Thus, the brighter they are, the stupider they appear to be.
It is what makes them happy. We can judge it only as art. And they are clearly great artists…currently shaping their greatest collaborative creation yet together, a masterpiece known as the Crazy Years.
Afterword
Your most royal swingin’ majesty:
I’ve been on a lot of sad tours…I been on a lot of mad beat bent-up downgradin’ excursions…I been on a lot of tilted picnics, and a lot of double un-hung parties…I suffered from pavement rash…I been bent, twisted, spent, de-gigged, flipped, trapped and ba-bapped…but I never was so drug in my life as I was with this here last gig you put me on…
—ALVAR NUÑEZ CABEZA DA VACA,
writing home to Ferdinand I of Spain from America
in the paleorap “The Gasser,” by Lord Buckley
IN 2004, the Globe and Mail’s Comment editor abruptly stopped buying my columns. I could not say why, since he also stopped answering my e-mails and voice messages. I suspect budget cutbacks, but for all I know he heard something about me and his wife and found it plausible.
This sudden partial unemployment came as an enormous relief, which has been growing ever since. For the first time since 1996, I have the glorious luxury of ignoring the news once again. Sometimes I don’t get Doonesbury now. My disposition has already begun to improve, not to mention my digestion. I have not noticed that the world has suffered measurably from the lack of my commentary. And I have a lot more time and energy to write novels, stories and songs, which is why I was placed in this skull.
But it is a shame, artistically speaking, that I ceased chronicling the Crazy Years just as they reached their apotheosis. Even Robert A. Heinlein himself could not have imagined just how horrible the madness would become, only fifteen years after his own death. Even he, the bravest man I ever knew, would have paled at the depth and malignance of the sickness that has beset his beloved United States of America today.
That may sound like hyperbole, and a lot of people have made chumps out of themselves by claiming to know what Robert Heinlein would have believed, thought or felt about this or that subject. But I believe I can show what I just said to be a factual statement, using his own words.
Robert made a great many fictional “predictions,” and a surprisingly high percentage of them happen to have come to pass. Only once, though, was he talked into making actual factual real-world predictions for the future, in a magazine article. As he later recounted, it “appeared with the title ‘Where to?’ and purported to be a nonfiction prophecy concerning the year 2000 A.D. as seen from 1950. (I agree that a science fiction writer should avoid marijuana, prophecy and time payments—but I was tempted by a soft rustle.)”
He later updated its nineteen specific predictions—twice, in 1965 and finally in the 1980 collection Expanded Universe—by which point he was showing a success rate of about 66 percent, or about 65 percent higher than the average fortuneteller, psychic or horoscopist. Of course, his predictions were more conservative. Jeanne Dixon and Edgar Cayce both prophesied the utter collapse of civilization by 2000; Robert merely foresaw that people would, for some reason, still be reading both of those prophets in 2001.
As this book goes to press, I have the unique honor to be writing a novel, Variable Star, based on a detailed outline drawn up by Robert in 1955, and recently entrusted to me by his estate (the Heinlein Prize Trust, which gives away half a million US dollars a year for achievement in commercial manned spaceflight; visit www.heinleinprize.com for details). So I recently found myself with ample reason to go back and carefully reread Expanded Universe, a wonderful collection of Robert’s work that sheds much light on what readers of the fifties expected the far future world of the 00s would be like one day. I was having a wonderful time. Then, halfway through the book, I came to the article “Where To?,” smiled in fond general recollection and continued reading, curious to see whether his success rate would hold, or if not, whether it would go up or down this time—
—and eleven pages in, I slammed the book shut, let it fall to the floor, put my head in my hands and burst into tears.
I sat there crying a while. Then, because it is our agreement, I brought my sorrow to my wife and shared it with her, and we comforted each other as best we could. Now I share it with you.
Page 266, prediction #4: “It is utterly impossible that the United States will start a ‘preventive war.’ We will fight only when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend.”
Even as late as his final update in 1980, Robert modified that only to the extent of saying, “it is no longer certain that we will fight to repel attack on territory we have guaranteed to defend; our behavior both with respect to Viet Nam and to Taiwan is a clear warning to our allies.”
