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Blog 65 Bypassing Dystopia - a Review.
Bypassing Dystopia is another homer by Canadian, Joyce Nelson!
But what’s wrong with it? I bought a dozen copies of her previous book, Beyond Banksters, and had no difficulty in passing them out as “enlightening" (and free) reads to friends at the curling club and other venues. Yesterday I tried the same offer with Dystopia, and had only two takers.
It has to be the title. I mean it’;s a splendid title for language nerds and history freaks like me. But for some folk not so inclined it may sound like directions for a highway detour - “Bypassing DYSTOPIA”. If that’s you, skip down to the footnote for a short explanation.
And permit me to subtitle her book “Countering the Current World (Dis)Order”_
*End note: The title alludes to a travel-fiction book called Utopia, published in 1616. - that’s right, 1616 - by Sir Thomas More. Every college English major reads it as a masterpiece of political and social satire. Two words are at play in its title; eutopia (Greek), meaning “a good place”, an ideal society, and utopia (Greek), meaning “no place.” That is, More is ironically saying that eutopia, presented in his book, does not exist - at least not yet.
On the other hand, “Dystopia" which means a “not good place, a place where everything is wrong". appeared first in English about 200 years after More’s Utopia.
So Nelson uses "Dystopia" to refer to the world presented on our daily TV news in 2018, where so many things seem to be so wrong that you just want to shut the damn thing off and let the President and the gun-toting psychotics carry on. (To say nothing of the extreme climate events.)
We can’t do that, of course, and Nelson offers hope, and direction, for the human race to bypass this stage of our collective history. With examples of what can be done and what is being done!
Next blog we’ll give you a few home runs from the book.
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