Starship Troopers and the Current State of America

Although I hated Paul Verhoeven's adaptation of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers when it first came out, I came to appreciate his satirical take on the novel. It's held up well over the years and Verhoeven's militaristic, fascist, and war mongering society seems to be closer to reality than Heinlein's more nuanced vision. 

The New Yorker looks at the movie and what it says about our modern times. 

Where “RoboCop” and “Total Recall” exist in grimy, crowded, dangerous futures that look and feel like degraded versions of the already degrading present, Verhoeven’s bizarre masterwork “Starship Troopers,” from 1997, is set in the more distant days of the twenty-third century—and, it quickly emerges, long after the end of history. “This year, we explored the failure of democracy, how the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos,” Rasczak, a history teacher (played by the Verhoeven favorite Michael Ironside), barks at his high-school students in an early scene. “We talked about the veterans and how they took control, and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since.” Rasczak himself is a disfigured war veteran, as are all of his fellow-teachers, and their job is to steer their students toward enlisting in a galaxy-wide war against a species of giant, lethal bug. In this universe, humankind is divided into “civilians” and “citizens”; only citizens have the right to vote, and citizenship can be won only through “federal service” in the military. “Something given has no value,” Rasczak explains. “When you vote, you are exercising political authority. You are using force. And force, my friends, is violence—the supreme authority from which all other authorities derive.” Daily life in the Federation may be cleaner and brighter than in any of Verhoeven’s other futures, but every ambiguity has been displaced by the certitudes, coercions, and doublespeak of endless, totalizing conflict.