{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2958",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 2958,
    "subject": "Notes on \"Hour of Trust\"",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-02-12T20:40:18+00:00",
    "last": "2002-02-12T20:40:18+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0202-153@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Roy C. Lackey",
        "address": "rclackey at stic.net"
      },
      "date": "2002-02-12T20:40:18+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Notes on \"Hour of Trust\"",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I think mantis was on the right path to interpreting this story when he\nviewed the suicide-bomber tactics of the rebels as unacceptably barbaric. In\nthe context of the story, I doubt that Wolfe's sympathies lay with either\nthe de facto corporate government or the rebels. Neither side was \"right\",\nbut one may have been more wrong than the other. Clio's final paragraph\ndecrying the ethos of corporate America echoes Ben Free, who, I think, was\nexpressing Wolfe's sentiments regarding the 20th century\ngovernmental/corporate stifling of individual initiative and freedom.\n\nI think the words in the title of the story have been overlooked. To which\nhour, exactly, does it refer? The obvious answer is the hour of one's death.\nTwo of the six members of the \"ken-kins\" choose to speak on camera before\nthey \"donate their bodies to Peace\" (which is clearly doublespeak; the group\nspread out to maximize casualties). Of those two, the bearded young man,\nafter giving his fuzzy-headed reasons for making his \"donation\", is asked by\nthe interviewer if he is \"stoned\". Upon replying affirmatively, the\ninterviewer says he doesn't look stoned, and the kid answers \"Trust me.\" .\nThen the skinny girl, the \"Jesus freak\", is described as having \"the large,\ntrusting eyes of a fawn\". Trust. None of the three ken-kins (is the hyphen\nthere just because of the line break?) we are told anything about appear in\nany way noble or even well grounded in reality. They seem to have no common\ncause except a willingness to die and kill others in the process.\n\nThe bearded young man (naked, seemingly unarmed and speaking of peace)\ngained the trust of a soldier; that trust cost the soldier his life, shot by\nsomeone from the young man's own side. The young man is then shot in the\nback by a soldier, fortunately (for the soldiers) before he could blow\nhimself up and cause the deaths of even more soldiers; after all, that's\nwhat the young man was there for. The soldiers who gathered around the girl\nviolated her trust when they tried to rape her; but those fawn eyes were a\nmask; she expected that to happen and came wired for the occasion. The bald\nman attempted to get close enough to take out the quad-fifties by appearing\nto be a harmless nutcase. The officer who shot him would have to have been\nan idiot to have trusted to appearances. If the officer wasn't already aware\nof ken-kin tactics before that evening, he had just seen what happened with\nthe girl. The barbarity of the rebels makes trust impossible.\n\nThen there is Tredgold, who gets too much ink in the story to be ignored. He\nis the same age as Peters, but seems much older. He opens Peters' eyes to\nthe realities of corporate life, and is at least partly responsible for\nPeters' change from a good corporation \"yes\" man at the beginning of the\nevening to the wannabe, boat-rocking corporate soldier at the end. (The\nirony is that Clio [who presumably is on the side of the rebels against the\ncorporations] kills Peters when he continues to talk of making a difference,\nof exercising personal initiative to change the way corporations do things,\nright after lecturing him about what was wrong with corporations/big\ngovernment--that they were mindless, bureaucratic entities who only wanted\nto preserve the status quo--which is what the rebels were rebelling against\nin the first place.) Right after joining the party Tredgold shouts to\nVirdon, who is outlining his battle plans on the vid screen; \"Those marks\nshow where you are now, eh? But where shall you be in an hour?\". Then he\nwhispers to Peters \"Well, we'll see, eh?\". The answer, for Peters, is dead.\n\nWhen the kid from Philadelphia hacked into the vid link, Peters expected to\nsee a beard and \"the conventional, exotic, vaguely erotic, jewelry\" that was\nevidently common among the rebels. When Peters first saw Tredgold before the\nparty, Tredgold was wearing \"jade earrings and a (phallic) jade pendant\".\nCoincidence? In a thirty-page Wolfe story? And Tredgold was in a dead-end\njob with his corporation, and knew it.\n\nThe story's title may also play off of Peter's failure to keep watch at\nGethsemane, and Jesus's admonition to \"not enter into temptation; the spirit\nindeed is willing, but the flesh is weak\".\n\n-Roy"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}