En 1957, Robert A. Heinlein, un écrivain libertarien, a imaginé un gouvernement américain qui serait stupide au point de payer les gens pour envoyer leurs voitures à la casse… La science-fiction d'Heinlein est devenue réalité avec Barack Obama:
The job I found was crushing new ground limousines so that they could be shipped back to Pittsburgh as scrap. Cadillacs, Chryslers, Eisenhowers, Lincolns – all sort of great big, new powerful turbobuggies without a kilometer on their clocks. Drive'em between the jaws, then crunch! smash! crash! – scrap iron for blast furnaces.
It hurt me at first since I was riding the ways to work and didn't own so much as a Grav-Jumper. I expressed my opinion of it almost lost my job….until the shift boss remembered I was a Sleeper and really didn't understand.
"It's a simple matter of economics, son. These are surplus cars the government has accepted as security against price-support loans. They're two years old now and then can never be sold….so the government junks them and sells them back to the steel industry.
You can't run a blast furnace just on ore; you have to scrap iron as well. You ought to know that even if you are a Sleeper. Matter of fact with high-grade ore so scarce, there’s more and more demand for scrap. The steel industry needs these cars."
"But why build them in the first place if they can't be sold? It seems wasteful."
"It just seems wasteful. You want to throw people out of work? You want to run down their standard of living?"
"Well why not ship them abroad? It seems to me they could get more for them on the open market abroad then they are worth as scrap."
"What! and ruin the export market? Besides, if we started dumping cars abroad everybody we'd get everyone sore at us – Japan, France, Germany, Great Asia, everybody. What are you aiming to do? Start a war? »
Heinlein, un libertarien? Ça se discute toujours… sa vision de la société est loin d’être libertarienne dans Starship Trooper (le livre, pas le film!)
Ce n’est pourtant pas d’hier que des gens revendent leur minoune à des ferrailleurs… mais c’est vrai que c’est la première fois que le gouvernement lui-même met en place des incitatifs pour le faire!
C’est plus compliqué que ça.
As the 1950s ended, Heinlein wrote a final boys’ novel, Starship Troopers. Scribner’s rejected it, finding it inappropriate for its intended youth market. It tells the story of a young man who finds his place in the world by joining the Mobile Infantry, going through the travails of training, and eventually fighting a war against sinister, implacable alien bugs whose ant-like lack of individuality was an unmistakable metaphor for communism.
Troopers was published in 1959, just before Barry Goldwater made his first big national splash with his 1960 manifesto Conscience of a Conservative. Goldwater’s appeal had two things in common with Heinlein’s: an individualist sense that Americans were being overmanaged and overpampered by an out-of-control federal government, and a belief that those rotten commies needed to get it, good and hard.
Heinlein was influenced by the same Cold War realities that inspired Goldwater. Even in the 1930s, during his brief involvement with Upton Sinclair’s left-wing End Poverty in California movement, Heinlein had always been a staunch individualist (and somewhat of an elitist). His novels were peopled by super-competent men and women struggling against repressive governments and hidebound bureaucracies, not to mention more literal threats to their individuality, such as brain-controlling slugs from Saturn’s moon Titan (in his 1951 Red Scare metaphor The Puppet Masters).
The struggle part was key to Heinlein’s thought. In the 1950s, he viewed Soviet communism as a threat to individualism that needed to be combated by nearly any means necessary. (A draft, which he regarded as slavery under any circumstances, was not one of them.) One of his central ideas, repeated over and over again, was that man is the most dangerous beast in the universe. Thus, he saw no probable peaceful end to the Cold War. Preparing for a nuclear war he saw as bordering on inevitable was, he believed, an American’s prime duty. In 1958 he bought newspaper ads calling for the formation of « Patrick Henry Leagues » to push this idea. (Among other things, the ads stated that « higher taxes » were a price worth paying to beat the Soviets.)
The novel that arose from this sense of mission, Starship Troopers, strikes many readers as overly militaristic, bordering on fascist. The S.F. writer and Nation critic Thomas Disch wrote that the book caused « so many of [Heinlein’s] critics » to pin a « totalitarian » label on him. (Disch kindly said that « authoritarian » is more apt.) Troopers posited that a ruthless military was an inescapable aspect of human civilization, and it presented approvingly a society in which only veterans of public service could vote.
Heinlein’s detractors ignored the fact that military service made up only a small portion of that public service. The novel kept its occasional paeans to authority and discipline strictly within the military context, not meant to apply to all human relations. It also explained that active military men were not permitted to hold public office and were in fact held in low regard by the rest of the culture.
The choice to enter the service and earn the franchise was both voluntary and rare. The society in Troopers was, despite such a restricted democracy, one where « personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits. » Still, Heinlein’s insistence on the importance and glory of the military, and of often brutal discipline within that context, left him, as Disch wrote, « able to amaze and appall the liberal imagination like almost no other SF writer. »
Read the whole thing: http://www.reason.com/news/show/120766.html
Surtout qu’ici ce sont des véhicule parfaitement fonctionnelle qu’on envoie aux ferailleurs.