Ersatz, Slesar (1967)

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Though I was born before this story was written and am not overly prone to expressions of moral outrage⁠—⁠even so, it was a little jarring. The past is a different country, where their concerns and indifferences are not always the same as those of the later reader. When reading their stories, it is sometimes helpful to consider oneself an explorer.

This story is about war, specifically the sort of war in which rats and roaches would prosper and the living would come to envy the dead. The author is opposed to this. He makes his case by asking upon what things one would focus the mind while waging such a war. Material things⁠—⁠food, drink, shelter. Abstract things⁠—⁠dignity, honor, glory, comradeship. Chivalrous things⁠—⁠the idea that good men fight wars so women will be safe. One by one, the author shows each of these things destroyed by the war itself until desolation remains, rendering the war worse than pointless.

The present-day reader may have seen this dark mid-century vision packaged as nostalgia in places such as the Fallout franchise, and this story does bring Fallout to mind. But at the time this story was written, its dark vision was very clear and present in the popular culture. Night of the Living Dead was released the following year and crystallized the spirit of this dark vision, inspiring a body of further work that continues to be produced to the present day. Three years prior, Lyndon Johnson was elected president using the message of Daisy: that only his election could keep this vision from becoming reality. And this author wants to make clear that it would be an ersatz reality, a poor substitute for what was lost.