Heinlein Once Again

Once upon a time, pretty long ago as it happens, I contemplated writing a book on Robert Heinlein’s novels. My take on them was easy to state: the man’s perspective on almost everything in the world was vicious and rotten to the core.

 

I gave up on the project because I really didn’t fancy writing a philippic—and that’s what it would have been. It wasn’t just the outrageously condescending perspective on women that oozed from every single book, although that was sickening enough. It was also the corrosive attitude towards any established government, derived from what seemed to me the hopelessly misguided notion that the American wild west was the best time for men to be men. Kissing cousin to that point of view was Heinlein’s obvious politics of solipsism, which on a good day I could call libertarian, although it so often crossed the line into sovereign citizen idiocy—and so back to the attitude towards government.

 

But the presentation of women remained a central concern for me. Poor teen-aged Podkayne of Mars, whose only crime was her determination to be intelligent and active, gets blamed for causing the first interplanetary war. No reason, really, beyond the fact that Podkayne is a female.

 

Despite my misgivings, I decided to reread Stranger in a Strange Land. The why is kind of embarrassing, but in the interest of full disclosure I have to acknowledge that in my younger day—much much younger day, alas—I loved that book. It seemed to reflect everything that was good and proper. Suspicion of government chimed with my deep distrust of a government intent on pursuing the neo-colonial war in Vietnam. The casual disregard for conventional sexual morality struck me as just what the doctor ordered for an adolescent boy. I deeply grokked the idea that transcendence came through cultivation of the inner self, be that via Martian wisdom or, for me, via psychedelic drugs.

 

So I hoped that this book, which I had deliberately not reread when I outlined my plans for a philippic contra Heinlein, might serve as a cordial against the current Trump-induced malaise.

 

I had forgotten what an incredible windbag Jubal Harshaw is—a palimpsest for Heinlein himself. I had forgotten that the wind issuing from Jubal’s mouth traced point by point all the attitudes that I found so dismaying in his other books. I had forgotten in particular that the free sex that I had found so alluring in my adolescent years reduced itself to contempt for women, whose only redeeming quality was their willingness to be sex objects.

 

Some of that objectification is casual. For instance, when Mike, the Man from Mars, begins to understand the utility of money, “Jubal encouraged him to spend money and Mike did so, with the timid eagerness of a bride being brought to bed.” On its own such a statement doesn’t broadcast the insignificance of women, although it does hint that sexual submission, eager or not, timid or experienced, limns out the function of women.

 

But then there are passages that underscore that hint. So, one of the space voyagers who returns to Earth with Mike, is

 

pleased . . . that these women did not chatter, did not intrude into sober talk of men, but were quick with food and drink in warm hospitality. He had been shocked at Miriam’s disrespect toward her master—then recognized it: a liberty permitted cats and favorite children in the privacy of the home.

 

The women in question are Harshaw’s assistants—Anne, Dorcas, Miriam, and the new addition who comes to Harshaw’s residence with Mike, Jill—all of whom are impressive human beings, competent, self-assured, gutsy. At least they don’t chatter. But when they do, as Jill does when Mike begins to understand the human condition, they often speak as if they were Heinlein himself: “Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it’s partly her fault.”

 

A final observation about the passage on chatter, which may make it even more disturbing. The statement, really a dip into the mind of the character, comes from Dr. Mahmoud, who has no first name, apparently, although he's called "Stinky." He is the cultural anthropologist on the voyage to and from Mars, if “anthropology” is the right term for a study of Martians. Mahmoud is a lapsed but constantly repentant Muslim. The perspective on women that Heinlein attributes to him stands for a general sense of what Islam says about women.

 

Whether or not that attribution is correct presents an interesting matter to study. But the point that makes the whole thing stink to high heaven is that Mahmoud articulates precisely the perspective that Harshaw, and by implication Heinlein himself have on women. When it comes to the clear contempt of women that Mahmoud thinks is proper, however, brave and straightforward Heinlein ducks behind the cover of Islam.

 

I may finish rereading the book. I am curious about why it seemed so necessary to me back in the 1960s, indeed why it resonated so loudly with the mind set of those years. I am hoping that Mike, the Man from Mars himself, will redeem the novel.

Slang

One of the important uses of slang is to divide in-groups from out-groups. The ones inside are those who know the slang, which is entirely obscure to those in the outside. Slang also works to disguise meaning, and so it’s a regular feature of outlaws of all sorts. The proliferation of slang words for drugs and the drug trade is a case in point.

 

Here’s a passage of slang, from one of the coney-catching pamphlets published in London in the late mid-sixteenth century:

 

We will filch some duds off the ruffmans, or mill the ken for a lag of duds. So may we happen on the harmans, and cly the jerk, or to the queer-ken and scour queer cramp-rings, and so to trining on the chats.

 

A"coney" is a bunny, and to "catch" a coney is to trap it, so "coney-catching" is slang for thieving from idiots. A translation, provided by Stephen Greenblatt in his Dark Renaissance:

 

We will steal some clothes from the hedges or rob a house for a basket of clothes. But we could be set in the stocks and be whipped or taken to prison, there to be shackled with fetters, and then hanged on the gallows.

 

It’s thieves’ cant, the slang of folks too poor to get along without filching whatever came to hand—there’s a version of that need in Shakespeare’s _The Winter’s Tale_, which introduces Autolycus in 4.3 as follows:

 

The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,

With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing!

Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;

For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.

 

“Pugging” is a slang word. It translates to “thieving.”

 

And translation is the name of the game for slang. It is deliberately obscure for anyone outside the in-group. To make any slang statement clear to an outsider requires the same process that makes a foreign language intelligible.

 

Besides translation, a necessary consequence of slang is that it must always, but always change, and do so pretty rapidly. As soon as the slang terms becomes transparent, especially to the forces of law and order, new terms must come into being. Heroin is dope, smack, junk, H, hero, horse, boy, skag, mud, thunder. . . .

 

But even when slang isn’t associated with something illegal, the terms change as soon as their meaning gets spread enough so that they no longer separate in- from out-group. So “groovy” becomes "fire," "dope," "boss," "rad," "sleek.” There’s an obvious cross-fertilization from drug terms in the move from being in the groove to being dope, but the more general direction is obscurity or meaning. No sleek dude wants to make the mistake of using the wrong term and making meaning clear to everyone.

 

Being now an old man, I’ve noticed that the older I get the less slang is in my common discourse. I’m not sure why that is other than the obvious fact that age and grooviness are worlds apart. But I suspect there’s a smidgeon of social reality that creeps in. The in-group/out-group dynamic disappears when, as a result of the inevitable need to make money, I have to make what had been a narrowly defined in-group as large and comprehensive as possible. I can’t convince someone to buy my product, listen to my lecture, send money to my cause if I try to do it with language that is simply too obscure to convey meaning.

 

And so the standard language comes to the rescue. It may still be dope to celebrate being inside the orbit of the cool and boss. But, as they say, follow the money to a mutually understood lingo.