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June 26, 2005
An Ascot Wearing Man
Cultural micro-icon and probable ascot wearer James Wolcott is trolling for hits again. I shall oblige the greased (just a dab, please) vienna-sausage twiddler by taking him half-way seriously. More, and I might choke on a small bone. Whatever one might say about Heinlein's talent and character, worldly he was not. No, of course not. Whatever one might say about Heinlein's talent and character, if he were worldly, he would agree with James Wolcott. Using a simpleton's definition of worldliness, Heinlein would surely qualify. But we must never confuse the quality of worldliness with merely being well traveled, must we? Still, he was well traveled. He had letters of introduction to prominent persons in many places, which meant he usually had a little help navigating viscous local bureaucracies. Newspapers occasionally took the trouble to interview him. This prominence helped. Sometimes. So we can see that mere mileage is not enough. One simply must have a properly cultivated comprehension of the facts one is presented with. As the article at The Heinlein Society continues... His apocalyptic understanding of the Cold War has become sufficiently alien half-a-century later that it takes a certain anthropological sympathy to grasp it. Well, there you have it. Wolcott lacks anthropological sympathy. How could he possibly sympathize with the following sentiments? I came back to the U.S. convinced that it was an even better country than I had thought it was...But I came back, too, convinced that our peril was very great and our friends very few. The extent and the viciousness of the propaganda campaign against us must be heard to be believed... Travel all you want. If you return home with certain firmly held opinions, it will all have been in vain. Envy and hate are the inevitable concomitants of wealth and power; we have been uneasily aware of this and have tried to curry favor wherever we could. But it is not possible; we are hated not for our behavior but for what we are -- and they are not... You can take the boy out of Kansas City, but you'll never take Kansas City out of the boy. And perish the thought that you might evince something so terminally uncool as uncritical patriotism. Take it from a certain influential contributing editor at Vanity Fair, the folowing quote can't hold a patch to Ray Bradbury... England, in the days of her strength, paid no attention to what other peoples thought of her; she acted in her own best interests as she conceived them to be and ignored world opinion. We should learn from our predecessor at least part of this lesson: never let a decision be swayed by what the neighbors will think, for they will gossip about us whatever we do. Let us be honest and brave - but not politic. It just occurred to me that there is such a thing as The Heinlein Society, seventeen years after his death. Does anyone suppose that there will ever be a Wolcott Society? Yeah. Me, neither. But if a certain influential contributing editor at Vanity Fair should ever want for Heinlein info, he could do worse than to seek out the critical pages of Alexei Panshin. Now, I love Panshin's Anthony Villiers novels (Torve the Trog, visible here on the lower right, totally rocks) but his H-crit has more than a whiff of sixties idealism gnawing its own entrails. It verges on Rob Reiner as The Meathead...
So where had things gone awry between us? Where had the line been drawn? Top dog? That's all he could see? Time out for a historical anecdote. My family on my father's side can trace its roots back to the Ukraine and beyond. For my grandfather's generation, the Red Army actually did march into town, no kidding, and they were in no mood for backchat. End result? Nothing pleasant. I'm told the town is no longer on the map. My grandfather and his parents had already left for America. The folks who chose to stay on (it was their home, after all) ended up dispossessed, or dead, or shipped off to the gulags. A relative handful fled to Germany to start new lives. They had been left with nothing. Top dog posturing? What a fool. Wolcott ought to love it. In the spring of 1960, Robert and Virginia Heinlein made a trip to Russia to look the Communist beast in the eye for themselves. On May Day, one of those major Soviet holidays where tanks and missiles used to pass in review before Communist leaders standing on the tomb of Lenin in Red Square, the Heinleins were in Moscow for the parade. How very worldly of them. In the simple, uncritical interpretation of the word. That day, a U.S. spy plane was shot down 1500 miles inside Russian territory. When the plane went missing and it wasn't yet clear what had happened to it, the U.S. government issued a statement to the world. We said forthrightly that a weather plane had gone astray. Good heavens. We lied. When the Russians officially announced the incident on May 5, the Heinleins were in Alma Ata in Kazakhstan. They were told to report to Intourist, the Russian agency in charge of their travels. There they were forced to sit in the office of the local Director of Intourist and put up with a long, stern, fatherly lecture on the bad behavior of the United States, culminating with this latest outrage. Options one and two strike me as repugnant. I would probably opt for that last choice, always keeping in mind the ancient family wisdom that Commissars can kill you. Heinlein did none of these things. Instead, he went ballistic. How terribly unworldly of him. What a bad, bad man. Say, is Switzerland a polite society? I'm just asking.
posted by Justin on 06.26.05 at 01:03 PM
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» Rube awakening from Classical Values
Here's James Wolcott, detector of "rubes": Now I enjoyed reading Heinlein when I was, like, thirteen, but he's something you outgrow once you acquire a dab of literary and intellectual sophistication. Even the teen me was more enamoured of Ray... [Read More] Tracked on June 27, 2005 02:36 PM
Comments
What's so striking about Wolcott is that he doesn't realize that he's a hack writer. He thinks that he's an unrecognized genius -- or perhaps even a recognized one with adoring imaginary fans. And for the record, I realize that I'm a hack, too. But I know that. Wolcott doesn't. John · June 26, 2005 05:29 PM Regarding politeness, I almost forgot to ask, why is Wolcott so against it, anyway? Eric Scheie · June 26, 2005 07:12 PM Thank you, Justin, for fleshing out my meager comment on Robert Heinlein in the earlier post. I'm a long time Heinlein fan and have read of his travels, especially his experiences in the Soviet Union. But he came home still loving America. And that's just plain unacceptible to the Wolcott and ilk. Darleen · June 27, 2005 01:00 AM Their Communist attacks on Heinlein show him to be a great man. Substitute the word "Nazi" for "Communist in every sentence and "World War II" for "Cold War", and these so-called "liberals", "progressives", One Worlders, Communist appeasers, Communist fronters, what have you, just sound like so many of the Fifth Columnists we jailed during that War. I dare call them traitors. You are either on our side or on the side of the enemy. As for being "un-Sophist-icated", yes I am. The Sophists worked to undermine the ancient religion of Athens,and they were the original moral relativists. I prefer to be Homeric instead. The oppoaite of a "Sophist-icate" is obviously a "Pagan". Back to the ancient and to the eternal absolute values and faith. God, i.e., all Gods and Goddesses, bless America, the Rome of our Western, Northern European, Faustian high culture. As President Reagan said at the end of his final term: "I am proud that I am still an anti-Communist." Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping man's-man-admiring myth-based egoist · June 27, 2005 10:02 AM Eric Scheie wrote: An ancient saying to which I adhere: "God hath shapen lives three: Wolcott is, all too obviously, neither knight nor priest. Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping man's-man-admiring myth-based egoist · June 27, 2005 03:06 PM I happen to be reading "Tramp Royale" at the moment, and the description of the journey which you quoted does not capture all of its worldliness. For one thing, he hedged his comments about Uruguay's welfare system as being based on observation and not analysis. Not all of the cargo liners they travelled on were tidy, and they went places tourists didn't, including dealing with an illegal money changer in Djakarta. By the way, there are a number of details in the book which appear to have influenced his later fiction. triticale · June 28, 2005 08:54 PM |
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Whatever one might say about Heinlein's talent and character, worldly he was not.
Translation: he was from Missouri, not NYC, the stupid hick.