laugh at what Australians call a mountain), but they more or less work. At the same time, we tend to assume that things will stay the way they are and work in the usual cycles – and we’ll work our collective anatomy off to make that happen as long as we can do it even while everything else is collapsing around us. This is why the Roman Empire didn’t “end” in an obvious place to the people who lived through the collapse of the Western part. They kept on doing what they’d always done, tallied their accounts in Roman currency long after the Empire was a memory (even when there was no currency to make the payments – the tallies got squared by goods to the value of the Roman currency), and did their best to stay afloat. Of course, for the people in Rome things were a little different – they – were in the center of the storm.

Another example of this was the fall of the Iron Curtain. It took most of the West by surprise. Certainly it seemed to me (not that I was paying all that much attention) that one day the Berlin Wall was the absolute symbol of oppression and Communist evil and the next it was a meaningless piece of architecture as the checkpoints were opened and East Germans streamed past in their Trabants, pushing the things if they had to. The few who’d expected the USSR to fall mostly thought it would be a long, bloody revolution with a new regime as ugly as the old. They may have got the latter part right (Putin being ex-KGB only because the KGB no longer has an official existence), but the first? There weren’t many people who expected to see the entire edifice fold up and blow away, much less voluntarily split itself off into several smaller entities.

I know many people thought China would follow: I remember the bitter disappointment and sorrow after Tienanmen Square. All of it fodder for the story mill, although that was another one that would need a whole lot of foreshadowing and setup to make it work in a fictional setting. Stories have to make sense. They have to be internally consistent. Life doesn’t – but life still consistently pulls out the most amazing stories.