CRUEL BRITANNIA

It was with great interest that we stumbled upon yesterday’s posting on the Observer of Design web-oriented logging unit: a take-down by one Randy Nakamura of the so-called “steampunkery” movement. As with many commentators on the article, we believe that M. Nakamura seems to have missed the point entirely. We don’t, however, share their reasons for this belief.

For those in the don’t-know, steampunkism is a movement in which people with a fair amount of disposable income and jobs that don’t require excessive overtime create a kind of fantasy world that clings to the skirts of the past, a world that hearkens back to the heady early days of H.G. Vernian discovery, when the strangeness of the world was still new. They are Victoriana obsessives who limn a once-possible post-Tesla present that slipped through the fingers of our ancestors. They are dreamers. They are nerds.

Why, M. Nakamura asks, would anyone in their right mind be interested in turning the clock back to the grimmest days of the Industrious Revolution, during which entire families were forced to live inside toxin-spewing factory smokestacks (utilizing a unique bunking system) and class prejudice made it nearly impossible for anyone lacking a peerage to find decent toilet facilities? What romance can be wrung from a time in which provincialism was stuffed into East India crates and marketed to the world as imperialism?

First of all, the world was newer then, and a much larger place – literally, a few hundred extra miles around the equator. But this doesn’t fully explain the steampunkers’ forward-thinking nostalgia. In fact, all begloved fingers point to the stocky profile that loomed above the entire ill-conceived era, who lent her name to all forms of oppression, unchecked environmental degradation, and all-around haughtiness, the Doyenne of Devilry herself: Queen Victoria.

A little-reported phenomenon is that the majority of steampunkists worship HRH as a goddess – a sort of puffy, potato-like, impeccably mannered incarnation of H. Ryder Haggard’s tropical “She.” And like all goddesses, she refuses to remain dead. The fact is, the original claque of steampunkophytes congregated soon before her death and devised a plan. Knowing they would be unable to prevent her death and, with it, the flow of temporal progress, they plotted an eventual return to the world of their times, a world that would be heralded by the resurrection of Victoria herself. This hideous junta was led by William Jennings Darwin, the inventor of DNA. By injecting this new genetic chemical into the dying Queen’s bloodstream, he was able to extract a few parcels of her life-essence, which would be stored in formaldehyde until the technology was available to build a new Queen from these paltry remains.

As the recent wave of quaint, 19th-centuryesque gadgets and paraphernalia attest, those close to the project feel that the future (in the form of the past) is almost upon us. They want their newly revived Queen to see a world that she would recognize, abetted by progress that would make her proud. Whether their mission will prove, in the end, to be a genuine success, or yet another aborted eschaton, remains to be seen. In the meantime, we can admire the aesthetics of their brass-lined baubles and leathery laptops, but let us not fool ourselves: steampunkophiles are not harmless hobbyists, but the exponents of a dangerous cult, and should be approached with appropriate caution.

HEAVEN’S GREAT (We Hope, For Their Sakes)

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the Heaven’s Gate cult mass suicide. When the Halley’s Bop comet appeared over American skies in 1997, the members of this fringe religion shocked the nation by chewing on jellied Chuckles candies poisoned with arsenic, believing that by leaving their human shells they would join the crew of the spaceship they claimed was hiding either inside or behind the comet (no one was ever terribly clear on that point). Now that a decade has passed, is there anything new to be learned from the cultists’ foolish example?

After being cruelly disappointed by a major film flop so severe that it changed the face of Hollywood bureaucracy, director Michael Cimino went into a period of self-imposed exile in the California desert. He emerged with a new name, Marshall Applewhite, and a vision far stranger than any mere three-and-a-half hour cinematic trifle. Convinced that human beings could join a superior race of interstellar beings by embracing technology and castrating themselves, Applewhite joined forces with Senator Al Gore to invent the Internet, without the Senator fully understanding his partner’s dark intent.

Applewhite used this new communication medium to attract various nerds interested in meeting aliens, much the way it is still used today. Additionally, inventing the Internet created a demand for web design, which allowed the Heaven’s Gate community to make money while not having to deal too directly with other people who might find their lack of genitals off-putting. (To throw people off the scent, they invented Internet porn for good measure.) When the comet appeared in Spring 1997, it seemed as good an omen as any. Breaking into their vast reserve of quarters (the only currency by which the cult would accept payment for their web design), they raided the nation’s vending machines to liberate the precious sugar-sprinkled confections that would be the vessels of their mortal coil-shedding.

We dated a member of the cult once, about a year or two before the incident. Accustomed to potential mates with a greater-than-average interest in extraterrestrials and self-immolation, we thought little of it at the time. Upon hearing of her community’s having gone all Jonestown on itself, we were retrospectively thankful that the action never progressed further than second base; if the cult’s male members were known for, well, removing their male members, we shudder to think what the women did in kind.

Perhaps, though, it is those of us who remain that missed our chance at graceful, satisfying lives. Perhaps the denizens of Heaven’s Gate are speeding around now in their souped-up, custom-fitted comet, making merry with a group of otherworldly beings far sexier and more awesome than anything our inadequate brains and hearts can currently visualize. If we are still alive when the comet returns in the year 4380, maybe we too will hop on and join the party for its next go-round.