Customer Reviews

The Premar Experiments

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I hate to do this, but I'm going to have to go incognito here, for reasons you'll soon come to understand. It's been implied by earlier reviewers here, but it looks like more working-class grunts than me read "Harrad" and wondered "what about us?" and some of that got back to Robert Rimmer. Me, I've looked at it, as Joni Mitchell put it; "from both sides now"--I read "Harrad" as an undergrad, flunked out, and wound up in the blue-collar sector where his "Premar" protagonists live. Among other couples, Rimmer pairs off Samantha, a black gang-rape victim during her adolescence--with Jules, a gentle-natured Jewish boy--and we're supposed to believe that tenderness and love is all it takes. Errnnngh! Wrong answer. Twenty-five years ago, I was involved with a survivor of a number of dysfunctional relationships, including a marriage. Rape was not involved, but where she didn't get slapped around, she didn't get much respect, either. Her initial reaction to how different I was from my predecessors in her life was rhapsodic, but eventually she came to see it as an exploitable weakness. Experience apparently taught her certain lessons along the lines of Goethe's old saying; "One must the hammer or the anvil be." That's what happens when life teaches you to keep your mental dukes up, guarding your heart the way a boxer does his chin. Needless to say, we didn't last--I'm a working stiff, not a therapist. So, as a Gen-X pop song once put it; "Baby, sometimes love just ain't enough." In the five Rimmer books I've read, he implies that it is. I used to be into that kind of wishful thinking. I don't know whether to be glad that I'm not that much of a fool anymore, or to wish that my younger self, in concert with Bob Rimmer, had been right.

Once again, Robert Rimmer has presented the world with a ridiculous vision of social engineering. This time he's apparently decided that the vision of his _Harrad Experiment_ was elitist, and revised it to include greater "diversity." Elitist it certainly was, but the "Premar" vision is no improvement. Including affirmative action quotas and an outreach to less intellectual individuals does not change the fact that Rimmer's ideals are as fiercely intolerant as ever of the beliefs held by the vast majority of human beings.

Quite simply put, Rimmer is incapable of understanding that most people like traditional family structures and the comforts of their own heritage. Social engineering intended to turn everyone into members of the same amorphous mass, holding the same amoral individualist "values," is fundamentally opposed to diversity. True diversity is about cultures and ways of life, not skin colour or a few cute cosmetic details of dress or taste. "Liberals" like Rimmer (actually closer to Communists or Fascists) are apparently incapable of understanding this, and thus they continue to spout the same tired garbage that they did in the sixties and seventies, the same decades that created most of the social problems America is saddled with today.

While American institutions, most definitely including the universities, are in drastic need of revitalisation and renewal, Rimmer's idiotic proposals are not the answer, as they are simply variants on the same themes which have led to the current nadir. We need more respect for true difference, in the context of tradition, not a fales idolisation of superficial distinctions combined with rejection of true ones. We need greater academic rigour, not a further dumbing down to accomodate everyone with a "C average" in high school (in some American high schools this means the student is not even literate!). We need a strengthening of all relationships, not a promotion of casual promiscuity. While it is indeed possible that the strengthened family of the ideal future West--a West of peoples, not ideologies, of regions, not states, of friendship and honour, not bureaucracy and legalism--may include polyfidelity as an optional structure for married life, Rimmer's notion of the "swinging" lifestyle will never promote anything but a vile and vulgar, shallow and narcissistic, crude and unloving worldview. Love and respect for all may be an ideal, but it is only counterfeited by the shallow lack of special regard for any which is promoted by Rimmer and his ilk.

We've had enough social engineering in the West over the past hundred years or so. It's left us with deracinated masses and effete elites, impoverished cultures, unstable societies, and a host of other problems. Let's leave this garbage behind as we move into the twenty-first century, and instead affirm traditional values of freedom and honour, loyalty, piety, and duty. Rimmer's books belong on the same dustheap as the Communist, Capitalist, and Fascist ideologies that have turned this century into a mindless wreck.