R
At 10:49 AM 1/22/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Vikash Yadav" <vikash1 at ssc.upenn.edu
>
>
>-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