I read that prediction—it is utterly impossible that the United States will start a “preventive war”—and all at once I realized that the United States Robert A. Heinlein and I knew and loved, the one that does not, will not and never ever could first-strike, is gone. In a lousy fifteen years, somehow its most fundamental principles have vanished in the night, some of its most basic tenets have been smashed, trashed and pissed on, and nearly everything great it once stood for has been replaced with things for which it now crawls on its belly like a reptile.
Robert grew up in a literate and educated America, where people were aware of the existence of other countries and other cultures, or at least required their national leaders and policy-makers to be so, or at the very least required them to pretend to want to be so. He could not have imagined how quickly the U.S. would degenerate into a nation of mouth-breathing TV addicts proud of their ignorance and provincialism and happy to be led and represented by someone dumber than they are.
Robert lived his life in an America where most people were wise enough to understand, intuitively, without even needing to be told, that if it were ever to come down to it, it would be better to be defeated by Nazis than to become Nazis. He simply could never have conceived of an America that defecates on the precious Geneva Convention—much less its own magnificent Constitution and Bill of Rights—in the belief that it’s defending freedom.
Robert wrote his books in an America where everybody—not just a handful of crackpot liberals, but everybody—understood, without it even needing to be said, that John Wayne doesn’t hit first. That John Wayne particularly doesn’t hit a little puny guy first. That John Wayne most especially doesn’t shoot a little puny guy through the head, and then keep insisting the deceased had a gun after careful search has proven otherwise, like a child jamming his fingers into his ears and shouting “Neener neener neener” until he gets his way.
Robert thought America was made up of men and women of, if not high average intelligence—he was never that naive—at least of high average courage. He imagined them possessed of the same kind of quiet bravery that had allowed the common people of Great Britain to hunker down under Blitzkrieg and fucking carry on…counting their losses and with good reason to fear total doom, but moving forward. He probably assumed the citizens of a country that had fought an evil empire for half a century, with nuclear apocalypse as the stakes, had enough guts for anything the future could throw at them.
It would have been beyond his comprehension, I think, that fifteen years after beating that evil empire, America could possibly turn into such a stupendous collection of sissies, chickenshits, wimps, ninnies and weenies; that the loss of fewer than three thousand lives and two giant piles of ugly poorly constructed hubris would panic the greatest nation in history into abandoning both its brains and its honor; that even after three full years without a single follow-up attack by al-Qaeda, without a single injury let alone fatality on U.S. soil, most of the nation would still be quivering in genuine stomach-churning terror of the memory of nineteen dead savages with box cutters, so uncontrollably freaked out that they will willingly send their sons and daughters off to be killed or maimed and tolerate profoundl
y unamerican obscenities like Guantanamo and Al-Ghraib in their name, in return for even an obviously phony promise of “homeland security” made by people who, as Bill Maher so eloquently puts it, “are clearly still eating paste.”
Robert respected the scientific method, and probably felt that America, whose success was based on it, would always agree that when it has been proved something is false, and everyone can see and test the proof, then you have to stop saying it is true. An administration impervious to facts, infallible as a Pope, would have seemed to him a contradiction in terms—how could you ever get that far, if you kept consistently ignoring reality? It might have boggled his mind that half the nation could possibly continue to believe Saddam Hussein was al-Qaeda’s friend, even after it has been proven to them that he was al-Qaeda’s enemy—just because they want so badly to beat up a friend of al-Qaeda and can’t actually find any. He’d probably have been sourly amused to learn, as we just have at press time, that in fact, al-Qaeda’s biggest friend in that part of the world at the time of the September 11 attacks was…wait for it…Iran, Saddam Hussein’s hereditary mortal enemy. Considering that President Bush can’t (or perhaps simply won’t) read, I think he did remarkably well to come within a single letter, and only a few miles, of attacking the right country.
