Children of the Strange Times

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I tried to read Lovecraft to my kids the other day and it was an unmitigated disaster. Not because of the frequent racist themes, I picked the short story carefully to sidestep the worst of that. It wasn't because the story was too scary or too fantastical, either. Not even the obscure vocabulary and lazy reliance on entirely too many adjectives to pad out the word count. No, their problem is that they cannot relate with the narrator's inability to adjust to the information in front of him, his hesitation to re-evaluate his place in the cosmos on a moments notice. They are Children of the Strange Times, and they do not understand old ideas about reality.

The Children of the Strange Times have grown up with every iota of human knowledge available at their fingertips, and it's primary use is entertainment. Their arguments about facts are resolved by looking that shit up instead of relying on spotty memories. Their schools are full of legos and their textbooks are the laughingstock of every student. Learning isn't a thing they set aside time for, they just fall into wikiholes and come out the other end talking to you about the difference between cultivars of bananas and how every navel orange tree is the clone of a 200 year old mutant. Videos of deep sea monsters soothe them to sleep on restless nights.

The Children of the Strange Times have no religion, but they believe in everything. Tiny wiccans and hacker wizards fill the corridors, bragging to their less enlightened friends about how you can change the world with the right tools and the will to act. Everyone believes they can change everything, because they see it change all the time. Step-sisters become step-brothers and the only question is whether surgery was involved. They build robots and video games and write novellas before they break double digits and raise money for charity and march against oppression. Intractable issues like unrest in the Middle East are met not only with the typical "why don't they just..." of former generations but days of research and formal proposals and YouTube invitations for dialogue with the people on the ground.

It used to be if you were racist you could count on your kids to be racist. If you were Catholic or Protestant or Redneck or Irish, you could depend on those traits being inherited as surely as your great-grandfather's weird toe thing. Now there's white couples adopting Korean babies and Texans trying to get gay married and trust fund babies who just want to work on a farm. Nobody's inheriting anything. The Children of the Strange Times aren't limited to the bad signals their parents or village are sending out -- they tap into YouTube comments and flash games and minecraft server chatter. Parents try to teach their kids but the information's already beaten them to the punch. Sure they can't write by hand worth a damn, but the kids know what a Chordate is and how DNA damage causes cancer and do you know what a siphonophore is? Watch this video! It's grainy and has unnecessary dramatic background music and there's some Japanese guy freaking out in an inset screen, but the video is there all the same.

Before the Strange Times it took a village to raise a child, but the village got smashed and when we tried to rebuild it everything went sideways fast. Kids have two parents or one parent or four and nobody is embarrassed or ashamed or even confused with the exceptions of the adults. Classmates go on vacation halfway across the world to visit with family and pick afterschool activities based on visitation schedules. Teachers have given up trying to learn which adults are "parents." They find themselves saying "so well adjusted under the circumstances" and "you never would guess" so often you'd think they'd figure out that divorce and remarriage don't look like they used to, and that kids are more resilient than you think.

The Children of the Strange Times are always on the precipice of some grand new thing. They have no time to be afraid of anything. Their stuffed animals are the monsters that haunted our parents' nightmares, and their only fear is that Cerberus will be lonely if he doesn't have a dragon friend with him. Their compassion extends not just to dogs and cats but snails and skunks and tardigrades, too. I asked my kids if, in the event that a habitable exoplanet was found and they had access to a radio telescope that could send a hello message, they would take the risk and say hi, even with the possibility that the folks on the receiving end could be horrible and they could be inviting doom on the planet by hitting the button. "Of course we would!"

And if the governments of the world said not to?

"I'd do it anyway."

[Junkenstein]

just

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

YUSSSSSS

[Eater of Clowns]

I love this! Fuck yeah, weird kids!

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Indeed this is most excellent.

EDIT:
though it's a shame more don't embrace cosmicism

EDIT:
Regarding Lovecraft's racism, I find that it is generally only really blatant in his correspondences, not in his stories. If fact, if you look at the stories dispassionately, blacks and asians are generally depicted as being superior to whites; they know what's going on and accept it, rather than being trapped in a false conception of reality and wallowing in demonstrably unjustified narcissism like the white protagonist.

