Rustic vs Rusty

[public domain]

JFK vs. Ross Barnett  & Hamilton vs. Jefferson


"She had to find out for herself." 
                  --Glinda, The Wizard Of Oz


100 Years of Oz
  Utopian Tension in L. Frank Baum's Oz
  by Andrew Karp
  Utopian Studies, Spring 1998 


Abstract: In the Oz books written by L. Frank Baum the
author explores political and philosophical
concerns debated since the founding of the United
States: the conflict between personal rights and
freedoms and the good of the community. Baum creates
Oz, a idyllic community that favors cultural
pluralism. Cooperation extends to human beings,
minorities, inanimate, mechanical beings and flora
and fauna.

In the Oz works, Baum continually grapples with two
political issues debated in the United States
since its inception: 1) the conflict over whether to
give primacy to "individual rights and freedom" or
highest priority to "community life and the good of
collectivities" (Taylor 1985, 182); and 2) the
problem of how to create a unified community that
still recognizes the "fundamentally multiracial and
multi-ethnic nature of the United States" (Gordon and
Newfield 77). In developing the community of
Oz, Baum seems to be trying to do the impossible: to
create a world that combines the pastoral and
artistic features of William Morris's utopia with the
technological and urban advantages of Edward
Bellamy's; to fashion a utopia that is simultaneously
egalitarian and authoritarian; and to establish a
society that values and protects individual rights,
interests, and freedoms, as well as cultural
multiplicity, at the same time as it promotes the
value of a unified state to which individuals owe
allegiance, a state created "E Pluribus Unum."



http://www.halcyon.com/piglet/books8-Karp.htm












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