It's About Time....
Jan. 7th, 2019 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogI had the phrase "rabbit hole" come into my head recently- it's what I've come to call the spot in my consciousness when I'm trying to get (usually back) to sleep. It's when whatever I'm thinking about- a case, a person, an event- suddenly stops making sense, and I realize I'm about to cross over into un/subconsciousness. Being self-aware of this only makes it harder to follow through with getting back to sleep, but whatevs.
"Rabbit hole," ever since Lewis Carroll, has had a specific plot meaning: that place you go down where you don't know what to expect or whether you'll even get back. It's been used in thousands of works, but the one I remember it being used most recently, and powerfully, is in the J.J. Abrams adaptation of Stephen King's 11.22.63. I started watching it again on Hulu tonight, and I also read the King original material after finishing it the first time. There are differences between the two, beginning right with the title- the book used slashes, not dots, between the numbers- and the series also compresses the time period covered by the....
(spoilers, sweetie....)
slingshot effect of the time portal. In the book, the rabbit hole places you in 1958, giving you five years to get ready for the target date. Hulu cuts that to just over three, with Opening Day being just before Halloween of 1960. In both versions, Jake's success proves to be a butterfly-effective failure as things get much worse leaving JFK in office. Which got me thinking, in that goofy insomniac kind of way,.... what else could he do, maybe closer to 1960 than 11.22.63, that would have been better in the long run? I tried some assorted assassinations, shamings, expansion draft selections for the 1962 Mets, but surprised myself with the one change I think New Jake could make if that rabbit hole's still working:
Fix it so Richard Nixon wins. Not the presidency in 1960, but the governorship of California two years later.
----
That political race isn't as famed as Tricky Dick's adventures before and after it, but things really built upon it in remarkable ways. Recall that he had lost the 1960 presidential election by one of the closest margins ever; he was still coming off an eight-year vice presidency and a preceding Senate career; in hindsight, he's best remembered for his anti-communist rants, but they were part of the time and would've helped his cred in later activities. This 1992 retrospective of the campaign quoted Brown The Elder (just-departed Guv Jerry is his son) about some of the reasons for his victory over Nixon for the statehouse. Three stand out: the Democrat was the incumbent and had all those advantages; voters were concerned that Dick was just resume-building with the office and would use it to step back into Washington; and the last days of the campaign included the distraction of the Cuban Missile Crisis. His loss led to his famed "won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" concession speech, effectively pulled him out of national politics for the next cycle, and led directly to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan becoming the standard-bearers of his party at the national and state levels.
But if he wins? Even if history doesn't change The Big One and JFK still dies in 1963, I see Nixon, rather than Goldwater, being LBJ's opponent in 1964. I see Johnson still winning, but not in the crazy smackdown he put on Goldwater; LBJ probably still gets his domestic agenda through in '64 and '65, but as the tv premiere predicted through Al (gotta have guys named Al in time travel, yo), a President without Johnson's massive 1964 mandate would not have escalated Vietnam nearly as much. He would have had to rely more on Kennedy's people, including that other Kennedy- and I think he would have run for re-election in 1968- thus saving, not JFK, but RFK. Nixon would not have been The One in 1968; maybe LBJ wins, maybe it goes to a George (Romney, or the much younger H.W. Bush), and I really don't think it matters, since R's and D's were so much more interchangeable back then. We'd still have the moon landing, the Mets, and the end of a much smaller Vietnam war. But just in those nine years after arriving in 1960, Our Hypothetical Hero has prevented Nixon's ascension to the Presidency, Reagan's entree into public office, and Robert Kennedy's assassination. And he'd have made a butt-ton of money betting on the 1969 World Series.
----
From there, it gets fuzzier. Bobby runs and wins in 1972 and goes again in 1976; he'd weather the energy and Iran crises far better, perhaps with Jimmy Carter as his second-term secretary of state. The 80s are not the division of our nation into greed and need. I doubt we'd have stomached Teddy as a third Kennedy, even if we'd gotten him a better car to drive in 1969, but Humphrey, Hart and Hollings were just three of the possibilities who would all have been better than Mondale or Dukakis. I could still see Clinton ascending when he did, and I can also see the Twin Towers not Descending if the previous 40 years of rhetoric and divisiveness hadn't become so poisonous at home and abroad.
Cheeto would have been lucky to have gotten a tv show. Nixon would still be rotting in hell.
----
I still have to work out lots of fiddly-bits; do Yellow Card Man and his merry friends follow this blog and find roadblocks? Could anyone from the present day bring themselves to help Nixon out? Would there still be a Samefirstname Samelastname taking a shot at RFK either before or during his presidency?
