"I think you've got hold of some wrong premises, an interpretation that does not follow from your observations, and some incorrect "facts" and that throws your logic off."

Bill’s rationalization, then, that Heinlein is ‘darned near unique’ in his ability to do something that is an essential element of the narrative voice in any structured account, is a necessary justification. It quite neatly (a) takes the blame away from Heinlein apologists, who jest cain’t help themselves, no sir, they’re caught up in somethin’ that’s bigger than all of us, girl… and (b) it transforms what seems to Bill (as a rabid Heinlein apologist) to be a criticism of Heinlein (he’s a textually charismatic whackjob) into a statement of Heinlein’s nearly unique brilliance (he’s a uniquely textually charismatic whackjob, and that makes it all right).

Then Bill goes on to say:

This is wonderful; I am gaping and slackjawed in my frank admiration for this statement. If, in fact, anyone has ever perceived there to be anything in Heinlein’s writing that is obviously false to observed fact or just plain damned loonie, then Heinlein didn’t put it there, it’s just his poor weak readers, caught up in the master’s ‘nearly unique ability to be a mirror’ and filling in their own nutball beliefs where Heinlein didn’t actually posit such.

Now, there’s quite a lot of factual statement or philosophical musing in Heinlein’s large body of work over the years that is either obviously false to fact or just plain nuts. For example, Heinlein often reiterates from one book and short story to another his theme that all cops and civil service workers are essentially corrupt, which is simply false to fact, and rather contemptible, and Heinlein’s undeniable assertion in Starship Troopers that military veterans are all more civic minded, as a body, than those who have never served in the military, is honestly nuts…if you set up a society in which only military veterans get to vote and hold office, there will be no public libraries, simply for one example, or if there are, the fiction shelves will contain nothing but the works of Tom Clancy and Roland Greene and David Drake and maybe some S.M. Stirling, and the non-fiction shelves will hold nothing but military memoirs, Rush Limbaugh, and Anne Coulter books.

But according to Bill Patterson’s ingenious rationalization, assuming he were to agree that any assertion found in a Heinlein book was actually wrong or just frickin’ deranged, well, Heinlein didn’t say that, you’re just reading that into it yourself.

Exactly why people who don’t believe a certain philosophical assumption (like that being a conscientious objector is the worst form of moral cowardice imaginable, and actual treason to your national culture) would be inclined to project such a philosophical assumption (that they themselves don’t agree with) into a body of work that does not actually contain it, simply due to Heinlein’s ‘darned near unique’ ability to ‘be a mirror’, I couldn’t tell you.

You’d think, by Bill’s bizarre but brilliant extrapolation, that Heinlein would end up being all things to all people… the pacifists and peaceniks would read Starship Troopers and see an overwhelmingly reasonable and passionate cry for a non-aggressive, non-military mind set when dealing with other cultures (such as, in fact, Joe Haldeman puts forth in The Forever War, a book best described as being a sort of philosophical polar opposite to Starship Troopers) while the gung-ho artillery nuts would read Starship Troopers and find it a compelling call to arms against all cultures we do not understand, especially those that do not exalt individual achievement, like socialism and communism.

(There’s an irony, there, since the M.I. depicted in ST hardly emphasizes individual initiative, and the Federal government shown in the book seems rather socialist in some ways, such as its world wide public education system with mandatory universal classes in History & Moral Philosophy, and a system of civil punishments that seems to encompass public flogging and execution as an alternative to prison… both staples of some socialist arguments that it’s more moral to either punish a perpetrator quickly and publicly and then let him go, or simply execute him, than it is to deprive him of basic human rights for an extended period which will often be spent under torturously inhumane conditions. In fact, the Federal Service itself necessarily removes all individual freedom and choice when you enlist; as with the Communist states, you don’t get to pick what you want to do from available assignments, you get analyzed to determine what your strengths and gifts are, and then assigned where you’ll be of most use to the State. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, indeed.)

Skipping over most of the rest of that long paragraph, in which Bill doesn’t try to rationalize Heinlein or tell me I’m completely wrong but instead engages in more or less honest discussion of the discussion itself, we come to, at the end of it:

I excerpt this to show that Bill simply isn’t paying attention to what I’ve written, a general problem most Heinlein fans of Bill’s ilk have when they run across someone who questions the triple godhead that is the Robert, the Anson, and the Heinlein. Now, I deliberately made no attempt to trick or persuade such blockheads that I might even remotely be one of them with the article Bill is commenting on; my chosen title for that article, Heinlein: The Man, the Myth, the Whack Job is right up front with my thesis… that Heinlein was not some superhuman specimen of divine providence incarnate in mortal form.