[Cain]

Except, no, again you are wrong:

http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-the-ages-the-madness-of-hp-lovecraft/

Lovecraft's racial biases ran deep and strong, as evidenced by his stories–from exotic locales with tropic natives lacerating themselves before mad gods in acts of "negro fetishism" (Call of Cthulhu), to descriptions of a black man as "gorilla-like" and one of the world's "many ugly things" (Herbert West — Re-animator). This was no abstract part of Lovecraft's creative process, where he was trying to imbue his work with some hint of realism. Rather, these were expressions of his foremost thoughts, a key part of his personal beliefs, most notably his virulent xenophobia towards an increasingly diverse American society emerging outside of his Anglo-Saxon New England.

In his 1919 short The Street, the United States is represented as being colonized by "good, valiant men of our [Anglo-Saxon] blood who had come from the Blessed Isles across the sea" until ominous newcomers arrive, "swarthy, sinister faces with furtive eyes and odd features, whose owners spoke unfamiliar words ...."They brought with them alien thoughts, and had come to "tear down the laws and virtues that our fathers had exalted; to stamp out the soul of the old America – the soul that was bequeathed through a thousand and a half years of Anglo-Saxon freedom, justice and moderation." These swarthy men living in "rotting edifices" were "the brains of a hideous revolution" and "at their word of command many millions of brainless, besotted beasts would stretch forth their noisome talons from the slums of a thousand cities, burning, slaying, and destroying till the land of our fathers should be no more." Eventually, the sinister hordes are destroyed when their squalid homes (referred to as an infested "nest" filled with "stench") collapse, burying and killing all their kind in a genocidal apocalypse.

A similar story of foreign contagion, The Horror of Red Hook, goes full tilt into the race-baiting, with such wonderful descriptive characters as "an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth." Charming.

One can find direct parallels between the racist imagery in his personal letters and his depicitions of revulsion, horror and degeneracy in his writings, where he is using the exact same words to describe non-white immigrants as he does to describe cosmic horrors.

[Demolition Squid]

This.

Was.

Fucking.

Incredible.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I'm glad this one hit! It's been sitting half-finished in a tab for like a week.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Except, no, again you are wrong:

http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-the-ages-the-madness-of-hp-lovecraft/

Lovecraft's racial biases ran deep and strong, as evidenced by his stories–from exotic locales with tropic natives lacerating themselves before mad gods in acts of "negro fetishism" (Call of Cthulhu), to descriptions of a black man as "gorilla-like" and one of the world's "many ugly things" (Herbert West — Re-animator). This was no abstract part of Lovecraft's creative process, where he was trying to imbue his work with some hint of realism. Rather, these were expressions of his foremost thoughts, a key part of his personal beliefs, most notably his virulent xenophobia towards an increasingly diverse American society emerging outside of his Anglo-Saxon New England.

Lovecraft was definitely racist IRL and this certainly bleeds into the speech and mannerism's of his characters, but the point that I'm trying to make is that by the end of Call of Cthulhu, for example, the beliefs of the negro cultists are totally vindicated whereas the worldview of the white protagonist is almost totally refuted

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Except, no, again you are wrong:

http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-the-ages-the-madness-of-hp-lovecraft/

Lovecraft's racial biases ran deep and strong, as evidenced by his stories–from exotic locales with tropic natives lacerating themselves before mad gods in acts of "negro fetishism" (Call of Cthulhu), to descriptions of a black man as "gorilla-like" and one of the world's "many ugly things" (Herbert West — Re-animator). This was no abstract part of Lovecraft's creative process, where he was trying to imbue his work with some hint of realism. Rather, these were expressions of his foremost thoughts, a key part of his personal beliefs, most notably his virulent xenophobia towards an increasingly diverse American society emerging outside of his Anglo-Saxon New England.

Lovecraft was definitely racist IRL and this certainly bleeds into the speech and mannerism's of his characters, but the [oint that I'm tryi g to make is that by the end of Call of Cthulhu, for example, the beliefs of the negro cultists are totally vindicated whereas the worldview of the white protagonist is almost totally refuted

They're "right" but their rightness is horrific and evil, and tied to them being less human than the white people. That's still fucking racist.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

a bunch of stupidity elided out of mercy

Why do you even keep typing. You just seem to be a reservoir of bad programming and erroneous data.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Except, no, again you are wrong:

http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-the-ages-the-madness-of-hp-lovecraft/

Lovecraft's racial biases ran deep and strong, as evidenced by his stories–from exotic locales with tropic natives lacerating themselves before mad gods in acts of "negro fetishism" (Call of Cthulhu), to descriptions of a black man as "gorilla-like" and one of the world's "many ugly things" (Herbert West — Re-animator). This was no abstract part of Lovecraft's creative process, where he was trying to imbue his work with some hint of realism. Rather, these were expressions of his foremost thoughts, a key part of his personal beliefs, most notably his virulent xenophobia towards an increasingly diverse American society emerging outside of his Anglo-Saxon New England.