I turned off the Hulu stream to contemplate this, and the news came on (my friend's Jeopardy! appearance was tonight:) and I saw a newsbreak about Cheeto and the shutdown.
Nah. Couldn't be any worse.
"Rabbit hole," ever since Lewis Carroll, has had a specific plot meaning: that place you go down where you don't know what to expect or whether you'll even get back. It's been used in thousands of works, but the one I remember it being used most recently, and powerfully, is in the J.J. Abrams adaptation of Stephen King's 11.22.63. I started watching it again on Hulu tonight, and I also read the King original material after finishing it the first time. There are differences between the two, beginning right with the title- the book used slashes, not dots, between the numbers- and the series also compresses the time period covered by the....
(spoilers, sweetie....)
slingshot effect of the time portal. In the book, the rabbit hole places you in 1958, giving you five years to get ready for the target date. Hulu cuts that to just over three, with Opening Day being just before Halloween of 1960. In both versions, Jake's success proves to be a butterfly-effective failure as things get much worse leaving JFK in office. Which got me thinking, in that goofy insomniac kind of way,.... what else could he do, maybe closer to 1960 than 11.22.63, that would have been better in the long run? I tried some assorted assassinations, shamings, expansion draft selections for the 1962 Mets, but surprised myself with the one change I think New Jake could make if that rabbit hole's still working:
Fix it so Richard Nixon wins. Not the presidency in 1960, but the governorship of California two years later.
----
That political race isn't as famed as Tricky Dick's adventures before and after it, but things really built upon it in remarkable ways. Recall that he had lost the 1960 presidential election by one of the closest margins ever; he was still coming off an eight-year vice presidency and a preceding Senate career; in hindsight, he's best remembered for his anti-communist rants, but they were part of the time and would've helped his cred in later activities. This 1992 retrospective of the campaign quoted Brown The Elder (just-departed Guv Jerry is his son) about some of the reasons for his victory over Nixon for the statehouse. Three stand out: the Democrat was the incumbent and had all those advantages; voters were concerned that Dick was just resume-building with the office and would use it to step back into Washington; and the last days of the campaign included the distraction of the Cuban Missile Crisis. His loss led to his famed "won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" concession speech, effectively pulled him out of national politics for the next cycle, and led directly to Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan becoming the standard-bearers of his party at the national and state levels.
But if he wins? Even if history doesn't change The Big One and JFK still dies in 1963, I see Nixon, rather than Goldwater, being LBJ's opponent in 1964. I see Johnson still winning, but not in the crazy smackdown he put on Goldwater; LBJ probably still gets his domestic agenda through in '64 and '65, but as the tv premiere predicted through Al (gotta have guys named Al in time travel, yo), a President without Johnson's massive 1964 mandate would not have escalated Vietnam nearly as much. He would have had to rely more on Kennedy's people, including that other Kennedy- and I think he would have run for re-election in 1968- thus saving, not JFK, but RFK. Nixon would not have been The One in 1968; maybe LBJ wins, maybe it goes to a George (Romney, or the much younger H.W. Bush), and I really don't think it matters, since R's and D's were so much more interchangeable back then. We'd still have the moon landing, the Mets, and the end of a much smaller Vietnam war. But just in those nine years after arriving in 1960, Our Hypothetical Hero has prevented Nixon's ascension to the Presidency, Reagan's entree into public office, and Robert Kennedy's assassination. And he'd have made a butt-ton of money betting on the 1969 World Series.
----
From there, it gets fuzzier. Bobby runs and wins in 1972 and goes again in 1976; he'd weather the energy and Iran crises far better, perhaps with Jimmy Carter as his second-term secretary of state. The 80s are not the division of our nation into greed and need. I doubt we'd have stomached Teddy as a third Kennedy, even if we'd gotten him a better car to drive in 1969, but Humphrey, Hart and Hollings were just three of the possibilities who would all have been better than Mondale or Dukakis. I could still see Clinton ascending when he did, and I can also see the Twin Towers not Descending if the previous 40 years of rhetoric and divisiveness hadn't become so poisonous at home and abroad.
Cheeto would have been lucky to have gotten a tv show. Nixon would still be rotting in hell.
----
I still have to work out lots of fiddly-bits; do Yellow Card Man and his merry friends follow this blog and find roadblocks? Could anyone from the present day bring themselves to help Nixon out? Would there still be a Samefirstname Samelastname taking a shot at RFK either before or during his presidency?
I turned off the Hulu stream to contemplate this, and the news came on (my friend's Jeopardy! appearance was tonight:) and I saw a newsbreak about Cheeto and the shutdown.
Nah. Couldn't be any worse.