Elephants against capitalism

 For the BSpec book club, we read Brooke Bolander's The Only Harmless Great Thing, a very political novella that is about, among other things, Topsy the Elephant and the Radium Girls. (That's not a band, although it would be a great band name). Topsy the Elephant is an elephant that was horrifically executed via electrocution at Coney Island in 1903. The Radium Girls is the name the press gave to a group of female workers who painted watchfaces with radium paint around the First World War. I wasn't previously familiar with the story of Topsy the Elephant (and, in an uncharacteristic bout of squeamishness, I haven't watched the video yet), but a few months ago I did read an entire book about the Radium Girls, Kate Moore's excellent and heartwrenching The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. 

 

The Only Harmless Great Thing combines these two American tragedies into one story. In this timeline, elephants are sentient, and are able to communicate with humans via sign language. When the Radium Girls story breaks, the U.S. Radium Company decides to train elephants to do the job instead, on the theory that since elephants are real big, a little radium won't hurt them like it did the girls (obviously, this is about as true as the idea that since a lot of radium burns out cancer, a little radium is healthy for you). Topsy, aware that she is being poisoned, develops some sympathy for Regan, the dying Radium Girl retained by the company to train her to paint dials, and when the mean, shady foreman abuses Regan, Topsy quite understandably kills him. This gets Topsy sentenced to death. Regan, however, comes up with a desperate plan, aided by another dead Radium Girl who use to work in the mines, for Topsy to avenge herself and the Radium Girls. The historical reverberations of Topsy and Regan's last act of defiance are chronicled in a framing narrative about Kat, a scientist trying to figure out how to warn future generations about a nuclear waste dumping ground. In this timeline, Topsy's suicide bombing made a much bigger cultural impact than the regular old barbaric execution that happened in our own timeline, because humans barbarically destroy so many things and people that it's hard for anything to stick out, and also we don't like to think about it. 

 

The thing that really stands out in this novella is how unapologetically rage-driven it is; in addition to its portrayal of Topsy's suicide bombing as fully and well justified--which is a thing we Do Not Do in American writing these days--Bolander explicitly dunks on the idea of alternate, Disneyfied versions of the story where Topsy decides that Violence Is Never The Answer. The point, the very clear and unmistakeable point, is that while violence might be the last resort or whatever, sometimes, people are left with only that last resort. Sometimes, there isn't any other way, because the people in power have made sure that every other way has been exhausted and rendered impotent. Sometimes the only choices left are to die quietly or to take some of the fuckers with you, and if you've been used and abused into that position, you might as well take some of the fuckers with you. They might learn something. Probably they'll still refuse. But you should fuck them up as best you can anyway. 

 

In our current moment of Amazon sweatshops and child concentration camps and digital fake money that's using up all the energy on the planet, as the U.S. ethnic cleansing machine is fully let off its hook by a rampaging carnival barker of an haut-bourgeois narcissist whose sole discernible talent is leading our idiotic media by the nose into ever more eye-meltingly stupid feats of disinformation, The Only Harmless Great Thing is a timely voice of rage for the exploited and a fearless look into the face of just how inhuman human society really is.