It never occurred to me to take the masturbation angle on that song. I’m giggling over that particular interpretation, sure puts the song in a different context, but I have to side with Bernie on that one. There’s just no way that song is actually supposed to be about masturbation. It’s just sounds like one of those silly post facto interpretations hammered onto a song.
It’s been a while since I read the book, but weren’t the people in charge of recruitment deliberately making the path to citizenship sound worse than it really was? The wounded recruitment officer who only wore his prosthetic leg off-duty wasn’t one of Verhoeven’s additions, was he?
I would go with the genre of social dystopia, as well, and don’t see sci fi in it at all. There are hints of a nuclear war which may have triggered the Republic, but I don’t identify any sci fi aspects in that, or in any of the technology used or discussion of the society itself.
Haven’t Eminem and some other rappers claimed that “faggot” wasn’t meant as an anti-gay slur in their lyrics? In fact IIRC one seemed to claim he didn’t know it was an anti gay slur.
Sociology is also a science.
Dystopic fiction is science fiction. It’s a subgenre, like space opera and cyberpunk.
Anne McCaffrey claims that Dragonriders of Pern is science fiction. 
I’d respect George Lucas more if he admited that the Kessel Run parsec thing was a mistake.
Bob Dylan has always denied that the bulk of “Blood on the Tracks” was about his crumbling marriage with Sara, but I think no one ever bought that.
He was explicitly doing research for the military, sort of weapons development and the like.
Well, here’s the thing… Heinlein had his characters say several things about “military service” in the books that are somewhat contradictory. I think it comes from having this idea that he wanted citizenship based upon a particular notion of service, but also wanted the ability to earn it open to everyone, not limited in who could apply. If you don’t get the option of military service because of some physical condition (say, flat feet), then you are incapable of earning citizenship. That is counter to his desire for equality of opportunity. He wanted citizenship to be earned, but not prevent anyone who desired it the opportunity.
So he has to have a character (a doctor doing the screening, who himself is not a citizen or a “veteran” or performing service that qualifies for future citizenship) describe how everyone gets an opportunity, so he rattles off some bullshit about how a guy who is blind and crippled could get some sort of make work job that would allow him to qualify.
But that’s contradicted by other descriptions given about service. Note that the history of their government derives from after a global disaster (IIRC war) and the fracturing of society and governments, and the birth of their government came from groups of people who banded together to form pockets of organization that spread to form the new world government. Those people were veterans - ex-soldiers (presumably nobody was a current soldier because the existing governments had fractured by then or were effectively moot) - or primarily so. And the reason why is described in detail in his Political History sections of the book, where Johnny and his class get educated on their government, history, their society, and why their form of government is so much better than any other. That’s where the notion of “service” and “only veterans can be citizens” comes from. It’s that the veterans are the ones who earned it by putting their health and welfare on the line for the greater good. Not just they did a job, but they risked sacrifice.
Note that Heinlein explicitly states that many government jobs (like the aforementioned doctors screening potential enlistees, clerical workers at the Army base, etc) are filled by contract civilians and do not qualify as “service”. All the explicitly stated jobs that qualify as service are military positions.
Now some people have skills and abilities that put them much more useful for the good of society in better places than the battlefield front lines. That’s Rico’s buddy who gets to do electronics research off Pluto -
who gets fragged by the Bugs.
But delivering mail to your doorstep does not sound to me like the kind of service that qualifies. It isn’t improving society any more than a doctor who screens recruits to determine what their abilities are and therefore what branches/jobs they are capable of doing to earn their citizenship. I mean, maybe in the ghetto, with drive-by gang turf wars, and paramedics getting shot for trying to help, etc. But Rico’s world is supposed to be better than that. It just doesn’t fit.
And I’m sure Rico would have felt perfectly happy signing up for postal carrier rather than testing space suits on Titan or whatever.
So the real root of the problem is that Heinlein himself didn’t really think through the conflicting desires of his proposed system, or else he did a poor job of explaining what he meant. Which seems unlikely, given how didactic and extensive the section on political history is and how much of the book it dominates over the action parts.
I should also probably point out the line about counting fuzzy caterpillers was stated by the doctor, who really doesn’t know what constitutes service because it’s not his job. His job is to categorize in extensive detail the capabilities, limitations, and mental function of the recruits so that someone higher up in the food chain can evaluate the recruits for jobs that they can actually do. So counting fuzzy caterpillers is likely reserved for blind, deaf, parapalegics with no arms, who have to use their nose to do the counting, or something. For them, just rolling a caterpillar from one pile to another without losing it or letting it get away is a tiresome and physically challenging task.
I agree that Mobile Infantry (MI) was a small part of the service, but I think that all qualifying jobs were military. I don’t think my current job as a contractor to NASA building space equipment would qualify. If working for NASA doesn’t qualify, then carrying letters door-to-door certainly doesn’t.
