Wednesday, September 03, 2014

Wait til he reads Heinlein

I ran across a comment about this item that claims modern "young adult" novels (and films?) promote right wing ideas.

YA dystopias teach children to submit to the free market, not fight authority
The Hunger Games, The Giver and Divergent all depict rebellions against the state, and promote a tacit right-wing libertarianism. 
and lower down it notes:
What marks these dystopias out from previous ones is that, almost without exception, the bad guys are not the corporations but the state and those well-meaning liberal leftists who want to make the world a better place. Books such as The Giver, Divergent and the Hunger Games trilogy are, whether intentionally or not, substantial attacks on many of the foundational projects and aims of the left: big government, the welfare state, progress, social planning and equality. They support one of the key ideologies that the left has been battling against for a century: the idea that human nature, rather than nurture, determines how we act and live. These books propose a laissez-faire existence, with heroic individuals who are guided by the innate forces of human nature against evil social planners.
 Yeah. It complains it's not like the "good old days" when HGWells supported Stalin, and influenced the SciFi writers to posit left wing ideas and take over the sci fi establishment.

Hoyt has a lot of complaints about the difficulty of publishing such sci fi on her blog and how the trade associations dislike those who oppose their line of thought. 

She is an immigrant from Europe and recognizes this as a way that the experts control their population: How dare they criticize the experts!

They’ve – by which I mean the cultural establishment – tried to bring the same here.  I’ve railed here before about how cozies were – in effect – blacklisted by the publishing establishment because “amateurs can’t be better than the professionals.”  And how my books couldn’t have funny policemen because “Policemen are professionals and must be respected.”  And I’ve talked about how shocked I was when a bunch of high school kids came to beat me on my blogbecause I’d criticized their teacher (I actually hadn’t.  I’d criticized the curriculum which is is not teacher set, but they lacked the semantic ability to distinguish these) and how dare I?  She’s a TEACHER.  I’m supposed to respect her.  (She also was considerably less educated than I, much younger and I have reason to believe she sent the kids over to harass me – the harassment stopped when I threatened to scan in some of her (outrageous) grading handiwork and post it. – which leaves me in doubt of her moral character.)
While these things annoy me and shock me, as does anyone preventing my questioning him by saying “I’m the expert” – it is still new here.
and how does one learnabout American culture? She says by reading Heinlein.
Yeah. I'm waiting until they make a film of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (about a rebellion)...or even Friday (which has wars between corporations and political states, polygamy, racism, lesbianism, thinking computers, and surrogate parenting, but whose theme is essentially about Friday finding a home with those who love her and becoming a domestic goddess).

And of course, Tolkien is about not just about the importance of fighting Sauron, but about rejecting Saruman's utopia, (the book...this part was left out of the movie). 

The importance of fighting for western civilization came at a time when multiculalism got a set back when the Towers fell...and I wonder if the Hobbit will similarly strike a cord that individuals and cultures think differently, but they have enough in common that they can recognize that there are bad guys out there who are out to kill them, and that they need to cooperate. And of course, Bilbo unites them by "thinking outside the box"

FYI: the PB link is because I was looking for the Giver, which we haven't found yet at the book store. But Ruby actually bought the Divergent and Hunger Games series...and we will probably buy The Giver when we go to the mall on Friday when I usually buy Lolo's medicines there... so I'm not pirating itbut previewing it. But as for Heinlein, I brought a lot of ny Heinlein collection with me to the Philippines...and no, I won't let Ruby read Friday (yet) but I did lend her my "podkayne of Mars" book...

No comments: