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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2274460" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, ERB comes from a family that abhors racism and its clearly evident in the texts.  It's all well and good to hand wave stories in which he mocks the white martian racists with thier notions of racial supremacy and then makes a black martian show them up in terms of honor, martial prowess, decorum, intellect, and the ability to learn.  You can pretend that he doesn't have something in mind in the real world when he writes that all you want, but it's still sorta staring you there in the face.Frankly, if you believe that ERB is a racist, you probably believe that Rudyard Kipling is a racist and there is no point in having this conversation because we'll have to drag into the conversation Edward Said, 'orientalism', and a bunch of other politically charged notions of what it means to be racist.   Suffice to say that while I think ERB didn't have a racist bone in his body and did not believe in racial superiority in any fashion, he was very much a believer in the superiority of Western and particularly Anglo-sphere culture.   ERB is unabashedly a 'culturist'.  Whether you believe that this is the same thing as racism ,worse, or better is a whole other can of worms, but in the case of the 'Injuns', Arabs, and black africans you are quite right to think he sees them as 'uncouth savages', but this is not at all the same as thinking that they are uncouth savages because they are Arabs, black, or 'Injuns'.   Like Rudyard Kipling, ERB's relationship to non-Anglo cultures is more complex than that.And frankly, that's bull crap.   I FREAKING READ 'PRINCESS OF MARS' FOR THE FIRST TIME WHEN I WAS EIGHT.   I'VE READ IT AND THE REST COUNLESS TIMES SINCE THEN.  THE WORKS ARE MOST CERTAINLY NOT BEING FITTED TO THE THEORY.  THE THEORY IS BEING FITTED TO THE WORKS.   I DID NOT DEVELOPE THIS IDEA AT AGE SEVEN AND THEN TRY TO FORCE ERB'S WORKS TO FIT IT, NOR FOR THAT MATTER DID I FAIL TO NOTICE THE INSTRUCTIVE LECTURING IN THESE WORKS WELL BEFORE I DEVELOPED A THEORY THAT ENCOMPASSED IN GENERAL WHAT THE OBJECTIVES AND METHODS OF A FANTASY STORY WHERE.Really.  I suppose you think that when A is always within the set of B, that it naturally follows that B is always within the set of A.Do you think anything in 'A Clear and Present Danger' is a symbol for anything other than itself?  Do you think Tom Clancy invented things in 'A Clear and Present Danger' in order to serve as symbols for abstract ideas?  What things in 'A Clear and Present Danger' are abstract concepts put into cleaner, simplier, more tangible forms?  Even if he was writing morality tales, what Tom Clancy is doing has exactly the opposite goals of a fantasy and he goes about in exactly the opposite manner a fantasy writer would.   The only romantic element of the story is his reoccuring heroes, and I certainly agree that a romantic hero is in and of itself no proof of a fantasy.Frankly, I don't think you are getting it, and the utility of trying to explain it to you is increasingly in doubt.Are you actually listening?  Or did you just blink when I wrote, "RB's own beliefs are expressed far too clearly in what he wrote - even when they defy the conventional thinking of the day - for this merely to be a message massaged to fit the expectations of his audience."ERB's anti-religious and anti-racist sentiments, disguised by the fantastic setting though they were, probably caused an equal ammount of consternation amongst the moralists of the day.   Just because ERB does not agree with convention morality, doesn't mean he doesn't have one.   If an ten year old boy can parse out ERB's agenda in his story telling, why are you having problems?  If you don't believe the agenda is there, then do as that ten year old boy did later as an adult and read about the things ERB and his father said about the real world outside of the stories.</blockquote>

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