Back in the nineteen-forties and \u2013fifties Robert A Heinlein was writing his \u201cFuture History\u201d stories about the time period that currently is the recent past. And on his very impressive chart somewhere between the beginning of space flight and the beginning of a theocratic dictatorship in the United States was a period around the nineteen sixties that he called the \u201cCrazy Years.\u201d\u00a0 You get a flavor for what he meant in a story called \u201cThe Year of the Jackpot.\u201d\u00a0 In this story social mores were unravelling.\u00a0 Women would spontaneously strip naked in public without knowing why they were doing it and transvestite men and women would challenge the authorities with prosecution for daring to notice that they were queer.\u00a0 Whether Heinlein was truly prescient or whether he just detected the beginnings of the curve and extrapolated it to its outlandish extreme is unknown to me.\u00a0 But obviously he was being cautious.\u00a0 No kidding, the current events that greet each of us as we survey the contents of our daily purveyor of fake news is well beyond what would have passed for science fiction or parody a few decades ago.\u00a0 States are suing the federal government to prevent it from ascertaining if a census form is being filled out by an illegal alien.\u00a0 A \u201cwoman\u201d who used to be a man is marrying \u201cman\u201d who used to be a woman and we are supposed to believe that somehow now a man will be giving birth to the child.\u00a0 A porn actor is suing the President\u2019s lawyer for defamation of character.\u00a0 Does a porn actor even have a character that can be defamed?\u00a0 We\u2019ve been laughing at these insanities for decades but none of it has gone away or even slowed the march to the brink of insanity.\u00a0 Heinlein\u2019s theocratic dictatorship is looking less and less like a nightmare scenario and more and more like a really good idea.\u00a0 I\u2019m really starting to wonder how much worse Sharia Law would be than the current politically correct straight jacket we currently endure.\u00a0 At least under it there are easily recognizable roles for the traditional individuals most of us remember as normal.<\/p>\n
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Heinlein later in his career wrote a sort of spy novel with a female replicant heroine called \u201cFriday.\u201d In that universe the United States and Canada had balkanized into a number of smaller states.\u00a0 Some of the states mentioned are Brit-Can, Quebec, the Alaska Free State, the California Confederacy, the Republic of Texas, the Vegas Free State and the Chicago Imperium.\u00a0 This later novel is significantly less optimistic than his earlier works.\u00a0 I definitely don\u2019t claim that Robert Heinlein was particularly more skilled as a prognosticator than any other seers around but I begin to see a rationale for separating from behavior that keeps trending not only farther and farther from normalcy but even begins closing in on suicidal.\u00a0 I still hope that the path forward is the majority of Americans rejecting the progressivist nightmare that is currently unfolding and at the least restore the conditions needed to allow a functional society.\u00a0 But I have to admit I\u2019m starting to worry that the Alt-Right may not be just making up their apocalypse.\u00a0 I better get my passport stamped for the Republic of Texas, or should that be the Vegas Free State?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in the nineteen-forties and \u2013fifties Robert A Heinlein was writing his \u201cFuture History\u201d stories about the time period that currently is the recent past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,5,237,4,242,6],"tags":[80,893,891,892,711,603],"class_list":["post-2480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-current-events","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","category-trump","tag-alt-right","tag-balkanization-of-the-united-states","tag-friday","tag-future-history","tag-robert-a-heinlein","tag-the-year-of-the-jackpot"],"yoast_head":"\n