License Plate #2: Mr. Galt and Mr. Long.

[elfs]

Back away slowly

There's an old Far Side cartoon, the caption of which says something like "How nature signals 'stay away.'" It shows all manner of animals in threatening poses, except for the picture of the human in the clown suit, inner tube, and other absurdist paraphernalia.

That's how I feel about this license plate. When you're young and stupid, Lazarus Long is about as admirable a role model as Hank Reardon, Dagny Taggart, or Howard Roark. I don't say that with much venom: sometimes a clear authoritarian message dolled up in anti-authoritarian blather helps a young person power through their own stupidity and make it to adulthood alive.

But just as, eventually, you begin to see just how creepy the whole Randian enterprise is, so too must the mature reader come to the hope and prayer that Long wasn't some Mary Sue for Bob Heinlein. The nihilistic narcissim of cloning your own sex-changed twins and then sleeping with them only shows just how far along poor old Bob was into the kind of angsty loss-of-vitality story that so plagued the later fiction of Bellow, Updike, and other writers who wrote through that national quasi-male-menopausal period known as "the 70s." Ultimately, Lazarus Long deserves to be left behind.

I used to think something like this was hot. Now I know better.

Comments

[caprine.livejournal.com]

Back in the eighties, San Diego author Atanielle Rowland, in the pages of the now-long-dead SWAPA, suggested the plot of the ultimate Heinlein novel: a plague is ravaging the galaxy, the Long foundation develops a cure/immunization (an engineered virus which can only be transmitted sexually) and Lazarus and his two clone-daughters boldly set forth to inoculate the galaxy, one sex scene at a time.

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

LOL.

[(Anonymous)]

Mostly joking:
Hey, you took my porn story plot!

Seriously:
Hey, I'd like to read a story by Elf wherein he takes that idea and turns it into a tale that's actually good.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

When you're young and stupid, Lazarus Long is about as admirable a role model as Hank Reardon, Dagny Taggart, or Howard Roark.

From advanced middle age, I'd say that it's just as true for me now: I admire Lazarus Long every bit as much as I do Hank Reardon, Dagny Taggard, or Howard Roark.

[lemur123.livejournal.com]

I haven't read all of his bio, but apparently Heinlein was born before his time, and was a 60s free-love wife-swapping porn star ages before the Age of Aquarius. He calmed down for a bit after meeting his second wife Virgina, but then came roaring back again as he aged. He was diagnosed as having an enlarged cranial artery; after it was surgically corrected, he calmed down again.

Re:

[grum]

Reminds me of a chemistry teacher I had. Mild mannered and lovely with a bothersome thick accent, I was warned that he threw things at students (like chalk, and textbooks). Apparently he'd done that a year or two prior but had been on sabatical and had a brain tumor removed in the interim.

Hmm

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Who do you want to put up against John Galt and Lazarus Long?

Ken Shardik?

Seriously, how have you, of all people, missed this point so badly?

These characters aren't meant as role models. Their authors didn't emulate them, certainly, and didn't expect others to do so either.

The purpose of these characters-- and the stories written around them-- is to illustrate certain ideals. These illustrations aren't meant to be realistic. Other aspects of the characters' personalities and the events in the stories are necessarily also unrealistic in service of this goal.

You seem to have lost your idealism, and for that, you have my pity-- but those of us who still have ideals can still appreciate and admire characters like John Galt and Lazarus Long.

By the way, to his "intimates and trusted friends" (his own words, from a letter to Jerry Pournelle in July 1973) he was "Robert." He allowed "friendly acquaintances and friends who are not quite intimate ones" to call him Bob, but to you and me, he was "Mr. Heinlein."

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