Robert, a graduate of Annapolis, greatly respected the military and stood up for them so eloquently in the dark days of Viet Nam that he even managed to persuade raggedy-ass hippies like me that I should respect them too…whatever I or he might think of the fatheaded chair-warming paper-shuffling cementheads who gave those brave soldiers, sailors and fliers their orders. I think he would have wept aloud to see a great military force so criminally misused, to see so many good men and women killed or crippled for absolutely no reason at all but one man’s blind pig-ignorant obsession, spilling their blood and leaving body parts in the hot sand without having succeeded in avenging a single Twin Towers death or in postponing the next such Jackass Jamboree by so much as an hour. I know he would have cursed sulphurously to see not just America’s soldiers, but all soldiers everywhere from now on, placed in ghastly danger by the completely gratuitous obliteration of the Geneva Convention and the disgraceful official sanctioning of torture as an allegedly acceptable policy of allegedly civilized peoples.
As if we couldn’t possibly win without cheating! As if the ghosts of the Nineteen Numbskulls—and those friends and supporters who didn’t have the guts to accompany them to battle last time, even though Mohammed Atta begged for more manpower—were really so terrifying that we dare not handicap ourselves with Marquis of Queensbury rules in fighting them. As if a nation of over 300 million people truly needed to fear a handful of cowardly psychopaths; as if Japanese kamikazes had actually defeated the US Pacific Fleet, let alone defeated the atomic bomb.
I think Robert would have found it just as astounding as I do that anyone, anywhere—much less everyone, everywhere—could possibly believe Osama bin Laden is still alive. What are all you people smoking out there? Do you all honestly think for three years he’s had constant access to extremely low-fi audiotape, but has never once managed to get his billionaire hands on a camcorder or even a new cell phone? (If he can’t afford one, why are you afraid of him?) Or can you conceive of some reason he would not want to conclusively prove he’s survived the worst the Great Satan could throw at him?
I believe Robert would have been as appalled and heartsick as I am to find that America’s response to murderous assault by fewer than twenty terrorists would be to recruit untold thousands more. That instead of demonstrating to the world that those religious fanatics were wrong, murderously wrong, we would do our best to make it appear that they were right: that we here in the west are a civilization of arrogant bullies and self-righteous ignoramuses as they claim, that democracy is just the rich and powerful conning the poor and weak. For this, Americans went half a trillion dollars in debt?
When I first moved from the United States to Canada, I put in a lot of hours defending my native land to the residents of my adopted land. You have to: Canadians bitterly resent America because it not only has everything they want and don’t have, it doesn’t want what they do have, even though it’s better. The stupid bastards down there don’t seem to want free health care, good manners, safe streets and schools, clean cities, racial integration, intelligent radio, tasty beer or good marijuana, for instance. So I spent a lot of time telling fellow Canadians, “Look, America has sometimes failed to live up to its own ideals. If you want to upgrade ‘sometimes’ to ‘often,’ I won’t argue with you. Well, the same is true of Canada, let’s face it—and of every nation there ever was, if it comes to that. But remember this: America has, far and away, the most magnificent set of ideals that any nation in history ever failed to live up to.”
Well, it used to. Apparently, America has found the strain too much, and has chucked its ideals into the dumper. They are just too much of an impediment, given the deadly urgency of defeating a worldwide terrorist conspiracy so vast, so well funded, so brilliantly organized and led, so terrifying in its implacable wrath, that the evil mastermind behind it has not killed a single American in three solid years of fighting. I speak, of course, of Michael Moore.
I used to wish, passionately, that Robert A. Heinlein had lived longer, much longer. But maybe it’s just as well that he took his leave before the Crazy Years reached their peak intensity. It’s going to be a while before anyone can again be as wholeheartedly proud of being an American as he—and I—used to be. I only hope I live to see the day America remembers its own splendid ideals, and decides to respect them again. And I really hope my nephews, nieces and grandchildren live to see the day.
Enough Crazy Years. Time, long past time, for some sane ones.
That’s my prediction for the future: sunny skies, with increased chances of intelligence showers in the afternoon, and major brainstorms expected by early evening. The Sane Years—at long last. If it turns out I was right, terrific. And if not, we’ll all have a lot more to worry about than the accuracy rate of some scribbler from
— Howe Sound, British Columbia
19 July, 2004 (my 29th anniversary)
The Crazy Years Page 32
