by Doctor Science (who can’t seem to log in the usual way via Blogger, goshdurnit)
The polar vortex many Usans are experiencing reminds me of one of my favorite, formative books, The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read the whole Little House series many times while I was growing up, and read it aloud twice, once for each Sprog, while *they* were growing up. I love the whole series, but The Long Winter was always my favorite.
In recent years, I’ve learned that the Little House books are considered libertarian manifestos, supposedly shaped by LIW’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane to show the Ingalls family as icons of self-reliance. This boggles me, because when you actually read the Little House books carefully — reading them aloud, for instance — you can’t help noticing that Laura’s family was *never* self-reliant. They always depended on store-bought food, especially cornmeal, flour, and salt pork, and they got their land through the government’s Homestead Act. One of their watchwords was “Free and Independent” — but that was an aspiration (or a comforting platitude), not an accurate description of their lives.
The Long Winter, in particular, is about how individual self-reliance isn’t enough. As a friend pointed out to me, it’s essentially a post-apocalyptic story, about how people stay alive after the failure of a critical technology. In this case the technology is the railroad: when the train can’t run, it cuts off the town of DeSmet, Dakota Territory, from its food supply — because they were not self-reliant or independent.
