When you don't have a reverse gear, example ??? of ???
"He remained an unreconstructed rightwinger, but his worldview shrank from its earlier big-picture pride to a series of petty complaints about his fellow Americans."
This is Digby's description of what happened to gtst's uber-patriotic parent following disillusionment - or, I suppose, partial disillusionment, since if you refuse to go the whole way into acknowledging how you were wrong and what was really what when, then you're not really disillusioned, properly speaking. It's very familiar to me: I've seen it increasingly in my own house these past couple years, it also describes at least one of my grandfathers post-Vietnam, and you know what it really is? It's changing the subject. It's just a form of changing the subject in the course of an argument, and if you've ever had an SO or parent who was a hardcore fulltime Fault-Finder, then you know exactly what this looks like. It's just being done on a grander scale than "How come you didn't put the wet laundry in the dryer- oh, that's a second load somebody else started - well, you NEVER remember so how could you expect me to know that? and anyway, you left your coffee cup in the sink this morning" &c - this is as applied to a whole country, and even the whole bleeding world so as to avoid self-knowledge, examination of conscience and contrition.
Which is why we keep ending up in this position, haven't learned a damn thing since the days of the filibusters (and the Puritans), and likely never will.
[NB: this is not really a change of topic, despite appearances]
I haven't so far had the Whoah, Author X Has Been Bodysnatched moment that has happened a couple times to a lot of people in fandom during the GWOT, because I was never a Dan Simmons fan and (although I didn't hate Enders Game unlike a lot of liberal/progressive readers, I thought it was a pretty decent exploration of moral culpability and exploitation of trust for what it was) Orson Scott Card had left me feeling cold -- okay, rebuffed, alienated-as-a-female-reader, and more than a little squicked with the metaphysics/ethics of it -- when I dipped into the Homecoming series because of the cool Enya-esque title and Dinotopia-esque cover back circa 1996. This was utterly confirmed with Hart's Hope (which is why Ender's Game had to be practically pushed on me with tongs, and btw that has to be the most appallingly-misleading one-sentence summary of a novel out there loose in the wild) so that he should prove a ruthless bigot in a lot of different waysand the moral nuance implicit in Ender's Game a thin coating of soil that should dry up and blow away in the nooneday sun was not really a shocker.
Well, it's happened twice in a month now, if a little more subtlely and less blatantly than Simmons or OSC. I've not had a chance to write about the first the last couple weeks, and I haven't yet been able to force myself to finish the second, which is a first for this author and me, even when I haven't been thrilled with all parts of all her books, I've never been able to not wonder What Happens Next To These People? - the Seven Deadly Words have never kicked in before.
I suppose it's remotely possible that it could redeem itself in the last hundred pages from being something ghostwritten for AEI or Crisis Magazine - redeem itself from being an apologia for fascism-in-the-guise-of-FREEDOM!!! and a fawning encomium to Tashlan. I really hope it does - that it isn't just the thinly-disguised allegory of Middle-American Conservatarian anti-UN paranoia, uncritical glorification of all things Military, and Conservative Xtian sockpuppetry-passed-off-as-Socratic-dialogue that it has so far been doing a darn good imitation of...
...But I'm not an optimist, myself. (Anyone here read it yet? Are my suspicions unjust?)
This is Digby's description of what happened to gtst's uber-patriotic parent following disillusionment - or, I suppose, partial disillusionment, since if you refuse to go the whole way into acknowledging how you were wrong and what was really what when, then you're not really disillusioned, properly speaking. It's very familiar to me: I've seen it increasingly in my own house these past couple years, it also describes at least one of my grandfathers post-Vietnam, and you know what it really is? It's changing the subject. It's just a form of changing the subject in the course of an argument, and if you've ever had an SO or parent who was a hardcore fulltime Fault-Finder, then you know exactly what this looks like. It's just being done on a grander scale than "How come you didn't put the wet laundry in the dryer- oh, that's a second load somebody else started - well, you NEVER remember so how could you expect me to know that? and anyway, you left your coffee cup in the sink this morning" &c - this is as applied to a whole country, and even the whole bleeding world so as to avoid self-knowledge, examination of conscience and contrition.
Which is why we keep ending up in this position, haven't learned a damn thing since the days of the filibusters (and the Puritans), and likely never will.
[NB: this is not really a change of topic, despite appearances]
I haven't so far had the Whoah, Author X Has Been Bodysnatched moment that has happened a couple times to a lot of people in fandom during the GWOT, because I was never a Dan Simmons fan and (although I didn't hate Enders Game unlike a lot of liberal/progressive readers, I thought it was a pretty decent exploration of moral culpability and exploitation of trust for what it was) Orson Scott Card had left me feeling cold -- okay, rebuffed, alienated-as-a-female-reader, and more than a little squicked with the metaphysics/ethics of it -- when I dipped into the Homecoming series because of the cool Enya-esque title and Dinotopia-esque cover back circa 1996. This was utterly confirmed with Hart's Hope (which is why Ender's Game had to be practically pushed on me with tongs, and btw that has to be the most appallingly-misleading one-sentence summary of a novel out there loose in the wild) so that he should prove a ruthless bigot in a lot of different waysand the moral nuance implicit in Ender's Game a thin coating of soil that should dry up and blow away in the nooneday sun was not really a shocker.
Well, it's happened twice in a month now, if a little more subtlely and less blatantly than Simmons or OSC. I've not had a chance to write about the first the last couple weeks, and I haven't yet been able to force myself to finish the second, which is a first for this author and me, even when I haven't been thrilled with all parts of all her books, I've never been able to not wonder What Happens Next To These People? - the Seven Deadly Words have never kicked in before.
I suppose it's remotely possible that it could redeem itself in the last hundred pages from being something ghostwritten for AEI or Crisis Magazine - redeem itself from being an apologia for fascism-in-the-guise-of-FREEDOM!!! and a fawning encomium to Tashlan. I really hope it does - that it isn't just the thinly-disguised allegory of Middle-American Conservatarian anti-UN paranoia, uncritical glorification of all things Military, and Conservative Xtian sockpuppetry-passed-off-as-Socratic-dialogue that it has so far been doing a darn good imitation of...
...But I'm not an optimist, myself. (Anyone here read it yet? Are my suspicions unjust?)