heinleinblog

I’ve been a fan of the works of Robert A. Heinlein since I was in junior high school. I was browsing the shelves at the B. Dalton’s store in Northwoods Mall when the cover of Heinlein’s Friday caught me eye. You know the one: A hot blonde in a blue jumper unzipped down to there. Those sultry eyes and other attributes just begged me to pick up the book and take her home for a read. Dad liked the cover, too.

I ended up reading the book cover to cover as my family went on a car trip to see family in Tennessee.

On the day we returned, I took what little cash I had to the used book store and bought all the Heinlein books I could get my hands on.

And I’m glad I did. I was raised to be a liberal Democrat. It wasn’t even a matter of thinking about it. It was just assumed.

Heinlein taught me to think for myself. I eventually became a card-carrying Libertarian. I occasionally encountered someone who dismissed Heinlein as a “fascist,” thanks to “Starship Troopers,” a novel that expressed his unabashed respect and love for the soldiers who fight and die to protect us.

Sometime before I came to the conscious decision that I was in fact a libertarian (I think I always knew that I didn’t believe exactly what liberals and Democrats believed and behaved; likewise the conservatives and the GOP), I learned the wonders of HTML and the World Wide Web. This was roughly at the same time the Paul Vorhoeven-directed movie “Starship Troopers” (1997) hit the big screen. In addition to the incredibly bad science, the movie did its best to portray the government as fascist and the soldiers in it as sadists. Heinlein  wrote the book to extoll the virtues of taking responsibility for the safety and security of one’s nation; while Vorhoeven gave us fascists spouting slogans and propaganda.

If that’s the point of view Vorhoeven wanted to put forth, more power to him. For a nation that he wants to portray as fascist, we are remarkably tolerent of immigrants and refugees who want to insult us. I just think he needed to write his own original piece of fiction, not adapt the work of someone who believed exactly the opposite messagethat he wanted to portray.

Wanting to defend Heinlein from this kind of slander, I created a Blogger site that came to be called “Libertarianism and Robert A. Heinlein.” It contained a series of short essays that pointed out the issues on which Heinlein expressed an opinion, those opinions tended to lean toward the libertarian point of view. I can’t think of a world view that is as far away from fascism as is libertarianism.

I then discovered blogging. I created the site that later evolved into Peoria Pundit. I also tried to turn my Heinlein site into a blog, called “heinleinblog.” But Peoria Pundit became my one true blog love for a while and months would go by without a post to heinleinblog. So I closed it down.

Not long ago, I created a multi-user Word Press blog site that lets members create their own unique blog. Also, this version of Word Press lets users import their Blogger posts. This weekend, I moved all my Blogger-based heinleinblog posts here to http://heinleinblog.blogpeoria.com.

I’ve gone through some news articles I’ve collected and added some posts (back-dated, of course) and added some of the little extras a blog has just gotta have these days.

I’m in the process of fixing things up in here. Those origially short essays made the move too. You will find them in the category “essays.” Feel free to comment on any post, or to email me.