In which I take the words of an old friend woefully out of context.
Actually, I probably shouldn’t refer to Rob as an “old” friend. I’ve known him longer than almost anyone I know now outside of family, true; Phil’s the only one who beats him, and that’s only due to a chance encounter when I went up to Oberlin my senior year of high school as a prospective. (“Is that ‘Memories of Green’? I said, and he looked up from the piano and said, “Why, yes. Yes, it is.”) —Rob was (briefly) in my froshling Russian class, first semester, and I actually officially met him when I responded to an Infosys post about a neat-sounding PBM game. He sold me his position, which I never did anything with, and later on when he was shedding all his Heinlein books I bought his copy of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Not because I had an especial thing for Heinlein—as all liberal SF aficionados must, I’d shed him like an old coat, leaving only “The Menace from Earth” and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress behind, and Spacesuit, because the protagonist’s name is, um, Kip.
But that was all a long time ago, and while I dropped out and wandered off this way for a bit, he headed off yonder, and our paths have crossed only a couple of times since, in the occasional Seattle living room. And we can argue all night about whether you ever really change or just become more of who you always already were—I’m pomo enough to know that things look different from different points of view, and so while I might shrug and shake my head and say (with some little wistfulness) that he’s gone through the looking glass and over the edge off the deep end, he’d smile (I’d like to think he’d smile) and tell you I’d always had too much heart and not enough head, and what there was was woolly, at that. (Of course, by that standard, Giordano Bruno was postmodern. But I digress.) —The facts on the ground are this: he’s pretty much as right-wing and reactionary as you can get from my linchinography, he is by a long shot, and he’s only there because I knew him when, and he knows jokes that most of you don’t, and it was through him I met Elkins and Barry and Phil (again), and through them everybody else; without him, I wouldn’t be who I am today. A link on a blogroll is chickenfeed, next to that.
(Charles? Charles had the room under me, froshling year, and borrowed my copy of The Darkest Road, and he still swears Carl Muckenhoupt was the one who broke my slinky. So I would still have met Charles, and could have through him everyone else etc. But that’s not how it happened. So Rob gets the glory, and the blame.)
This is what Rob had to say, in another context, just recently:
You are certainly entitled to treat other people as you see fit.
The broad political grouping that I find myself a part of has adopted a different approach. We don’t all agree on everything, but we have agreed to support one another on the issues that we do agree on. And, as part of our compact, we each try our best to refrain from casting aspersions at one another—so I don’t call my bozo fundamentalist friends bozos, for example. It makes coalition building much more effective, as we’re able to reach out to groups with whom we have any common ground at all.
Other political groupings adopt a different strategy—one where ideological purity on a wide range of issues is required before there can be any cooperation, mutual respect, or basic courtesy. This prevents idiosyncrasy and heresy from infecting the loyal troops; you can’t be infected by the evil meme if you drive off the memebearers with vitriol.
So far, my side has taken control of the government, is setting the national and regional agenda on many-to-most of the items that are important to us, and is daily making huge inroads on the popular culture.
How’s your side doing?
Well, we aren’t trying to get Alberto Gonzalez in as Attorney General. That’s how we’re doing.
Leaving aside the stark fact any fule kno—that utilitarian arguments for torture crumble before its staggering uselessness as a means of generating trustworthy, actionable intelligence—there’s the craven, callow figure of a man Gonzalez presents, willing to bend any rule, write any memo, fill out any form that does what his boss wants done. Forget, for a moment, torture: Alberto Gonzalez, attorney, judge, Republican, insouciantly opined that the President could “set aside” whatever quaint laws got in his way—thereby setting aside almost 800 years of common law pretty much because a few bad apples might otherwise rough up the ride a little.
A woolly-headed socialist with anarcho-syndicalist leanings shouldn’t have to remind a libertarian what happens when you grant a government powers like that.
