Shouldn’t a “space elevator” be sited on the equator? I can’t see one in Texas. A rocket port, sure, they could launch towards the Gulf and have it there for staging or aborts.
I dunno, Fenris. I think the point of Alexander running through that list of things accomplished and hope to accomplish is to show the social matrix that Hergensheimer is operating within. That doesn’t necessarily excuse him, but it does allow the reader to truly understand what sort of American theocracy he comes from. Because, let’s face it, in the narrative there’s not a lot of info on the origins of Hergensheimer. Within a few pages we’re out of that world and living inside Hergensheimer’s head.
So, even though our POV character is sympathetic, being a literal stranger in a strange land (forgive me) it’s necessary for the author to make clear just out over-the-top his culture is. It’s a culture in which those tasks he lays out appear to be achievable goals. That’s a frightening thing and lays out the extent to which Hergensheimer needs to change over the course of the story. Even with that RAH lays out Hergensheimer’s love for the pulps and such as a boy to establish that he’s not always been this way to allow the reader to perceive him as twisted by his culture and not from birth.
But to me, the flaw is that Alex is a primary architect of that culture. I’d be fine if he was just some guy from Fundie-Nazi-Land who was sympathetic to their goals until he learned better. But he was one of the main movers-and-shakers. He wasn’t a schlub drafted into the German army, he was Goebbels.
One other interesting point…and this is to Heinlein’s credit…Alex never gets over his racism. It’s pounded into him too deeply. He can see THIS black person or THAT black person as an individual and an equal, but he never gets to the point where he can extrapolate to “…then ALL black people are my equals and individuals”. Which is sad, but realistic.
To carry it further, I think RAH is making a sort of jab at Christianity. Regardless of the sins Alex has done or condoned, he gets reborn and his sins are washed away and he’s got a 1st class ticket to Heaven. Unlike the non-Christian infants that have been killed.
I don’t think that any specific, put-your-finger-on-it references to “The Unfortunate Profession of Jonathon Hoag” are really necessary-- The overall description of the world as a whole is sufficient to make it clear that they’re either the same world, or similar enough that they might as well be.
Did we actually move on to Job, BTW, or is this all just an extended side-track?
I think AH’s viewpoint is that these are all positive efforts he supports.
I love Job and agree it’s Heinlein’s best late book, and among his best overall (maybe top 20)… but the evolution of Alex from moralistic prig to Heinlein Hero is utterly unconvincing in motive, timeline and development. He just flips a switch on all prior cultural conditioning because he meets a hot cheesecake Danish.
Extended side-track, I think.
Side track, definitely. But it’s a sign of a power of the book that it’s spurred two extended discussions in the thread.
Exactly. And not only “supports” but is on a star-chamber to promote and advance these things. The main organization banned abortions, contraceptives and four or five other things. The star-chamber AH is in is currently discussing if it’s time to move to the “final solution” for the “Jewish problem”, if sterilizations or (something–coventry? lobotomies?) are the way to handle gay people, what about Catholics? Is it time to turn on them…or wait 'till later to deal with them. How about blacks? And the context is that AH is proud to be on this secret committee. Also, he’s high enough in the ranks of his org that he can call collect giving nothing but his name and he has every expectation that any worker who answers the phone will know who he is. (The fact that he gets some random pre-teen answering the phone (kid’s a soprano–it said so. 
) is just Loki’s mischief, one assumes.
For what it’s worth, he beats himself up about it every now and then when Heinlein thinks about it.
AH also keeps gaining skills that he should not have. The bit where the thugs try to bully him out of the $1,000,000 and he flings himself in the pool and near-drowns the thug while yelling “Help!”? The bit towards the end of the book where he out cons the crooked lawyer? AH should have absolutely no idea how to do that. None. Alex Graham? Maybe. AH? No.
(PS-sorry for the hijack Jonathan! 
)
By the way, here’s the passage in question:
Oddly, (or because of sloppy editing) he refers to Catholics as stauch allies at like two other points, but goes after Jehovah’s Witnessess for being too rigid. Not a major problem with the book, but slightly sloppy.
I don’t get it. What’s so funny?
“John Thomas” is (IIRC) Navy slang for penis.
It gets funnier when you understand that Heinlein’s idiot editor at Scribner’s was a “Freudian” – she saw porn in everything–a martian pet that was essentailly a furry bowling ball with three eyestalks was too suggestive and she fought him tooth and nail because the eyestalks were “suggestive” or “Freudian” or “dirty” or somesuch.