This position will always deeply and mortally offend the ardent Heinlein worshipper, with his or her cracked and badly chewed nails digging fervently into his or her severely dog-eared and extensively highlighted copy of Stranger In A Strange Land, and it will usually cause them to instantly conclude they don’t really even need to read the text under my article's title, at least, not all that closely; they can just skim it and then go to war.

However, the three books I noted as being ‘bad or questionable’, as Bill puts it (and in fact, what I said was, they were bad novels, but interesting social and philosophical pamphlets nominally disguised as novels) are Stranger In A Strange Land, Glory Road, and Beyond This Horizon. Bill sloppily lumps Starship Troopers in with them because that’s what my article is mostly about, since that’s what the two articles I read on James Gifford’s website were about. But in point of fact, I like Starship Troopers fine; it’s a great military SF adventure novel, if one where the underlying social and moral philosophies are absolutely insane. However, since Heinlein gives us a thrilling, entertaining, and wonderfully engaging adventure novel while he’s spewing all his toxic nonsense about how everybody in the ideal society will pay taxes, but only an elite few ex-jarheads will get to vote and run for office, well, I don’t much care about the toxic nonsense. Heinlein is always spewing toxic nonsense, and it’s only when the book itself is substandard as actual entertainment (as in the three cases listed, where they are) that I pay any attention.

(Some more typical Heinlein nonsense, just to show that I’m not making this up as I go along: male lechery is perfectly agreeable and totally acceptable when the hero is lusting after his assigned romantic interest, such as Sam with Mary in Puppet Masters, or any male Friday finds attractive in that self titled novel, but it becomes obnoxious, objectionable, and in fact, punishable by instant death, if the lecherous male is someone Friday doesn’t like, especially a police officer. And yes, I know, Friday wails at length that she kills the cop because he pointed a gun at Janet, which is not acceptable to her. In point of fact, Friday kills the cop because Janet has told her that the cop wants to have sex with her, and she doesn’t like him, and in Friday’s world… and, apparently, Heinlein’s… a man's action in wanting to have sex with an attractive woman who does not want to have sex with him immediately puts that fellow on the Better Off Dead List… a list which one may act terminally on immediately at the slightest pretext, without the smallest shred or quiver of a moral qualm beforehand or afterwards. It’s also interesting to note that Friday later on tells us that it’s okay for men to rape women, if the woman finds the man in question attractive and he takes a shower and brushes his teeth and gargles with a nice mouthwash before and during the actual rape.)

Now, though, we’re coming to the really interesting part, where Bill breaks cover in such a way that even those not well versed in academic circumlocution can see that he’s not only a rabid Heinlein apologist, but also just plain frickin’ snotty about it:

As I noted in my original article, just as when I read Friday talking about how all civil servants are necessarily corrupt, I merely remark "BLOW me, living artifact bitch" and continue on, so, too, does a similar response seem to be all that is merited, when some pinhead with one or two post-grad degrees gets up on his hind legs and sneers at me for enjoying superhero comic books. It’s the sort of put down you expect from the ignorant and narrow minded, and that generally one simply sort of blinks at, while mentally entering the person proffering such on the ‘here’s a completely worthless idiot’ list most of us keep in our heads. However, since Bill had taken the time to write to me at such length, and in such a tone and with such vocabulary that he didn’t seem like the usual grade of Internet troll who comes across an article in which someone they don’t know has said the Frank Miller Elektra/ninja stories on Daredevil were horribly written, and decided to start launching email insulting the writer’s mother, well, I decided to go on reading what he had to say and even responding.

However, let’s make no mistake: this is intended as a put down, and it’s a rude one. It’s also so completely off the subject as to be very nearly a non sequiter. Bill has noted the links in the column next to my Heinlein article, crowed to himself "Ah ha, he reads comic books, he’s an idiot" and decided to make sure he makes mention of this to me, to subtly underscore the ‘fact’ (as he perceives it) that clearly I’m a complete moron, and therefore, it’s to be expected that my judgement on anything, much less the radiant and splendid Heinlein Who Is The Universe, is questionable to say the least.

Such a sneer is also very typical of the Heinlein monkey-boy (and occasional monkey-girl, as well) because Heinlein was also mightily contemptuous of comic books. He only mentions them as ways of demonstrating how immature a young character may be, or how frankly substandard intellectually an adult character may be (I think, in Elsewhen, Heinlein actually has a rather stupid cop reading comic books at one point, to underscore that only really dimwitted adults would bother with such trash).

