7-6-06 Heinleinian News
If you've ever read any of Robert Heinlein's sci-fi books, you will remember his penchant for setting faux news clips into the scenes of his stories. From the late 1950's and through the 60's and 70's, whenever I read any of his stories, the news clips from the future always fascinated me. I would stop reading whenever I came across one of them and ask myself, "Will the future really get that crazy?"
As the years have rolled by, I've occasionally found a real news story that could have easily come right out of one of Heinlein's stories. The criminality in government, the Catholic Church's seemingly never-ending sex abuse scandals, and so on, seem to make Heinlein's little projections into our future (now our present) a foreknowledge that I consider uncanny.
Ultimately, that foreknowledge of Heinlein's may have merely been his sense of humor over man's inability to learn from history, simply because history is just so boringly repetitive. But Heinlein certainly did predict the resurgence of religious fanaticism in America, even the christianist bent that it has more recently taken, along with its effect on our society.
Here's a New York Times article that, were it not so starkly representative of the insanity ripping our society apart, could easily have been one of the better examples of Heinlein's prescience...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05liberty.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
The only thing missing from the statue is an AK-47 slung over Liberty's shoulder.
Thank you, Robert Heinlein, for warning me of what was to come in your books, so that I'd recognize the lemmings when they arrived.
As the years have rolled by, I've occasionally found a real news story that could have easily come right out of one of Heinlein's stories. The criminality in government, the Catholic Church's seemingly never-ending sex abuse scandals, and so on, seem to make Heinlein's little projections into our future (now our present) a foreknowledge that I consider uncanny.
Ultimately, that foreknowledge of Heinlein's may have merely been his sense of humor over man's inability to learn from history, simply because history is just so boringly repetitive. But Heinlein certainly did predict the resurgence of religious fanaticism in America, even the christianist bent that it has more recently taken, along with its effect on our society.
Here's a New York Times article that, were it not so starkly representative of the insanity ripping our society apart, could easily have been one of the better examples of Heinlein's prescience...
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/05/us/05liberty.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
The only thing missing from the statue is an AK-47 slung over Liberty's shoulder.
Thank you, Robert Heinlein, for warning me of what was to come in your books, so that I'd recognize the lemmings when they arrived.
posted by Jeff Barnard at 4:27 PM
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