(urth) The Devil in a Forest
James Wynn
crushtv at gmail.com
Sat May 16 20:52:15 PDT 2009
>Robin Dunn said:
> I do believe Wolfe to be a friend of
> authoritarianism, and like Plato, he longs for the good king who can
> destroy and create with a Christ-like wisdom, a wisdom borne of a deep
> humanity and humility.
I emphatically disagree with statement; especially the first half. You might
as well say that Wolfe is a friend of cruel, unjust penal systems simply
because they occur with regularity in his stories. He often presents
characters who are recognized as "kings" solely due to their manner and
bearing. But Able, Latro, and Horn are never "rulers" of anything. The
philosopher kings, Silk and the Rajan, are--by choice--not official rulers
for long.
> America is an idea, one molded from lots of different peoples, not
> exclusively from the godlike founding fathers. Private property is
> absolutely essential in understanding past and contemporary America,
> but Wolfe is too smart in my opinion to embrace any kind of oligarchy,
> which is what the founding fathers were.
Once again, not true. If anyone was part of an oligarchy it was the colonial
government established by the English crown who were displaced by the system
that the founders helped set up. The leadership of the states, even under
the Articles of the Confederation, were elected. I suppose if you believe
that limiting the vote to land-owning Americans an oligarchy, then it's an
oligarchy. But the term usually refers to a more closed, tightly knitted
club that is much harder to join. The founders established the system they
eventually did through the power of their ideas (for example, the Federalist
Papers), not through insiders' influence. They definitely tended to be
successful merchants, but that is a position that one can easily lose or
gain, unlike that of a nobility or a insiders cabal.
>Denying class in America is a shibboleth now.
Errr...it's nothing new. It is something that has commonly been marked by
Europeans that Americans always say they are "middle class". To Americans,
the "rich" are people like Thurston Howell III: people who don't work for a
living and never had to. That's very rare among Americans. The term "class"
is imported from the Old World. In America, it's merely an arbitrary amount
of money that a family makes per year. People move in and out of poverty,
middle class, wealthy, all the time. Since most of the top 1% families moved
into that percentage within their own lifetimes, this is not the sort of
thing Marx thought of when he referred to "class". De Tocqueville carefully
explained why this tends to be so in the U.S.
>No Wolfe story leaves class absent, in fact,
>and insofar as his best protagonists often embrace
>the best aspects of Christianity, they militate against
>inequity in all forms.
Inequality of opportunity? Yes. Inequality of results? Absolutely not.
> Socialism is about equity. It's about diminishing the gap between
> rich and poor.
Okay.
>I would say this is an attractive idea to Wolfe,
> insofar as he does valorize so many Christ-like figures who fight
> various forms of injustice, while sometimes perpetuating other forms
> of it, either knowingly or unknowingly.
I don't find your implied definition of "justice" (the legislated equality
of wealth) to be recognized as such in Wolfe's stories. tDiaF is a good
example. The tradesmen are presented as hard-working and deserving, albeit
imperfect and entirely corruptible (especially by a demagogue like Wat) .
There is never a sense that somehow the poverty of the charcoal burners
created either Wat or Ganelon or the soldiers.
>Your scare quotes around "community" are
> troubling indeed. I take your point that the "community" is a broad
> term, and it is often misused by politicians when what they really
> mean is "a few of my good buddies."
They weren't intended as "scare quotes" (neither were those). They were
meant to imply (as you acknowledged) that "community" is a term that
politicians love to use because it can mean almost anything: up to including
a single well-connected contributor. General Motors President, Charles
Wilson, famously opined that "what is good for GM is good for America".
So --to his mind-- money, considerations, and protections going to his
company actually went straight to the community chest. By the same token, I
put the words "those who don't need it" in quotes to imply that their
meaning was also up for grabs.
>But revolution comes when that
>rich/ poor gap gets too high. And revolutions have very, very high
>costs. Wolfe knows that too, I bet.
Wolfe has said that bad governments are subject to revolution. He has not
opined that unequal societies are subject to revolution. In fact, his heroes
are the epitome of inequality. They rise to the top because they deserve to
and everyone around them recognizes it. Like the Hero in "The Tale of the
Student and his Son" they where an invisible crown that is visible to
everyone around them.
>Again I think it's a real tribute to Wolfe that his stories are so
>rich, varied, and in the end, non-ideological, that many different
>political philosophies can be tolerated in his fictional universe. ;)
I agree they are rich and varied. As I said, tDiaF is about many things. And
it can be enjoyed on many levels, I think. However, I think it is intended
to unequivocally strip the bark off the concept of the goodness of "robbing
from the rich to give to the poor."
J.
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