Outside of watching Jimmy Stewart's Elwood P. Dowd alley scene from Harvey once again, one rarely heard "My cleaver waits" much anymore...
Let's say it once more...
My cleaver waits...
Ahhhhhhhhh... 
the night is so young!
Posted on 08/19/2007 6:06:46 AM PDT by tpaine
Heinlein the Libertarian
"Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me," shows yet another side to the Heinlein paradox.
As a literary influence on the emerging libertarian movement, Heinlein was second only to Rand.
Yet his statement about self-sacrifice and duty to the species seems as un-Randian as you can get. Heinlein, a human chauvinist, always believed freedom and responsibility were linked. But he would never have thought it proper to impose the duty he saw as the highest human aspiration.
Heinlein once told a visitor, "I'm so much a libertarian that I have no use for the whole libertarian movement." Although never in lockstep with every libertarian attitude, Heinlein's fictions seemed derived from libertarianism before the modern movement even fully existed. Before books like Rand's Fountainhead and F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom sparked the modern libertarian movement in the mid-'40s, Heinlein had published a novelette, "Coventry," about a world whose government was based on a freely entered covenant that said that "no possible act, nor mode of conduct, was forbidden to you, as long as your action did not damage another."
Heinlein's other contributions to the libertarian zeitgeist include one of the epigrams of the gun rights movement, "an armed society is a polite society" - a line first published in his 1942 serial Beyond This Horizon.
He was also a direct intellectual influence on many important libertarians. David Friedman, author of the anarcho-capitalist classic The Machinery of Freedom, considered Heinlein's 1966 novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress vital to his intellectual evolution. (One of Moon's heroes was a professor advocating "rational anarchy," partially based on Heinlein's one-time neighbor, Robert LeFevre, founder of the libertarian Rampart College.) David Nolan, founder of the Libertarian Party, got his start in political activism in 1960 sporting a self-made "Heinlein for President" button. Another Heinlein devotee was Robert Poole, longtime editor of Reason and founder of the Reason Foundation, one of the first institutions to try to effect libertarian change in the real world in a practical manner. Poole's efforts could be seen as a legacy of Heinlein's interest in the nuts and bolts of how his imagined societies would actually function.
Even though he adopted the Milton Friedmanite phrase "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" as a slogan for his revolutionaries fighting colonial oppression in Moon, Heinlein was not deeply embedded in the economic strain of libertarianism, which stresses the importance of spontaneous order, the failures of central planning, and the efficiency of free markets. As the economist Robert Rogers has argued, Heinlein's fiction seemed to believe that it took Great Men or a single mind (sometimes human, sometimes computer) to make sure economies ran well. In a 1973 interview with the libertarian writer J. Neil Schulman, Heinlein was doubtful when Schulman referred to the greater efficiency of free markets. "I don't think the increase in efficiency on the part of free enterprise is that great," Heinlein said. "The justification for free enterprise is not that it's more efficient, but that it's free."
Heinlein was, then, his own kind of libertarian, one who exemplified the libertarian strains in both the Goldwater right and the bohemian left, and maintained eager fan bases in both camps. A gang of others who managed the same straddle, many of them Heinlein fans, split in 1969 from the leading conservative youth group, Young American for Freedom, in what some mark as the beginnings of a self-conscious libertarian activist movement. In a perfectly Heinleinian touch, the main sticking point between the libertarian and conservative factions was one of Heinlein's bêtes noires: resistance to the draft, which he hated as much as he loved the bravery of the volunteer who would fight for his culture's freedom or survival.
Heinlein the Iconoclast
The prominence of his juvenile novels and his galvanizing effect on so many adolescent fans have led many critics to condemn Heinlein's work as inherently unworthy of serious adult attention. As one scholar, Elizabeth Anne Hull, has written, "In an attempt to account for the extraordinary popularity and influence of the novels of Robert Heinlein, it would be all too easy to assert that the masses are asses and let it go at that. Those of us academics who read Heinlein are likely to admit it with an apology [and consider] our weakness in enjoying his work a minor character defect."
Heinlein is indeed best approached when young, because his work appeals to that eternal youthful question: How should you live as you grow into a culture you did not make?
Heinlein does this best via his defining characteristic, one that bridges the apparent divides in his work. As William Patterson, the author of a forthcoming two-volume biography of Heinlein, told me, the best way to understand Heinlein in toto is as a full-service iconoclast, the unique individual who decides that things do not have to be, and won't continue, as they are.
That iconoclastic vision is at the heart of Heinlein, science fiction, libertarianism, and America.
Heinlein imagined how everything about the human world, from our sexual mores to our religion to our automobiles to our government to our plans for cultural survival, might be flawed, even fatally so.
