ATDDTA (3): Control issues, Chums, They

[Monte Davis]

> I would say that by the end of the novel, the Chums are essentially 
> Anarchists, that the values expoused on the final pages of AtD are 
> the core values of Anarchy...

"The values espoused" ... Here's where my heart always wants to go with you,
and my head always says "wait a minute."

I agree it's very significant that AtD ends with that portrayal of the Chums
in a blissful, ongoing family setting, on a trajectory to grace. But it's
equally significant that that setting is very clearly Neverland,
cloud-cuckoo-land, the Big Rock Candy Mountain, another Yz-les-Bains that's
not on any map: in other words, explicitly *not* the damned world below, the
one we're in when we close the book.

Ditto for the Traverse family picnic at the end of VL, ditto for the boys'
American dreams at the end of M&D, ditto for the Counterforce that fades out
into static.

So if by "espoused" you mean "values that AtD holds out as offering personal
and familial happiness," I agree. But to the extent you mean "values that
AtD holds out as promising a better world"... I have serious doubts. I
believe AtD and the whole TRP oeuvre are better for their never-resolved
tension between:

These values bring out the best in us as individuals

and

These values are hard -- maybe impossible -- to embody in political action,
to put to work in history