Current events have me thinking, oddly enough, about plant sociability.
Sociability describes how aggressively plants spread. Some stay where right they are, others creep a little, or stay in moderate but contained patches, while the most aggressive will, if left alone, dominate the landscape.
An example might be Canada Goldenrod, which spreads both by seed and rhizome (horizontal arms that shoot out from the main stem). I first saw three, four plants show up in the alley behind our garage a few years ago. This past fall, practically the whole alley was swathed in its eponymous color. Even though the plant’s native to our area, it crowds out less aggressive ones, both native and non.
You can try to remove these plants, or deadhead them before they seed. These strategies tend to work better when there are still relatively few plants in the area. What do you do if a highly social plant has already taken hold? You might introduce other highly social plants that can hold their own against solidago canadensis. You plant ironweed and bee balm, milkweed and Joe Pye.
You meet aggression with aggression. Because that’s what the situation demands.
Mark my words: Pluribus is going to be remembered as the series that best captures this mid-2020s moment. I’m talking not just our current flavor of sycophantic AI chatbots, but also the memory of pandemic alignment, of what we can do if we all work toward a common goal.
If you want to see a society’s subconscious, all you need do is look at their science fiction. What I see here is both a fear of and admiration for collectivism, a fear of and admiration for – intentional or not – an ascendant China. That tension is what makes the first season of this show so interesting. And so American.
Last month I mentioned I was playing the JRPG-inspired game Sea of Stars. I finished that (and enjoyed it!) and moved onto Final Fantasy X, which I finally played after reading Aidan Moher’s history of the genre, the brilliantly named Fight, Magic, Items.
From that book I went right into Matt Alt’s broader-scoped Pure Invention, which opens with a scene from Final Fantasy VII and makes a compelling case that a lot of what’s happening in American society right now happened in Japan decades ago.
Next up bookwise: W. David Marx’s Ametora. And gamewise, send me a JRPG rec, if you have one (preferably one that won’t take 40+ hours to finish).
Jack