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  • Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery
  • By Andrew Shaffer
  • Published by Quirk Books, 304 pages
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On Sept. 9, 2016, The New York Times published a piece that, needless to say, did not age particularly well.

Written by Veep showrunner David Mandel, the speculative fiction in question imagined the first 100 days of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Day 5: Clinton plans a “girls’ weekend” with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Day 33: Russia invades the United States, and is handily defeated. Day 63: “Laundry Day. Sixty-three pantsuits sent to cleaners.” On Day 100, Libya rebrands as a Westernized democracy.

Looking back, Mandel’s imagined index of the would-be president’s accomplishments seems pathetic, even beyond its spurious claims to funniness. Hillary’s First 100 Days – and similar pieces emerging in the months before the fateful 2016 presidential election – spoke to a confidence in Clinton’s victory that borders (with hindsight) on arrogance. It also signalled the smug assuredness inherent in the belief that a Trump presidency wasn’t just unlikely, but utterly unfathomable; the comfort of a collective delusion. The ensuing election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States did little to shatter this delusion. Instead, it opened a political pocket universe – a vacuum where Clinton was president, the Democrats still ruled the roost of U.S. political life and the legacy of the Obama administration carried on, unabated by the inconvenient meddling of reality itself.

On Twitter, the hashtag #IfHillaryWon saw HRC diehards imagining an alternate reality where feminine-hygiene products were subsidized by the government, and where things were so calm that people had nothing more interesting to talk about than the daily weather. A post published on Lenny Letter, a recently defunct newsletter curated by Girls creator Lena Dunham, saw Clinton described, unironically, as “light itself.” In the deeper burrows of the internet, scribes produced (digital) reams of sunny liberal fan fiction, with scenarios ranging from Clinton doing battle with Marvel Comics’s Avengers superteam, to Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau getting stoned while discussing marijuana legislation.

The fancies of online fan-fiction communities – exploding with non-canon scenarios in which Captain Kirk and Mister Spock canoodle, or in which characters from the children’s educational franchise The Magic School Bus devolve into drug-fuelled debauchery – are no doubt esoteric, and hardly worth noting outside of valiantly researched academic surveys. But now the online imaginary world that comforts with fantasies of continued Democratic Party confidence is leaking out into the world of publishing proper. Now we have Hope Never Dies. Billed as “An Obama Biden Mystery,” authored by best-selling author Andrew Shaffer (he of, per his bio, “Fifty Shames of Earl Grey and other malarkey” fame), and distributed by Penguin Random House, Hope Never Dies stars a fictionalized version of former vice-president Joe Biden who moonlights as a detective. Tipped off by former boss/BFF Barack Obama, who rides shotgun in Biden’s gas-guzzling vintage Dodge Challenger throughout the ludicrous whodunit, Biden hauls himself out of retirement to get to the bottom of the mysterious death of a local Amtrak conductor. That the stakes of the caper appear so low is, one presumes, meant to be part of the charm. In lieu of operating at some grand, geopolitical scale, here are two Democratic heroes who solve local mysteries simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Hope Never Dies abounds in all manner of pat liberal schmaltz. Early on, Biden mentions having a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell. Later, Trump (who Biden claims he could have handily routed in a general election) is referred to as “the Tweeter-in-Chief.” During a conversation about drug overdoses with the local constabulary, the Biden character offers this mini-soliloquy: “Drug abuse is a disease. We need to stop treating addicts like violent offenders.”

Careful not to make his heroes too milquetoast, Shaffer works in the muscle car, Biden’s traditional breakfast of super-slathered spicy hash browns, and an Obama who alternates between shooting hoops with the local youth and vanishing to smoke cigarettes (or “coffin nails”) like some genuine hard-boiled gumshoe. Such shaggily heroic characterizations target the presumed reader with the precision of a Hellfire missile fired from an Obama-era General Atomics MQ-1 Predator drone.

The question of “who the hell would read this?” feels a bit disingenuous. There is, after all, bound to be some overlap in the market for sustained fantasies of Democratic Party competence and that of middling genre fiction. And those looped in the centre of such a once-improbable Venn diagram are sure to get something (or more) out of Hope Never Dies. (“It is magical,” wrote one reviewer on the book-review fanzine Goodreads. “I’m buying cases of this book for all my friends and relatives this Christmas.”) In a world where historical memory has been so shortened that people giddily meme-ify the warmonger George W. Bush for sneaking a candy to Michelle Obama at John McCain’s funeral, there are no doubt plenty of readers who would happily regress from the pitiful reality of U.S. political life into a world where Obama and Biden rip around in a classic car solving mysteries.

The larger problem with such seemingly trifling fluff isn’t that it offers mere distraction. Rather, such zero-calorie escapism risks recertifying all manner of comforting myths: that Biden would have won, that the Obama administration constitutes some zenith of U.S. leadership, that the former president and his VP are unimpeachably Good and Righteous. Such fictions only consolidate fudged real-world narratives, deepening the cozy pocket universe, and in turn strengthening the sundry delusions that drive political identity.

Many wish we lived in a world where the biggest news story is President Clinton hatching a Girls marathon with Merkel and Theresa May. But wishing won’t make it so. It’s one thing for fiction to serve as a balm easing the stress and horror of daily life. It’s quite another for it to demand – in however trivial, innocent-seeming ways – that we ignore that reality all together.

Against such mollifying, wholly deranged reveries, self-published fantasies about Ms. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus dropping acid with an iguana seem productively surreal, even radical. They’re certainly more fun to read.

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