Rand Simberg points out a letter from sci-fi writer Spider Robinson in the Globe and Mail. Robinson seems to be in the grips of that peculiarly deluded mindset so loud among Canadians of late, which prompts its sufferers to look down upon America and its leadership and actions with mocking disdain, if not outright hostility.
Let’s take a look at his latest opus, shall we?
I want my money back. War, plague and pestilence (think SARS) — this millennium sucks.
Three years in and we’ve tackled everything but famine. Man, the next nine-hundred-ninety-seven years are going to be booooring.
I’m a science-fiction writer: I look forward by training and inclination. Future equals good. I spent the closing half of the 20th century yearning for the 21st, because it was my conviction things could only get better, and therefore they would. It seemed a reasonable assumption. All my life, each year things seemed to get — on average — just a little bit better. Sure, there were setbacks, rude shocks. It got ugly in Croatia, Rwanda, and other places. Hell, I still can’t believe some imbecile backshot John Lennon.
Hey, Spider…I’m, you know, telling you this as a friend. Because I care. It’s been twenty years, man. John’s dead. It’s time to move on with your life.
Maybe a good grief counselor could help.
(For someone who looks forward, you seem to have a fixation with the past, and things long gone, even past things that never really happened. Read on…)
But overall, things tended to improve: The Berlin Wall suddenly dropped as though it were no more than a pile of bricks and stones. The Soviet Union, the dark monolithic menace that overshadowed the first half-century of my life, folded its cards without firing a shot.
Perhaps it is a good thing that you “look forward”, because your grasp of history is appalling. The Berlin Wall didn’t just — oopsie! — come down unexpectedly…there was in fact a context for the event, believe it or not — just as there was for the collapse of the Soviet Union. You remember, that whole “Cold War” thing, and how the USSR’s socialist utopia an unsustainable fraud, and how the U.S. pushed socialism past the tipping point and onto the very ashheap of history to which it had consigned us?
No? Well, I guess the cold war, military strength, confrontation, espionage, containment, detente, etc. were really pretty pointless and silly, then, if the ruthless tyrants of the former East Bloc were just going to decide one day, spontaneously, to give up the game anyway…”You know, Wojciech, this police-state stuff is so Red Decade, so booooring — let’s hand over the keys and go have ourselves a round of Zywiec…”
(Of course, if you actually described history as it was, you’d have to give credit for the denouement, in part, to that other hated American cowboy, Ronald Reagan.)
Nelson Mandela walked free. Apartheid ended. The abominations in Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere finally started the world thinking halfway seriously that something like a Terran Federation might be a good idea.
The world? Or just Tranzis (who always wanted that anyway) and sci-fi authors whose political ideas are still stuck in the 1960’s utopian fantasies of Future Shock and Star Trek?
If the UN’s performance re: Iraq in the last decade of the last millennium, not to mention the blind eye it turned to Rwanda and the other blind eye it is still turning to Zimbabwe is any indication of what some future “Terran Federation” has to offer, well, no, thank you. You can keep your sci-fi fantasy, but please confine it to your writings, where it belongs and in which form it will hopefully have the greatest measure of real-world tangibility it is ever likely to attain.
Somebody punched out Geraldo Rivera on camera.
So, you favor suppression of the press via violent means?
Interesting.
There seemed every reason to believe we were finally getting somewhere. Consider that at the turn of the millennium:
The economy was booming.
Oh, you mean the Dot-Com Bubble? I’m sure the economy looked like it was booming in 1928, too. Then the exuberance wore off and reality reasserted itself. It’s no small indicator that we have gotten somewhere that, this time around, the bursting of the bubble has only led to a lingering pseudo-recession and not the upheaval of a global depression.
The Age of Deficits was finally over for good; we’d learned our lesson.
See “Dot-Com Bubble”, above. And who’s this “we” you speak of? You are Canadian, right?
Unemployment and inflation were down;
Last I checked, unemployment was still very low by historical standards (in the U.S., at least), and inflation has been miraculously low for the past two decades.
Peace in the Mideast seemed just around the corner,
What, you mean Oslo? Yeah, it’s a shame that Arafat blew the best chance the Palestinians have had since the Arab states screwed them over in 1948.
thanks to the patient diplomatic efforts of a well-informed, articulate and creative U.S. president.
