Recently, I asked my partner the question: Why are most military novel antagonists and tricksters democrats? I was thinking about it in relation to Jack Carr’s The Terminal Man novel. The book casts the good guys as macho men, tough guys with very hot blonde wives, friends, and allies. It casts the bad guys as corporate dweebs, pencil pushers, and, to a person, democrats. The political divisiveness present makes me, not a republican, feel like I’m being lumped in with some nonsense. The us vs them separations and the generalized feeling that republicans are the only real Americans resonates throughout the text. It bugs and I wondered why.
She told me it is because of who the military lifers generally are, and damn if she isn’t right. Even the ideas of patriotism are often drawn in the us vs. them columns, leaving many who serve in the military to be recruited from places that are right-leaning. Left-leaning places are therefore only amplified as being the other when you have that many like-minded individuals and such a diligent command structure.
This is one of the many things that don’t tend to translate into my writing when developing future-leaning projects such as Shadowrun. Political divides magically disappear, because I am not forced to consider them. I think that, on the whole, it makes my writing less realistic, because I am not dealing with those things in any meaningful way. As I script out the next novel and next short story I find myself thinking that I need to lean in vs. lean away and truly tackle some of these concepts in a way that is reflective of the corporate dystopia we’ve created.