If I had followed the life-path that had been laid down for me, then I might never even have joined a trade union and would certainly never have been active in one. Once, we demonstrated outside the High Court in Manchester when two Branch Officers where charged with a potentially imprisonable offence. Fortunately, they were only fined and we raised the money.
Poul Anderson accurately captures the atmosphere of a packed mass meeting addressed by a powerful speaker and the heckling when Brother Evan Friday speaks up from the floor:
"'Boo! Boo! Throw 'im out! Spy! Blackleg! Boo!'" (p. 114)
I think that Friday is wrong to retreat and withdraw. Amid all the howling, he could quietly have returned to his seat. He had validly questioned Wilson's interpretation of the census figures and shown that the speaker was trying to polarize a very diverse community.
Friday seeks common cause with small shopkeepers. If I were on board the Pioneer, I would want to continue to participate in those mass meetings but also to offer an alternative to Wilson's approach.
6 comments:
Wilson would win. He knows how to whip up a crowd into a fighting mood. Appeals to reason are, to be blunt, a fart in a hurricane in those circumstances. A crowd like that wants blood.
Oh yes. An anti-Wilson party would need to organize to defend itself.
As a short to interim measure, it would be fortunate if Wilson had a tragic accident, with a subterranean leak putting the blame on some of his closest associates.
Then they'll take care of each other -- out of preemptive self-defense, combined with ambition.
If someone had bumped off Hitler in 1931 and put the blame on Ernst Rohm, the world would (probably) been spared much tragedy.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Or what would have happened if Hitler had not survived WW I? Considering all the dangers and narrow escapes he faced as a front line soldier, it's amazing he survived.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the Devil protects his own!
But then, reality doesn't have to be realistic.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Too true! Satan was also protecting Lenin and Stalin!
And I thought of the improbable number of COINCIDENCES leading to Francis Ferdinand's assassination. You wrote of how editors would have balked at accepting stories which had such "unrealistic" coinidences.
Ad astra! Sean
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