Seventeen

Lee Berman · 27 May 2011, 12:11 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 27 May 2011 08:11:23 -0400
Subject: (urth) Seventeen
Message-ID: <SNT123-W368DE4A33EEBD2F042F3F6CF760 at phx.gbl>

>David Stockhoff: But since the Internet was not around in the 1970s, we are left with (a) 
>Communist slogans (b) ad slogans as a source of total social 
>brainwashing. From the soldier's tale, Ascia certainly sounds more like 
>China than Madison Avenue, to me.

Yes, I would agree. Not only was the Cold War on in full force in the 70's, Gene Wolfe can
be fairly labelled as having a history of a Cold Warrior. Not to suggest he was a blinder-on
American patriot but at the time, communism was considered both a real threat and America's 
main enemy. In a Wolfe interview, I think he said that he set Ascia in N. America in part 
because he wanted to show, "it could happen here".

>Nathan C. Tresch: I think it's just as likely that formalism and political 
> correctness taken to an extreme could produce such a culture, or that 
> some kind of mass media which spread slogans, (like the internet 
> spreading memes), could also be the impetus.

Not disagreeing, necessarily, but that does sound like a very 21st century sentiment. The masses
were not so considered as "sheeple" in the 70's. If they chose to adopt a popular slogan, that was 
free will, the opposite of communism.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net