by Rigorous Intuition » Thu Feb 09, 2006 11:52 pm
<!--EZCODE IMAGE START--><img src="http://www.montrealmirror.com/2006/020906/images/books_1.jpg" style="border:0;"/><!--EZCODE IMAGE END--><br><br>Like the ’80s TV series Max Headroom, set “20 minutes in the future,” Maggie MacDonald’s debut novel [<!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Kill the Robot</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->] presents a paranoid, technology- dominated reality (and rebellion) that, she says, may lie right around the corner. In some ways, the world has already caught up to Kill the Robot.<br><br>“The recent revelation in the New York Times about the NSA spying on people without a warrant—that’s just a hint of what’s possible, especially when there’s not enough protest against it and people don’t mobilize,” says the author, a mover and shaker in arts and politics. MacDonald ran as an NDP candidate in her hometown of Cornwall, Ontario, in 1999 (at the age of 20) and continues to work for NDP and various NGO campaigns. Now based in Toronto, she’s also an award-winning playwright, a visual artist (her illustrations dot Kill the Robot) and a musician—she’s both the frontwoman for the politicized dance-punk band Republic of Safety and a member of the internationally acclaimed Hidden Cameras.<br><br>Like MacDonald in her teenage years, the novel’s heroine, Moore White, immerses herself in the punk/zine subculture, though White’s experience is substantially more sinister. She lives under the rule (and surveillance) of a totalitarian regime and multinational tech corporation, where her anarchist associates are disappearing and isolation and illness abound. Within its cyber sci-fi framework, Kill the Robot also presents an alternate history, wherein John Hinckley succeeds in assassinating Ronald Reagan in 1981 and George Bush I takes the throne eight years early, thus accelerating the Western world’s downward spiral.<br><br>“There’s not even a need for the September 11th attack for the government to justify blatant surveillance the way it does now,” says the author. “We have it pretty bad in terms of government spying and the Americanization of our country, but it could be worse.”<br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://<br>http://www.montrealmirror.com/2006/020906/books.html">Montreal Mirror</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Last month she was on stage in Toronto in a play she'd written called The Rat King:</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>The Rat King itself has a fairly simple story on first glance: it's the tale of the fucked-up Cannon family, headed by a military-minded patriarch, struggling to survive in a dystopian future marked by climate change, a dying population and an influx of rodents.<br><br>Haunted by ghosts of dead relatives, and compelled to ensure the survival of his species, father Ed searches for a suitor for his daughter Carlyn, and recruits a seemingly mute servant – the titular Rat King – to help build a nefarious invention to destroy the rat race.<br><br>Scratch the surface, and you'll discover a world of references: Ed, who's based on Edward Teller, the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, sneers at atomic bomb team leader Robert Oppenheimer in song. The opening chorus comes from T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. Carlyn's sister Carson is named after Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring.<br><br>"Oppenheimer stopped and felt terrible guilt even before the project was finished. By then it was too late to stop what he was doing, but he had this sense that things were too terrible. But Teller, his colleague, went on to promote the development of the hydrogen bomb. To me, he was so hawkish. <br><br>"It seemed to represent a very modern idea, that we can dominate nature for the security of humanity – which just seems so fucked, cuz how is humanity separate from nature? Things like DDT represent that: you kill mosquitoes to stop malaria, but if you kill the mosquitoes you kill the fish. You kill the fish, you kill the birds, then we get cancer."<br><br>...<br><br>Punk may have introduced her to the power of community, but writing has remained a chief mode of connecting with people. That's probably why, even though MacDonald has played active roles in electoral politics – in 1999 she ran for election as an NDP MP candidate in Cornwall, and has worked her ass off campaigning for the party in a number of elections – she's most pulled to creating political change through art.<br><br>Her greatest asset is her ability to draw incredibly clear links between diverse concepts. As we sit in her bedroom discussing the unseasonably warm weather, she jumps from relating tropical storms to the worries about global warming in The Rat King to quickly and cogently explaining why, from an environmental and progressive standpoint, the NDP is a far better political choice than the Green party in this week's federal election.<br><br>"I want to firmly and openly endorse the NDP," she matter-of-factly declares. "The Green party just doesn't have a progressively consistent platform. They may say, 'Let's recycle, let's be more environmentally rigid,' but the environment isn't just a single issue; the environment is bound up in class, in issues of health care. Recycling will not stop all the environmentally influenced cancers – that's gonna happen with free medicare.<br><br>"It's a crisis time, not a time for subtle change. And it's the duty of the artist – the writer, the visual artist, the performer – to try to convince people that there is a crisis and to make people ask our political leaders for massive change.<br><br>"The politician communicates to the mind and tries to make people stay calm, but it's not a time to stay calm. We're not safe any more."<br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://<br>http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2006-01-19/cover_story.php<br>">Now Magazine</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=rigorousintuition>Rigorous Intuition</A> at: 2/9/06 8:54 pm<br></i>