It isn't a quality amenable to pigeonholing, or to creating a movement around "What would Heinlein do?" As Heinlein himself said of his work, it was "an invitation to think-not to be-lieve." He created a body of writing, and helped forge a modern world, that is fascinating to live in because of, not in spite of, its wide scope and enduring contradictions.
Well, when you get to butchering that next hog, carve me off some nice chops!
Oh most definitely i would like to be on this ping list, thanks.
Good night and good morrow to you.
yeah, but great work if you can stomach it!
My all time favorite RAH quote.
Bump to the book list.
I have read each at least once.
Just the thought of getting rid of Soros and his Liberal Democrat ilk make me almost wish this were true!
Now, notice... I said ‘notice’ I say almost...
Yet, it would be fun to get rid of the scum and then have a nice little bloody revolution to get back on the true course a’la Heinlein, eh?
“Well, when you get to butchering that next hog, carve me off some nice chops!”
Happy to. My cleaver waits in great anticipation.
Outside of watching Jimmy Stewart's Elwood P. Dowd alley scene from Harvey once again, one rarely heard "My cleaver waits" much anymore...
Let's say it once more...
My cleaver waits...
Ahhhhhhhhh... the night is so young!
Seeing that long, long compilation of Bob’s inventive genius is astounding; he threw off brilliant ideas like flares from a never-ending Roman candle. Only one other writer in the genre ever impressed me near as much, and only one story by him: Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage,” published in the first volume of Harlan Ellison’s “Dangerous Visions.” DV is still one of the most powerful collections of stories ever put to paper, the RotPW can still give me chills — Farmer was absolutely profligate with brilliant ideas and flights of imagination, and like Bob did it with a flair that concealed the intense effort and dedication that all good writing requires. If you ever get a chance to pick up Dangerous Visions, I highly recommend that you do — most of the stories, which gathered a passel of Hugos and Nebulas, still make for powerful and challenging reading.
From http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042546/quotes while I am on a roll...
Harvey and I sit in the bars... have a drink or two... play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they’re saying, “We don’t know your name, mister, but you’re a very nice fella.” Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We’ve entered as strangers - soon we have friends. And they come over... and they sit with us... and they drink with us... and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they’ve done and the big wonderful things they’ll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he’s bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that’s envy, my dear. There’s a little bit of envy in the best of us.
Same here. Larry Niven is probably close. RAH even got me to reading shorts again. Twenty years after I had thought my hi-skruwl teechurs killed the desire.
That has been my observation as well.
From the "Daydream Engineers" exhibit at the US NAval Academy Library.
Harlan Ellison first got my attention when I saw his name on the teleplay for the ‘City on the Edge of Forever’ episode of “Star Trek” first broadcast on April 6, 1967.
I started reading his works, critiques of his work and his sayings in interviews... I was soon of the opinion he was a jerk who happened to write a good sci-fi yarn now and then...
Like Frank Sinatra who was a mega-jerk who sang great, great lounge songs and did passable rat pack films for light guilty pleasure entertainment..
After years of give and take, with all the stories of his and Roddenberry’s saying Ellison made Scotty a drug dealer, I say this. Given a 2 or 4 million dollar budget of 1967 dollars, I do not believe any filming of Ellison’s original script would have been better that the ‘bastardized’ 44 minute version he claims Roddenberry savagely cut, rewrote, filmed and presented for less than $200,000 1967 bucks.
Yet my main opinion of Harlan Ellison is still the same: He is a jerk who happened to write a good sci-fi yarn now and then!
DEFINITION OF AN ENGINEER
"An Engineer is one who passes as an exacting expert on the strength of being able to turn out with prolific fortitude strings of incomprehensible formulae calculated with micrometric precision from extremely vague assumptions which are based on debatable figures acquired from inconclusive tests and quite incomplete experiments carried out with instruments of problematic accuracy by persons of doubtful reliability and rather dubious mentality with particular anticipation of disconcerting and annoying everyone outside of their own fraternity."
I agree
Oh, yeah — Ellison = jerk, period, no excuses. I never found him much of a creative writer, either; workmanlike, yes, good at recycling others’ ideas. But as an editor, I’d put him up there with Campbell, as one who consistently could bring out the magic other writers had within. DV was a milestone; Theodore Sturgeon’s afterword to “If All Men Were Brothers...” is alone worth ten times the price of the book. Enjoy your evening — hope you’re cracking open number seven, in honor of Bob (can’t have an even number of beers for an old Navy man!).
Your I agree
Gadzooks, never, ever agree with my old cuz!
It gives him delusions of grandeur!
And it don't improve his fishing one damned bit!
Hee hee! How is the fishing anyway? :-)
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