CBR12Bingo – Red
So this is my second Tom Clancy book, and like the other one, Patriot Games, it’s a solid spy novel with an absolutely simplistic childish morality affixed to it nonsensically. There’s a moment in an Orson Scott Card novel where a group of white middle class people discuss how the subtleties of Western cooking, which developed because of sensitive white palates, has a kind of Enlightenment superiority (and they say all this with a kind of affected sympathy) over, in this case, African palates, which require heavier spice and strong flavors. So that’s what this Tom Clancy novel basically does. It over-simplifies the cultures of both the US and the Soviet Union without once really understanding that that two superpowers, competing for world domination can have internal consistency, things each do well, and each do monstrously, and refuses to engage with the idea that America is pro-America as a form of self-preservation, not simply as a destiny, morally fulfilled.
It’s such an indictment over Conservative thinking that they would want such simplified American garbage spoonfed to them with zero complexity, and constant reassurance that not only are the morally correct in all their reactive assumptions about the world, but they are also big strong men who protect the weak. To be clear, the Soviet Union seems to be me to have been a truly horrifying and terrible place to live, but that doesn’t mean that a) humanity didn’t happen there, and that b) the US has tons of its own atrocities to account for. Anti-Soviet Russian literature is often amazing because it’s got an accidental irony sometimes, or is purposely targeting absurdity, but anti-Soviet American fiction is at best, embarrassing.
(Photo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19691.The_Hunt_for_Red_October)
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