Bovadium and Starship Troopers

Years ago Mom read us MOTEL OF THE MYSTERIES, a picture book "account" of the excavation of a lost tomb from an ancient civilization.  Said tomb is actually a motel (think budget options like the Motel 6 chain), and the baths, TV sets, and remote controls misinterpreted to be sarcophagi, altars, and ceremonial wands.  It's a goodnatured critique of archeology and archeologists that encourages humility in the face of antiquity.

THE BOVADIUM FRAGMENTS is social criticism of a different sort.  A new addition to JRR Tolkien's posthumous library, it chronicles in similarly humorous fashion a real social development in Oxford at the time when Tolkien was a professor.  Oxford was (and is) a spectacular city, its medieval, gothic, and Neo-gothic architecture sharing cobblestone streets, bounded by picturesque fields and countryside, the heritage of 2000 years of Roman, Saxon, and English civilization (I'm not concerned about leaving the original Britons out of the lineup, because the Welsh ARE the original Britons, and they were thoroughly Romanized before the coming of Hengist and Horsa).  But the advent of the motor car and the double decker busses threw this idyllic town into chaos as vehicles spewed fumes and packed the narrow streets and planning commissions implemented eminent domain to seize properties for demolition and erasure in preparation for new roads.  

Like MOTEL OF MYSTERIES, Tolkien's BOVADIUM FRAGMENTS takes the form of scholarly investigation in the distant future, trying to examine what went on during these lost times, when storied Bovadium suddenly introduced iron monsters of strange design that led to its collapse and that of the whole civilization.  It's an erudite book and probably most accessible to readers familiar with the Mycenaean collapse and our current struggles with Linear A and Linear B script - but the critique is clear enough: seen from a future vantage point, by a people who know no automobiles and cannot fathom their importance, the disruption of modern "development" is predicted to end in disaster.  The solution (get rid of motor cars!) is implicit.

Which brings me to STARSHIP TROOPERS.  If you've seen the movie and read the book, then you'll understand when I compare the movie/novel relationship to that of THE IRON GIANT, Nolan's ODYSSEY, and (somewhat) Jackson's HOBBIT trilogy - movies that lift the names and major plot points from the books and use them to tell totally different stories.  In the case of TROOPERS, whereas the movie is a critique of the military industrial complex that questions the nature of war and how it warps society, the novel is a critique of 20th Century American culture wars and how they warped society - as seen from a future society totally divorced from it.  One of the key themes is that citizenship - which includes voting rights and government office - should be restricted to military veterans.

I thought about this when I saw a clip from a longer interview with a Yale professor who advocates that voting rights should be shifted away from parents and onto single adults, essentially a collectivist argument intended undermine the family under the guise of "advocating" for the children.  This reminded me that voting in America has always been a fluid concept, shifting and adapting with the times.  First it was landed men, then (at least in England) it was men who possessed huge amounts of capital (factory owners), then free men, then all men, and eventually men and women.  Some people argue that voting should come to include non-citizens.  Others argue that the franchise should be restricted to households (one vote per family) or to those who pay taxes.  

In TROOPERS, only 20-year veterans of the military are granted citizenship and allowed to vote.  The argument is that only military veterans have the understanding and demonstrated commitment to actually put the collective above their own interests.  It is an interesting theory, though my first concern is "who decides what is right for the collective?" having seen firsthand how some leaders in the Army define that which is Good.  But if nothing else, it serves as a useful reminder that what we consider normal now has not always been such, and that to future generations the things that we do consider normal will appear to them distant and strange.  Like a roach motel.