Robert A. Heinlein: A Writer as Big as America

[WestVirginiaRebel]

PJ Media

As some of you know, I’m an American by choice. I left kin and country, culture and connections to throw in my lot with the freedom gang.

How did this come to happen? How could a girl raised in Portugal, of patriotic (fanatic, really) parents, get to the point where she felt expatriate, a stranger in a strange land?

Well, a lot of it had to do with what I read. When I tell people I was raised on Robert A. Heinlein books, I wasn’t joking. And there was something in those books that just made me American, before I even realized it was happening.

(This, by the way, is why I have zero sympathy with the invaders at our border, singing the anthems of their nations and reviling us and our flag, even as they seek to come in. Yes, our immigration system needs fixing. A lot of what needs fixing are the tweaks that the left made over the decades, like lotteries from sh*t—er… underprivileged countries, treating the U.S. as some sort of charity that must take in the neediest and not those who want to become Americans. But the watchwords for immigration should always be "fit in or … er… fly off. Anything else is an invasion. People who invade illegally, flaunting our laws and calling us oppressive need to be sent home. The alternative is to let them destroy us and all we are. I understand firing them from cannons in the general direction of home is inhumane. But we can picture it. Meanwhile stop “detaining” them. Just send them back. As a bonus, add in Occasional Cortex, she who reviles us from within.)

I started my reading scoffing at the constant griping at taxes – I mean, you hold your land at the sufferance of the state and you’re a loyal subject, no? – and by 20 I was seriously questioning why someone was entitled to the work of another’s labor.

How did this happen? Regardless of what the left thinks, Robert A. Heinlein never preached. Was his work message fiction? Well… kind of, sort of. If you squint and shake the magic eightball, and read somewhere his precepts for writing, you’ll find one of his (like his last in list) objectives was to make the reader think.

And think I did. As I wound my way through The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and Red Planet, I thought about the American Revolution, which led to reading the founding documents, and eventually the Federalist Papers and biographies of the founding fathers. (This year, while in Portugal on family stuff, I found I still had those on the shelves. In English, as a bonus.)

The other stuff made me think too. Puppet Masters, with its mind-controlling aliens, was eerily reminiscent of Cold War Europe, and those glossy Soviet Life magazines might as well have been dispatches from the masquerade, with the aliens obscuring the fact that no one was free. (Unfortunately there is no seven-day fever for Marxism, and we’re still in the long, at some point bloody course of getting back from it.)

Or there was Starman Jones, which so clearly illustrated the bindings that ossified systems could fall into. (And is really reminiscent of Europe in so many ways.)

When I came to the U.S as an exchange student, it just all coalesced, but Heinlein had planted it long before.

Not by preaching, but by asking, by questioning, by poking, by engaging in thought experiments. Recently I keep coming back to Revolt in 2100. The thought-tyranny that almost got us (if you don’t think so, talk to recent graduates of our public schools) is not – as Heinlein thought, or perhaps just posited – a religious one, or at least not traditionally religious. But Marxist principles are as unyielding and grip as hard as any religion. They have in fact become a religion without the concept of redemption, but judgmental and inflexible.

 

And I keep thinking: When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. – Robert A. Heinlein

 

No, Heinlein didn’t preach. What he did was be an American. Be an American so intensely that it was impossible for his work not to transmit it. The internal logic of the stories themselves led you to believe and think like an American.

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Robert Heinlein, the last real American writer?