(no subject)

I'm not really up on Night Vale fandom, and pretty new to listening to the show, so it may be that all of this is very obvious! But it's been starting to get to me at a deeper level than just an amusement, and I want to think about it for a bit.

Horror fiction almost never works for me. This is because I almost never feel pleasurably scared by fiction, so all I'm left with is getting grossed out. (I don't much feel pleasurably scared in real life; don't try me on surprise parties or roller coasters.) I liked Cabin in the Woods quite a bit, but it may be the only horror movie I've ever enjoyed, and it's pretty much a critique of horror movie tropes all the way through. I most likely would have never given Night Vale a chance except that lots of people were selling it as not a horror podcast, but a humor podcast set in a horror universe.

But Welcome to Night Vale is frightening to me.

Sometimes in a pleasurable way; more often in a "I feel deeply unsettled about the entire universe and my place in it" kind of way.

I loved The X-Files when I was in high school, but it was always just fun for me -- I was too young to remember much of the Cold War, and the development of my political consciousness took place during the Bill Clinton presidency. I grew up thinking that your government might be immoral or embarrassing, and your government might have weird minor scandals, but it was all in a benign sort of way, and they were probably not competent enough to do a good job covering anything up. (I realize that for some families more right-wing than mine, Ruby Ridge and the various conspiracy theories around the Clinton administration were a big deal. But this definitely was not true inside my own little bubble.)

And so it wasn't until I was older that I started to get a sense that the government of the developed democratic country I lived in was a government that would torture people, that would ship people off to places where torture was practiced. This is a government that will kill people with drone strikes. This is a government that has the power to spy on a heck of a lot of your communications.

And I put that out of my mind, because life goes on, and I shop for groceries and go to the library and listen to NPR, because the coulds and the mights are quite far from everyday life -- though sometimes I'd listen to how they wouldn't spy on U.S. citizens, and I'd be forcibly reminded that I'm not a citizen. But there's a deep uneasiness somewhere beneath there.

That's what's much more frightening than the glow cloud or the feral dogs. It's how Night Vale is a place where horrible, horrible things happen, and the government is corrupt and power-mad and there is nothing you can do but paper over it and keep going.

I'm really not a conspiracy theorist. And I really don't think that the U.S. government is anywhere near as evil as, say, the Sheriff's Secret Police. But I'm left with a lingering sense of helplessness in the face of indifferent, and sometimes actively malevolent, bureaucracy. The government that blithely insists that the feral dogs were actually nothing but plastic bags, and nobody really got hurt, seems frighteningly plausible even if the feral dogs themselves do not. The horrible things that get papered over, not necessarily with conspiracy but with indifference and a "Look! Shiny!" news cycle, are too real.

And still we go on living in this world, turning on public radio while driving home with the groceries.