It genuinely is a good litmus test, not for politics but for a baseline level of reading comprehension.
Almost the entire plot is a sequence where a seven foot tall fourteen year old walking chad meme hijacks the TV, shouts out "I am the EMPEROR" at the entire world, instantly gets a super hot babe, then literally defies gravity through sheer cool factor until he's stopped by a cartoon villain. It's the impotent reactionary impulse laid bare, stripped of everything but the childish power fantasy at its core.
I find it hard enough to believe that anyone could read through all 1,095 word of the story and manage to take the 'Handicapper General' thing at face value, rather than as a absurdist parody of anticommunist propaganda; but to not pick up on how the title character himself is even more of a caricature, and the thing actually being lampooned, seems unthinkable.
Vonnegut literally wrote it as a parody of anticommunist literature, and they couldn't recognise it.
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It genuinely is a good litmus test, not for politics but for a baseline level of reading comprehension.
Almost the entire plot is a sequence where a seven foot tall fourteen year old walking chad meme hijacks the TV, shouts out "I am the EMPEROR" at the entire world, instantly gets a super hot babe, then literally defies gravity through sheer cool factor until he's stopped by a cartoon villain. It's the impotent reactionary impulse laid bare, stripped of everything but the childish power fantasy at its core.
I find it hard enough to believe that anyone could read through all 1,095 word of the story and manage to take the 'Handicapper General' thing at face value, rather than as a absurdist parody of anticommunist propaganda; but to not pick up on how the title character himself is even more of a caricature, and the thing actually being lampooned, seems unthinkable.