The opening sentence:
"They hadn't risked putting me in the base hospital or any other regular medical facility." (p. 89)
First person narration plus this guy is dangerous and in a military setting.
There is a war on. Although they are in the US, the narrator's wife works in a co-op and a Recreation Bureau has to ok its employees vacationing at Lake Pillsbury.
A guard has a stunner - a futuristic weapon, I think? The regeneration techniques that the narrator mentions are certainly futuristic.
This guy has been:
"'...charged with treasonable conspiracy against the People's Republic of the United States...'" (p. 92)
- not just individual treason like the narrator of "High Treason."
That phrase, "People's Republic...," is used literally, not sarcastically or ironically.
The narrator's wife, Bonnie, writes to him as John Reed but a political officer addresses him as Colonel Dowling. All will be made clear, no doubt.
The US and the Soviet Union are at war against a Sino-Japanese alliance.
Somewhere during the changes that have happened, the narrator's grandfather shouted with:
"...autumn sumac a shout of red behind him, and the wind shouted too, till I imagined old bugles blowing again at Valley Forge and Shiloh and Omaha Beach. Maybe that was when I first thought I might make the army a career." (p. 94)
(A man shouts so the wind does: Andersonian pathetic fallacy.)
OK? I'm not. We understand some of what is happening but not all of it yet.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Anything with some as hypocritical as "People's Republic" in it is always going to sound ominous, sinister, menacing.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I agree unless the people themselves do build it.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And that has never happened, every single laughably titled "People's Republic" has been nothing but a brutal tyranny. What a pompous, absurd, and nauseating thing jargon like "People's Republic" is!
Ad astra! Sean
Disagree.
Kaor, Paul!
It's still revolting, sickening, nauseatingly hypocritical jargon. Every single "People's Republic" has been tyrannical.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Has it? Every single one? And everyone who tried to do something better was revolting, sickening and nauseatingly hypocritical?
That does not mean that people cannot remake society to address human needs instead of continued competition, conflict and destruction. In fact, surely this issue has now become urgent?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, every single one of those hypocritically titled "People's Republics"! I am totally skeptical of "reformers" who yell for drastic "reforms." As was Anderson.
You cannot eliminate the human drive to be competitive or ambitious. The way to handle them is to channel those drives into non-destructive paths. The limited state, in whatever form, and free enterprise economics, has been the best or most practicable means of doing that.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Free enterprise economics and all forms of economic competition will be redundant when technologically produced wealth is held in common, controlled democratically and distributed equally and competitiveness will be channeled into sport and other activities some of which we cannot even conceive of yet and I want to be able to stop having to repeat this.
Paul.
Too much.
Post a Comment