I’d Feel Safer Living In Alan Moore’s Watchmen Dystopia

“It don’t matter squat, because inside 30 years, the nukes are gonna be flyin’ like maybugs.” –The Comedian

I was reminded of Alan Moore’s Watchmen today, and I couldn’t help thinking, in light of current events, how naïve a dystopian world it was. Indeed, none of the great works of dystopia I’m aware of can quite measure up to what is unfolding before us. The situation we now face has all the bleakness of 1984, all the absurdity of Brazil, all the stupidity of Idiocracy, all the dehumanization and psychological conditioning of Brave New World, and all the violence of The Iron Heel. All of them, individually, fall short of explaining the present, though Watchmen at least dealt with an impending nuclear holocaust.

I give Moore credit for getting other things right that nobody else foresaw. Take, for example, the characters Rorschach and Comedian. As unlikeable as they were, as emblematic of the worst of rightwing ideology, they were the ones who injected a degree of humanity into the story. At times they were almost sympathetic compared to the evil that was being prepared for humanity in secret. And not unlike Tucker Carlson today, they often got the better lines.

Where Moore comes up short is in his attempt to imagine a dystopian form of government, the kind that would be most prone to lead the world into Armageddon. His 1985 dystopia envisioned a sixth term for Richard Nixon, had as his secondary antagonists Nixon and Kissinger.

What I wouldn’t give for a Nixon and a Kissinger today. Whatever evil they committed in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, they were fully aware that nobody wins a nuclear war, were capable of doing what needed to be done in order to avoid heightening tensions to the point we are at today. Rules were established that — and this is the crucial point — The United States itself was intent on living by. The underlying philosophy was called MAD, which stands for mutually assured destruction. The philosophy we seem to be living by today is called MADNESS, which seemingly stands for nothing.

Instead of a sixth term for Nixon, what we have instead is a de facto 11th term for Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the first actor we had for our President, a man playing a role for the television audience. This has become the new norm, an actor reciting lines written for them by someone who is never seen. No longer do we see a perspiring Dick Nixon in front of a black and white camera, we now have to have a president who looks good on high-definition television. Even if they are incapable of stringing words or ideas together. Image is everything, everything else can be explained by the talking heads.

Politicians and politics are literally sold to us by the same people who are selling Mountain Dew and sugary cereals. In short, our political landscape is being shaped by the same people who turn children into lifelong addicts. Everything is image, nothing is substance

One particular shortsightedness of Moore was shared by so many of us: we all assumed that when fascism arrived, it would be at the leadership of Republicans. All the signs pointed that way. Instead, we are living in a dystopia that is leaning towards something far worse, all wrapped up in language and symbology that would imply liberal values. Imagine a collaboration between Goebbels and Bernays.

Whereas Watchmen told of unaccountable superheroes hiding behind masks in order to take the law into their own hands, today we have people we are not even aware of distributing justice not merely in their own cities but across the world. In Alan Moore’s dystopia, he envisioned a populace that would dare to pose the question “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who watches the watchmen?) In other words, the people in Moore’s story understood that justice carried out under privacy would easily and eventually be abused.

The watchpersons of our present dystopia have far greater anonymity than the masked superheroes in Watchmen. They also have a much greater capacity for violence. They are capable of starting a war whenever they so desire, killing the innocent and guilty alike at greater levels than any but Dr. Manhattan would have been capable of. Furthermore, today’s watchpersons have far greater sympathy from the press.

Did I say sympathy? I meant to say sycophancy. Total and absolute sycophancy. Ask yourself when the last time any secretive intelligence agency was given ANY scrutiny by the mainstream press. Ask yourself when the last time the pronouncement of any intelligence agent, anonymous or otherwise, was given anything but complete acceptance by any media figure.

But what’s most frightening about our current dystopia, something neither Moore nor any other dystopian writer I’m aware of dared imagine, is the utter lack of concern or even understanding of the threat and impact of what playing with nuclear war would mean. The threat of nuclear war hovers in the background throughout Watchmen, that is when it is not brought to the fore. Heroes and villains alike are acutely aware of the weightiness of the danger.

We’re facing quite a different reality now. It’s like humanity as a whole has experienced a psychotic break preventing us from associating our behavior with the logical consequences of our actions. A truly remarkable occurrence, too unlikely for writers of fiction to play with, and yet increasingly difficult to deny.

The truth of what is going on, if not the solution, is delivered in the end of Watchmen by the most unlikely of sources. Rorschach dropped his notebook in the mail chute of an independent publication named New Frontiersman before leaving to confront the antagonist. New Frontiersman is what would today be called a distributer of mis- and dis-information. In fact, it is a stereotype of the genre, the kind establishment media would have you believe all voices independent of “acceptable” news providers are like. It is an oily rag, dealing with fringe beliefs and attitudes, but it is outside the establishment’s purview. And because the editor leaves it to a flunky to choose a story from out of the “crank file”, the truth is made available to the general public.

Of this more than anything am I convinced: If and when we receive the truth, we will receive it from something other than the establishment media. And while it could possibly come to us from some disreputable source sharing something from the “crank file”, far more likely it will be from some of the brave independent journalists working to share the truth with the world. That is why the establishment media and the watchpersons who are supposedly looking out for our wellbeing are so actively trying to squelch dissenting opinions right now.

That’s something else Alan Moore never imagined in writing Watchmen, the way in which the consciousness of the populace could be controlled by those who claim they are fighting for truth, justice, and the American Way.

A hell of a lot has changed since Alan Moore wrote Watchmen, very little of it for the better.

Oh, by the way, I probably should have included a spoiler alert at the start of this. Don’t read this if you haven’t read Watchmen already.