Reading Through Ex Machina, Up to Book Three

[mrdankelly]

Mitchell Hundred is kind of a douche, isn't he? I know Vaughan is trying to present him as an enlightened, nonpartisan politico, but he seems to be listing toward the too-common attitude that he must be in office because he's meant to be there, and he alone must make the difficult decisions, right or wrong. I think the part that made me vomit was

Comments

[wanderingaengus]

I like that series a lot, although I'll admit it has problems. The Bush line -- and the paranoid terrorism plot -- seemed to me to be relics from the dark days of the early oughts. The early post-9/11 period when a lot of intelligent people were crazy-scared enough to trust George Bush.

I think the book does draw on the dumb American myth that what politics needs is some outsider who will just cut through all the bullshit -- "run the place like a business" is the usual phrase. There's some of that, and the technocratic version of the fable with the engineer-mayor. But, counter to that, Ex Machina does a good job at showing how running a city is just a difficult thing to do. There's not a lot of stupid simple answers presented as the solution to representational government's flaws -- just hard choices.