The Other Man of Steel Knows Nothing, The Scouts Know A Little More
You could drive yourself clean around the bend if you started wondering about stuff like that. What if Joe Steele's folks had stayed in the old country instead of coming to America? What would he have become over there? A priest? A Red? Nothing very much. That was the way to bet. The United States was the land of opportunity, the place where a man could rise from nothing to -- to five terms in the White House.
Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party and Premier of the Soviet Union -- the former for three decades and the latter for thirteen years concurrently -- was someone, especially if you were in the country he led, you wanted to stay on the good side of. You didn't, you ended up in a labor camp or dead. This morning I finished reading Harry Turtledove's latest novel Joe Steele (ISBN 9780451472182), an alternate history where the man who became Stalin in our world was born to Russian emigrants who fled to California and rose as a politician eventually becoming one of the rivals to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 for the Democratic Party's nominee for President. It's never quite proven, but a fire breaks out in New York that kills Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and one of the main characters becomes suspicious of whether it was set or helped along. And it bugs Charlie Sullivan, who eventually becomes one of President Steele's speechwriters, the rest of his life.
It's a fine piece of work, don't get me wrong. So is an artillery shell. That doesn't mean you want one on the coffee table.
For the United States still recovering from the Great Depression, President Steele is perfectly willing to put people back to work, especially people who question him or any of his Four Year Plans (compared to FDR's New Deal) whom he through the Government Bureau of Investigation (compared to our world's FBI) labels "wreckers" who are trying to destroy America rather than save it. Charlie Sullivan's brother Michael criticizes Steele once too often and ends up in a punishment camp until he volunteers for that world's World War II. Say what you want about Steele/Stalin, but the more I read this the more I found myself buying into -- and asking myself, let's be blunt -- how far we are willing to go, how far we are willing to support our leaders in what seems to us purges of their own people. And how far we have already done so.
American uber alles was the Know-Nothing solution, and to shout "Americanism" or to utter bathos over Old Glory was a push button for automatic applause-- then as now.
And you think politics in the United States today is exclusionary, no matter how much you hear "all men are created equal" and the rest of the Declaration? Take a look back in our real-world nineteenth century, in the decades before the Civil War. Carleton Beals' Brass-Knuckle Crusade (LOC 60-9120) deals with the rise of a political party ... well, various movements that coalesce, more of less, into a political party of "Native Americans" (unlike today, referring to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants without the preppy atmosphere) that by hook or by crook sought to keep the country from being corrupted, as they saw it, by Irish and Germans and Catholics among others. One of their most famous call signs became, when asked about what they were actually doing, "I know nothing." This did become hard to take seriously, but it took a generation or so for it.
But it enabled many persons to shed inferiority feelings, to feel superior to their brethren, and flaunt their own special moral wisdom -- not by reason of individual worth or ethical principles or personal achievement, but on the basis of birth -- common failing of jingoistic societies.
Don't start me on Wallbuilders Live ... but after work last night, I got to Christ Lutheran for one of our monthly Bear Scout meetings (not sure why I was loaned a key, as near everyone had gotten in on their own) and THANK GOD I remember to look over some skits, for I found some my group of seven -- I also had three other parents there which was great! -- is so excited to perform that we rehearsed them twice. I just have to combine the scripts now so everybody knows what they are doing. We'll be performing them at the pack meeting in two weeks, and we have a tree climber, an emcee, The Bravest Scout In The World, Cool Guy Bob, a zombie football player, King Kong, and a crazy elf. Oh, and the enlarging machine, don't forget the enlarging machine!
May this turn out as well as it's playing in my head, David
Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party and Premier of the Soviet Union -- the former for three decades and the latter for thirteen years concurrently -- was someone, especially if you were in the country he led, you wanted to stay on the good side of. You didn't, you ended up in a labor camp or dead. This morning I finished reading Harry Turtledove's latest novel Joe Steele (ISBN 9780451472182), an alternate history where the man who became Stalin in our world was born to Russian emigrants who fled to California and rose as a politician eventually becoming one of the rivals to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 for the Democratic Party's nominee for President. It's never quite proven, but a fire breaks out in New York that kills Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and one of the main characters becomes suspicious of whether it was set or helped along. And it bugs Charlie Sullivan, who eventually becomes one of President Steele's speechwriters, the rest of his life.
It's a fine piece of work, don't get me wrong. So is an artillery shell. That doesn't mean you want one on the coffee table.
For the United States still recovering from the Great Depression, President Steele is perfectly willing to put people back to work, especially people who question him or any of his Four Year Plans (compared to FDR's New Deal) whom he through the Government Bureau of Investigation (compared to our world's FBI) labels "wreckers" who are trying to destroy America rather than save it. Charlie Sullivan's brother Michael criticizes Steele once too often and ends up in a punishment camp until he volunteers for that world's World War II. Say what you want about Steele/Stalin, but the more I read this the more I found myself buying into -- and asking myself, let's be blunt -- how far we are willing to go, how far we are willing to support our leaders in what seems to us purges of their own people. And how far we have already done so.
American uber alles was the Know-Nothing solution, and to shout "Americanism" or to utter bathos over Old Glory was a push button for automatic applause-- then as now.
And you think politics in the United States today is exclusionary, no matter how much you hear "all men are created equal" and the rest of the Declaration? Take a look back in our real-world nineteenth century, in the decades before the Civil War. Carleton Beals' Brass-Knuckle Crusade (LOC 60-9120) deals with the rise of a political party ... well, various movements that coalesce, more of less, into a political party of "Native Americans" (unlike today, referring to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants without the preppy atmosphere) that by hook or by crook sought to keep the country from being corrupted, as they saw it, by Irish and Germans and Catholics among others. One of their most famous call signs became, when asked about what they were actually doing, "I know nothing." This did become hard to take seriously, but it took a generation or so for it.
But it enabled many persons to shed inferiority feelings, to feel superior to their brethren, and flaunt their own special moral wisdom -- not by reason of individual worth or ethical principles or personal achievement, but on the basis of birth -- common failing of jingoistic societies.
Don't start me on Wallbuilders Live ... but after work last night, I got to Christ Lutheran for one of our monthly Bear Scout meetings (not sure why I was loaned a key, as near everyone had gotten in on their own) and THANK GOD I remember to look over some skits, for I found some my group of seven -- I also had three other parents there which was great! -- is so excited to perform that we rehearsed them twice. I just have to combine the scripts now so everybody knows what they are doing. We'll be performing them at the pack meeting in two weeks, and we have a tree climber, an emcee, The Bravest Scout In The World, Cool Guy Bob, a zombie football player, King Kong, and a crazy elf. Oh, and the enlarging machine, don't forget the enlarging machine!
May this turn out as well as it's playing in my head, David
Comments
Post a Comment