AtDDtA(15): He Is Not What He Says He Is

[Mark Kohut]

Very Yes to the smaller routine, smaller worldview, so to speak.
   
  Robin (and you) must be right...The Chums are All good....so
  The Trespassers are not good...some kind of evil......only the 
  Powerful can survive and get time machines?...
   
  I have just read the section in GR where They "might live forever"...
  remember?....in the 550s of the Miller paperback version, the section with
  Pirate and Katje......
   
  The Trespassers are another version of Them? They, etc.?
   
  

mikebailey at speakeasy.net wrote:
  Pyschotronic ramblings on the vulnerability 
of the Chums organization
to the Trespassers and the segue from
FICOTT to band camp:

If, in addition to its primary connotation
as a congeries of time-theorizing intellectuals,
in another, shadowy, sense, the FICOTT brings to mind
the 1st International and the attempted development
of a consensus toward a different (labor-centric)
theory of history, which was hijacked by Marx's 
manipulation of parliamentary
procedure and developed into a recipe for
totalitarianism - then the Trespassers are
attracted from the future in the same sort
of time-travel-y way as the scientists who
die but, unfazed, appear at each year's
convocation. The Trespassers, perhaps, gravitate back
toward the node of decision from the future 
that resulted from the theories developed there...

Strictly speaking, some pointers in the text
can be read to suggest that the 
Trespassers may represent (to put it
baldly) Communists, who wish to enlist
the Chums in co-operation against the
capitalistic system which they have seen
destroying the world.
Someone who habitually Trespassed would
perhaps be someone who didn't believe
in private property...

However, there are other suggestions available,
or at least, divergences:

1) the Communist rhetoric I'm (modestly) familiar
with plays heavily on self-sacrifice, justice, 
and (let's face it) revenge,
whereas the Trespassers appeal to the selfish
desire of the boys to live forever

2) one of the harshest assessments of capitalism
in the book appears in Fleetwood's conversation
at the Explorers' Club, but is as applicable
to the (supposedly temporary) Leviathan State 
envisioned by Marx as to capitalistic Corporations:
the supra-human entity impressing individuals 
like sled-dogs, and consuming them in its drive 
toward a goal that has nothing to do with 
their organismic needs...

3) Mister Ace almost sounds like "Master Race" -
maybe they are Nazis?

4) Darby, the budding anarcho-syndicalist,
doesn't jump at the chance to join in, but
takes a back seat in the discussion, deferring
(I'm guessing) to Miles's ESP. Not to mention
the fact that Darby's class sympathies may
already have been diluted by his exposure
to the Law and his growing mastery of the 
vagaries thereof...

Anyroad, if, as mentioned in the test, the Chums
do not - unlike some other satrapies in the 
Chums network - accept the Trespassers' offer, still, 
they have severed some of the ties:
the whole Candlebrow excursion is on their
own initiative - who knows what weird
missives are going unreceived, what
vital missions are being ignored?

jolted by the conflicting worldview,
it's almost as if they retreat into
a smaller and safer routine...





       
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