Mean Martin Manning
by Scott Stein
(ENC Press, 226 pages, $17.95)
This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but a…knock on the
door from a busybody do-gooder.
Epic conceit is the bread and butter of the dystopian author:
The machines are rising or falling, with apocalyptic consequences;
the government has collapsed or else been usurped by theocrats or
fascists or fascist theocrats (but seldom, strangely,
Objectivists); humanity is doing battle with giant insects or
having its potential limited by genetic coding or…well, let’s
just say it’s hardly ever a walk in the park out there in the
far-beyond.
By contrast, the Nanny State dystopia envisioned by Drexel
University professor Scott Stein in his satirical novel Mean Martin
Manning is smaller in scope, relying more on the morning
newspaper for inspiration than a crystal ball hazy with dire
prophecy. Crafting a breezily subversive, funny narrative out of a
barely hyperbolized modern American zeitgeist,
Stein spins perhaps a bit too-timely-for-comfort cautionary
tale.
MARTIN MANNING, A ONCE-POPULAR commercial artist, has not left his
apartment in decades. Within its walls the septuagenarian has
constructed an idiosyncratic utopia, having all essential supplies
delivered, collecting ceramic frogs, watching trashy television
programs, never changing out of his bathrobe and subsisting mostly
on salami and cheese hoagies — heavy on the mayo — as he
leisurely awaits the Grim Reaper.
Much like the hapless Eloi of H.G. Wells’ heavy-handed dystopian
class war parable The Time Machine, in his bubble Manning
fails to recognize what easy prey he has become. Unlike the Eloi,
it isn’t ravenous subterranean monsters that break his reverie.
Instead, it is a prim and proper bureaucrat at his door named Alice
Pitney, a nightmare version of Supernanny Jo Frost empowered by executive
order of the governor to administer a new neighborhood
life-improvement zone.
Manning has tailored his life exactly to his own quirky pursuit
of happiness, sustained by his own resources and harming no one.
Alas, Alice Pitney hews tightly to a view of humanity akin to the
one espoused by Sigmund Freud in The Future of an
Illusion: The “masses are lazy and unintelligent,” the father
of psychoanalysis wrote, with “no love for instinctual
renunciation.” They require elite leaders, Freud explained to
induce them “to perform the work and undergo the renunciations on
which the existence of civilization depends.” It’s an ethos fairly
far removed from the non-coercion principle.
In other words, Pitney is there to make Manning eat his
vegetables, both literally and figuratively. If Martin Manning
isn’t renouncing the things or behaviors she believes he should, he
isn’t progressing. And if he isn’t progressing, he certainly isn’t
improving. Failure to improve clearly places him in noncompliance
with the rules and regulations of a life-improvement zone, however
content he may erroneously believe he is.
“I’m sure that you think you don’t want help,” Pitney tells the
shut-in when he tries to opt out of her non-optional assistance.
“That’s standard. In fact, not wanting help is one of the signs of
needing it. Yours is a textbook case.”
A FEW DAYS OF PASSIVE RESISTANCE and one Elian Gonzales-style raid
to remove him from his apartment later, Martin Manning finds
himself in a brave new world of few allies, but armies of
sycophants and apologists. “We’re a bit outside my area of
expertise,” a doctor, moments before performing an under duress
colonoscopy at Pitney’s behest, explains when Manning protests that
his constitutional rights are being violated, to say nothing of his
poor colon. “I can only assume they had a good reason.”
“Very few people believe that they’re pursuing selfish ends
exclusively, or that they need a big, rhetorical goosing from their
elected officials to get up and do the right thing,” Andrew
Ferguson writes of this societal tic. “But with a little
persuasion, people can be made to think that other people
need a goosing.” And no matter how much lip service is paid to our
foundational rugged individualism, it is hard to deny “goosing” now
occupies a heroic space in our culture.
Stein captures this cultural pathos extraordinarily well,
putting Manning through, alternately, a hellishly inverted version
of This Is Your Life, during which a long parade of
disgruntled people from his past testify to his meanness at a
therapeutic show trial (“Apparently Pitney has been unable to track
down some transsexual paraplegic lesbian dwarf virgin of Eskimo
descent and Aztec heritage, whose future had been shattered by my
lack of sensitivity to her special needs,” Manning acidly observes
when testimony concludes); a guest spot on a
Dr.-Phil-by-way-of-Oprah pop psychologist’s television show (“After
a brief time in private practice, specializing in family therapy, I
found an agent and got a syndication deal,” Dr. Karen says by way
of explaining her qualification, adding, “Plus — and this is no
minor achievement — I single-handedly made broaches popular
again”); and a session with a man who works to end racism by
getting patients to scream racist epithets (“Your racism is so
real, so central to who you are, you’re afraid to shout the truth
in your heart,” Mr. Bob snarls at Manning when he refuses to shout
a certain loaded word Jesse Jackson recently employed. “Afraid
you’ll lose the essence of who you are if you purge your
hatred.”)
In between these sessions Manning returns to an empty apartment,
all his material possessions confiscated by Pitney to reduce
self-improvement distractions and wean him from the wrong kind of
materialism. (As Manning learns from a local university consumerism
expert, cheap ceramic frogs are symptomatic of bad materialism
while much more expensive first edition novels and pretentious
abstract expressionism paintings are symptomatic of a refined
cultural palate.)
“Now our renunciations have failed us,” Philip Reiff wrote in
The Triumph of the Therapeutic of the end result of
Freud-worshipping “psychologizers” like Pitney who become “fully
established as the pacesetters” of cultural change. “Less and less
is given back bettered.”
“Less than zero,” Manning might say. Left with none of what he
loves, the man dubbed “Mean Martin Manning” foregoes progress at
the barrel of a gun for a campaign of creative and oftentimes
hilarious vengeance, the details of which it would do no good to
ruin here.
IN THE CLOSING PAGES of Mean Martin Manning a hardly
chastened Alice Pitney stands next to the governor who empowered
her as he announces his bid for the presidency. A national
“life-improvement zone,” one presumes, cannot be far off, and as
Martin Manning looks out into the cheering throng he has an
epiphany: He has been dragged out into a world where individuals
are not victims but, indeed, the enablers of those who
seek to infantilize us and codify their own arbitrary mores as
inviolable:
Alice Pitney was only possible because the governor
gave her power. The governor was only possible because the people
gave him power. And his opponent, with the same damn plans, was
only possible for the same reason. It was hopeless…I looked
around and saw only Alice Pitneys, little tyrants
everywhere.
Shawn Macomber is a contributing editor to The
American Spectator.
