“True artists were scarce—nailing him down by such a simple device as stealing his pants! He loved them for it and wanted to see more of them, as violently as possible.”
“We defined thinking as integrating data and arriving at correct answers. Look around you. Most people do that stunt just well enough to get to the corner store and back without breaking a leg. If the average man thinks at all, he does silly things like generalizing from a single datum. He uses one-valued logics. If he is exceptionally bright, he may use two-valued, ‘either-or’ logic to arrive at his wrong answers. If he is hungry, hurt, or personally interested in the answer, he can’t use any sort of logic and will discard an observed fact as blithely as he will stake his life on a piece of wishful thinking. He uses the technical miracles created by superior men without wonder nor surprise, as a kitten accepts a bowl of milk. Far from aspiring to higher reasoning, he is not even aware that higher reasoning exists. He classes his own mental process as being of the same sort as the genius of an Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.
“For explanations of a universe that confuses him he seizes onto numerology, astrology, hysterical religions, and other fancy ways to go crazy. Having accepted such glorified nonsense, facts make no impression on him, even if at the cost of his own life. Joe, one of the hardest things to believe is the abysmal depth of human stupidity.
—Robert Heinlein, Gulf, 1948Robert Heinlein was one of the best writers this world has ever seen. If that is hyperbole, it is only slightly so. His prose seems effortless. It’s sometimes even light and airy, yet the concepts he proposed in his works question some of the precepts that we hold dearest. Heinlein routinely asked fundamental questions about our culture, our future, and the nature of self that a good many people have lived their entire existence without ever considering.
This is one reason why I could gleefully kick Paul Verhoeven to DEATH for that abortion he created and named Starship Troopers. Verhoeven INTENTIONALLY subverted that written work of Heinlein's based solely on his own personal, sociopolitical beliefs.
"According to the DVD commentary, Paul Verhoeven never finished reading the novel, claiming he read through the first few chapters and became both 'bored and depressed.'" The film's Wiki supplies, "Verhoeven states the film's message: 'War makes fascists of us all.' He evokes Nazi Germany—particularly through its use of fashion, iconography and propaganda—which he sees as a natural evolution of the post-World War II United States." This is nearly the polar opposite of the movie's supposed source material. The Wikipedia article on the book states, "The overall theme of the book is that social responsibility requires being prepared to make individual sacrifice." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers_(film))
Themes aside, Mobile Infantry Powered Armor in the author’s words resembled a "hydrocephalic gorilla". Some artists render it thusly:
Now, consider how Verhoeven thoroughly corrupted the concept.
What Hollywood did to Starship Troopers was the artistic equivalent of giving a Bonobo chimpanzee some India ink and letting it paint directly on the canvas of the Mona Lisa. I’ll never NOT be annoyed by that. But, then, for some people “one of the hardest things to believe is the abysmal depth of human stupidity”. I definitely believe and understand this.
