I used to love reading Robert Heinlein as a teenager, much as I used to love to watch Star Trek, it was reassuring that someone thought the future was going to be a better place, and it was just a few engineering challenges away.
One of Heinliens first stories was "If This Goes On—" first serialized in 1940, and rewritten for his 1953 book Revolt in 2100.
The story is set in a future theocratic American society, ruled by the latest in a series of “Prophets.” The First Prophet was Nehemiah Scudder, a backwoods preacher turned President (elected in 2012). You can get the T-shirt here:
So lets play Pick the Scudder :-
Michelle Bachmann
Newt Gingrich,
Jon Huntsman Jr.,
Ron Paul,
Rick Perry,
Mitt Romney
Rick Santorum
Tricky....
Thanks to David Brin for reminder.....
"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything —you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." Robert Heinlein
1 comment:
Nehemiah Scudder first appeared in Heinlein's "lost" novel, For Us: The Living. He wasn't so much an elected leader in that book as he was just a charismatic and tenacious fundamentalist whose ideology controlled a large portion of the United States before he was ultimately beaten back. Heinlein later raided that manuscript for parts, which is why Scudder shows up in the Future History series.
Heinlein would later note in Expanded Universe that, in all the years he'd received mail about "If This Goes On--", not one person had questioned its basic premise: that America was capable of throwing away its freedoms and submitting to a rather crude religious dictatorship. He inferred that he wasn't alone in believing it.
Post a Comment