Some Of What Follows Is Hyperbole

Christine O'Donnell is one of those public figures that emerge from time to time that make any writer of fiction envious of reality. Only a truly gifted writer could make someone like this up and then sell her as a plausible character. At the heart of it, she is the problem with the Tea Party. Here's the thing I've never understood about the far right: fiscal responsibility is well and good and certainly we could do with a lot more---we could have used some for the last thirty years, certainly, a period during which Republicans (and by inference conservatives) have been largely in control of Congress---but how come is it we can't seem to get candidates who are just about that without dragging all the social issue crap along with them? I for one am tiring of having my alternatives clipped because some whack-a-do who may well have a sound fiscal policy in mind is also hell bent on "correcting" the lax, immoral, godless state of the country. Now we get right down to the basic issues with Ms. O'Donnell: jacking off. It's destroying the country. People are going blind from this, divorce rates are record high because selfish people are doing themselves at the expense of the shared relationship god intended they have. Abstinence means all of it! Tie those peoples' hands behind their backs! Put those genital safety belts on those young fellows who can't leave johnny alone! Why, if we root out the evil of self-pleasuring, we'll be on the road to sound financial policy and security in no time! Then of course there's the usual slate of absurdities---she's a young earth creationist. (What, may I ask, does this have to do with fiscal conservatism? Well, in her case, apparently, a difficulty with basic math...) Naturally she opposes abortion and since she's so down on pud pounding, we may presume she hasn't much use for birth control of any kind, sex education, or possible female orgasm. She is that perfect contradiction of modern far right womanhood---someone who probably thinks women's place is in the home who is attempting to establish a powerful political career in order to legislate herself back into a state of chattel bondage. And then there's the Libertarian wing of the Tea Party that basically believes people ought to be free to choose their own lives without interference from anyone, especially the government, and eventually they will create the fissure in opposition to the Talibaptist contingent who want more than anything to tell people how to live decent lives. It may do this country good to elect some of these folks into public office so we can see, really see how they perform. How they make their philosophies mesh with what most Americans really want. It's a sad time for American politics. We're in a depression (why they insist on continuing to call it a recession is purist political cynicism), Obama has not miraculously fixed that, and people are pissed off. They are in a "Throw the bastards out" mood, but unfortunately they have little to choose from. The Republican Party, self-deluded that they may ride this tide back into power for "all the right reasons", has so bankrupted its credibility right before, during, and since W that even conservatives must hold their noses to vote for them. The Democrats have failed once again to define an American Ideology behind which the people can get and although right now they are probably on the right track fiscally, it will take time for their actions to result in anything fruitful. (Didn't Obama say all along it would take a long time? Didn't he say this would not be painless? Didn't he say a lot of work would have to be done before things started drifting back to something good? Didn't he? But he's been in office 19 months! My god, just how long is a long time?) They haven't "fixed things" so people don't like them either. So there's the Tea Party. This is bottom of the barrel time. These are the screeling, apocalyptic, neo-revisionist, founding-principled-though-illiterate gang of conspiracy theorist candidates who have gained momentum through sheer quality of nerve, who intend to save the country from our foreign-born Muslim president and the anarcho-socialist intellectual elite. They are the ones who wish to remove all the interfering laws and restrictions that hamper the marrow-deep entrepreneurial American essence and allow people to make millions on their own or starve in the gutter with their families because while Darwin was wrong about biology he was right about economic policy and the weak ought to perish so the strong can dominate. These are the folks who would free us to be dominated by Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Banking, and Big Insurance. These are people who believe corporations are people, too, and back the American dream nurtured in the heart of every kid who wants to grow up to be a corporation. Or an oligarch. But first, they have to curtail masturbation. The country has had enough of people jacking off. Time to get them back to work.

Continue ReadingSome Of What Follows Is Hyperbole

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.

Continue ReadingHeinlein and the Problem of the Present

A question for President Obama

I wonder, which is a better recruitment tool for potential terrorists: the burning of a Koran or the following news items from the past month or so:

  • Civilian death toll in Afghanistan "soared" by more than 30% since 2009
  • Taliban asks for independent commission to investigate civilian deaths, insisting that they are not to blame. U.S. says they don't want to grant Taliban legitimacy by negotiating with them, stonewalls the issue.
  • 12 American soldiers on a secret "kill team" have been (allegedly) caught murdering Afghan civilians for sport. They then (allegedly) took pictures posing with the bodies, mutilated them, and kept fingers of the dead as souvenirs. They were turned in by a fellow GI, who was then beaten and told to keep his mouth shut and stop "snitching". Originally five soldiers were arrested, now seven more have been arrested as part of the cover-up and assault on the whistleblower.

Continue ReadingA question for President Obama

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 . . . ]

Continue ReadingRobert A. Heinlein In Perspective