Hm. From this side of the border, it looked more like “self-serving legacy building of a mendacious, glib, and loose-with-the-truth” U.S. President.
Was poor taste in mistresses
Ouch. What an insensitive thing to say, especially from someone as enlightened and intellectual as yourself. Was Paula Jones a poor choice because her large nose and drawl didn’t fit with the standard beauty ideal? Was Monica Lewinsky a poor choice because she was plump? Gennifer Flowers because she was too old? Just what qualities should a President look for in a mistress?
a sensible reason to replace him with a man who’s proud to tell you foreign affairs are something he himself is never ever going to have, swear to God?
Al Gore? I mean, that’s who would have replaced Mr. Clinton, had he in fact been removed from office.
This is a straw-man anyhow — his “poor choice in mistresses” was not the reason he was nearly removed from office, as I’m sure you know very well. It was no more “all about sex” than the current war is “all about oil”.
Whose idea of diplomacy is smiling while delivering an ultimatum?
It’s a simplistic reduction of the events leading up to the present war, but all in all, I think it’s worked out marvelously…compared to the alternative.
What part do you have a problem with, Spider? The smiling, or the ultimatum? Had he delivered the ultimatum with a pensive frown, would that have made him a great leader? Had he continued the pointless and idiotic charade of pursuing further Terran Federa– er, UN approval while wearing a charming smile, would that have made him a master diplomat?
I’d hardly call his expression during the Monday ultimatum a smile, so I’m guessing it’s the ultimatum itself you had the problem with. Color me shocked.
In 1993, Arab terrorists tried to — get this! — blow up the World Trade Center. Of course, they failed ludicrously.
Oh really? I can think of six families who believe otherwise.
Terrorists usually did;
Except when they didn’t.
they were figures of fun, bearded buffoons who squabbled and shot ineffectually in all directions in films.
Except when they didn’t.
They couldn’t even take out a satirist: Salman Rushdie toured at will. The only modern terrorists to have taken a significant number of lives on U.S. soil were white, male Americans — specifically, Timbit-Brain McVeigh in Oklahoma City and the FBI in Waco;
I see…the brown terrorists are laughable and ineffectual caricatures, while the white terrorists are the truly dangerous ones. I guess the 9/11 planes must have been hijacked by microcephalic Irish-Americans from the middle states, and this whole War on Terrorism is just some terrible misunderstanding.
Musicians and writers were optimistic.
Oh, but Spider, now they’re ecstatic! They once again have a Great Cause &tm;, which allows them to wrap themselves in self-righteous Social Relevance&tm; — it’s like the Sixties all over again. Even better: the whole world waits with bated breath on their latest political pontifications, and the more outrageous and less coherent their message, the more attention they get. Who needs to be rational, or consistent, or even coherent? What more could narcissistic publicity-whores ask for? It’s so much easier now than back then, before they had Bush as their whipping boy — I mean, back then they were actually expected to be creative, and talented, and all those other hard things.
Multitrack recording had just stopped requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars of machinery and expertise;
Lowering the talent-filtration bar, allowing for an explosive growth in the number of “musicians” and a precipitous drop in the average talent level of the industry. Yeah, that’s progress.
the sound quality of consumer playback had just reached perfect.
Ha! Tell that to a tube audio enthusiast.
Publishing books suddenly no longer absolutely necessitated printing 25 paper copies in the hope of selling one, and writing them no longer required a (shudder) typewriter;
Nor did it, as with the recording industry, require much in the way of talent. Now it’s just easier to pump out godawful crap — like, say, Starmind.
The Internet was going to make us all rich. ‘Nuff said;
An unrealistic expectation fueled by the hype of the Dot-Com Bubble. However, it depends on your perspective — I certainly consider my life vastly more efficient and more effective as a result of the introduction of the Internet, and I am unquestionably more informed and involved than I otherwise would be. It has yet to make me rich, but it has had a tremendous positive impact in my life and in the lives of millions, perhaps billions of others.
Oh, but perhaps that doesn’t count, since you were talking about monetary wealth, right? And that’s all that really matters when carping about the U.S..
