Don't Panic
By Darrell Lee
In the opening moments of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a bewildered Englishman named Arthur Dent is informed that his house is being demolished to make way for a bypass. Moments later, he learns that his entire planet is being demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. The sheer, compounding, bureaucratic absurdity of this is played for laughs. It is also, unfortunately, the most accurate description of being an American voter in the 21st century.
We live in a political landscape that has out-satired satire. The daily news reads like a script rejected by a drunken Douglas Adams for being too unbelievable. We are governed by a system that combines the mind-numbing bureaucracy of the Vogons, the performative narcissism of Zaphod Beeblebrox, and the perpetual, bewildered panic of Arthur Dent. To navigate this political galaxy, we no longer need a civics textbook. We need a towel, a good stiff drink, and a copy of the Guide.
At the heart of the story is Arthur Dent, a man whose only crime is wanting to live his life, drink his tea, and not have his home unexpectedly pulverized. Arthur is the perfect stand-in for the modern American electorate. He is a man perpetually blindsided by colossal, life-altering decisions in which he had no say.
Arthur’s primary complaint is one of transparency. He fumes at the demolition crew that the plans for the bypass were never accessible. The crew chief, in a magnificent display of bureaucratic indifference, replies, "The plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months...we’ve got to build the bypass."
This is the American political process in a nutshell. We are constantly told that incomprehensible, 2,000-page omnibus bills, corporate tax carve-outs, and byzantine regulatory changes were "available for public comment" on some obscure government website. Like Arthur, we only find out about the policy when the bulldozer is already on our lawn. We are expected to have the legal expertise of a D.C. lobbyist and the cosmic awareness of a seasoned political operative, all while just trying to get to work and pay our bills. We are the ultimate passengers in our own democracy, clad in a metaphorical bathrobe, wondering why the galaxy's elites decided our planet was "mostly harmless" and, ultimately, disposable.
If the voter is Arthur, the modern politician is Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed, flash-and-no-substance President of the Galaxy. Adams explains Zaphod's role perfectly: "The job of the Galactic President is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it."
Does that not sound chillingly familiar? We have entered the era of the performer-in-chief, where a politician's primary function is to be a media spectacle. The job is no longer to govern, but to distract. It is to generate clicks, to "own the libs," to "fight for the people," to star in a nonstop reality show of rallies, social media posts, and manufactured outrage. Zaphod’s great presidential achievement is stealing the Heart of Gold, a spectacular, headline-grabbing stunt that serves no one but himself. He is a creature of pure, unadulterated ego.
The two heads are the most brilliant metaphor for a modern political candidate. One head spouts the pre-planned, teleprompter-approved talking points about "our shared values" and "bipartisan solutions." The other, wilder head winks at the camera, speaks to the base, and reassures them that he doesn't really mean all that boring stuff. A modern politician must be two people at once: the statesman and the showman, the healer and the brawler. Zaphod just makes this internal contradiction an external reality. He is the logical endpoint of a celebrity-obsessed culture that has decided it would rather be entertained by its leaders than governed by them.
While Zaphod is busy being famous, the Vogons are the ones who actually run the galaxy. The Vogons are not evil; they are far worse. They are a soul-crushing, indifferent administrative state. They are "The Swamp." They are the DMV, the IRS, and every regulatory body rolled into one beige, nihilistic package. They are the force that demolishes Earth, not out of malice, but because the proper forms were filled out in triplicate.
The Vogons' most famous trait is their poetry. It is the third worst in the universe, a form of agonizing, nonsensical torture. Anyone who has ever tried to read the U.S. Tax Code knows what Vogon poetry feels like. It is a language designed to be impenetrable, to dull the mind, and to force submission. This is the serious, unseen part of our government. While Zaphod is tweeting, the Vogons are quietly drafting regulations and enforcing statutes that dictate every aspect of our lives. They are the "Deep State" that conservatives fear, and the "corporate capture" that liberals decry. They are the unmovable object, the institutional inertia that ensures nothing truly changes, no matter which two-headed celebrity happens to be president.
The rest of the Guide's cast perfectly populates this political hellscape. Ford Prefect is the media pundit class. He’s an "insider"—he knows the world is ending. But this knowledge doesn't inspire him to save it; it inspires him to get a good stiff drink and make sure his entry in the Guide is up to date. He is the D.C. journalist who explains to Arthur why his house being destroyed is a sad but necessary part of a larger, more complex story. He has cocktails with the powerful, observes the chaos with a detached, ironic amusement, and offers no solutions.
Trillian (Tricia McMillan) is the policy wonk. She is, by any objective measure, the most qualified person on the ship. She is a brilliant astrophysicist who was ignored at a party on Earth for being too smart, and she is ignored on the Heart of Gold while Zaphod gets to be "President." She is the competent candidate, the overlooked expert, the one who actually understands the math of the "Infinite Improbability Drive" (the news cycle) while others are busy having ego-driven adventures. As a political adviser, she can’t get any elected official to listen to her advice because it “doesn’t appeal to the base”. As a candidate, she isn’t flashy enough to get the American voter’s attention.
Marvin the Paranoid Android is the American cynic. He is the "doomer," the "Why bother voting?" crowd. With a "brain the size of a planet," Marvin is acutely, painfully aware of how absurd and futile everything is. "Here I am," he moans, "brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to park cars." This is the voter who has concluded that the entire system is hopelessly broken. This cynicism is completely justified, but it is also completely paralyzing. Marvin’s depression is a self-fulfilling prophecy that just makes the universe a more miserable place for everyone else.
The final political parallel in the Guide is the quest for "42." A race of hyper-intelligent beings builds a supercomputer, Deep Thought, to find the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." After 7.5 million years of calculations, the computer produces the answer: "42." The beings are furious. The answer is useless, simple, and makes no sense. Deep Thought calmly explains that the answer is meaningless because they never actually knew what the question was. This is American politics. We are obsessed with finding the "42" for our problems. "Build the Wall." "Medicare for All." "Defund the Police." "Make America Great Again." These are not policies; they are slogans treated as ultimate answers. We feed our complex, nuanced societal problems into the supercomputer of our 24-hour news cycle, demanding a simple, satisfying answer. And when we get one, we are furious that it solves nothing. We are so desperate for a "42" that we have stopped doing the hard work of figuring out what "Ultimate Question" we are even trying to ask. What does it mean to be a successful, prosperous, and just society in the 21st century? We don't know, but we're pretty sure the answer is "42."
Douglas Adams gave us a gift. He gave us a mirror to see our own absurdity. The Vogon spacecrafts are positioning themselves for Earth's destruction. Our two-headed president is on TV, distracting us. The media is at the pub. And the cynics are telling us it's all pointless anyway. The only advice the Guide offers is "Don't Panic." It may be the only sane political strategy left.
Darrell Lee is the founder and editor of The Long Views, he has written two science fiction novels exploring themes of technological influence, science and religion, historical patterns, and the future of society. His essays draw on these long-standing interests and apply a similar analytical lens to politics, literature, artistic, societal, and historical events. He splits his time between rural east Texas and Florida’s west coast, where he spends his days performing variable star photometry, dabbling in astrophotography, thinking, napping, scuba diving, fishing, and writing, not necessarily in that order.