Posted on 11/13/2004 12:26:56 PM PST by WillRain
Calling for assistance from my fellow Heinlein fans here.
I'm an education student (and a Social Science major) who has an assignment which is related to using literature to teach Social Studies.
I'd like to use, for this project, an excerpt from Starship Troopers in which the political philosophy of earning the franchise through a term of service is most concisely described.
Do any of you know of an on-line source that makes reference to these ideas?
In the absence of that, can you specify for me the place in the novel which has the clearest and most concise reference to the ideas (I'm thinking of a passage in which Rico remembers a class in which his instructor described the reasoning behind the service for franchise system). I've read the book a dozen times but I'm having trouble finding the exact passage i want. I'm asking because it strikes me as the sort of think that might have been excerpted on some blog or other somewhere on the net.
Anyone have a suggestion? I'm on a deadline and the project must be completed this weekend.
Thanks in advance.
I never thought "Podkayne" was sexist. Podkayne was my hero for years - seemed to me that her debate was really the one most girls facing a male-dominated career choice go through. I choose computer science. I have the same sort of worries Poddy did all the time - what happens when I want kids? If I take twenty years off to raise them, my training is worthless, but the other message of "Podkayne of Mars" is that if you have kids, you'd darn well better raise them.
I like Heinlein's stuff because he recognized that men and women are different but managed to have strong female characters in his stories at the same time. My favorite is Hazel, the grandmother in "The Rolling Stones" who can integrate in her head and teaches her grandkids astrogation, among many other things.
=== And you have to wonder how many people became liberals after reading "Stranger in a Strange Land" too.
Why? (Just out of curiosity). That and the Moon is a Harsh Mistress seem to be the two most popular among folks I know.
(I've read a lot of James Branch Cabell but never any Heinlein. Not a lot of Heinlein turnover secondhand. =)
(Hi WN! Hope you've been keeping well. We miss you...)
A book suggestion for your niece: "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card. If she's smart and alienated, she will love that book, and she's at about the right age. That and some Heinleins should be enough to make her quite dangerous, later in life - she might end up an engineer or a programmer or an astronaut, you know...
Stranger in a Strange Land belongs to the second sort of Heinlein novels. The first sort are wonderful stories about human resolve and conquering the future. The second sort are... well, I can't get through them.
Check your local used bookstore. Not a lot of Heinlein but you can usually find one or two. Or the bookstore. In general, look for a publication date in the 40s and 50s, most of his best stuff was written then. As an adult, I would recommend "Moon is a Harsh Mistress", "Double Star", "The Door Into Summer", and "Starship Troopers" as starters. The juveniles are wonderful but best if you either already like Heinlein, or encountered them in middle school.
My brother didn't question me giving her Citizen of the Galaxy though he'd never read it. BUT, he would not allow me to give his kids Tolkien's books. He's never read them, only seen the movies but he thinks they are demonic. *sigh* I tried to 'splain!! I bought him Fellowship to let him read and see... but he's not a reader and after almost 2 yearas he hasn't finished it yet. ~shaking head~
How very sad! Does he find Television "demonic" as a rule? If not, why not!!??
I wondered about taking my aunt (who has brain damage) to the Rings simply for their complexity and a bit of the violence. I guess we assume too often that just because she's five years old in some respects she's immature across the board. Not so ... she loved them!! Follows them more closely than I, even, given some of the questions she asked and detail she noticed. =)
Hey ... how have you been?
Well, I hope.
=== He just needs to read the books in order to understand.... i
Or read them to his kids.
I think that's the thing I"ll miss the most about never having kids: reading stories to them. I loved that as a child. My Mom read to us quite a bit.
My Dad was more famous (or infamous) for scaring the bejeezus out of us as little Irish kids by reading stuff like "A Modest Proposal" at dinner. =)
=== It's his views on non-possessive love relationships that resonate for me.