Just about everyone on Earth understood that the United States would never, under any circumstances, first-strike a weaker opponent. It had just proven it by allowing the Soviet Union to surrender;
A blatant distortion of the facts. First off, we did not “first strike” either Afghanistan or Iraq. Afghanistan, in the form of al Qaeda terrorists to whom it gave refuge and resources in aid of their efforts, attacked us on 9/11, and on at least three occasions before that (Khobar Towers, Kenya/Tanzania embassies, USS Cole). Iraq invaded Kuwait, which we then liberated. Hussein signed a cease fire in that war, which included provisions requiring the elimination of Iraqi WMD and the unconditional cooperation of the Iraqi government in same. He failed to meet those conditions, and three weeks ago we resumed the war.
And I watched on TV as Mikhail Gorbachev signed the document terminating the USSR in December 1991. It was Boris Yeltsin in the room, not George H.W. Bush, and (as noted) it was a dissolution, not a surrender.
British Columbia still believed it had some sort of obligation to spend perfectly good money on hospitals, nursing care, special education, social services, legal aid, police protection, infrastructure maintenance, public housing, and an accountable ferry system. It had not yet decided that the only proper use of tax dollars is hosting international sporting competitions;
Not being from B.C., I’ll withhold comment.
The U.S. seemed poised to legalize medical marijuana. Or rather, individual states still entertained the delusion that they had the power to do so, merely because the Constitution said they did and their citizens voted for it;
A decent point about Constitutional authority, but a distortion of the breadth of support for the medical marijuana initiatives. In any case, it really is a Constitutional law issue (to wit: states rights, and possibly interstate commerce), and this is how these things are settled…via test cases that can be brought to the U.S. Supreme Court.
You could board an airplane in under two hours, carrying nail clippers;
Thanks to a late cab, on Monday I boarded a plane (carrying nail clippers, a disposable razor, and even a pair of tweezers) in under thirty minutes. Your point?
There seemed to be so little to worry about, we had time to worry about nothing at all. Anybody remember Y2K, when our biggest fear was that at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, our term papers would be lost and Revenue Canada would forget how much we owed?
It’s easy to say in hindsight that Y2K was “nothing at all”. Did you feel that way beforehand? Or were you decrying Man’s dependence on technology, and scoffing at us for foolishly placing the integrity of our entire technological civilization at the mercy of two little digits?
We were living in the Golden Years, for a while there.
Ah yes, the Golden Years of Milk and Honey Under the Glorious Supreme Leader Bill Clinton, May His Ever-Changing Yet Eternal Legacy (Whatever It Is at the Moment) Shine Forever.
“Got kneepads?”
Instead of savouring it, making sure that half a century of that kind of forward progress would continue,
What? Only half a century? What about this “new millennium” thingie you were just going on about?
we decided, for a minute, that it was safe to coast.
Who’s “we”? Speak for yourself, Mr. Ostrich.
We yammered about the End of History, and invented “reality TV.”
Hey, thanks, Spider: I know Fukuyama’s to blame for the former, but now I know who I can blame for the latter!
We thought we could afford to let dimwits take the reins of power. How much damage could they do?
Careful now — talking about Chirac that way is bound to get some nasty frowns thrown your way from the general direction of Quebec.
Oh wait, were you talking about President Bush? Silly me. Right. You just go ahead and keep on believing that he’s stupid. Then the next time he does something inexplicable (to you), take Ayn Rand’s advice and “Check your premises.”
I choose to believe that the true Golden Age lies always ahead of us, never behind. But some years, it’s harder than other years.
Oh, my! A sudden world-weary flourish and we’re at the end, with no real conclusion or summation of arguments. And here I thought he was maybe going to say something meaningful at some point.
Say, you don’t suppose this is a case of having only enough material for one piece, but spinning it into a trilogy anyway, do you? If so, maybe he’ll tell us in subsequent letters what he should have been able to say in just this one.
Spider isn’t Canadian–just a minor correction.
Not quite so, Rick C, I am fairly certain that Spider grew up American, fled to Canada during the Vietnam war. I don’t know whether he took out Canadian citizenship, or retains landed immigrant status. Just a typical Commie whiner.
For all you trivia buffs, the “Canada” mentioned above refers to a sparsely-populated snowmass located somewhere west of Greenland.
“Not quite so, Rick C, I am fairly certain that Spider grew up American, fled to Canada during the Vietnam war.”
