The Politics Of Gene Wolfe

brunians at brunians.org · 02 Jul 2010, 12:59 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2010 08:59:27 -0400
Subject: (urth) The Politics Of Gene Wolfe
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It is what the framers thought.

If you don't believe me you should read the Federalist and the
anti-Federalist.

Or just, you know, continue to believe what you prefer to believe.

.


> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:20 AM,  <brunians at brunians.org> wrote:
>>>> I guess I'm a moderate conservative or libertarian on the issue.
>>>> I think the Second Amendment creates an individual right and
>>>> that that individual right clearly isn't meant to cover every
>>>> conceivable form of weapon.
>>
>>> I would argue that the intent was self-evidently for it to cover every
>>> conceivable type of weapon.
>>
>> Indeed, the most powerful weapons available in the eighteenth century
>> were
>> warships, many of which were privately owned, as was much artillery in
>> the
>> sense of crew-served weapons.
>>
>> The intent of the second amendment is to allow the citizenry to more
>> readily defend themselves against the government, when this becomes
>> necessary, as it inevitably does.
>
> I don't think that this is what the founders thought, but I'd bet good
> money this is what Gene thinks.
>
> I've read through most of _Starwater Strains_ now, and my initial
> belief has hardened: Gene's writings are definitely getting more
> political. In his older works like _Peace_ or _Book of the New Sun_
> (pre-90s), I didn't notice anything political, or at least,
> contemporary. But in stuff from the last 2 decades? My suspicion has
> become certainty.
>
> The stories in SS though are absolutely littered with
> libertarian/conservative plots or asides. Some stories do nothing but
> push such ideas. "Viewpoint", for example, has a dystopian government
> which claims to own all money and which suppresses all weaponry, the
> better to oppress its citizenry; the protagonist, who is a heroic
> moral wilderness survivalist fellow, spends most of the story trying
> to get a weapon. His great victory is to murder a government agent.
> "Has Anyone Seen Junie Moon?", when it's not trying to channel
> Lafferty, ends with best wishes for a rebellion that will kill 'the
> big important gangs with suits and guns' (the government). "The Fat
> Magician" ends with a rant about totalitarian governments. Another
> story seems to implies that the government is responsible for taking
> away everything interesting and handing over power to machines and
> rules ("Petting Zoo"), while in "The Dog of the Drops", the government
> seems to engineer the extinction of dogs because dogs don't pay taxes
> and don't love the government but their owners. (I'm speculating a
> little with this one because the dialect is so hard to read.) And so
> on.
>
> I haven't even finished, but it's all far more blatant than _An Evil
> Guest_.
>
> --
> gwern
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