Guy Yedwab

Victoria Anderson

10/21/2006

A Three-Edged Sword

In “The Late Victorians,” Richard Rodriguez navigates utopian ideals and dystopian hells with

ease, trying to pin down whether or not San Francisco fits cleanly into either idea. As an old man, he

describes in one sentence his hesitance toward optimism and yet at the same time his want to accept it,

writing, “Though I am alive today, I do not believe that an old man's pessimism is truer than a young

man's optimism simply because it comes after.” (Rodriguez 312) He implies his age, referencing that he

is 'still alive' as though that is not to be expected, and links himself to an old man's pessimism; on the

other hand, he denies his belief that pessimism in necessarily the best sentiment. He does not, however,

assert that optimism is the superior belief either; he merely sets up the discussion between the two

viewpoints for the rest of his essay. When he discusses his own views on the subject, they lean toward

the more pessimistic. Contrasting himself with the “lonely teenagers” (Rodriguez 312) who arrive in

San Francisco looking for Utopia, to whom “the city can still seem...[like] paradise” (Rodriguez 312),

he writes, “I have never looked for Utopia on a map... the point of Eden for me, for us, is not by

approach but expulsion.” (Rodriguez 313). The only places which can be perfect are places which are

perfect in our memory, but are no longer perfect now. This sets the stage for the format of the rest of the

essay; each point of optimism and clarity is brought into sharp opposition as he hits terrible loss. For

instance, he describes the Castro District at great length, describing the flourishing of a freer

homosexual community. He ends his description thusly: “The Castro district, with its ice cream parlors

and hardware stores, was the revolutionary place. Into which carloads of vacant-eyed teenagers from

other districts or from middle-class suburbs would drive after dark, cruising the neighborhood for

solitary victims.” (Rodriguez 317). Like the Eden Rodriguez describes, Castro is a place which at some

point was imagined to be a perfect place of revolution and freedom, until the ideal is suddenly lost to
gay bashers; “the ultimate [of which]... was a city supervisor named Dan White...he murdered the

mayor and he murdered the homosexual member of the Board of Supervisors.” (Rodriguez 317). The

Eden of a place of support for homosexuals is shattered, even up to the level of city government. One

can even compare Dan White to Lucifer, who sat at the right hand of God until he suddenly fell from

grace in an act of revolution and violence to the pit of hell.

In the end, however, Rodriguez realizes that San Francisco is neither the utopian dream which

contemporary liberalism would wish it was, nor is it an inescapable ruinous hell that one might fear it

would be. The good and the bad live side by side; it cannot be discarded simply because it is

corruptible. Luckily for Rodriguez, the forces of good and evil seem to be playing out in the world

around him. However, Will Eno's play Thom Pain (Based On Nothing) tackles the slightly more

disturbed mind of an individual for whom the good and bad battle out within his own personality.

Thom Pain has just left the woman of his dreams, his love; but even he must agree that things are not as

they seemed. “It was more complicated than this, our love,” he says. “Plus, I lied about all of it.” (Eno

29). Things were not as they seemed, were not as beautiful as he wants himself and everyone else to

believe. The truth escapes him as he tries to speak about it in alternately the first and third person,

speaking about it alternately between positive and negative terms. “Good good times. Except for my

rotten breath, bad leg, acid lack of wit, lifelong mistrust and other mental defects, everything was

perfect.” (Eno 29). Ironically, he seems to be finding positivity even among his intensely self-

deprecating view. Perhaps he has learned how to “love what is corruptible.” (Rodriguez 323). On the

other hand, the complications get in the way of his perfect view on love. Referring to himself in the

third person again, he says, “He did not love too much, nor too well, but with too much sweat, shit, and

fear, with too many long words, too many commas.” (Eno 34). Utopia is supposedly simple; yet

unfortunately there is nothing simple about his love, however beautiful it may seem to be for him. He

sums it up perfectly in his statement, “Perfection, with an asterisk.” (Eno 30). Everything is perfect

until you read the fine print, see the catch. Rodriguez loves the Victorian houses which the
homosexuals seem to have found safety in; still, however, there is the “kill faggots” written in chalk on

the sidewalk.