Actually, he moved there in 1973.
“Just a typical Commie whiner.”
Who practically worships Robert Heinlein. Robinson was sound enough on 9/11 and Afganistan: I retain enough of a fondness for his earlier work to give him the benefit of the doubt. Possibly he had just had a bad day when he wrote the article. Or possibly he’s just getting old.
Moe
PS: Cheap shot on the Geraldo thing, BTW: most of the people I’ve asked over the years were at least neutral about Geraldo getting punched on camera…
PPS: Instalanche warning, BTW.
hmm.. well I’d never heard of ‘ol Spider before now, but, ummm.. he sure sounds like he’s, you know, ‘dumb as a box of hammers’
I’ve never heard of this Spider guy before, but is it possible that he was just writing satirically and you guys missed it? If I’m wrong, he is truly a caricature of himself, isn’t he? The superficial depth, the wistful sigh for the lost illusions his sentivitity allows him to imagine and share with the great unwashed (i.e., us). If there’s one silver lining to the visibility the self-righteous “peace” movement has gotten lately, it’s that they stand naked in all their stupidity, absurdity, and ultimately self-absorption. It makes it much easier to refute them. If you just say, “S/he is in the peace movement…” it says all you need to say about the person’s credibility and depth and no further commentary is necessary. I say this, by the way, as a recovering leftist and peace protester from the 60’s.
Gee whiz, what a whining puss.
“We thought we could afford to let dimwits take the reins of power. How much damage could they do?”
Coming from the land of Chretien, Stockwell Day, Preston Manning, Alexa McDonnaugh, Joe Clark, Sheila Kopps, Bouchard and Parrizeau, Ralph Klein and the BC Convicted PM’s club, this is especially rich.
T.L. James-
Hilarious! One of the funniest Fiskings I’ve read in a while. Thanks for the laughs.
Brilliant fisking. I’ve always had a soft spot for Spider, but his political & social commentaries in the Globe and Mail have always been half-formed.
franko: no, he’s not kidding. That’s generally why his fiction has suffered, he’s been stuck in the same mindset for the last 25 years. Hell, I grew up reading his Callahan stuff.
Well, I DID live in British Columbia during the late 1990’s. Robinson’s statement about accountable ferry systems is beyond parody. As is any notion of good governance or government during that era. Interested readers can reconstruct this golden era by googling some of the following keywords
“New Democratic Party”
“Premier Glen Clark”
“Premier Mike Harcourt”
“Fast Ferries”
“Nanaimo Bingo”
“Carrier Lumber”
“Mary-Woo Sims”
Enjoy. Those of us who paid taxes there did not.
This is so disappointing. More and more people keep coming out with opinions of this war, and I find fewer and fewer people to admire.
While I never truly admired Spider Robinson, I respected him for a writer. He’s often been compared to Heinlein, and I was always confused by that.
As the above article points out, there’s no real reasoning here. If I could find a war protestor who could give me a decent argument, and reasons instead of slogans, I might change my mind. As it stands they all shout at me so that I can’t rebut and walk away when they can’t stop me from speaking.
I never liked Mr. Robinson much. He always seemed like a Heinlein wannabe. Not Heinlein in his classic era days, but more in his wacko days, when it work consisted largely of hippie fantasies.
Do I read this right? Did he just, in effect, deny that 9/11 ever happened? We just invaded Afghanistan and Iraq for no reason whatsoever?
Speaking of dimwits…no wonder the hard left has lost all credibility.
What has struck me about Spider Robinson is he has generally been very far left socially while lionizing the thoughts and stories of Robert Heinlein to the point of sycophancy. Heinlein never let himself be pinned down, but he certainly was in the libertarian-conservative camp(i.e. pro-gun)and very pro-military and pro-defense. I would guess Heinlein would definitely approve of Pres. Bush’s dropping the ABM treaty considering the praises he sang about the original SDI and would likely support the Iraq war based on the NBC weapons issue alone, especially after 9/11. In addition I think he would have shared the right’s suspicions of the ICC and the Kyoto treaty as well as gov’t spending/bureaucracy in general. While Heinlein shared in the “one world Gov’t” concept common in SF I think he wanted it on an American model not the Bureaucratic-Socialist-UnRepresentative- Parlimentary model that is the current UN. So how Robinson can reconcile all the gushing he has done on Heinlein with that silly and rather thoughtless letter above is puzzleing.
