Heinlein and the Problem of the Present

Having read the new biography of Robert A. Heinlein, I indulged myself in dipping back into some of the novels. Heinlein worked out a Future History in which he set many of his stories. Obviously, any writer who attempts predictions is usually in for a bit of embarrassment---it's difficult at best to know what might happen next week let alone next century. But Heinlein had more than the usual "horse sense" when it came to sociology and the way in which history unfolds and he often nailed the essence of a coming period if not the specifics. (He tagged the Sixties the Crazy Years all the way back in the Forties.) One of his chillier stories is a short novel called If This Goes On--- in which he depicts the Second American Revolution. This time it occurs in response to a homegrown despotism---a theocracy, established by the First Prophet, a combination of Huey Long and Billy Sunday named Nehemiah Scudder. (You can find it published with two other stories in the book Revolt In 2100.) I reads this in seventh grade, while attending a Lutheran school, and it had a lasting impact on me. In the early Fifties certain publishers started packaging the better SF novels in hard cover for the first time and this was one of Heinlein's. He wrote an afterword to it and I just reread that. In view of our current social circumstances and in light of so much that gets discussed here at Dangerous Intersection I would like to quote two paragraphs in particular. Mind you, Heinlein wrote this in 1952.

Nevertheless this business of legislating religious beliefs into law has never been more than sporadically successful in this country---Sunday closing laws here and there, birth control legislation in spots, the Prohibition experiment, temporary enclaves of theocracy such as Voliva's Zion, Smith's Nauvoo, a few others. The country is split up into such a variety of faiths and sects that a degree of uneasy tolerance now exists from expedient compromise; the minorities constitute a majority of opposition against each other. Could it be otherwise? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not---but a combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday's efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck. Throw in a depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negroism, and a good large dose of anti-"furriners" in general and anti-intellectuals here at home and the result might be something quite frightening---particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington.
I was very much struck by that. Looking around, it made me even sadder, since obviously there have always been people with foresight enough to see what might happen and how and yet they are often ignored. In Heinlein's case, because he was just one of those "Buck Rogers guys" with all the cookie ideas about space and aliens and such like. But obviously even then the shortcomings of our "voting system" raised a possible red flag for some. Anyway, I thought I'd share that little near-forgotten gem.

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Robert A. Heinlein In Perspective

I finished reading William H. Patterson's large new biography of Robert A. Heinlein yesterday. I knew I wanted to write something about it, but I gave it a day to simmer. Frankly, I'm still not sure what to say other than I was positively impressed. Basically, Patterson achieved the remarkable goal of demythologizing the man without gutting him. I've read any number of biographies of famous (and infamous) personalities which tended either to be hagiographic (and therefore virtually useless as any kind of honest reference) or a brutal airing of personal failings in some sort of attempt to drag the subject down to "our level" and resulting in a catalogue of reasons to think ill of the person under study. (This is one reason I tend to urge people that if they like an artist's work, read it all if possible, see it all, listen to it all before finding out about them as human beings. Too often the person, depending on the book, spoils the work for many.) Patterson has done something useful for aspiring science fiction writers. (Hell, for any kind of writer as far as that goes.) Heinlein's reputation casts a long, dark shadow across the field. He is one of the pantheon of timeless Greats and in many ways the most intimidating of the lot. It is, I think, useful to know that he had just as much trouble getting started---and staying started---as any other decent writer. (Harlan Ellison has observed that the hard part is not becoming a writer but staying a writer, that anyone basically can get lucky at the beginning, but over time the work simply has to stand up for itself.) The legend has been repeated ad nauseum, how Heinlein saw an ad for a short story contest, wrote a story, then decided to send it to Astounding instead of the contest because Campbell paid better, and it sold. That story was Life Line. From there, up was the only direction Heinlein went. The reality is much more as one might expect. True, he sold that first story to Campbell and sold more, but not without rejections getting in there and Campbell making him rewrite some of the pieces and not without a lot of wrestling with reputation and deadlines. Writing is hard damn work and this book shows what Heinlein had to go through. Yes, he was better than most, but he wasn't teflon. And he had to learn, just like any of us. Reading about time spent living in a four-by-seven foot trailer on $4.00 a day while he sweated a new story makes him suddenly very human. But also very admirable. The other problem with Heinlein is that he did codifying work. There were time travel stories, generation ship stories, alien invasion stories, and so on and so forth before him, but he wrote a number of stores---all lengths---that more or less set the standard for how those stories should be done. He wrote "defining" stories, and for a long time people gauged their work and the work of others by that gold standard. One gets tired of having such a bar hanging over one's head all the time and naturally a reaction emerged over time that was as nasty as it was inevitable, casting Heinlein as the writer to work in opposition to. By the time I discovered Heinlein, during my own golden age at 11, 12, and 13, he was already being touted as "the Dean of Space Age fiction." [More . . . ]

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My kind of house

Unlike Tony Coyle, I'm an introvert (I've tested off the charts as an introvert). Also, the pace seems to be getting too frenetic down in the city these days. My life seems to be in balance about like this hammer and ruler. You see, I'm not in a Koyaanisqatsi phase. Therefore, when I found this site, I starting thinking that I'd like to live in one of these houses, just for a month or two or three.

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Why income disparity matters

In a series of articles that he calls "The Great Divergence," Timothy Noah advises that in the United States of Inequality, income disparity is rapidly growing and it does not bode well for our country? Here's an excerpt from today's posting at Slate.com:

Income distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador. Income inequality is actually declining in Latin America even as it continues to increase in the United States. Economically speaking, the richest nation on earth is starting to resemble a banana republic. The main difference is that the United States is big enough to maintain geographic distance between the villa-dweller and the beggar. As Ralston Thorpe tells his St. Paul's classmate, the investment banker Sherman McCoy, in Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities: "You've got to insulate, insulate, insulate."
Wikipedia offers much more information on income distribution in the United States.

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Refusing to recognize marriage

Tom Ackerman has an provocative approach for dealing with a constantly simmering problem here in America: gay marriage. Whenever someone mentions their husband or wife (or their "marriage"), he makes a blunt statement that he "doesn't recognize marriage." His reason? "[N]obody should have marriage until everybody does." That gives people who have been privileged with the ability to marry a bit of the perspective of those are aren't allowed this privilege. Here's how he does it:

Yesterday I called a woman’s spouse her boyfriend. She says, correcting me, “He’s my husband,” “Oh,” I say, “I no longer recognize marriage.” The impact is obvious. I tried it on a man who has been in a relationship for years, “How’s your longtime companion, Jill?” “She’s my wife!” “Yeah, well, my beliefs don’t recognize marriage.” Fun. And instant, eyebrow-raising recognition. Suddenly the majority gets to feel what the minority feels. In a moment they feel what it’s like to have their relationship downgraded, and to have a much taken-for-granted right called into question because of another’s beliefs.

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