The technomutants are already here

Originally published 25 September 1995

No, I haven’t seen the new big-bud­get Stal­lone movie, Judge Dredd. But when my youngest son was liv­ing abroad he acquired a volu­mi­nous col­lec­tion of the British com­ic 2000 A.D., in which the film’s epony­mous hero held vio­lent sway.

And a real­ly, real­ly nasty char­ac­ter he was, Judge Dredd, in a strip of such extreme scuzzi­ness as to make the Bat­man and Cap­tain Mar­vel comics of my youth look like Dis­ney concoctions.

Dredd is the law, so to speak: judge, jury and exe­cu­tion­er rolled into one. He lives in a place called Mega-City One, a sprawl­ing metrop­o­lis on the east­ern seaboard of the for­mer Unit­ed States, where peo­ple are housed in sky­scrap­ing City Blocks by the tens of thou­sands. Beyond the city lim­its is the Cursed Earth, a waste­land inhab­it­ed by assort­ed slime­balls and tech­no­mu­tants who move about in ghast­ly punk-tech machines.

I occa­sion­al­ly perused those comics, if only because of a sense of dread that the Cursed Earth might be just around the corner.

I was right. It is here.

It used to be that we could escape from the noise and con­ges­tion of the city into the tran­quil­i­ty of unspoiled coun­try­side. A day at the beach. A walk in the woods. A bicy­cle spin down peace­able lanes.

No more. The ghast­ly punk-tech machines are everywhere.

High­est on the list of offend­ers are the jet-skis, ear-split­ting Dreddnoughts of coastal waters and inland lakes. This sum­mer I watched buzzing swarms of these wretched things dri­ve ter­ri­fied young swim­mers onto the sand. “See me! see me!” the machine’s infer­nal engine shrieks, “I’m young, I’m male, I’m Judge Dredd and I don’t give a drokk whose after­noon at the beach I ruin.”

Almost as bad are the snow­mo­biles. Fresh soft snow. Pine boughs dip­ping under pris­tine bur­dens. Blessed silence. Then — VROOOOM! VRRMMMMM! Fleets of gaso­line-pow­ered peace shat­ter­ers, judge, jury, and exe­cu­tion­er, dystopi­an vio­la­tors of the win­ter woods.

Two‑, three- and four-wheeled ATVs, all-ter­rain vehi­cles, and we do mean all. Moun­tains, deserts, dunes, forests, mead­ows — no place safe from these earth-goug­ing robo-toys for boys of all ages. A beau­ti­ful walk­ing trail in my town has been turned into an erod­ed gul­ly by recre­ation­al vehicles.

Have you noticed how these high-deci­bel play machines increas­ing­ly look like time-trav­eled imports from Mega-City One? For most of our cen­tu­ry, vehi­cle design­ers hid the tech­nol­o­gy — engines, gears, pipes, etc. — under a pseu­do-organ­ic skin. Now, Dredd-like, the tech is worn on the sleeve, accen­tu­at­ed in shout­ing col­ors, glitzed with chrome.

The Great Out­doors has become a mega-indus­try: ATVs, snow­mo­biles, jet-skis, per­son­al hov­er­craft, four-by-fours. Nature is no longer a place for repose or spir­i­tu­al ful­fill­ment; it’s a venue for fren­zied mechan­i­cal fun.

OK, I’m being crotch­ety, but the bat­tle lines are drawn between Thore­au­vian con­ser­va­tion­ists and 2000 A.D. recre­ation­ists. It’s a fight for the last rem­nants of organ­ic wild­ness. The wind in the wil­lows vs. the infer­nal com­bus­tion engine. Walden Pond vs. the Cursed Earth.

Writ­ing in Lon­don’s Sun­day Times, Jonathan Leake has described the zany con­flict rag­ing in Britain over the loud col­ors of recre­ation­al cloth­ing. No kid­ding, the Brits are hav­ing it on about the col­ors of clothes.

Lurid Lycra and skin-cling­ing syn­thet­ics in Judge Dredd col­ors. Aero­dy­nam­ic hel­mets and high-tech gloves in gar­ish hues. No more wet­suits or bik­ing shorts in basic black; now it’s lime green, flu­o­res­cent lilac, Day-Glo orange. Zip it, creep. Krak! Whok! The Judge is here.

So gaudy is the garb of hik­ers, bik­ers, canoeists, etc. that farm­ers com­plain the cloth­ing star­tles sheep and caus­es ewes to mis­car­ry. Exag­ger­a­tion per­haps, but the Nation­al Trust, Britain’s largest con­ser­va­tion group, and the Coun­cil for Nation­al Parks have tak­en a stand against bright col­ors that destroy “the sense of iso­la­tion that most peo­ple seek in the countryside.”

In a sim­i­lar vein, the Nation­al Trust has banned wind­surfers from Wast Water in the Lake Dis­trict, which Leake calls “one of the finest inland venues for the sport,” on the grounds that the lurid sails and wet­suits spoiled the view.

The pres­i­dent of the Ram­blers’ Asso­ci­a­tion of Britain has appealed for recre­ation­al cloth­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers to tone down their designs so that they don’t clash with the landscape.

Are these protests about cloth­ing elit­ist? Anti-safe­ty? Sub­lime­ly sil­ly? Prob­a­bly all three. But one mem­o­rably bright day this past sum­mer I looked back down the trail from the shoul­der of Car­raun­tuo­hil, Ire­land’s high­est moun­tain. The val­ley below was lit­tered with out­landish col­or where neon-clad hik­ers made their way uphill. I tried to imag­ine John Muir rang­ing the high Sier­ras in flu­o­res­cent lilac and magenta.

At least that par­tic­u­lar val­ley has not yet been pol­lut­ed with the offend­ing deci­bels of ATVs, nor have its frag­ile heath­ery bogs yet been reduced to a mud­dy criss­cross of tire tracks. But that can only be a mat­ter of time. The Cursed-Earth tech­no­mu­tants and their Dreddful machines are on the way.