Starship Troopers and Dubya's "service" -

so I finished Heinlein's enjoyable little bit of pulp-lit fascism the other day, but only this morning did it strike me that aside the questionable assertion that our refusal to spank our children is leading to the downfall of American civilization (no, he really says that - a couple of times, too) notwithstanding, Starship Troopers makes an interesting point about citizenship and military service that is relevant to the recent controversy swirling around George Bush's record of service - or make that a lack of a record - in the National Guard. In Heinlein's futuristic utopia, only veterans of the armed forces have a right to vote, a.k.a. "The Franchise", the logic behind this being that political decisions inevitably boil down to questions of war and peace, and therefore should be made by those who are familiar with both. Now whereas Heinlein is trying to make this a statement about his flower-child hippie contemporaries and what he saw as their fatal obsession with nonviolence, Starship Troopers turns out to be a much better indictment of officers and commanders-in-chief who order soldiers to battle and their nation to war when they themselves have never seen a day of combat. While I don't agree at all that we should only look towards men or women with military service as our potential leaders, there is something to the idea that in a time of war (which everyone says we're in right now), someone who has actually stared Death in the face while serving his country during the Vietnam War might be a better choice for President than a playboy who couldn't even complete a cakewalk term of service at home.

Again, totally not what Heinlein was going for, but that's the fun of literary criticism!