Ursula Le Guin – Stuck in Omelas

Call me a redneck, if you’d like, but any time I read the words “Berkeley, California” in an author’s bio, I reach for the airsickness bag; it’s nearly a Pavlovian response. Sure, I’ve been wrong occasionally, but not very often. I was right again with Le Guin.

I am sick to death of condescending, hand-wringing, alleged intellectuals trying to find new ways to make me feel responsible for the plight of the countless unfortunates that populate this third rock from the sun.

The fictitious trappings of her hair-shirt diatribe are mildly creative, I’ll give her that, but her overall point has been ridden into the ground for centuries. I was decidedly unimpressed and most genuinely unmoved. The hackneyed, weepy contention that “those who have, oppress those who have not, simply by having” or, otherwise stated, “for you to have it, you must necessarily take it away from someone else first” is such intellectually vacant hogwash as to not even be credible in fiction; I was quite unwilling to suspend my disbelief for that tired nonsense.

Granted, the piece was first published in 1973 and it was much more fashionable to spew such pathetic drivel back then, but it had no more real relevance or basis in fact then than it does now. A prime example of wailing, morally-superior self-flagellation inflicted on the reading public; pathos without point, logos sans validity, and self-aggrandizing ethos of the most narcissistic and tedious variety.

Safe to say, I found no value in it.


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