BTW, I did like one or two of his short stories.
Mr. Robinson states:
“Nelson Mandela walked free. Apartheid ended. The abominations in Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere finally started the world thinking halfway seriously that something like a Terran Federation might be a good idea.”
Mr. James responds:
“The world? Or just Tranzis (who always wanted that anyway) and sci-fi authors whose political ideas are still stuck in the 1960’s utopian fantasies of Future Shock and Star Trek?”
Or “Stranger in a Strange Land”. Sounds like Robinson has joined Heinlein at his political dead end.
Good grief…so what? He entertained me. I’m supposed to…what, exactly, now that there’s evidence that his brain doesn’t function especially well outside of fictional pages? Sheesh. This is a fairylike wisp of wishing for something-or-other, like a more Roddenberryish world, and is quite unlike the hypocritical belligerance of someone like Tim Robbins, who’s just a talentless hostile beanpole.
Blame the editors who printed the damn thing for not smacking Spider’s nose with a rolled-up copy of their newspaper and sending him back to smoke pot and think about, you know, the future and stuff.
In response to the above: I think that one of the worst disservices ever done to Spider Robinson, as a writer, was to compare him (frequently) to Heinlein. Heinlein was a giant of a writer, and Robinson worshipped him, verbally and in print. Robinson’s writing, by contrast, was witty, sometimes insightful, and occasionally could hit you right between the eyes (see the Callahan books, mentioned above… and be prepared for a drastic franchise-change after the first three).
But Robinson can be a LAZY writer, which destroys all that’s good in his writing, in my opinion. His best works are the ones he worked hardest on and researched most thoroughly (e.g. Stardance, Night Of Power); I don’t see this as a coincidence. (And yes, I’d argue that his political opinions vis-a-vis the war are not especially well researched.)
When he aspired to be like Heinlein — and I doubt ANY writer ever worked harder than Heinlein, or did his research more thoroughly — the results could be wonderful. But when Robinson started believing (or seemed to believe) that he was already AS GOOD AS Heinlein, his fiction suffered terribly.
Let me hasten to point out that I don’t know the man personally at all. It’s possible that he never believed the hype written about him. I’d be delighted for him to prove me wrong by working his ass off on a new novel, preferably a radical departure from anything he’s done before.
As for his political opinions on the war — well, folks, let’s think about his qualifications. Does his status as a science-fiction writer make him any more qualified in the international arena than, say, Janeanne Garafalo? I’d say no. (And in Robinson’s specific case, I’m having a hard time remembering ANYTHING he’s written that took place ANYWHERE on Earth other than in the United States and Canada. This does not bode well for depth of international understanding.)
Consider the source, folks. Go ahead and enjoy some of his books if you want; I did. On the other hand, perhaps Robinson and Mr. Bush should reach an agreement — Bush won’t try to write science fiction, and Robinson won’t try to enter the Foreign Service. I could live with that.
sincerely,
Daniel Schwartz
Medford, MA
I’ve enjoyed a lot of his fiction, but have always wanted to grab him by the lapels and tell him an old show business quote – “If you want to send a message, call Western Union!”.
I’m a Spider Robinson fan, have been for a long time. Some of his stuff is less-than-good (the mentioned “Starmind” being a good example), but his Callahan’s novels (including the Lady Sally books) are amongst the favorites in my “I-used-to-work-in-a-bookstore” enhanced collection.
If this is him doing a self-parody, I’ll eat my hat, my socks, and YOUR socks, to boot. This tracks very well with his usual writings. I do wish he’d pull himself up into the present, but if it means that his fiction writing would suffer, I’d rather he stay “back then.”
Just because I like his books doesn’t mean I have to like his political beliefs. I’ll still go out and buy whatever books he puts out, and read them with the same enjoyment level I had before. I don’t agree with much of what he says in this column, but heck, it’s his opinion.
Oh, and “the next Heinlein” thing has always confused me, too. Other than both having pretty clear opinions in their books (whether or not they AGREE with those opinions isn’t the point; look at Heinlein’s “Farnham’s Freehold” for an example), and being “free-thinkers,” I don’t see a whole lot to compare between them as writers. They write different stories, with different styles, and that’s a-okay with me.
