A Tale for Hungry Times
Ana Marie Cox

 

Signs of our troubled and troubling economy (the lines for jobs; the empty, unsold houses; headlines every day) are so obvious and omnipresent that I feel guilty for pointing out one of the more subtle indicators of our country's dark mood: namely, the flabbergasting success of "Mockingjay," Suzanne Collins' final book in her young-adult series "The Hunger Games."

The novels take place in a hellish future in which citizens of what "used to be" North America annually send 24 teenagers to their capital city to play the ultimate reality-television game: a fight to the death, broadcast nightly, bet upon and absorbed by the population with the avidity of fans at the World Cup and the hand-wringing tension of families at a mine disaster.

In "Panem" (as in "panem et circuses," or "bread and circuses"), life in the districts outside the capital is subsistence-level. Everything they make or grow or mine is sent to The Capital, where a tweaked-out upper crust enjoys late-Roman-Empire-style decadence (complete with vomitoria). Even the two dozen children sent to play in the Hunger Game are considered luckier than most: In preparation for the tournament, they'll eat better than anyone back home. Sure, the price for that short-term satisfaction is steep indeed, but they've also got that 1-in-24 chance of never being hungry again.

Is this starting to sound familiar? Think of the near-riots we've had over people getting in line to apply for jobs. Think of the tent cities that have grown around urban areas like rings of bathtub mold -- unsightly and stubborn. Think of the anger and fear etched on the faces of the thousands that throng to Tea Party events.

We are obviously not quite at Panem-level straits (unless the Fox network has some new fall programming I haven't heard about yet). Collins herself says it would take hundreds of years for the United States to become Panem, which itself was helped along by a limited nuclear war and unspecified natural disasters apparently due to global warming. But the staggering popularity of the books -- "Mockingjay" sold 450,000 copies in its first week -- suggests that their grim worldview resonates with readers. And I'm afraid even my bare-bones description of the plot does not quite capture just how grim that worldview is.

While classified as science fiction and containing some technologies of questionable physics, "The Hunger Games" cannot really be called "fantasy." It's certainly not escapist. The heroine of the trilogy, Katniss Everdeen, does not triumph over adversity by mastering a spell or hooking up with a supernatural being. Rather, she thinks things through, she toughs things out, she practices and gets better. And sometimes she doesn't triumph at all. However far-fetched you might find the premise of "The Hunger Games," the only thing that makes me skeptical about Katniss as a character is that her attention span in unusually long for a teenager. Though, given that the Katniss-aged readers are pounding down Collins' 300- to 400-page books, maybe I'm not being generous enough.

There is so much death and suffering in Collins' books, they make even the darkest of the darker Harry Potter books seem like "The Baby-sitters Club" and the cotton-candy-mouthed sparkly vamps from "Twilight" series nothing more than slightly more dangerous than average rejects from a Dashboard Confessional concert. But it's not just the clinical descriptions of one 15-year-old killing another 15-year-old or the harrowing catalog of what it's like die of dehydration that differentiate "The Hunger Games" from those two other young-adult publishing franchises. In Collins' books, there is no magic. Glenn Beck's incantations about the power of gold notwithstanding, that's probably a very good lesson for the children of our current economic crisis to learn.

Ana Marie Cox is the founding editor of the political blog Wonkette and is the Washington correspondent for GQ magazine. She can also be seen on MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show."

 

 

A Tale for Hungry Times

 

(c) 2010 Ana Marie Cox