Never even heard of it before. Looked at lyrics. WTF?
It does sound a bit like he is saying “semen” with an odd inflection. But how do you know that it’s an either/or?
No, that’s in the book. The recruiting officer sits there with one arm and one leg to scare off the Momma’s boys. Later, after Johnny signs up he happens to run into the recruiting officer again and doesn’t recognize him at first because he’s using his prosthetic leg and arm. A minute later Johnny realizes he shook the officer’s prosthetic hand and didn’t know it at the time.
The point is that the recruit doesn’t get a choice. Oh, he can state a preference, but that’s just a way for the recruiting office to try to sort people into the right jobs. You join, and you do the job they give you. That’s not going to be delivering the mail, unless there’s for some reason a critical shortage of mail carriers.
The recruiting officer who was so pleased to see Carmen sign up to be a pilot said that if she flunked out of pilot school she could end up scrubbing toilets on Titan, so some such. And it’s clear that the MI, the branch that’s most military, is only a small fraction of the service, over half the kids in Johnny’s training camp wash out. Some of those are like the kid who punches Zim and gets court martialed and kicked out. But while they can kick you out of the MI for medical reasons, they can’t kick you out of the service. Johnny mentions an older classmate who can’t keep up physically and is carried off in a stretcher, he later meets the guy who is now a cook in the navy or some such.
I’m not saying you have to believe him, but Bob was quite capable of writing straightforward songs about his divorce. “Sarah” on the ***Desire ***album clearly WAS about his divorce. There was nothing abstract or symbolic to the song at all, just an unadorned statement of his heartbreak and his memories of good times his family had shared.
So, if Dylan claims that an abstract song ISN’T about Sarah, he may be lying. But he might just tell you, “Hey man, when I want to write songs about Sarah, I** write songs about Sarah!”**
That’s true, but in the book all the paths to citizenship that are described – even hypothetical ones – all seem to be military. If it’s not a combat role, it’s support or testing or something, but he never describes it as a non-military civil service job. nobody seems to get their obligation out of the way by delivering mail, or manning the DMV desk, or being a county clerk, or whatever. Even after the initial “horrorshow”, all the talk is about doing things for the military, even if it’s “counting fuzz on a caterpillar by touch”, of testing environment suits on Pluto.
Heinlein himself later maintained that non-military civil service was a route to citizenship (he claims this at some length in Extended Universe), but he inevitably talks about “veterans” having the franchise, and always seems to describe them as ex-military. You can vote when you’ve been discharged, which is a weird way to describe leaving a Federal Bureaucracy.
Some folks have written passionately about this on the internet. I strongly suspect Heinlein pretty much had military service in mind, and his backpedalling to “civil service” was a later rationalization that he never really embraced or thought through. Heck, even if you were in his military you’d probably have a combat post – his idealized military organization is famously short of “idlers” – even the cook and the padre make combat drops. As Rico learns in OCS, any non-military tasks that can be done by non-combat individuals get farmed out to “civilians” – and he makes it clear that their efforts are not a road to citizenship.
At least he admits that the opener is about the divorce:
“[This song] took me 10 years to live, and two years to write,” Dylan often said before playing “Tangled Up in Blue” in concert. His marriage was crumbling in 1974 as he wrote what would become the opener on Blood on the Tracks and his most personal examination of hurt and nostalgia.
From CNN (5/25/11)
Using that definition, every novel is science fiction because they’re all written in the context of a society.
I’m not sure I agree, since not all dystopian fiction is about dystopias that occur due to zombies, nuclear armageddon, or space wars. I don’t know that I’d think a book about the decline of civilization due to people just being normal rat-bastards is science fiction.
I agree that “civil service” jobs are not what Heinlein was thinking about in the book. Civil service jobs are staffed by civilians. Other jobs are reserved for veterans, like cop and History and Moral Philosophy teacher.
But the reason there aren’t any cooks or doctors in the MI is that those support functions are filled by navy personnel. Everyone drops in the MI, but the MI is only a small fraction of the service. You can have civilian cooks and doctors and file clerks back on Earth, but you don’t have them on navy ships.
So you’re not going to go into the service and end up an elementary school teacher, or even a firefighter. But you could end up teaching, the teachers at Johnny’s Officer Candidate School were all active duty MI, or you could end up a firefighter on a Navy ship or government outpost.
If it’s about a decline of civilization that’s already happened, that’s a history book. If it’s about one that hasn’t (yet) happened, that’s science fiction. No zombies or nukes required.
You seem to be talking more about apocalyptic fiction rather than dystopian fiction. A dystopia is not necessarily a declining or ending civilization. Look at 1984 - at the end of the book, the civilization is still going strong, in its way.
I disagree, but I don’t really care enough to argue about it.
Good point.