Lovecraft was definitely racist IRL and this certainly bleeds into the speech and mannerism's of his characters, but the [oint that I'm tryi g to make is that by the end of Call of Cthulhu, for example, the beliefs of the negro cultists are totally vindicated whereas the worldview of the white protagonist is almost totally refuted

They're "right" but their rightness is horrific and evil, and tied to them being less human than the white people.

Perhaps, but in he world of he Cthulhu Mythos humans in general are a pathetically inferior race and being less human is therefore a good thing

[Demolition Squid]

Except, no, again you are wrong:

http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-the-ages-the-madness-of-hp-lovecraft/

Lovecraft's racial biases ran deep and strong, as evidenced by his stories–from exotic locales with tropic natives lacerating themselves before mad gods in acts of "negro fetishism" (Call of Cthulhu), to descriptions of a black man as "gorilla-like" and one of the world's "many ugly things" (Herbert West — Re-animator). This was no abstract part of Lovecraft's creative process, where he was trying to imbue his work with some hint of realism. Rather, these were expressions of his foremost thoughts, a key part of his personal beliefs, most notably his virulent xenophobia towards an increasingly diverse American society emerging outside of his Anglo-Saxon New England.

Lovecraft was definitely racist IRL and this certainly bleeds into the speech and mannerism's of his characters, but the [oint that I'm tryi g to make is that by the end of Call of Cthulhu, for example, the beliefs of the negro cultists are totally vindicated whereas the worldview of the white protagonist is almost totally refuted

They're "right" but their rightness is horrific and evil, and tied to them being less human than the white people.

Perhaps, but in he world of he Cthulhu Mythos humanity as a whole is an inferior race and being less human is therefore a good thing

STOP FOCUSING ON THE MOST UNIMPORTANT, TINY DETAIL IN THE AWESOME PIECE OF WORK, YOU PEDANTIC MORON.

[Edward Longpork]

That was fantastic.

I think a lot about the absurd eclectic world we live in, and the rapid-eye-motion speed of kids growing up in the post-dialup era. Even though I grew up in the era of card catalogs and family values, I have trouble imagining what it would be like to go back. It would feel barbaric.

If this neophilia and resiliency is part of a long curve... Do you think it will continue to increase? And if so, will there be a breaking point?

Like, is there a point at which this neophilia stops being a good adaptation to the world?

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Except, no, again you are wrong:

http://www.racialicious.com/2014/05/28/the-n-word-through-the-ages-the-madness-of-hp-lovecraft/

Lovecraft's racial biases ran deep and strong, as evidenced by his stories–from exotic locales with tropic natives lacerating themselves before mad gods in acts of "negro fetishism" (Call of Cthulhu), to descriptions of a black man as "gorilla-like" and one of the world's "many ugly things" (Herbert West — Re-animator). This was no abstract part of Lovecraft's creative process, where he was trying to imbue his work with some hint of realism. Rather, these were expressions of his foremost thoughts, a key part of his personal beliefs, most notably his virulent xenophobia towards an increasingly diverse American society emerging outside of his Anglo-Saxon New England.

Lovecraft was definitely racist IRL and this certainly bleeds into the speech and mannerism's of his characters, but the [oint that I'm tryi g to make is that by the end of Call of Cthulhu, for example, the beliefs of the negro cultists are totally vindicated whereas the worldview of the white protagonist is almost totally refuted

They're "right" but their rightness is horrific and evil, and tied to them being less human than the white people.

Perhaps, but in he world of he Cthulhu Mythos humanity as a whole is an inferior race and being less human is therefore a good thing

STOP FOCUSING ON THE MOST UNIMPORTANT, TINY DETAIL IN THE AWESOME PIECE OF WORK, YOU PEDANTIC MORON.

Well that's really the only at-all questionable thing. The rest is absolutely solid.