Well that's a significant improvement from when I was a kid. Back then all the hot young adult stuff was as lefty as lefty could be. Maybe Harry Potter is a prophet as well as a wizard? I sure hope so because we really can't stay on this statist death spiral much longer and it sure as heck isn't going to be my "baby doom" I mean "boom" generation that saves anything but our own increasingly boney self righteous asses. Faster please.
Over at the Guardian, Ewan Morrison is pissed off that young-adult novels don't preach a left-wing, progressive vision. In fact, he writes, many of the most popular titles actually undermine the collectivism at the heart of so many utopias-gone-bad:
Books such as The Giver, Divergent and the Hunger Games trilogy are, whether intentionally or not, substantial attacks on many of the foundational projects and aims of the left: big government, the welfare state, progress, social planning and equality. They support one of the key ideologies that the left has been battling against for a century: the idea that human nature, rather than nurture, determines how we act and live. These books propose a laissez-faire existence, with heroic individuals who are guided by the innate forces of human nature against evil social planners....
Jeebus, the sourness runs strong in this one. Morrison is in such a rush to denounce the neoliberalism of the books that he manages to misrepresent them. Far from being anti-community, these books are anti-collectivist, at least when the group is based on involuntary servitude, perceived mental and physical capacities (mostly the result of genetics in these books), or accidents of geography. To the extent that they—like virtually all novels—rely on individual protagonists, those heroes are all about political and social equality rather than any sort of elevation of the great man or woman at the expense of others. None of the books he cites is against community per se. They are against reactionary states that rule by dictate rather than democracy (whether in a the voting booth or the marketplace).
And there's this:
This generation of YA dystopian novels is really our neoliberal society dreaming its last nightmares about the threat from communism, socialism and the planned society. We've simplified it to make it a story we can tell to children and in so doing we've calmed the child inside us....
If you see yourself as a left-leaning progressive parent, you might want to exercise some of that oppressive parental control and limit your kids exposure to the "freedom" expressed in YA dystopian fiction. But let's not worry about it too much, the good thing about laissez-faire capitalism is that things come in waves and pass out of fashion quickly.
Wow. Impressive Guardian eek out. "Mummies: make sure you keep the naughty freedom bits away from the kids lest they get ideas." But the fact is that left fascist consensus causes societies to decay as much of Europe and the US is doing right now. And societal decay ruled by the old for their benefit isn't good for the young. Hence the need to keep 'em ignorant and feed 'em a lot of that old time statist religion in school. And sex. Keep em focused on non procreative sex. Aldous Huxley predicted this tops down sex and soma soaked diversionary existence for our kids (although he missed the virtual reality/on line bit) almost 80 years ago.
Because when the kids figure this scam out, Katie bar the door. Us boomer 'rents are going to be about as popular as a Yankee at a Red Sox weenie roast. Our kids are going to absolutely hate us. And for very good reasons. That's why I write this dreck: so I can have plausible deniability Please don't cut of my Geritol and Metamucil - I sweartogod it wasn't me! I was on your side!
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