Well, with a name like poly-girl ... =)
Just teasing ... what does he/you mean by "non-possessive love relationships"?
Just as a side - The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of my all-time favorites. I'm inspired to read it again.
We can throw rocks at them!
Nice, concise tick-list, Ladydoc! Well done.
How have I been?
That would take several pages.
Thirty years career over,
now working full time in steel shop.
anyway not so bad as long as the Zoloft holds out.
Glad to see you back here too.
Seems like a lot of folks have started appearing more.
Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were good friends, and their works are powerfully moral through and through. I've never seen a better description of the battle between good and evil than LOTR.
I stumbled across "Space Suit" in the threadbare library of my junior high school in 1970. I was 11. Been an RAH fan ever since.
Patricia Wyant Reisfeld (sp?) lived in my reverie when I was still terrified of girls. (You'll have to read the book to know.)
About half of what Heinlein wrote is laid against a common background, sometimes known collectively as his "future history."
Most of that, from "Lifeline" to "Methuselah's Children" is complete in one volume, if you can get your hands on "The Past Through Tomorrow."
In the late 70's, he wrote a capstone to all that, a hefty tome called "Time Enough For Love." It's all fine reading, I think his best work, but some of it is at least PG-13, even today.
Heinlein's deepest penetration into lesbian sex (make up your own joke here) was with "I Will Fear No Evil," about an old man whose brain is transplanted into a young woman's body. RAH actually danced around a lot of societal taboos with this approach. And the political commentary in "Evil" is unsurpassed.
All that said, I could not get 100 pages into "Number of the Beast" without my eyes glazing over. Wish I had stopped with "Friday." You might wish you had stopped reading this several paragraphs ago.
Have a good weekend.
Thanks for that, Restorer.
(Though I might argue that the white-tipped cane of objective inquiry that is Science and the morally neutral tool that is Technique are increasingly morphed into Magic which not only Dominates, reshapes, retools, manufactures beings and binds men but "changes everything" ... including what we used to call self-evident truth. Science and technology -- in their present forms, anyway -- are not the replacement of white magic but, rather, the Ring.)
lol ...
Kate ... what did you end up doing, if you don't mind my asking?
Good choice!
I gave a copy of Troopers to my son while he was in high school
He is now a Marine.
I liked the part were police jobs could only be held by combat vets because they knew what happened when the trigger gets pulled.
I don't see any similarity at all. Heinlein was talking about soldiers defending the civilian populace and protecting their comrades; Marx was talking about "everybody being equal" and involuntary distribution of wealth.
And unfortunately what's happening today, with this kind of very sanctimonious and sermonizing talk about sex that's coming out of the rape counselors and so on, people do not realize, with all their good intentions, how oppressive this is to sex, what a disaster this is to the mind, what a disaster this is to the spirit, to allow the rape counselors to take over the cultural stage. Now the work that they do is good, and it's wonderful that they're there. But we cannot have this scenario being projected of male rapaciousness and brutality and female victimage. We have got to make women realize they are responsible, that sexuality is something that belongs to them. They have an enormous power in their sexuality. It's up to them to use it correctly and to be wise about where they go and what they do. And I'm accused of being "anti-woman" because of this attitude? Because I'm bringing common sense back to the rape discourse?
Today these women want the freedom that we won, but they don't want to acknowledge the risk. The minute you meet a man, the minute you go out wiht a man, the minute you go to a bar to have a drink, there is a risk. You have to accept that part of the sizzle of sex come from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered. (Ahhh ... )
I mean, wake up to reality. This is male sex. There's an attraction between the sexes that we're not totally in control of. The idea that we can regulate it by passing campus grivance committee rules is madness. My kind of feminism stresses personal responsibility. I've never been raped but I've been very vigilant -- I'm constantly reading the signals.
Sex, Art and American Culture, Camille Paglia
as originally posted on : Animal House: Dartmouth Porn Shocker
Brilliant analogy BUMP.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.