In order to maintain complete honesty, I’ll have to admit that I knew that “Dalek” had something to do with “Doctor Who” but I only knew this because I’ve been using Tumblr as my blogging platform and people whose blogs I read here seem to like these things.
Also, my good friend Scott Hammond is a big “Doctor Who” and so I’m guessing he’s shaking his head while reading this.
So I went over to Wikipedia, read the first two paragraphs, and learned a good deal more than I needed to know. And I don’t say that because I’m some sort of SciFi snob. No, I say it entirely from an academic perspective. That is, my sense is that a book that tries to combine human rights and these mechanical mutants would involve series headaches for the author … in no small part because a) the daleks aren’t human themselves and b) the daleks seem more interested in doing terrible things to humans than in thinking about rights and dignity.
By the way, it’s this thing:
Inside, according to Wikipedia, “Daleks are shown to be mollusk-like in appearance, with small tentacles, one or two eyes and an exposed brain.” So there’s that to consider.
But perhaps my Dalek-loving friends have different (read: better) ideas for my upcoming book than I have. After all, “In 2010, readers of science fiction magazine SFX voted the Dalek as the all-time greatest monster, beating out competition including Japanese movie monster Godzilla and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Gollum, of The Lord of the Rings.” While this seems perfectly insane to me, perhaps I need to just throw up my hands and start watching “Doctor Who.”
But, yeah, that’s probably not going to happen.
Well, the reason I love daleks is because they are (unlike our human brethren) so unconcerned about human rights and dignity. Precisely like an aggrandized version of so many ideologies now in vogue, their discourse is relentless and childish, repeating the same phrases over and over (who do we know repeating the same lies ad infinitum hoping that a) the lies become indisputable truth and b) hoping the lies will become part of mainstream ideology? and all of it with quite a high measure of success).
If pop culture gives way to metaphorical representations of our greater issues, it is by creating characters that embody our fears and concerns. I contend daleks are an excellent metaphor of the kind of systems currently present in politics. The daleks seek to exterminate humanity. For me, in the same way that some politicians seek to strip us off our humanity (i.e those values like solidarity and understanding that make us human). While one set of villains are set to destroy it physically (the daleks), the other are set to destroy our metaphors of humanity and what it means to be human.
But… you know I was joking about my book proposal anyway.
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