Stupid Politics in Literature

Generally speaking, I don't mind apolitical literature. I despise politics and believe that current-day American society has allowed itself to be high-jacked by the notion that politics is the end-all-be-all of existence, so . . .

Most of the time, I say, the less politics the better.

I can't help but get irritated, however, when a story presents a political situation that doesn't take reality into account.

For instance . . .

I recently read a short novel based on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," only with a happy ending. I rather adore sea fantasy/mermaid/merman literature, and truthfully, I'll probably keep this short novel on my Kindle despite finding it rather frustrating.

The frustrating part: the novel postulates that human beings have messy politics because human beings are so controlling and nasty and toxic and power hungry. Merfolk's politics, on the other hand, aren't like that at all. Their king and queen are super nice, more like supervisors, ya know, than actual dictators. All that messy human stuff never happens to them.

The reader is supposed to buy into this despite the fact that one of the ongoing issues in the novel is that the king and queen don't want their youngest son, or any merfolk really, to go to the surface. It's dangerous and puts the merfolk at risk. National security, ya know.

Let's think about this.

If the king and queen--who awesomely enough function out of Maine waters--are localized, then there must be other mer kings and queens throughout the world. Do they all agree that fraternizing with humans or land folk is a bad idea? Really? Does that type of total agreement seem likely for any sentient species? For all of them to absolutely agree on a single issue without exceptions or caveats or yes-buts? As if they were robots--and not the fun Asimov kind?

Both Nesbit and Lewis provide their

merfolk with complicated motivations.

Since it highly unlikely that they would all agree, what do the localized king and queen do when a king and queen from, say, Scandinavian waters decides, "Hey, we need/want to trade with humans." Do all the kings and queens get together for an international summit? What if the summit fails? Do they go to war? How important is security, keeping merfolk safe?

Perhaps this king and queen control--eh hem, sorry--supervise all merfolk throughout the world. So how exactly do they prevent their supervisees from meeting up with humans? How much security do they have operating at any given moment? The son is fairly closely guarded in the days after he returns from seeing his land-based lover. Does this apply to all merfolk?

It's hard to believe that a king and queen in Maine could control/supervise a bunch of merfolk around, say, Australia without a massive standing army. Doesn't a massive standing army betoken a huge infrastructure that costs somebody somewhere an awesome amount of fish or gold or whatever merfolk work for?

Or maybe they don't work. Maybe they float around all day. But in that case, do the security guards and sentries (which exist in the story) volunteer? Is it really possible to get sentient beings to volunteer for things like guard duty? Even if it is a National Service kind of thing?

What if the security guards don't agree with the king and queen? What if they also fall in love with land folk? Who is going to keep them in line? Do security guards and sentries get punished? By whom? Where do they go if they get punished? If they don't go to prison, are they also closely supervised? Wouldn't that involve MORE sentries and security guards?

Do merfolk mind being constantly watched? If not, how are all these sentient merfolk being culturally indoctrinated to believe that constant supervision isn't tedious and infantilizing? Or maybe they are rewarded for spying on each other--but with what? And who decides how they are rewarded?

Or maybe they are cowed into upholding an ideology that they don't entirely agree with. Who is doing the cowing? Do merfolk go to rallies? Under the Sea Political Conventions?

Perhaps, we are supposed to believe that all merfolk are so happy that the prince is a kind of anomaly. That weirdo, going off to want to be with land people. If so, isn't that prejudice? Or at the very least, a stigma?

Maybe the prince wanting to be with a land person is somehow more offensive or dangerous than it is for ordinary citizen merfolk--this argument (coming from the king and queen) would actually make sense, but that would mean that merfolk care about things like reputations and examples and role models. It would suggest that certain individuals, such as royalty, have more sway than ordinary civilians, and the book is at pains to deny this.

Worse: perhaps the prince wanting to be with a land person is consider a special case--because he is so unique and advanced and what-not. In other words, all the other merfolk are drones who only care about robotically obeying their king and queen. The prince is a kind of advanced uberspecies who thinks outside the box.

Sound elitest? So much for the merfolk not having a power-based (however intellectual) hierarchy. (To be fair, the book denies this possibility--other merfolk do fall in love with land folk. But ooooh, the questions that raises.)

I honestly don't think the author thought this far ahead about any of these issues. She is a skilled enough writer to provide enough motivation in the day-to-day interactions of both the prince and his lover to compensate for the senseless political labels.

I find the lack of political commonsense tiresome, anyway.

Writers: simply declaring that one group is bad and power-hungry and awful and another group is wonderful and lovely and sweet doesn't really work if you don't know how the differences could actually be sustained.

So stop doing it already. There's a reason Jane Austen stuck to the day-to-day. She wasn't being parochial when she didn't deliver diatribes on the Napoleonic Wars in her novels. She was being smart.