It’s almost Cthulhu – pardon my hiccup, I meant, “election” – season again. And if the tactics of these times don’t make your head swim and your bowls ache, as if you were being eviscerated by a barely-seen eldritch horror, well … you must have turned your phone off.
The parallels abound. Do the reddish and bluish claws of destiny (see cover) clutch for power any differently? In RI, the forces of evil vs. more-evil gather in the guise of a single party, but their redness and blueness are no less real for being carefully disguised beneath a single Donkey, neighing in its angst before becoming a ritual sacrifice.
The biggest – and deservedly so – political McGuffin this year is housing. Our unhoused population is reaching record numbers; for everyone else, the cost of housing (as a percentage of income) is among the worst in the country. Yet, the subterranean horrors pay no rent. They lurk, waiting for the stars to align and return them to the surface. Lurking is mostly free. They eat the Rhode Islanders who plummet into the earth on a regular basis, sucked below by blackhole pot holes and inhumanly decrepit bridges. And so the inhuman and inhumane flourish off the bones of Rhode Islanders, slightly thinner recently thanks to the GLP-1 they can also not afford.
As the sloppy, flopping, all-consuming tentacles from DC grope our environmental ills, tear down our windmills, and strangle our arts and education budgets, local horrors stay below ground, plying their destruction more subtly, corroding infrastructure with the acid of their apathy.
And if you’re an aeons-old subsurface slug, you care naught for health care, transportation, or equity. Rising water and the storms of climate change feel like little more than a good back scratch. But campaign ads? There’s a tasty treat of noxious fallacy that’s sure to entice you to the surface, maw extended, gaping.
If Cthulhu were running, they would probably do pretty well. They’d run on a platform of “Tear it all down.” People like voting to “Tear it all down and rebuild it from scratch.” While the big squid-boy would skip over the rebuilding part, it’s still tapping into the motivation many Americans feel right now. If the ancient tentacles of greed and corruption could strangle the oppressive demons of bureaucracy and emerging digital monsters, would it be worth it? Or would they team up to inflict even greater carnage. There used to be a popular bumper sticker supporting Cthulhu for president. “Why vote for the lesser evil?” it asked.
But at the root, the horror intrinsic to weird fiction is fear of the unknown and unknowable, yet powerful. It is the currents/connections unseen, motives indiscernible, and a future inscrutable which make the world of politics equally terrifying. Sometimes, a horror is so immense, just thinking about trying to resist it can be overwhelming. For many, that describes the current political powers that be – a nest of injustice and inequality interwoven with so many interests, loopholes and mixed motives, deciphering it feels arcane and correcting it insurmountable. Hello, eldritch horror!
In traditional horror, a hero often survives, if only to perish in the sequel. In weird fiction and work drawn from Lovecraft, going insane is usually the absolute best a character can hope for. Which is the better analogy for the political season?