Reading: Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Robert Lawson, Rabbit Hill

Moving: Not that walk I theorized yesterday.

Viewing: the first minutes of the second hour of a Kate movie I hadn't heard of, "Undercurrents." It looks like it might be pretty good and had Robert Mitchum and someone I recognize but can't name as her husband. From the bit I saw before forcing myself to turn it off, it looked like a cross between "Gaslight" and "Rebecca."

Listening: Dave Matthews Band.

Learning: Is that what this site looks like through IE on a Mac?

27 February 2000: Rabbits Abide

Okay. I've figured out why I don't like Rabbit Hill so much. As a story for kids it's great, but I don't like the subtext.

I must have been skimming a bunch of Objectivists' web sites when I thought everyone in the world but me had read and loved Earth Abides. I was also subscribed to rec.arts.books, and who wasn't talking about Stephen King was talking about George Stewart. An appropriate name, I'm sure he thought, because the point of Earth Abides is that the planet suffers after the human population is reduced by 99% or so.

(Not "decimated." Ninety-nine percent is more than 10% and people should talk with some understanding of math.)

In Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland rightly makes the point that if suddenly everyone but say these few people in Seattle disappeared, leaving factories running and whatnot, yes, the climate would go haywire. In Earth Abides (and in The Stand), since everyone gets sick and dies, mostly people've had time to turn off switches.

Stewart takes us through the next century as western civilization's knowledge (and civilization) pass from living memory and thence from societal memory. After enough time has passed that the main character (the bastion of learning and culture) is too frail to make the trip, someone else travels across the continent (no longer country) from (what used to be) Marin County to the east coast. This jaunt serves no narrative purpose that I remember but serves only the author's desire to demonstrate how the land suffers without human stewardship.

The main character advises the young'un to travel by roads. Tellingly, he has to show the young'un what digits look like so he can follow maps, though any sensible person would have said "walk toward the sun in the morning and away from it in the afternoon because you know it's been 60 years and the roads are going to be shot to hell and maps useless."

I figure Objectivists like Earth Abides because it shows what a fantastic lot of good humans do for the planet. I can never think it of without remembering a flyer I saw for an Objectivist Society lecture at UConn about how humans have actually improved the environment, as the term is properly understood. Air-conditioning has made our environment--that capitalist humans live inside of--more pleasant. Roads facilitate transportation and it's right that hills be blasted away for them since flatness is efficient. Stuff like that.

So anyway. Yesterday I looked through the Decker branch's shelves for The Goats and The Alfred Summer. I didn't find much that I wanted, because video- and audiotapes and series like SVH and Animorphs occupy a lot of shelf-feet, but I found Rabbit Hill, which was on the SLJ list and which I didn't know too well.

On a hill in pastoral western Connecticut live the usual rabbits and deer and skunks and chipmunks and woodchucks, and they live there despite the past few years having been lean, food-wise. The last Folks on the hill didn't keep a garden, you see. So when a rumor goes round the hill that new Folks are moving in, everyone is curious and anxious: will they garden? will they have dogs? have boys? hunt? trap moles? poison skunks? And then the new Folks move in and they're perfect: no children, no dogs, one old cat who doesn't hunt, and they double the size of the garden. They do good things like care for Little Georgie Rabbit when he's struck by a car and not rebuilding the old stone wall because of a woodchuck (which the lower class handyman calls a groundhog, can you feel the class warfare building up?) who shouldn't be disturbed.

So. The Folks plant their garden and it's so big that when the animals get together on Dividing Night, everyone anticipates so much plenty that no one quarrels. By long-standing agreement, no animal touches the garden until Midsummer's Eve, six weeks off. And, on that auspicious night, the Folks have put out the garden's first offerings of the season and set up a statue who's a birdbath and a fountain too, with this caption: "There is enough for all."

Willie Fieldmouse "sees" for blind Mole:

Willie's voice was hushed and breathless. "Oh, Mole," he said. "Oh, Mole, it's so beautiful. It's him, Mole, it's him--the Good Saint!"
"Him--of Assisi?" asked the Mole.
"Yes, Mole, our Saint. The good St. Francis of Assisi--him that's loved us and protected us Little Animals time out of mind."

All of this implies that animals were helpless before St. Francis--that their lives were nasty brutish and short until about 1200 years ago--and that the little furries depend on humans.

So it's okay to go to feed wild animals Chee-tos or whatever you've brought into a National Park with you. Okay, I'm extrapolating.

There's also a strong message that reading is good. The handyman and the mason discuss that the quantity of books the new Folks have means they're weird, and the animals don't know what to make of that. The Folks plan their garden out of books and decide just to roll their lawn to discourage moles instead of trapping them. So read, read, read, little Johnny and Janie and you'll say "woodchuck" (derived from an Indian word) instead of "groundhog" (of low-class Saxon origin), and know not to trap or poison, and good things like that. Plus you'll make better stewards of the Earth.

I like "There is enough for all," too, because there is, if everyone would share. The planet has its own devices for ensuring that remains true. Hmm, maybe Rabbit Hill isn't like Earth Abides, since that one, final, umbrella concept is--gasp!--socialist.

Can I like one subtext but not another?