OT: watchmen on trial

Nathan Spears · 09 Apr 2005, 08:34 · from 2005-April.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: spearofsolomon at yahoo.com (Nathan Spears)
Date: Sat Apr  9 08:34:13 2005
Subject: (urth) OT: watchmen on trial 
In-Reply-To: 6667
Message-ID: <20050409153409.57921.qmail at web54405.mail.yahoo.com>

I apologize if someone has already said what I'm about to say:  I still have about
160 unread posts but I wanted to point something out here before I forget it.

> Herbert's initial impulse in writing Dune was to write a criticism of  
> Messiah figures, from Jesus to JFK, showing that one SHOULDN'T follow  them.  
> Illustrating their actions, in the case of Dune, isn't the same as  condoning
> those 
> actions.

The problem with the Dune, I think, is that Herbert did a terrible job of
encapsulating the themes he wanted to work with in the first book, which is the best
(from a storytelling perspective).  He wanted to debunk the messiah myth and show
how power ebbs and flows.  From this point of view, the Fremen were not a master
race, just a sort of coiled spring waiting to be released.  The pressures creating
their stored power were religious fanaticism (unfortunately for them, it was
artificial religion created by the Bene Gesserit), a flexible, efficient power
structure, and physical prowess honed by decades of hard living and fighting.  Once
their power was unleashed, Paul became the somewhat unwilling Emperor, but then
these causes were no longer present to give the Fremen their strength and they faded
from the story.
As for the Messiah, Herbert unfortunately shot himself in the foot by making us like
Paul so much.  The revenge and retribution story is more interesting than the
Messiah part of the story, and Paul is such a compelling character that nobody (I
know) was really that interested in seeing him "debunked."  We feel a little guilty
seeing Paul exploit the Fremen to a certain degree by pretending to have a divine
mandate; at the same time, we close one eye and pretend with the Fremen, because how
could God not hate those awful Harkonnens?
The one moment in the book for me in which Herbert shows that not all is well with
the future Emperor is when he is dealing with the Guild at the climax of the book. 
When they refuse to do his bidding he threatens them with the spice, which he knows
how to destroy:
"The power to destroy a thing is control over it," or something along those lines is
what he says to them.  This argument is obviously deeply cruel and, if Paul means
what he says (which he might not) then he is betraying an ugly side of himself that
we had not previously seen.

About Watchmen:  Again, I apologize for repeating anything already said, but I
wanted to chime in to agree with the person who said that in the context of the
story, Ozy's arguments are viewed as "correct" and his actions justified, but that
viewing them from outside the story we condemn them both.  I never once thought that
Ozy was meant as a persuasive tool or that Dr. Manhattan was enlightened.  Those of
you who did think so: are you also convinced that 1984 is a propaganda piece written
by that minister of totalitarianism George Orwell?

__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site!
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/

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