And maybe my “side” does demand a certain ideological purity, comparatively speaking; maybe doing so means we’ve pretty much lost on this one, and we’ll have Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and the sick-making transposition of an “n” for a “q” in today’s Times will prove a harbinger, not a typo, and we’ll be talking about the horrible photos coming out of Evin in a couple of years. Maybe that’s not how it will happen. I don’t know. But whatever happens, however it happens, I’ll know I never valued liberty so lightly that I’d toss it out the window at the first sign of trouble. I’d know I still thought some ideals were worth a suicide pact. Torture is wrong; we should never, ever do it; anyone who ever tried to write it off as no big deal for whatever reason has no business as our Attorney General—and if my “side” fails to prevent that from coming to pass, well, that’s something we’ll have to live with, yes, but at least we’ll know where we stood, and for what.
And it says something cold and horrible that I even have to say these words, and take this stand. But anyway, that’s how we’re doing. Or what it looks like, from where I’m at.
X had been the editor of Upton Sinclair’s EPIC News, a political newsletter with a peak circulation of two million, and one of six men chosen by Sinclair to write a constitution for EPIC in 1935 as it set out to become a nationwide movement. Clearly this young man was no mere fellow traveler and certainly not “the moderate Democrat” he would claim to have been when he once referred to this otherwise deleted section of his curriculum vitæ. No, he was the genuine article, a ’30s radical leftist, and his name was Robert Heinlein.
—Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of
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I'm sorry—who again are these nicey-nice guys on the right who aren't alienating people? I mean, other than David Brooks, and that's cuz he's got cozy lib establishment gigs.
Anyway, being friends with people with loathsome ideas is old hat where I come from.
So I moved. :)
"as all liberal SF aficionados must, I’d shed [Heinlein] like an old coat"
Dissenting from that categorical claim, boss.
Eh. I knew I should have said "politically correct."
(Those more interested in a less—polemically charged? more nuanced?—consideration of Heinlein from my corner over hyar [really, one does need a rhetorical term for the act of slicing off one's nose to spite the entire affair] are invited to read this comment.)
Sweet of you to remember, Kip. Give me back my PBM position! (I don't even remember which game it was for.) You have a good brain, and you have to have heart, as well; all you lack is sufficient context, which is hardly your fault. You'll get it.
Didja read his (Heinlein's) radical-30s-novel?
It was dreadful, of course, but very interesting to see the original expression of his ideas. I sure wish we could get psychotherapy to the point that he thought possible; it would ameliorate so many problems.
The moral I take from his life is "people change; a lot." Novels, movies, TV shows, poems, whatever, where the main character steps up on page one and walks out on page three hundred fifty and she/he is the same person...rubbish.
This is the part where I mention my years-old Why I Hate Heinlein rant.
Oh, I almost forgot. In the odd coincidences department, right now my tiniest-library reading is "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel". Why? Because 1) I really had to go, and it was the first book to hand, and 2) Once I had started, I was seized with the urge to write a book aimed at my 8-year old and so now it's research.
You remain as gracious as ever, sir, and the coincidence tickles the funny-bone. —Someone less gracious than myself might well note that "lacking sufficient context" is awfully close to what most folks are getting at with that old heart/mind chestnut; me, I'll just smile and say it isn't how much context you've got, or when you get hold of it, as what you do with the one you're in at the time.
Or, in other words, we change, oh yes. —"If people remembered the same they would not be different people."
I'm mildly curious, R. When it comes to Gonzales, which of his stances are you supporting when you say "but we have agreed to support one another on the issues that we do agree on."?
His legal opinions supporting the use of torture?
His legal opinion that the commander in chief can set aside law?
Or would it be his lack of meaningful review of death penalty cases in Texas?
Possibly you don't agree with any of these. However, I don't think it takes much ideological purity to hold that out of a nation of 250+ million, there may be someone without this baggage who is more suited for the position.
Or is it that the President wants what he wants when he wants it, and you feel he should be given it?