For myself, I’ll simply note that anyone who sneers at superhero comic books most likely hasn’t read many of them, and they certainly haven’t read many of the good ones, and, for that matter, while it’s true that Heinlein did not generally write ‘comic book stories’, both Friday and Gulf explore similar themes to those underlying most superhero comic books, while Time For The Stars and Stranger In A Strange Land are both driven by their protagonist’s superhuman abilities, as, to a lesser extent, is Starman Jones and The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag. Beyond that, Magic, Inc. is simply a straightforward comic book without pictures; its pleasantly simplistic morality and cleanly delineated conflicts, as well as its easily imagined visualizations and its interestingly different alternate reality setting, are all the sort of thing that could be very easily adapted into a comic book format (while it would be enormously expensive to film).

And leaving all that aside, Roger Zelazney’s brilliant Lord of Light is a classic ‘comic book story’, as is Daniel Keyes Moran’s excellent Emerald Eyes and Steven Gould’s remarkably entertaining debut novel Jumper. Superhero comic books are also, in general, firmly within the science fiction subgenre (the prototypical superhero, Superman, is an alien from an advanced but doomed civilization sent to Earth in a rocket as a baby by his scientist father) and folks like Bill Patterson only sneer at ‘comic book stories’ at their own expense, usually with clearly visible flecks of spittle on their chin.

This is where I first really started to worry that any discussion with Bill would turn out to be fruitless (as, eventually, it did, which you’ll see). Like James Gifford, Bill falls into the epistemological trap of stating his own subjective opinions as objective fact… and even more ironically, he does this in order to tell me that my own subjective opinions, which I never stated as being anything but subjective opinions (while supporting them with my reasons for drawing such conclusions at some length) are not only not objective, but are, in fact, objectively wrong.

Not that there is any indication in Bill’s statement that indicates that it is to be taken in any way as anything but actual, hard, concrete, established and literal truth, Holy Scripture out of the very fundament of God, as it were. Bill not only disagrees with me that that the handful of Heinlein novels I have listed as being, in my opinion, bad, are actually bad, but he is stating, quite flatly and bluntly, that I am wrong. There is no doubt. There is no question. There is no debate. "Not one single book [I] listed as bad or even questionable is, in fact, bad or even questionable".

You can’t get any more straightforward than that. He’s just absolutely right, and I’m just absolutely wrong, and that’s so utterly self evident that he doesn’t even have to explain himself.

Here we start getting into Bill’s rather nonsensical statements that in fact, a book in which African blacks take over the world and institute a society in which non-blacks are not only enslaved (which is, regrettably, a quite common pattern in human history) but are actually slaughtered and butchered and prepared as food and eaten by their masters (a social feature, to the best of my knowledge, completely unprecedented in the long and debased history of human slavery), and in which every single positively portrayed character is non-black, while every single black character is deeply and irrefutably shown to be not only dislikable and unsympathetic, but also, flatly, depraved and evil, is, according to Bill, irrefutably not only not racist, but is as anti-racist as Samuel Clemens fine book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Bill’s apologist statement/admission that ‘Heinlein grew up in a racist environment" and that "does condition the elements he chooses to attack" is a masterpiece of academic subterfuge, basically stating that yes, Heinlein is addressing race in this novel by showing blacks vs. whites and by depicting whites as the noble heroes and blacks as the evil villains, and that’s due to the fact that Heinlein is a product of a racist culture, but still, none of that means Heinlein is a racist, oh no.

Bill then tries very very hard to tie Farnham’s Freehold to Huckleberry Finn, since he knows that if he can palm this card successfully (assuming I’m a slopebrowed, slack jawed, hairy shouldered moron who can’t really think beyond getting across a street without breaking my leg), I’ll be forced to conclude that in fact, FF, like HF before it, is a book falsely charged by various idiots incapable of analysis as racist, when in fact, it’s a powerful anti-racist statement.

We’ll come back to that in a minute, but I want to get to Bill’s other statement… that in fact, FF’s central thesis is the much simpler (and more politically correct, and flattering to Heinlein) view that "bigotry damages everyone it touches".

