"Granted, the Roosevelt gang was in charge, but the conversion of the Republic to the Corporate State was not very far along as yet and didn't affect Laurie's and my private lives; the outright disintegration of this society wouldn't be a fast and obvious process till (my opinion) after the 1964 election."
-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 333-465, 1935, p. 343.
So maybe American blog readers can tell us why Carl dislikes Roosevelt and the 1964 election result?
In Anderson's time travel novel, There Will Be Time, there is a chapter of political satire that I usually skip past while rereading. Fortunately, we find many common interests despite these unavoidable political disagreements.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
What happened during the disastrous Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt was how he institutionalized a massive centralization of power in the national gov't. Attended by a great expansion in costly "welfare" programs. And the election of Lyndon Johnson to a full term in office in 1964 was his and the Democrat Party's huge expansion of welfare and still more centralizing of power in the US gov't thru their futile "Great Society" schemes. And, unfortunately, LBJ also made catastrophic mistakes in his handling of the Vietnam War.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I mistakenly left a comment discussing your last paragraph here in your "Conceptual Space" blog piece. Drat!
Sean
Sean,
I have deleted that comment so you can start over here.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Many thanks! I will.
We have discussed before that chapter of THERE WILL BE TIME that you dislike. Even back when I first read the book, I thought it tone and pitch perfect as satire. I would point out that Poul Anderson used to live in San Francisco before moving to the NEAR BY town of Orinda. Which means he came to be all too familiarly aware of hard line leftists of the crude sort satirized in that chapter. Unfortunately, there were and are Americans who do think, speak, write, and act as described in that part of THERE WILL BE TIME.
Sean
Kaor, Paul and Sean!
I agree about Roosevelt and Johnson. Many people think that the New Deal got us out of the Great Depression (it didn’t; the Depression dragged on), or at least gave relief to some of the unemployed and other victims of the Depression (to some extent it did). But then there policies like limiting farm production to raise prices for farmers, never mind that this also raised food prices for the hungry.
I remember a letter in the local newspaper in which someone thanked Roosevelt for Social Security, and his monthly check. I wanted to tell him that his gratitude was misplaced; he should thank current workers and taxpayers, not the ghost of FDR.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
You are correct. FDR's so called "New Deal" did not end the Depression. If anything, his policies prolonged and worsened it. To say nothing of how absurd and counterproductive agricultural policies has become!
And don't get me started about the lie called "Social Security"! I've known for many years that it's actually just a Ponzi scam. If we HAVE to have a mandatory old coots pension scheme, it should have been set up to be self funding by the beneficiaries, not the tax payers. The mere fact the SSA does not collect enough in taxes to pay for all annual payouts, but has to borrow to cover the rest, shows how poorly based it is.
Sean
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