Among the Intellectualoids
Stillman, J. Whitney
Among the Intellectualoids I am not a conservative but, like most decent people, a lifelong liberal who, shortly following my ninth birthday in 1961—and after years of growing disenchantment with...
...Generically, the novel is a bildungsroman, the traditional story of a young man from the provinces who travels to the, usually corrupt, capital city...
...Science fiction is known as the "literature of ideas," and Stranger in a Strange Land is virtually littered with these things...
...Society owes these superior individuals the right to make love, or share water, with the object of their Own choosing—whether vegetable or mineral—so long as the object gives its tacit consent...
...others—incorrectly—believe that acne is contagious...
...Drink deep...
...Thou art God, Brother...
...Then he is resurrected...
...Members of the mob viciously attack Smith, who then wills his own death, or "discorporation...
...Love with a motionless or inanimate object is just as beautiful as love with a moving one...
...Among the Intellectualoids I am not a conservative but, like most decent people, a lifelong liberal who, shortly following my ninth birthday in 1961—and after years of growing disenchantment with proliferating government—read Robert A. Heinlein's monumental novel, Stranger in a Strange Land...
...This is the kind of literary risk that only a novelist of Heinlein's stature could successfully take...
...But that would have been easy...
...In the sixties, when libertarians were still struggling for social acceptance, it was often said—perhaps in jest—that A libertarian would make love to anything that moved...
...He sees that this majority will often try to suppress superior people who conduct their lives rationally...
...In short, someone very much like Robert A. Heinlein himself...
...But Smith is also terrifically rich, as both heir to a huge fortune and the sole legal owner of Mars...
...For example: "Jubal reckoned anything that happened to a theologian short of breaking him on the wheel as no more than meet...
...Smith removes his clothing and confronts those in the crowd in order to share his love with them: "thou art God...
...This episode will remind libertarians of their own struggles against jealous inferiors...
...Many of the, insights are Jubal Harshaw's...
...He goes outside and, in the nude, tries to calm the increasingly volatile mob...
...One day a hostile crowd collects outside the "nest" of Smith and his followers...
...Never thirst...
...My point is that it is not just that Patty is female...
...She kissed Ben carefully and thoroughly...
...Thou art God...
...Not me, you limber Levantine whore...
...Theodore Sturgeon, the great scienc fiction writer, declared that in Stranger i a Strange Land Heinlein gives a pictur "of love, of worship, of honor and dew tion more -basic and more pure than an) thing earth has seen since the early day of apostolic Christianity...
...In many ways this part of the novel is better than Ayn Rand...
...So the novel ends with a sense of promise...
...Smith's initial problems on earth are in learning English and acceptable human behavior—difficulties with which most libertarians tan strongly identify...
...don't mean just that it's fun to shad up with a bunch of bouncy babes, I lo' them—all my brothers, both sexes...
...Since that moment my attitudes, toward the state in general and nudity in particular, have been entirely transformed...
...Thou art God...
...I don't thin anybody gets over needing that...
...Finally, one of them explains it to him, "Mike is not dead...
...Recognizing the divinity in everyone, Stuith uses as salutation the phrase, "Thou art Gocl...
...had better get down here and get ti 26 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 19' word...
...Smith brings to earth is somewhat related to the ancient wisdom of the Orient...
...This is a Biblical analogy...
...he says...
...The fact is that most libertarians find it virtually impossible to get a date...
...Examples this are easy to find in the text—in th following passage Heinlein represem the transformed consciousness of tw characters, Duke and Patty, as they taJ with Ben, a third...
...These are themes which have previously only been explored in the comics...
...It is lonely at the top, but I have found nudism a tremendous solace...
...Today it is still often said...
...Examples of the genre are Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Dickens' Great ,Expectatians, and Magruder's An American Life...
...The full implication: of Smith's Martian concepts are hard t( convey in English...
...Harshaw sees that the vast majority of people are stupid and susceptible to superstition, religion, et cetera...
...He might have had Smith taken to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington itself...
...As Heinlein writes, "Mike pushed back his halo and got to work...
...Smith's philosophy gains hundreds of adherents, but it also wins him the enmity of those who refuse to understand his simple creed: "thou art God...
...Come here, babe, and kiss your brother Ben...
...When a jealous politician—the president of the world government—endangers Smith's life, a kind-hearted nurse and an enterprising newspaper columnist smuggle him out of a Washington-area' Robert A. Heinlein: Lonely at the Top hospital to the retreat—"somewhere in the Poconos"—of "Jubal E. Harshaw, LL.B., M.D., Sc.D...
...Never charged for it in my life," the woman denied as she glided toward them...
...And his Martian foster-parents have given him something more valuable than a planet—the ability to tap at will seemingly superhuman "psi" powers...
...Oh, I'm not running down tail—" "Who is running down tail...
...bon vivant, gourmet, sybarite, popular author extraordinary, and neo-pessimist philosopher...
...The first part of the novel ends with Harshaw brilliantly, and successfully, defending Smith and his estate from government aggrandizement...
...But they can't accept his love...
...The planet Mars is itself, in some ways, to the east...
...Started giving it away before anybody told me...
...They are life-givinj rather than life-denying...
...The "stranger" of the book's title is Valentine Michael Smith, the first human born and bred on Mars, and the "strange land" he comes to is Earth, which is of course familiar to us...
...Many people are afraid of their brilliance...
...The final importance of Stranger in a Strange Land is as a powerful declaration of the individual's inalienable right to complete sexual self-expression...
...Smith is first brought to the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, which is only a suburb of the capital...
...He notes with praise and cherishes the 'essence of others so that he may fully groA and ultimately grow closer with them This is evengreater than Hermann Hesse Smith establishes a temple for his fol lowers where they can relate honestly without clothes...
...He could see a lot of changeshe wanted to make—" This is a happy ending, although Heinlein is making terrific fun of people who believe in religion...
...It makes for a particularly moving denouement...
...This seems clearly symbolic...
...She r minds me of Jubal...
...The Bible is 1,777 pages long but doesn't once mention the phrase "free market...
...Thou art God...
...The casual style of dyes: lets them spontaneously celebrate their religious ceremony, sharing water—which, in our terms, means to "mak( love" or to "hose...
...Share and grow closer without end...
...a contralto voice interrupted...
...Nor can he ever be away from us who have already grokked him...
...he has evidently been resurrected...
...and that old basta...
...Morality, as everyone but traditionalist conservatives realize, is just another excuse society's privileged classes use to keep good people down...
...How can he be dead when no one can be killed...
...He can't understand the seemingly callous unemotion of Smith's other followers...
...Inside the "nest" Smith's disciples, watching him on stereovision, notice that "some trick of sunlight andstereo formed a golden halo back of his head...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 27...
...Encountering a. passage such as this, it is impossible not to be immediately reminded of the opening books of the New Testament...
...Later Harshaw hears Smith speak to him...
...Smith's ideal is the achievement of oneness with all about him...
...Although Smith wills his own death, it is the mob which has, in effect, crucified him...
...The message which Valentine Michael "Stranger in a Strange Land is not a classic bildungsroman...
...They are bigoted, and answer his love with hate—bricks, shotgun blasts, flaming gasoline...
...Duke swung around...
...But that attitude reflects the most disgusting sort of Puritanism...
...I do not know how Heinlein got the idea of paralleling Smith's life to Christ's...
...Oh my brothers, I love you so...
...Jubal Harshaw is stunned by what he's seen, and shaken by the realization of Smith's death...
...TaA Patty—Patty mothers us...
...Share water...
Vol. 9 • February 1976 • No. 5
