(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Wed, 4/11/12, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

>>  
> Of course I agree that we haven't evolved much as a species
> in the past
> 70 years. But I actually think the (usually annoying)
> pervasiveness of the
> media has made a positive difference in terms of reducing
> global atrocities.
>  
> The real difference is in the nature of the media, i.e. that
> it is now far
> more visual than it was in the 40's. I find the Abu Graib
> torture case to be
> illustrative. That story came out in the news and nobody
> really noticed or
> raised much of a fuss. Then a few months later the pictures
> came out. Instant 
> worldwide uproar, condemnation and major efforts to prevent
> a repetition. Such
> high quality pictures have an impact that the printed news
> and b/w grainy photos 
> of WWII atrocities didn't have.
>  
> Most modern nations don't seem to be willing to risk
> building giant extermination
> camps or carpet bombing and nuking millions of civilians to
> face the instant
> global backlash as cell phone images instantly report and
> broadcast the results.  
> Even brutal regimes in Iran and Syria must tread more
> carefully than in the past 
> in reaction to internal rebellion.  Nobody wants to be
> the next Saddam Hussein or 
> Mohamar Ghadaffi.    
>         
>           

I like how these political threads on Wolfe always get a response, so I'm going to piggyback on this back to Wolfe's short fiction. (I am trying to cope with his political takes on "how the whip came back" and "hour of trust" now - ugh - not my forte) --- but no comments on the conclusions I came to about "The Changeling"?

Wasn't anybody elses mind blown by the actor Peter Palmer, who played Lil Abner, in real life being born in 1931 - the "objective" evidence of which interpretation to take for Wolfe's Changeling("two separate families, switched at birth, Palmer born 1931 and age matches service duty" VS "one family, Palmer born in 1934-5, splitting later in 1945 into two separate ones - are the Palmieri's an outbranch of that mental creation/splitting too?")

That was so far the best interpretive work I've done on the short stories at a plot level ... no comments. :(