So slipping the John Thomas thing past her wasn’t just putting a doity word in a kid’s book, it was putting one over on a notorious/incompetent censor.*
*She also wrote little girls with horsies books and Heinlein had some things to say about the “Freudian” nature of them.
Huh–I just looked it up. It’s not specifically Navy slang, it’s from (get this!) Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Apparently Ms Chatterly’s boyfriend calls his weenie his “John Thomas”.
Bingo.
You’ll never read Star Beast the same way again. There’s one particularly telling line…
When Mr. Kiku tells Betty that Lummox has been “raising John Thomases,” her reaction can be read more than one way.
There are many others. My favorite literary easter egg.
One last quick hijack…(sorry Jonathan! I promise I’ll stop)
Apparently Alice Dagleish actually published stuff beyond “little girls and horsey” books. She got several Newbery* Awards including one for a book I vaguely remember plodding through in Elementary School: The Courage of Sarah Noble about a little (like 6) girl from Boston who moves to “the wilderness” with her dad and mom but is terrified because her friends tell her how the savages will eat her and chop her head off. She’s able to manage her fear because her mommy gives her a phrase to repeat when she’s scared…something like “Remember your courage, Sarah”. Some “good” Indians show up and she realizes that they might be human. For some reason (I really don’t remember what) the kid ends up having a sleep-over with the indians (who apparently live alone–there’s no tribe, no society, just a mommy Indian, a daddy Indian and three (?) kid Indians). She plays games and has fun and decides that…maybe…they’re people. She comes home the next day and mom freaks out that she was allowed to do a sleepover. The book ends with Sarah talking about how their “good” Indians will protect them from the “bad, Northern” Indians.
It’s written at about a 2nd grade level–if you’ve ever read the “Little House” books, Courage is written at a MUCH lower age level.
There’s an interesting discussion of it here. (Interesting=a lot of people with differing yet valid viewpoints and a few hypersensitive ninnies.)
Also–I wonder if Dagliesh ripped off something from Heinlein. In Farmer in the Sky there’s a repeated motif of getting courage from what your mom said… Bill kept remembering his mom saying “Stand tall, Billy” as he goes to live on the frontier. In Courage, Sarah’s mommy’s saying gives her the courage to live on the frontier. It’s obviously no more than a swipe of the gimmick, the stories aren’t similar at all. But…given a several year gap (and more, since she saw Farmer long before it was published…I have to wonder if she “borrowed” that bit. (Farmer was 1953, Courage was 1955)
*Which doesn’t impress me all that much. I’m not a fan of the Newbery criteria–far too much emphasis on lit’rary qualities and not on “books that kids devour and teach a love of reading” overall. But it still is a major award.
The term is also used in Blackadder III (in the episode titled “Amy And Amiability”)
"I’d no more place my daughter in the hands of an unworthy man than I’d place my john thomas in the hands of a lunatic with a pair of scissors. "
I still gotta disagree, Fenris. You seem to feel that what AH is doing is some sort of secret cabal or something. RAH is describing nothing more than a lobbying group, and for a lot of those line items you can fine groups in DC right now advocating them (God knows I used to cover them sometimes).
RAH is using that to define just how different the world of AH is from the one the reader lives in. It’s a place where the worst of the Mrs. Grundy impulses is considered normal and moral and that infuses AH as a base part of his personality. But it doesn’t make him (as deputy director he’s primarily a fundraiser) Hitler.
Remember, also, that AH was initially a failed engineer (couldn’t handle the math) and then a failed pastor (couldn’t handle the congregation). He fell into fundraising and lobbying because it was something he COULD do. He’s a classic busybody convinced of his own righteousness. That’s what makes his transformation more telling. Remember, Loki describes God as saying he’d produced the greatest bigot EVER and Loki couldn’t break him.
Despite the fact that I am a fan of (early) Heinlein and a HUGE fan of Cabell, I have never read Job. Following this discussion I will rectify that lapse. Fenris, I strong recommend you read Jurgen.
Apparently from comments later in the thread the character’s name is Koshchei, which probably is a reference to the character of Koshchei the Deathless, the Enemy of all the Gods of Men, from Jurgen. Jurgen, a failed poet and successful pawnbroker, meets Koshchei when he (Jurgen) says a kind word about the Devil. Koshchei, in return, takes Jurgen’s wife away, and Jurgen has to travel to a number of improbable and uncomfortable places to get her back, including the Heaven of his Grandmother and the Hell of his Father.
**Jurgen **is extremely good and was banned in Boston, so it was also extremely successful.
Based on this description, there’s a strong resemblance between the plot of the second half (or so) of “Job” and Jurgen.
The Koshchei of Job tellingly works out of the Branch office. 