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RAH Comments

"I read some of Heinlein in the Sixties but somehow missed Starship Troopers. I still haven't read the book, but plan to after seeing the movie twice. My take on the movie is that it's kind of schizophrenic. As a commercial director Verhoeven has to give a large, unsophisticated audience heroes to cheer for and villains to boo. But at the same time, I don't think he's really that starry-eyed about his characters. Crypto-fascist themes are subtly but, I think, unmistakably suggested throughout.

Every unfree society from Plato's Republic (largely modeled on Sparta) to the late, unlamented communist regimes of Europe has proposed a trade of freedom for order and prosperity. Every one has proposed to accomplish this by entrusting a guardian class with moral authority and physical power over everyone else. In more benign versions, the non-guardians are allowed to grow fat and happy, as long as they don't presume to meddle in matters of policy. In other versions, the whole society is regimented to accomplish the objectives (usually military) of the guardians. In a very few instances, e.g., modern Japan, this is all done so skillfully, with so many mirrors to create the illusion of power where there is none and to conceal the true loci of power, that people actually don't experience their society as unfree, their destinies as decided by unknown others.

But that degree of success is rare. The great weakness of guardian states is obvious: they deprive too many people of a "felt" stake in the society. Being protected and allowed to grow fat is not enough. People want the adventure of living, of deciding their own destinies (moral and physical), of being important to their communities. Sooner or later a large segment of the society becomes disaffected. And because the guardians can't or won't co-opt everybody of talent (Japan, again, is something of an exception), sooner or later popular leaders arise (Walesa, Mandela and, God help us, Yeltsin) and the neat guardian plan begins to unravel. (Of course, some of these societies end another way, by provoking foreign resistance and being overthrown in war.)

Heinlein seems to have been a moral ranter somewhat in the tradition of H. G. Wells (who believed that an elite of social scientists should govern) and H. L. Mencken (an admirer of Hitler). Because of his World War II experience, Heinlein was in closer touch with working and fighting democracy than either of them, and therefore he often seems ambivalent about the idea of self-government. I think he liked and trusted the men he served with--who were, after all, ordinary Americans--and an American of his generation, who fought against totalitarianism, couldn't ever really go over to the Dark Side. But he also never got over losing the intensity of wartime discipline and bonding. After that, the freedom, cacophony and hedonism of civilian life seemed like "degeneracy."

The tension between these two sides of the man was never resolved, and perhaps never could have been. It is, after all, a tension inherent in the very idea of self-government. - Daniel Webster 12/20/97

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