Alt That’s Fit to Print

I SUPPOSE THE FANTASY SUBGENRE OF “ALTERNATE REALITY” doesn’t altogether count as fakery since such storytelling is usually up-front about its artifice. Nevertheless, I am an easy mark for “what-if-the-Nazis-or-the-Confederacy-had-won” stories and their ilk wherever I can find them. My latest guilty pleasure is For All Mankind, an Apple TV streaming series that imagines what the latter half of the twentieth century would have looked like if the Russians had beaten us to the moon.

Besides all the hyped-up soap-opera among technicians, pilots, bureaucrats, and the people who love them, there are so many intriguing background what-ifs that make up part of the fun: Alexei Leonov, and not Neil Armstrong, becomes the first moon walker; Ted Kennedy is elected president; John Lennon doesn’t get shot; and several American women fly into space well before Sally Ride actually does in the 1980s.

One of those women astronauts attracts the interest of Republican Party campaign guru-goon Lee Atwater as a potential candidate. At one point, the Atwater of this alternate reality says something that he could have said (and likely did) in our own. It’s about pro wrestling being the only “pure” sport because it drops all pretense of true competition. Americans, Alternate Lee maintains, are more into drama than they are into whether or not something is true. This hypothetical but plausible rationalization from a now-dead-in-our-own-time political fixer goes a long way to explain the last actual presidential administration, and maybe a few more within recent memory, as well as the shared delusions of voters who think Joe Biden stole the White House. Believing it’s true makes it so.

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