If, indeed, Heinlein wrote an entire (rather long) novel about this extremely simplistic (and to most folks in Heinlein’s audience, even at that time, consciously inarguable) thesis, then all I can say in response is, "Duh… no kiddin’?" However, Heinlein wasn’t this dull, nor was he this simplistic. Farnham’s Freehold is a much more complex novel than this, and it deals with a lot of Heinlein’s oft repeated themes… that human individuals can control their own destinies, that freedom and liberty will, ultimately, win out over repression and slavery, and last but certainly not least, that the Commies are evil sneaky bastards who want to bomb America into cratered, radioactive ruins but free, patriotic individuals will never, never surrender to the hated commissars, damn their little red eyes to hell and back.

Now, if you were to resurrect Heinlein and ask him, "Say, Bob, is Farnham’s Freehold a racist novel?", he might well opine, as Bill does, that in fact, as far as the element of racial tension and disparity goes, it’s a novel that powerfully argues that racism damages everyone it touches. And if I were to respond, "yeah, especially the people who get turned into steaks for Ponse’s table, right?", Heinlein might well glare at me and point to the many passages in FF where Farnham muses at length on racial inequality in both his own native and the alien far future society he finds himself in, thus drawing parallels to both and making Heinlein’s point, that all racism is bad, not just the depraved black on white racism he depicts in FF.

Or, he might chuckle and say, "You know, at the time I wrote that I was really trying to shock my audience into seeing that this far future society was truly evil, and by reflection, that our own society, which sort of mirrored it in our own treatment of blacks, was also evil. But I have to admit, I really undercut my own statement by choosing to ascribe to an African-dominant, technologically comfortable, socially advanced culture a taboo act that, throughout human history, has only been practiced by primitive, subsistence level societies always on the verge of starvation that had little other choice than to consume whatever nourishment might be available at any given time, including the bodies of outsider tribes, or no-longer functional tribesmen."

At which point, he might also admit, "And, given that the technologically advanced Africans do, clearly, choose to eat non-dark humans simply for pleasure, when they don’t need to, and that that’s anthropologically unprecedented, and that there is further not one single positively portrayed or likable black character in the novel, while my protagonists are all white…"

"And," I’d interrupt cheerfully, "all the black males refer to all white females as ‘sluts’…"

"Yes," Heinlein might admit, flushing a little, "there’s that, too… yes, I have to admit, although I didn’t intend it, there’s certainly an unintentional racist element to the book, and I regret it, and wouldn’t write it that way if I could redraft it now."

Actually, Heinlein probably doesn’t talk that way at all, and in fact, if he and I had ever met in real life, I imagine he’d find me obnoxious and insufferable and order me out of his house or hotel room post haste. But still. I’d like to think that, just as he later more or less apologized for the ‘only the military should rule’ nonsense of Starship Troopers, once he calmed down a bit, he’d also apologize for the ‘if we let the darkies get the upper hand they’ll EAT white people’ horseshit of Farnham’s Freehold.

But I could be wrong.

You have to love people who use phrases like ‘thematic axis’, don’t you? Especially when they’re talking to subliterate morons like me, who really like ‘comic book stories’. It’s just so rousingly egalitarian of Bill to address me in terms he’s probably certain even as he types that I won’t be able to fully comprehend.

I just want to point out here that Bill’s dragging in something Heinlein said in another book can in no way refute my assertion that FF is racist. Beyond that, my point remains… cannibalism may be in all our family trees, but the blacks who eat white people in FF have advanced technology and are otherwise quite ‘civilized’ and have many labor saving devices and live quite comfortably with many alternative sources for both labor and foodstuffs. They don’t need to keep slaves, and they certainly don’t need to eat them like cattle. They choose to do both because they like to, and that’s a very loathsome statement about African blacks as a race.

More ‘Heinlein the god’ talk, as Bill notes, in tones of near worshipful awe, that like many many other professional authors, Heinlein is capable of writing a long piece of fiction that explores more than one theme at once… in fact, he says, his voice hushed with transcendent, wriggling pleasure in the divine talent of All Father Robert, Heinlein is so good he does this nearly all the time.

I mean, wow.

This is, bluntly, just more apologism, stating that, since FF was written three months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, its anti-Commie jingoism is acceptable, and putting forward yet another rationalization as to what Heinlein was really trying to do with the book… which I don’t care about, because as far as I’m concerned, what a writer should be trying to do with a book that I buy in order to be entertained is write a good, entertaining book. Beyond that, I don’t think what Heinlein was trying to do is as important as what he accomplished, namely, writing a rabidly racist book that wasn’t even very entertaining into the bargain.

