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 One
Need
Not Eat All of an Egg...
A State of Disobedience {Hardcover}
A State of Disobedience {Paperback}
Tom Kratman
{Amazon
required me to award at least one star -- reflected by the above rating.
Proper rating is BOMB}
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read the replacement review i submitted (which was posted) after Amazon
removed this one, Click Here |
...to
know
that it is bad.
After painfully slogging through the clangingly turgid prose of the
first two chapters of this book, i skipped here and there ahead to
confirm my initial suspicions.
Yup -- this is another Radical
Reactionary Right screed against Liberalism, Big Government and the
current Big Hoohoo Demon of the Radical Reactionary Right, Hilary
Clinton. At least the author doesn't seem to be a racist as so many of
those who claim to be "conservatives" these days seem to be, though
homophobia does seem to be on the menu.
Basically, this is, as the one blurb from an established author that
Baen seems to have been able to get (and more on that in a moment)
establishes, thereby saving us from the trouble of actually having to
read the whole book, a novel of the "Second American Revolution", when
the Righteous Of The Nation shall find that they can Stand No More and
Rise Up and Sweep The Libruls From The Land and then rewrite the
Constitution to make sure that it clearly states those Principles Of
True Americanism that all Right-Thinking Americans understand in their
hearts so well that the Founding Fathers actually *meant* to put in
there, had they simply been as clever as today's Radical Reactionary
Right.
Along the way, it appears that we again take a few swipes at such
vaguely-equine-shaped damp spots on the ground as Waco, the ATF, and,
of course, that old bugaboo of Congresscritters and the American
Medical Association, Socialised Medicine, which, as it makes
appearances in the sections that i read, is Simply Horrible, as any
right-thinking member of the Radical Reactionary Right knows, despite
the evidence to the contrary of the British and Canadian experiences
(as reported by virtually everyone i know who has had significant
contact with them...)
The Villains Of The Piece appear to be thinly-veiled caricatures of
Hilary Clinton, Janet Reno and such, and the Good Guys are, of course,
those Simple American Patriots who see through their lies and
deceptions in the end. (One such, in particular, is presented as a
simple Son Of The Soil, and not an Intellectual, by such tricks of
"Characterisation" as having him amusingly misquote Dickens. Gosh, what
cutting wit.) Too bad he had to have a *female* Evil Librul President
for his story, there are any number of places where some really
villainous mustache twirling would have helped establish
characterisation.
And, at the end, there is a list of "Proposed Amendments to the
Constitution" brought in by a Constitutional Convention convened after
the Successful Second American Revolution; these are, really , the
purpose of the book, to lay out the author's Formula For Salvation Of
the American Way:
One, recognising that those pesky words about "A well-organised
militia..." can always be used to cast doubt on the legitimacy of
unlimited "Keep and Bear Arms", begins by *abolishing* the old Second
Amendment and writing a new one which allows private citizens to
possess anything short of Weapons Of Mass Destruction.
Another specifically forbids the Federal Government from enforcing the
"freedom from religion" that people like Thomas Jefferson wrote into
the Constitution.
Another, which is designed to eliminate such bodies as the FCC, ICC and
FDA, requires such bodies' staffs to be reduced by 10% every year for
ten years; presumably this is intended to eliminate them in ten years
-- in fact, a 10% annual reduction in staff would result in a strength
of 34.9% of the original staffing -- assuming that there were enough in
the original staff that one wouldn't have to clip a few fingers or toes
to meet the year's reduction. Perhaps the author, who is a lawyer, not
an engineer or mathemetician, meant "ten percent of present levels".
That is not, however, what he wrote.
Yet a fourth amendment (i am taking them somewhat out of order) outlaws
"...direct taxes ... levied upon living persons..."
And my two favourites relate to proposed changes in the Judiciary --
one allows a simple majority of Governors of the States to simply
overturn any Supreme Court decision (This would be, i assume, referred
to as the Jackson/Marshall Memorial Amendment), and another *requires*
that one of the Justices of the Spreme Court be eliminated from the
Court by popular vote of the people, every four years. After sixteen or
twenty years of this, why, we would have a Court that exactly reflected
the Will Of The People in its decisions.
What a horrible and terrifying thought.
The rest of the proposed Amendments are as bad -- if all were to be
ratified, taking us back to an even more poorly designed "nation" than
existed under the original Articles of Confederation, i'd expect that it
wouldn't be more than a decade or two before Georgia nuked California.
(Of course, the Radical Reactionary Right would probably applaud such
an action...)
As to the author blurb on the book's wrapper -- it is from fellow Baen
author (and now-collaborator {Watch on the Rhine, q.v.}) John Ringo, and reads (in
full) "Probably the most realistic depiction of a second American
Revolution ever written." No mention of what a great book it is, or how
the author brings it glowingly alive on the page, or how he thinks
that, as presented by the author, it seems like a Good Idea.
The phrase "damning with faint praise" comes to mind; my own capsule
review would be "Worst political SF from a mainline publisher since
'Farnham's Freehold'".
Could i give less than one star under the Amazon system -- perhaps even
negative numbers -- i would have.
The late Dorothy Parker, reviewing another work in another time, gave
me the perfect finish for this review of this book: "This is not a book
to be tossed aside lightly.....it should be thrown with great force."
A comment on the foregoing review,
from
another Amazon reviewer's post:
Bah. If the left
had their way this book which offends them so badly by portraying the
truth would be burned and the author sent to a Gulag.
Actually, no
-- it
is the Left (by that reviewer's apparent terms) that generally opposes
almost all censorship.
The same reviewer opens her review with a remark about reviewers who
claim a book is Very Badly Written, but seem unable to cite so much as
a single passage to bear out this claim -- in the case of this book, i
again find myself quasi-quoting a marvellous catty remark -- in this
case Mary McCarthy's comment on Lillian Hellman:
Every word he writes is bad, and that includes "a", "an" and "the".
I refuse to use the
label "Conservative" to describe the Radical Reactionary Right; they
are *not* conservatives, and have so debased the word by example and
misuse, just as the Radical Loonie Left have so misused and debased the
word "Liberal" (and vice-versa), that neither is usable any more in
honest discourse or debate.
Both "liberal" and "conservative" have classic definitions, which do
not match the manner in which most mainstream American pundits use them
these days.
A murrain on all of 'em.
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