Mockingjay, part 1

[osprey_archer]

The Society for Improved Dictatorship having definitively washed their hands of President Snow, I can’t exactly write up my impressions of Mockingjay in letter format, but I do want to record a few things to weave into the Society’s future letters (which will, in fact, be past letters, written before President Snow’s disastrous dictatorship-destroying decisions. If I ever post these elsewhere I will have to clean them up & sort out the timeline.)



First, we finally have some insight into the political structure of Panem! Katniss’s tiny mind is blown when her District 13 hosts say that they want to institute a republic once President Snow is overthrown, so clearly there’s not much voting going on in Panem, not even a rubber stamp “It’s election day! Have fun voting for the one candidate on the ballot” election. Either President Snow inherited his position from his father, or got it by duking it out with the ruling council after the former president croaked.

And speaking of District 13, President Snow made such a mistake when he pretended they were all dead rather than setting them up as the creepy militaristic latter-day Sparta to Panem’s open-minded, entertaining Athens. They have nukes trained on Panem at all times! Any dictator worth his salt ought to be able to whip up an ongoing firestorm of public hatred for District 13 based on that fact alone.

Nothing unifies people like a common enemy! President Snow should have thoughtfully provided one - other than himself, I mean; after he left the position open, his people decided he was the enemy, and look where that’s gotten him.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

President Snow made such a mistake when he pretended they were all dead rather than setting them up as the creepy militaristic latter-day Sparta to Panem’s open-minded, entertaining Athens.

The Snow presidency seems to have a blanket no-outside-enemies policy, which is an interesting approach for a dictatorship.

Maybe there's a patriotic Panem myth of being Humanity's Last Stand and it's considered too much of a nuisance to complicate that picture by encouraging anyone, even the ruling elite, to think about the rest of the world. I don't think we hear of anything existing outside Panem at all except wilderness (though I could be wrong?)

If District 13 continued to exist in opposition to Panem, that would mean that Panem is no longer the only game in town, giving dissidents somewhere to defect to other than deadly irradiated wilderness. (Whether they could get there without being shot is another matter - but just having it in their heads as a hope is bad enough).

(One problem with this theory is that no one in Panem seems to care about being Humanity's Last Stand at all).

It's probably pretty unlikely that Former North America is the only landmass with humans still on, but clearly they've become massively more isolated from the rest of the world - heck, maybe Panem itself is pulling a District 13 on the post-apocalyptic republics of South America et al. That might be doable if no one has satellites or reliable long-distance transportation; technological development has clearly suffered some setbacks and been diverted into new channels by the Foundation for Maximizing Creepiness.

ANYWAY it shouldn't be too hard to scrape up a common enemy who isn't also an attractive teenager fighting FOR LOVE, but poor Snow lost his groove a long time ago, if he ever had one to begin with. Should have got himself assassinated when he was young and beautiful, and had a nice tacky state funeral, and washed his hands of this mess.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, I hadn't even thought of the Humanity's Last Stand angle, and you are so right, President Snow is absolutely missing a trick by not emphasizing the hell out of that. There's a little bit of it in part 1 on Mockingjay, but he really should have been hammering it home with propaganda for years and years at this point.

IIRC we don't hear anything about the world outside Panem: as far as Katniss knows it's all wilderness and District 13. Maybe all the remaining powers on earth are pulling District 13s on each other? "Leave us alone and we won't complete the nuclear destruction of the planet!"

Or maybe North America's just being weird and isolationist and all the other leftover countries are like "Whatevs, let's just leave those bozos alone, at least they produce some good TV." They eagerly tap into the Hunger Games channel every year.

Given their technological advancement - television, hovercrafts etc. - it just seems unlikely for them to be totally unaware of each other. But perhaps President Snow has kept the knowledge of outsiders to himself, in order to ensure that his people don't get any hopes about running away. He's read about the Berlin Wall; he knows what that kind of hope can do.