Re: Worst Hugos Ever?

On Feb 29, 7:51=A0am, Bill Patterson <WHPatter...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> Some interesting notions. =A0I think, for example, that the
> "temperamentally unsuited to becoming voters" is part of the myth of
> the society and standing outside that myth we're invited to disagree
> with it.

My phrasing was awkward there. Some people are temperamentally
unsuited to military service, but that doesn't mean they should not be
allowed to vote.

> =A0(I think Heinlein, like many people, was offended and vexed
> by the problem of irresponsible voters, without having a "good"
> solution -- the solution he built Star****p Troopers around was a
> Solution Unsatisfactory.

Yes, that is a good - and highly appropriate - way to characterize it.

>=A0The founding fathers of our system designed
> it for a mostly agricultural electorate educated by 18th century
> standards, after all, and there's certainly nothing vile --though
> decidedly upsetting -- to point out it doesn't work for a mostly urban
> electorate intellectually crippled by a century of "factory
> education").

Of course, it's not really clear that today's city boys are
_uneducated_ compared to 18th-century farm boys.

> I'm having trouble with "close to Fascism," though, perhaps for this
> very reason. =A0Looking at the two models we have, Mussolini's Itay and
> Hitler's Germany, I don't see anything in the book particularly
> "close."

I don't see anything in there close to "real Facism" either. What I
call "real Fascism" is Nehemiah Scudder and his ilk - totalitarianism,
whatever the political stripe. Here, we have a society trying to be a
democracy, but with a little more starch in its spine. Is it
_workable_? That's a different question - so I'm trying to divide
criticisms of ST that I can accept as legitimate from ones that are
hyperboloc and unjustified.

> And, speaking of that, where's the dissent, and
> where's the suppression? =A0 There is a lot of grousing ****trayed in the
> book, but by and large people seem not dissatisfied enough with the
> way it works to sup****t anything like real dissent.

We have one counterexample, and the protagonist is disturbed by what
happens to him - contrasted with being serenely not disturbed at the
fate of a child molester.


> It's also hard to see militarism and "glorification of the
> military" -- another factor in those lists -- in a system that puts as
> much effort into discouraging enlistment as is ****trayed in ST.

The ST society definitely has a democratic, not fascist, mentality -
its goals are like those of democracies.

> I just don't see anything particularly close to fascism in the world
> of Star****p Troopers -- and in fact I think we're a lot farther along
> in that direction IRL since Bush rolled back the Enlightenment (a
> personal opinion likely to become stronger as I go through Air****t
> "Security" again in mid-March and April this year).

But I think that I couldn't really argue well against someone who said
that in any real world country where the military held the keys to
voting, things wouldn't turn out as happily as in Star****p Troopers.

John Savard