Decent fisking..
I’ve read a lot of Spider Robinson’s fiction and non-fiction over the years, but in the past 4-5 years he has become unreadable. Quite a few of his stories were pretty nastily anti-American, and most of the rest are not really worth wading through all the syrupy 60’s-hippy nostalgia to get to the puns/characters/good bits.
He has become a broken record, repeating a lot of what he has said before in his speechs at SF cons, the basic bit that there is a great reason for optimism because we have better musical fidelity, better Macs and no threat of smallpox (oops, he didn’t mention that), etc..
Golden Years: Willful and blissful ignorance of the dangers around us; the comforting delusion that if we pretend evil does not exist it will just go away; see also – Clinton Years.
You said it far better than I did, but I did it first… (shameless self-promotion warning):
http://www.relapsedcatholic.blogspot.com/2003_04_01_relapsedcatholic_archive.html#200128923
Definitely an excellent fisking! I am too bored with most fiskings to read them all the way through.
I had no idea Spider was such a moron.
Howdy from Texas!
I consider Spider’s political positions to be of the “harmless hippie” variety and not actually anti-American like some much more prominent celebrities. Therefore, I will forgive him for his misguided point of view, at least enough to keep reading his books. (Especially anything Callahan connected!)
Spider Robinson was born in New York in 1948 and emigrated to Canada in 1973. I doubt that he was evading military service, since that was after Nixon cancelled the draft and Spider doesn’t look like he’d have passed a military physical exam. As for his comments about B.C.’s lack of social responsibility, they are absurd. It’s still a womb-to-tomb welfare state, just with lower taxes.
OTOH, what’s wrong with punching out Geraldo? Can’t humanity everywhere find some common ground?
I have most of Spider Robinson’s books. I like the Bar books; most people do. However, I think this fisking is entirely justified. If you really want to let him know what you think, there is something called “Baen’s Bar” where the “Bar Flies” hang out at http://www.baen.com (Baen Books). Might ought to drop in and let him know what a putz he has been…
By the way, one of my daughters (she is 21) is one of the Bar Flies.
From Kathy’s link, I like her quote “Spider’s past his best-before date….” Just reminds me that I mostly prefer not to know much about any entertainment talent I enjoy, it usually taints them the next time around. Forgive me enjoying Richard Gere in “The Mothman Prophecies” though.
As for his reverence for Heinlein, I do not think he does him much justice. I also considered Heinlein’s work (his early work anyway) to have a thread of “quit whining and do it yourself” in it. I do not understand why these “free-thinkers” always have to freely think about picking my pocket to accomplish their goals of giving somebody else free stuff.
I disagree with Spider’s views here. But I’m proud to call both him and his wife “friend”, and hope he feels the same way about me. As someone once said about Isaac Asimov, he was (IIRC) “a trendy knee-jerk liberal of the worst sort; but if more people were like him, that would be not just a sensible view but the only one possible.”
As a B.C. resident (a liberal one), I really liked this – it was definitely justified, given the poor thought that Spider put into his writing. However, identifying him with liberals is like identifying him with Canadians – hardly fair.
This reminds me of the idiotic rant Robinson once wrote about his perception of the 3.5″ floppy as a failed design. The perfect title would have been ‘Why I Will Never Bean Engineer or Hard SF Writer.’
My take on Heinlein is that he didn’t like big government, but thought that world government was inevitable.
Robinson is done. He’s been done for a long time. He wrote a few good books and some truly hideous ones, including “Night Of Power” (lovely first-person, main character sharing in the joy of his daughter’s first orgasm. Poetry, spidy)
Like so many boomers, he actually believes that because he feels strongly about an issue, then his position is correct and…wait for it…relevant.
He’s done.
Given human nature, I see no way a Terran Federation or any other one-world government could ever be anything but a tyranny.
There was a time I found such a government an attractive idea, hoping that a stateless world would be a warless one. I also wished hot cups of coffee and Lucy Strikes grew on a tree in my back yard.
Dear Mr. James,
Spider Robinson and I were acquainted in college. He was a good guy then, would never harm a soul, and I’m sure he’s a good guy now. We disagreed on a few matters, but it didn’t keep us from being friends.