Despite our want to boil things into black and white, good and evil, utopia and dystopia, things

do not break down that simply at all. Our dreams, however, are often written in these terms. And when

our art mimics our dreams, we can find entertainment in simplistic descriptions of good pitted against

evil. Science Fiction, in its original populist form, did cater to the good versus evil form. Star Wars,

which defined the face of science fiction for multiple generations, pitted a small band of freedom

fighters against a faceless tyrannical empire which used evil magic and destroyed innocent lives for its

cold impersonal goals. Star Trek, on the other hand, presented a utopian view of human society;

mankind has conquered all of the divisions and hatreds and prejudices of the 20th Century and banded

together to explore the stars; not as conquerors and exploiters, but as scientists and peacemakers. Gene

Rodenberry put a Soviet on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, when the threat of Communism

had nearly led to a nuclear holocaust less than three years earlier; he put a black woman on the bridge

when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was still marching in Alabama and Mississippi to attempt to end the

Jim Crow laws which had segregated and disheartened African-Americans since the turn of the century.

As a child, I immersed myself in the world of science fiction, because as a child, I sought that

simplicity. Nowadays, I have (like Rodriguez), come to appreciate the corruptible without abandoning

myself to nihilism or pessimism. Neither view was entirely fulfilling; neither view really satisfied both

my gut (which knows that there must be something better in the world) and my brain (which like the

old men Rodriguez references has seen enough mindless sorrow to doubt). Then, one day, I read a

passage of the book The Plague, which I could feel rearranging the furniture of my mind as I read it.

The passage describes what we readers would think is heroism and fortitude in the face of a terrible

disease, among people who, like the people affected by AIDS in the church Rodriguez attends, show

fortitude in the face of plague. Then the author begins a sidebar:

“The narrator is inclined to think that by attributing overimportance to praiseworthy

 actions one may, by implication, be baying indirect but potent homage to the worse side

of human nature. For this attitude implies that actions shine out as rare exceptions, while

callousness and apathy are the general rule. The narrator does not share this view. The

evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much

harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than

bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this

that we call vice or virtue...” (Camus 131)

Camus' assertion here is that all men intend to do good, but that without the proper knowledge,

they will err and commit acts which seem evil to the more straightforward mind.

So when I returned to watching science fiction with my brother recently, we found ourselves

gravitating toward different shows. Most of all, we fell in love with an early 1990s show called

Babylon 5, because of its artful depiction of good and evil as it evolves over the course of the show.

The plot structure seems simple at the beginning; deliberately and deceptively so. The humans are

caught between a struggle between Vorlons (an alien race which appears to humans in the form of

angels), and a voiceless group of invisible creatures known as the Shadows. The Shadows never speak

directly through the first three seasons; they merely kill, maim, and destroy. The Vorlons advise, and

counsel, and direct the humans to destroy Shadows. Somewhere in Season 3, however, the dynamic

changes. The Shadows finally make direct contact with humans to explain their side of the story.

In a nutshell, the Vorlons and the Shadows are both ancient races who took it upon themselves

to guide the development of humans and other aliens in the galaxy. The Vorlons believed that the best

way to guide development is through a nurturing, ordered, protective way; telling the races only what

they need to know to continue, defusing fights, and providing them with structure and order. The

Shadows, on the other hand, use chaos and competition to fuel the process of evolution; fighting, they

argue, makes races stronger. After hearing both sides, the hero of the show still believes that the
Vorlons are right. And so do the Vorlons. In fact, the Vorlons believe that they are so right that they

begin to destroy entire planets that have sided with the Shadows. In retaliation, the Shadows begin

destroying entire planets that have sided with the Vorlons. The hero, feeling betrayed by the supposedly

“good” Vorlons and the supposedly “bad” Shadows, who have in the end turned out to be the same

thing, lures both sides to a confrontation, where he challenges their ideas in their face. During the

climactic speech, he accuses the Vorlons and the Shadows of being shepards who have not only proven

incapable of guiding the development of the younger races, but lost their own way completely. Rather

than siding with either one of them, he vows to create a third way. He quotes something that a Vorlon

character had said to him once: “Understanding is a triple-edged sword: your side, my side, and the

truth.”

All understanding is a triple-edged sword: one side, the other side, and the truth. One side says

that San Francisco is a utopian society, another says that it is a hellish trap for homosexuals; the truth is

far more complicated. Thom Pain is in love, but his love is complicated, painful, and overall

unpleasant; still it seems to him to be perfect. In the end, it proves to be more complicated. Camus'

narrator rejects 'good' and 'bad' and sides with the truth as well. Perhaps this is part what German

philosopher Friedrich Nietzche meant when he exhorted human beings to travel 'beyond Good and

Evil.'