-In any case, I think you are right that there are uncanny links in the USO -show/farce to Verhoeven's rendition of Strarship Troopers. On the DVD -version of the movie Verhoeven talks about how he made Starship Troopers as -a conscious attempt to incorporate some of Noam Chomsky's ideas on -manufacturing consent. I wonder what others think of Verhoeven's endeavor.
What pissed me off about Starship Troopers is that it was a cartoon version of fascist propaganda, where the original Heinlein source was a very conscious attempt to promote a military quasi-fascism at a rather high level of argument.
I actually think the movie reflects the infantilization of the pop left (Verhoeven, Stone) which by creating cartoon enemies, they refuse to directly engage with the real intellectual and social basis of rightwing thought and practice and why it gains adherents.
In the original, Heinlein was making a rather audacious rightwing political argument, that only veterans should have the right to vote and justifying a specific kind of military culture as the best way to create socially-responsible political leaders. He specifcally engages Marxist challenges to his own belief and while it's easy to argue with his version of Marx and his arguments, at least he doesn't treat the alternative as a cartoon but as a substantive intellectual and political challenge that needs to be refuted.
There is a strain of intellectual contempt on the Left that acts as if intellectual engagement with rightwing ideas is beneath them-- only parody, cartoon, ridicule are acceptable modes of engagement. Now while I am all for the latter in specific propaganda and public relation actions, it seems a bit too pervasive. And when original rightwing source material is so completely distorted by a movie maker, as Verhoven did in Starship Troopers, it does reflect an intellectual infantilism.
-- Nathan Newman