I’m lukewarm toward Spider’s fiction, but anyone who can get to where he has, despite the barriers the publishing world maintains against his sort of fiction, deserves at least a modicum of respect. You can take my word on that; I’ve been writing for thirty years and have yet to get a book into print.
So: given Spider’s relatively innocuous, if occasionally misconceived, column, what’s the big deal? What precipitated this shower of scorn?
It’s one thing to disagree with someone’s social or political opinions for what you think are good, objective reasons, and quite another to decide that he’s such a villain or loon that he deserves to be unloaded on like that. Did you have no more suitable target for such strong ammunition, or do you have something in particular against Spider that you’ve been waiting to avenge?
Francis, I found the smug, condescending tone of his article irritating, and its content of a piece with much of what has been coming out of Canadian intellectual circles lately (whether or not he was born in Canada is irrelevant here, as he has clearly “gone native”). Frankly, I’m fed up.
I understand that you might be offended by my comments, given that he is your personal friend. However, I was offended by the vacuity of his comments. He may be a swell and sweet guy, but neither that nor the laurels you ask me to allow him to rest on change the quality of his arguments.
I thought that the Blog might be interested to read my e-mails back & forth w/ Mr. Robinson in regards this editorial.
>> Dear Spider:
>>
>> I was a fan of yours even before I met you roughly two decades ago
>> at a southern California science fiction convention,
>>where you and your lovely wife were co-GOH. (and yes, I STILL have the
>>coffin lock key that saved the day, allowing the portable floor
>> to be safely assembled) I always thought your work showed
>>the thoughtful storyteller’s touch of classic Heinlein
>> work.
>>
>> Therefore, I was very much disappointed to read your recent
>> comments (4/9) from *The Globe and Mail* in re. events of the
>> past few weeks, years, and decades.
>>
>> I asked myself, “were these comments worthy of someone who considered
>> himself a student of Robert Heinlein?” (as I do
myself) And I fear
>> the answer is no, they displayed the sort of muddy reasoning that
>> Robert scorned. For a disection of your comments you might want to
>> look at the following:
>>
>> http://www.lamarssociety.org/archives/000454.html
>>
>> Mark L. Shanks
>> mlshanks@ix.netcom.com
>> Clio Eternum, Vita Brevis, Ludisimus
______________________________________________
—–Original Message—–
From: spiderweb@shaw.ca [mailto:spiderweb@shaw.ca]
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2003 11:55 PM
To: Mark L. Shanks
Subject: Re: Recent comments by Spider
Importance: High
Dear Mr. Shanks,
you appear to share an oddly common, inexplicable
delusion that my friend Robert Heinlein was in favor
of any and all use of US military power. I assure
you, Robert’s comments on America first-striking a
weaker opponent on suspicion alone would have been withering…even BEFORE the suspected concealed weaponsofmassdestruction turned out to have been imaginary. He would never have supported spending US$100 billion and brutally insulting the rest of the world to depose a clown who had NOTHING to do with 9/11, posed no plausible threat to America, and came in at about #14 on the list of World’s Top Ten Evil Tyrants.
I followed the link you supplied, and found little
reasoning, muddy or otherwise. Just a lot of young
men with no girlfriend. I started to find sophomore
bull sessions tedious about the time I reached
freshman year. That first hysterical rant by the
blogger himself was fun, though–I’ve rarely been so
implacably or creatively misread. Being the
Antichrist is oddly enjoyable. Thanks for that.
Sorry I’ve disappointed you with my prose. Perhaps
CALLLAHAN’S CON, due out in Tor hardcover in July,
may make up for it. Thanks for writing.
–Spider Robinson
______________________________________
Dear Mr. Robinson:
I have +NO+ idea where you derive from my comments that I belive that “Robert Heinlein was in favor of any and all use of US military power,” since I certainly never explicitly made that statement nor do I in any way believe that facile opinion. (…I suppose we might call the assertion “sophomoric”) However, my reading of Mr. Heinlein’s work and life leads me to the conclusion that whenever he was offered the opportunity to take a personal stand against fascist r?gimes and brutal dictatorships, he did so, often at significant personal sacrifice. (consider his behavior during WWII & the Cold War) That Sadam Hussien’s r?gime qualifies both as fascist and brutal has been made clear to anyone who has eyes to see. I personally suspect that Bob would have been withering in his comments all right….but it would have been directed at an American policy that allowed Iraq to fester for 12 years before cleaning up the mess that remained after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 and ther rebellions the US encoraged in 1992. Had our current situation come in their younger days, I expect that Bob & Ginny might have learned Aribic and visited the scene, as they did Russia durring the depths of the Cold War. Of course, we will never know, because ROBERT IS DEAD, and therefore unable to answer either of our views.
