November 2009 Archives

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sex, Space, and Salvation

For ECD.

Jubal Harshaw is a grumpy old man who surrounds himself with beautiful women and an electric fence in an Edenic retreat in the Poconos in
Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. This is a good thing,
since he has an uncanny talent for irritating almost anybody, redeemed
by a keen wit and a nose for the sweet spot in a bargain. When there
is blood in the water, Harshaw smells it. The key clue, among quite a
few, that this balding contrarian is a stand in for author Heinlein
himself is that he largely makes his living by spontaneously dictating
short stories. Although his periodic pontifications on the nature and
history of almost anything gives the game away almost as easily.
Harshaw, among other roles, serves as the chorus expounding upon the
themes of sex, freedom, stories, and salvation that comprise the major
themes of the book. The book is technologically uninspired but
conceptually bold; the space motif liberates the author by allowing
him to imagine a radically asexual Apollonian immortal consciousness
from Mars with which to contrast short-lived, sex-crazed humanity.

The criticism of a classic, even in such a typically underrated genre
as science fiction, is not to be undertaken without trepidation. In
this case, Heinlein's magnum opus wears rather better than perhaps his
second best-known book, Starship Troopers, in which hyperactive
soldiers in futuristic body armor combat giant "bugs" for mastery of
the universe after taking control of the earth. Much science fiction,
and Heinlein's work is no exception, is rather glandular, driven by
the kind of testosterone soaked combination of lust and aggression
most typical of young men in late adolescence. The question is
whether there is anything more.

For all his vaunted conservatism in other matters, Heinlein's Stranger
in a Strange land is an unqualified endorsement of free love, at
least, ahem, so long as it takes place between men and women, in fact,
the more women the better. Big busted, round hipped, conventionally
sexy women, mind you, although there is the occasional deviation, such
as the carnival woman who is tattooed with religious imagery from head
to toe. She becomes one of the central female figures in the book, a
kind of sideshow earth mother who heads up the cult of Mars.

And why not, after all, since the carnival is also one of the central
themes of the book? Not the Mardi Gras, but the fairground sideshow.
The book is clear that it regards all organized religion as variations
on the sideshow, scams run for suckers. The twist is that the book's
hero, Michael Valentine Smith, may be expropriating religion's carny
methods to lead mankind to a higher truth. Smith, abandoned on Mars
as a baby and reared by Martians, possesses uncanny telekinetic
powers, bodily self control, and mental discipline beyond the wildest
aspirations of an Eastern mystic. In addition, the Martian culture he
comes from is one in which communitarianism is so advanced, indeed so
intrinsic, that notions of money and property do not exist and radical
self-sacrifice is as normal as self-preservation in our society. On
the parched surface of Mars, interdependence and intimacy is
symbolized through the sharing of water; offering a stranger a drink
makes him (or her) a lifelong blood-brother, or rather, water brother.

But the root of the power of the Man from Mars lies in a total
comprehension and mental assimilation of ideas and matter under the
rubric of "grokking". "Grok," which at least among the readers of
science fiction has passed into the common vocabulary, signifies
variously completely understanding an idea, experiencing a feeling,
assimilating an object. When the Man from Mars reads an
encyclopedia as part of his early education, he "groks" it by
simultaneously memorizing, understanding, and expounding upon it
within days. He "groks" objects so thoroughly that he can either move
or disintegrate them at will, thus making him an unusually difficult
target for those who wish him ill, to no avail since he is also able
to "grok" their intentions while they are well out of range.

In the end, it is no wonder that Stranger in a Strange Land became a
kind of "Hippie Bible" (See Wikipedia) when it came out in the
sixties: organized religion is revealed as a con game; free love is
the order of the day; property is a primitive evil; self-discipline
and self-sacrifice are the paramount values. For all its tang of
adolescent sexuality, Stranger in a Strange Land leaves one with the
sense that humans need to be more loving, giving, and tolerant toward
one another, because no one else is going to do it for us. In the
end, there are worse words to live by than Jubal Harshaw's favorite
toast, "To our noble selves, damned few of us left."

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It is a shibboleth of the Right that anyone more liberal than Rush Limbaugh is a "traitor" to his country; the egregious Ann Coulter even wrote an entire book about liberal "Treason." The shrill rhetoric and exaggerated alarums over the bogeymen of the Left betray a deep-seated unease about American democracy, however. Modern American democracy is committed above all to the orderly transfer of power through stable institutions designed to express the will of the People. Secondarily, American democracy is committed to the proposition, familiar to every student who ever dipped into the Federalist Papers, that no one locus of power is ever to be trusted completely. A government of limited powers can best be preserved by encouraging each of the three branches of government to jealously guard its prerogatives and ensure that no other branch overstepped its authority.

