Editors Choice: THE RPPS Goes Back To School
Back To School
This is the RPPS Back to School and after the first day of
schol we should be hitting the books. The RPPS though not altogether
unanimously generally believes in the traditional curricula
with its longstanding attachment to mathematics and literature.
While Mayor Guilliani over in New York City has been juggling
the books to show that his under-attended summer school was indeed productive
of something, the RPPS has already been examining its
book list.
The Society has been asked to review:
Take That You Commie
by Rev Marlin Creasote,
Right Wing Books
TAKE THAT YOU COMMIE tries to build a right wing Utopia in the
tradition of Ann Rand with the style of Sir Thomas More.
The concept of a future world or an alternative world has always intrigued mankind. The foible of futurism is preaching.
Plato’s Republic (in Greek: Democracia) and
Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and lesser classics in that genre construct an alternative world in a polemic which emerges from a superficial story line.
By contrast Orwell’s 1984 and the underplayed TV
Miniseries Amerika show future worlds through the story line; polemics are an adjunct to the tale.
Take That tries the former approach but suffers in its preaching. Reading the author’s biases toward an old fashioned Anglo republic, I can see how such a Republic would falter on factionalism just as the White Russians failed in their rebellion against the Soviets.
Nonetheless, Take That has some interesting possibilities which the author ignores as a story.
What type of rebel leader would it take to challenge regular loyalist forces. Would he be George Washington waiting at the door of a rump legislature for appointment and instructions, Oom Paul Kruger reading the Bible on his back porch as he gives final instructions to the Boer Kommandoes facing the enemy bearing down on his capital,, Michael Collins coolly roaming an occupied city in the guise of a businessman?
And consider that your leader would have to face every obstacle those gentlemen did: particularly discipline in the ranks, factionalism, lack of an established organization and supply system. The opposing machine, even a poor one, has an advantage of regularity over the most ardent rebels volunteers.
Yet in the very first battle the Rebel General pulls off a manoeuver worthy of General Dan Morgan’s victory at Cowpens, in 1780, five years into the Revolutionary War. And Morgan had the advantage of well experienced troops intensely loyal to him. By contrast the American Army regrettably ran at Lexington and Concord at the beginning of the War.
The birth of a new nation out of the ruins of the old in the chaos of war would have presented both an opportunity to tell an exciting story and to present the "what-we-fight-for’ as well as the ‘what-we-fight-against’ without so much preaching.
I would classify Take That as a book with unrealized potential lost in polemics. The strength of the story over the invective is so great that even in this jaded age Christ’s parables are remembered by the many while Cicero’s speeches are lost save to a few.