While never having met him personally, I did exchange corispondence with Mr. Heinlein in the late 1970s & early 1980s, and just as he reminded me of his comments, I’d suggest you remember:
“What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what ‘the stars foretell,’ avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable ‘verdict of history’ –
what are the facts, and to how many decimal places?
You pilot always into an unknown future;
facts are your only clue. Get the facts!”
As for some of your assertions in your reply to me…
1) Weapons of Mass Distruction: The jury is still out. Searching a country the size of the State of California is not something effectively done either while a dictator rules or in the middle of an armed conflict. Recent provocative clues that he might still have them: Mass quantities of protective gear, a WMD support vehicle, detectable traces of chemical weapons in Tigres & Euphrates river water samples, previously unknown & very highly radioactive bunkers under a the site of a nuclear research facility… Let’s talk to the scienticts that he hid from UN inspectors and presured through “minders” and holding their families as hostages. I expect they could shed light on the state of Iraq’s WMD programs, if they still live.
2) Nothing to do w/ 9/11? Again, the jury is out. Perhaps you could explain why an Iraqi civilian airliner (A Boeing product) was found at a site south of Bagdad identified as a terrorist training camp and having armed individuals from Yemen, Sudan, Egypt, and Afghanistan? That Sadam supported Hammas, Islamic Jehad, and other Palistinian terrorists is common knowedge….because he previously BRAGGED about it. Why is it such a strech to visualize him supporting Osama? If it is just because of their ideological differences…remember that Islamic Jehad’s chief patron & ideological sponsor is IRAN (whom Sadam fought in open war), yet they stil received material support from Iraq.
3) Perhaps you can cite what in Mr. Heinlein’s writings leads you to believe that he would have given a damn for the opinions of “the rest of the world” (nonsense) or the very much unknown cost of bringing liberation to the Iraqi people. That he might have been cynical of the eventual results, I will conceed….he was often ascerbic in his view of politics. But I suggest that he might have asked YOU why all of the formerly communist eastern Europe lined up on the side of the United States in this matter? Or Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, or Australia? And perhaps he might find it in him to question why you, a Canadian resident, seem so conserned about costs that clearly are not being borne by you or the pusillanimous government on the United State’s northern border.
You need not respond to any of this. I eventually stopped writing Bob because his comments in Expanded Universe about writer’s time weighed upon my concience. And while I enjoyed or discussions by mail, they were neither earthshaking nor worthy of distracting him from either his writing or enjoying personal privacy. You are entitled to the same, although having placed yourself in the public political arena, I suggest that you have waived a great deal of these privacy expectations.
Finally, I suppose that if this is what passes for a polite response from you, I will have to pigeonhole you to the catigory of: “I’ll read his writing, but damned if I would drink w/ him at a con” with others such as David Brin or Harlan Ellison. Whether ideas come from young men, with or without girlfriends, is irrelevant to their opinions. They may be right or wrong, but their age or personal lives do not make them so. That you would dismiss them so demonstrates a contempt for ordinary politeness that is truly appaling. Unreasoned sneering about third-parties merely diminishes the one doing so.
I first wrote Bob when I was a “young man with no girlfriend” in high school. He replied politely (through a postcard in Ginny’s handwriting w/ his signature) with a very direct response. Over the next several years, we exchanged several letters, all of them unfailingly polite if none the less disagreeing with me (at least partially). (the subject was religon and faith) He never pretended that mere age or position made his opinions more worthy….only that he had come to conclusions base upon his considered interpretation of the facts.
Sincerely,
Mark L. Shanks
mlshanks@ix.netcom.com
Clio Eternum, Vita Brevis, Ludisimus
PS: I am taking the liberty of posting this to the same web site you dismissed. Certainly they are entitled to know your feelings about them.
Thanks, Mark. That’s quite an illuminating exchange.