In contrast, modern American conservatism, as repeatedly expressed in the eras of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the Younger, is infatuated with the cult of the man on the white horse, the strong central executive who will put all to rights because he is not bound by the petty considerations of law or morals that bind lesser mortals. (See Bombing of Cambodia, Watergate, Iran-Contra, War on Terror.) The Party panders in the pursuit of power to the racaille of the American South, who have historically been the pillar of slavery, segregation, States Rights, Jim Crow, and the Southern Strategy and who now form the electoral core of the rump of the party of Lincoln, (Teddy) Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Rockefeller, but the Republican Party does not fundamentally believe in fulfilling the will of the people. Rather, theirs is the paternalism of the plantation owner and the corporate executive, the "Quality" who will ensure that the teeming swarthy masses do not threaten white privilege in America, endowed upon the white man by grace of God, the gun, and the smallpox. The alternative would be to recognize equality and welcome participation in the political process by all Americans. (Anyone who doubts the overtly exclusionary tendency of the contemporary, conservative American South need only review the disproportionately anti-Obama vote of white southerners compared to the overall vote in their own states and to whites in other parts of the country, or anecdotally the interview footage of white Southerners in Kentucky before the election.)

The first two chapters of Benjamin Wittes' Law and the Long War starkly illustrate this modern tendency in the modern politics of the Republican Party. Proceeding under a theory of the "unitary executive," the Bush Administration sought to consolidate the emergency powers it had assumed immediately after the crisis of 9/11 on a permanent "wartime" basis. In his first chapter, "The Law of September 10," Wittes seeks to show not only that there was some continuity between the anti-terrorism efforts of the Clinton and Bush Administrations, but also that there were some theoretical precedents dating from World War II (or earlier) for the Bush Administration's insistence that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and that it needed no authorization from Congress to regulate its treatment of those captured in the wake of 9/11. In particular, Wittes points out that Guantanamo had been used prior to 9/11 for the indefinite preventive detention of HIV positive illegal immigrants, and that the Clinton administration had pioneered on a limited scale the practice of extraordinary rendition, or "outsourced torture," that later became a staple of the Bush Administration's "War on Terror." Wittes concedes that the Bush Administration was totally lacking in legal justification for its actions in only one area: its decision to disregard the jurisdiction of the FISA Court over the conduct of electronic surveillance.

Wittes explains the readiness of the Bush Administration to disregard legal and moral norms in pursuit of the so-called "War on Terror" precisely in terms of the Bush Administration's public insistence on casting the conflict almost entirely in wartime terms and its concomitant contempt for any argument that legal guidance or Congressional authority was relevant to prosecuting the conflict.

While Wittes' attempts to show legal continuity and at least theoretical justification for the Bush Administration's disregard of legal and moral norms in its prosecution of the so-called "War on Terror" seem a little strained, he is quite persuasive on the legislative and political dynamics that guided the Administration's actions. Wittes' formulation has almost the ring of a Greek tragedy. Persuaded in their hubris that any request for legislative authorization from the Congress would diminish the inherent power of the "unitary executive," the (Vice) President's men, particularly David Addington, strongly resisted any suggestion that they ask the Congress for legislation to regulate the custody of terror suspects and adjudication of their cases. Wittes identifies three important consequences of the Administration's arrogance. First, they failed to recognize that whatever small quantum of executive authority might be lost to the Congress, the authority of the executive is vastly magnified when bolstered by statute, as Justice Jackson long ago pointed out. Second, they failed to recognize that the supine Congress — Republican or Democrat — was ready to give them anything they requested. Third, they underestimated the willingness of the Supreme Court to step in and fill the vacuum left when the Administration bypassed the Congress, resulting in a series of highly embarrassing Supreme Court decisions that in fact undermined executive prerogative and enhanced the reach of the Court.

In Wittes' view, the normal dynamic of American democracy should be that the President proposes, the Congress legislates, the President executes, and the Courts, if necessary, adjudicate. The Bush Administration turned this dynamic on its head. The President, recognizing no limit on his authority, was brought up short by the Court, and then sought to control the damage by seeking legislation from the Congress to limit or overturn the Court's rulings. Such a course of action is not only woefully inefficient, but it drastically undermines the Administration's moral authority for any action it might take, particularly when the rebuke comes from a notoriously conservative Supreme Court. It is one thing to take action with the full endorsement of the nation's deliberative and legislative bodies; it is quite another to suffer public rebuke from the nation's highest court and then to be seen frantically manipulating a rubber-stamp Congress in order to proceed with a course of action that has been roundly condemned. Moreover, proceeding in such a manner is a course of action that, once the immediate fires had been extinguished, could only be undertaken by men with a fundamental contempt for representative democracy and a complete lack of concern for the damage they might do to our institutions and our freedom.

Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani's todo.txt-cli, which I learned about via hunch. com is a very cool LInux command-line utility that allows one to quickly write, update, and maintain a todo list on the command-line of a terminal. With small adaptations, it can be displayed on your desktop using Conky and accessed by iPhone via a webserver.