This recent article entitled The Ten Stupidest Utopias! brought back memories. If the author had read the final paper I wrote in my Utopian Fiction class at UC Berkeley back in 1987, I’m sure my utopia would have easily cracked the top 10.

The final exam for the class was to write our own utopian (or dystopian) short story. Mine involved a global thermonuclear war breaking out during a Super Bowl. The only human survivors of the war were 80,000 football fans watching the game inside a concrete domed stadium.

The civilization that emerged from this catastrophe used the NFL as its cultural foundation and economic model. Everybody lived in domed cities (to keep the radiation out), cities were organized into divisions, and divisions were assigned industries in which they would compete economically. Only the NFC East cities would make, say, beer, while only the AFC West cities would make, for example, clothing.

Any profits the cities earned were invested in the football team. The more efficient your economy, the better your football team. What better economic incentive is there than that?

Now, that’s clearly a stupider utopia than Plato’s Republic, or William Gibson’s Neuromancer, wouldn’t you say?

I thought about using baseball as a model instead, but the sex and violence of football just makes for a better story.

I dug around in my old papers, and tried to find the story. I found my first draft, but not my final paper. Dang. Where did I put it? I gotta do some cleaning up around here. My house is dystopianly disorganized.