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The fascinating decay





(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Scenes from a thought dystopian movie: Tonight. A smiling Donald Trump in front with a red tie, behind small stressed lackeys with weapons under his jacket, on his way into the White House.
When the Norwegian author center seeks out applicants for means of production for literary combination productions (sound, picture, text), and who approach the Cultural Schoolbag, they want dystopia. A utopia is "a good place", while the dystopia is a "not a good place". We know the dystopian science-fiction scenarios well from literature and the world of film. Blade Runner is a classic dystopian reference, directed by Ridley Scott after Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from 1968. Another novel of the same kind is War with the newts (1936) by Czech Karel Capec – perhaps the most impressive of all literary dystopias. In the story of the salamanders, they gradually take power, after being subjected to cruel experiments, and eventually infiltrate the institutions of men after learning the language of men, and because the salamanders are so skilled at diving for pearls, they gain an economy and all that it entails of insight into trade and scary good. Uncontrollable events expand, ending in war and misery. An allegory of abominable historical events – which once again came to fruition, and turned all reason and thought into unrestrained rage and thoughtless affect, while Capec published his novel.
"Non-places" has a special attraction in both art and ordinary social curiosity. Charles Dickens portraits of the shadow in London's slum, of the viciously vampiric insanity of the Greek and the scourge of poverty, were serials in the English newspapers, and were read with eager appetite – for here everything that one dreaded became possible to live in safely. distance from the slum you knew the stench from in the streets. The Norwegian author Axel Jensen cultivated the dystopia in the brilliant novel Epp (1966) about the lonely loner by the same name, and let's not forget his buddy Pushwagner and his cheerful dystopian images from a futuristic "idyll". Pushwagner's dystopias stand in a price range – they sell like hot wheat bread to investors and collectors.

Trump in the White House. Donald Trump and the US presidential election provide dystopian reminiscences, at least if one is to imagine the worst – and one should, if one wants to cultivate his most dystopian passions.
Frame 1: Evening. A smiling Donald Trump in front with a red tie, behind small stressed lackeys with weapons under his jacket, on his way into the White House. Frame 2: Women in high heels and in low-cut dresses in a flash of astronomical dimensions. Frame 3: Party with Putin and his friends team of oligarchs, followed by slightly smaller oligarchs in the guest wing. Frame 4: Poolside cocktail party. Frame 5: The empty tennis court. Frame 6: The bowling alley, where the bodyguards enjoy girls, wine and singing. Frame 7: The empty cinema with porn movies. Frame 8: Trump and Putin juggle in the underground chambers of the White House as they laugh at one thing or another. Then a quick montage from the 132 White House rooms, with the 28 fireplaces and the 412 doors opening and closing by themselves, as in a ghost movie. Frame 9: We see Trump throne in the oval room, sipping a glass of colored vitamin juice, surrounded by wife and children and with shiny white teeth. Frame 10: White and black limousines queue in front of both the main and back entrances, with the entire international diplomatic corps heading into the white neoclassical edifice, now shaken in their columns.

A dystopia is just the prelude to the collapse we can expect slowly and what it will entail through migrations, technological collapse, internal and external wars.

A dystopian cartoon, set in front of our eyes in the American Dream presidential campaign, which is duly covered by NRK broadcast correspondents. "Trump is an idiot," an angry man tells the camera. "Trump wants to restore the American dream," says a young woman.
Is the American election a taster of a real dystopia that will be realized in a short time? American Cormac McCarty's novel The Road (also filmed), a dystopia from the collapse that threatens American society, can be read as a taster of what we can expect if the rampant bully Donald Trump gets to realize his utopias. A utopia that of course will appear as a ragnarok.
A dystopia is just the prelude to the collapse we can expect slowly and what it will entail through migrations, technological collapse, internal and external wars.
Still, we find the dystopia appealing. It fascinates with its decaying aesthetic, its dark humor, the gruesome, nightmares that are just a dream, from which we can wake up by clutching our arms and saying: Huff, it's good we live in Norway. It is the Danish author Tom Kristensen who comes to mind when dreaming of ship disasters and vandalism.

The contradiction. Living in a well-controlled society like the Norwegian one can cause a bit of anxiety – anxiety for the well-systematized man, thoroughly well
established within the normalized control of predictability and robust consumption. Contemporary artists are also a product of this time, delivering art-like products – including those thoroughly controlled – such as an ordinary entertainment novel, a calculated piece of Macbeth, an appropriately designed and old-fashioned collection of poems for the lazy middle-class indifference to consume. The is a true dystopia. People live in a contradiction between what they do and what they say they stand for. This is how Nietzsche defined the morality of the slaves. I myself submit an application to the Norwegian Author's Center, based on a dystopian time travel into a foreseeable future utopia.

Terje Dragseth
Terje Dragseth
Author and filmmaker.

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