Now, getting back to that card Bill tried to palm on me a little earlier, equating FF with the much maligned (and far better) Huckleberry Finn… much further on in our correspondence, after hearing Bill repeat this theme at length and ad nauseum, I finally stated that certainly The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a powerfully anti-racism statement, something that would have to be seen by anyone who actually read the book and looked beyond the commonplace cultural use of the word ‘nigger’ and saw how Huck had struggled so hard, and eventually been forced to accept, Jim’s basic humanity and value to him, not as a servant and born inferior, but as an equal and a friend.

However, I went on, if at some point in TAOHF it had been revealed by Jim that he really liked to cook white people and eat them whenever he could get them, and that, in fact, all niggers really liked to cook white people and eat them whenever they could get them, but they kept it a secret because white people wouldn’t understand, well… I strongly suspect most people would agree that TAOHF was a racist novel.

When you depict an entire racial culture as being voluntarily engaged in a heinous and atrocious act that is taboo to all civilized, advanced human cultures throughout human history, it doesn’t really matter if you then turn around and say ‘well, I’m just trying to show the evils of racism… see, the blacks there are really no worse than the whites of our time, who figuratively cook and eat non whites through the very act of racial exploitation’. That’s nonsense. Cooking and eating people on the basis of their race is, flatly, worse than enslaving people on the basis of their race, or relegating a people to inferior jobs on the basis of their race, and all the ‘gosh, racism is bad’ musings of your white hero to the contrary really aren’t going to change that.

Anyway, I personally thought I’d made a telling point… that in fact, having stated that if Jim had been revealed to be a whites-only cannibal in TAOHF, and if, in fact, it had been shown by Twain that all blacks in the Old American South also ate white people whenever they could get them, that would have made TAOHF an undeniably racist book, I’d made my thesis clear as persuasively as possible, and even an academic dolt like Bill Patterson would have to let the scales fall from his eyes.

But, then I got this final note from Bill:

Yes! I thought, exultantly. Success! I’ve actually managed to make someone think beyond the narrow confines of their own carefully built up little reality tunnel.

It was a good feeling, one I rarely get. But, alas, it did not last:

In other words, ‘you’re an idiot and I hate you and if I think about what you’ve said any more I’m going to have to admit I’m wrong and throw out some of my most treasured beliefs about Heinlein and I would honestly rather die. Fortunately, instead of committing ritual seppuku, I can just haughtily ignore you from now on, while telling myself you’re just a big meanie and a bad ol’ stupid-face. And while I’ve thought about your points off and on all day and they’re driving me fucking bugshit because I cannot in any way convincingly refute them, nonetheless, I am so loftily content in my worship of Heinlein that I can simply resort to my childlike and unwavering faith in His supremeness and dismiss you as the annoying little nonentity you are, without even bothering to argue further with your points, because, well, I can’t, anyway.’

Or, to put it another way "I keep telling you that your opinions are not only subjective, but completely erroneous, because they are in total opposition to my completely subjective opinions, which are not subjective, but are in fact objective truth, and which not only cannot be argued with, but which must not be argued with, under any circumstances. And I have explained this to you over and over again, and you’re still being really mean and argumentative, and worse, doing so in a persuasive fashion, which is obnoxious and hateful of you. Therefore, you are crazy and writing in a ‘private language’, and in the future, you should open all your articles with a disclaimer saying ‘I am crazy and writing in a private language, and everything I say in my writing is just my subjective opinion, and not only that, according to Bill Patterson, who is never wrong, my subjective opinions are always nothing but tripe’."

This is pretty straightforward: "Heinlein’s writings are holy scripture. If you write anything about Heinlein’s writings that in any way indicates or openly states that Heinlein’s writings are not holy scripture, then you are not speaking about the only important qualities within Heinlein’s writings. You are, in fact, talking about something else entirely, and are obviously a big mean stupid-face, and nobody who understands the real truth about Heinlein’s writings should pay any attention to you. Nyah nyah so there."

This translates interestingly, basically as "I realize this is a completely stupid and utterly self-indulgent comparison, and I’m even willing to admit that it’s a completely stupid and utterly self–indulgent comparison, but, nonetheless, I like it, and you’re just a big ol’ mean stupid-face, so I’m a’not a’gonna talk’a to you no mo’."

Which is fine, because I’m done with him, too.

The nice thing about having your own website, even one that only maybe four people read, is that you get the last word, and you get to do really really annoying and obnoxious stuff like paraphrase other people’s text and make them look really silly.

Hey, I’m not getting laid and I don’t make much money. I have to take my entertainment where I find it. And what do you expect, anyway, from someone who likes comic book stories?