Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the book written sometime in the 1970s and when King was quite young? From what I gather, anti-government/anti-military feeling was generally still running high at that time from the Vietnam War, especially among young people, so it would hardly be surprising if King was influenced by that at the time, even subconsciously. I heard a commentary of King talking about The Stand the other day and he said that the premise came from 4 main influences: the Patty Hearst case (and the idea of people becoming "brainwashed" by their captors), a woman talking about how a plague shall fall once in a generation, a case of some government/military experiment going wrong in Utah and killing a bunch of sheep with apparently the only thing saving Salt Lake City from being wiped out being the direction the wind happened to be blowing at the time, and his own innate fear of not only getting sick but getting sick and then (in his words) "falling into the hands of people who don't necessarily care about making you better" - basically the situation Stu and his friends are in at the start of the book/miniseries. Those last two are probably the biggest influences of being critical towards the US government and its military and really, it's not awfully difficult to see why that is. In any case, it seems King may have mellowed by the time he wrote the miniseries since the military is portrayed a little more sympathetically there, where it seems they're acting out of a genuine desire to contain the plague and the panic rather than purely attempting to cover up what's happened.
Plus, it's sort of worth considering that in these types of stories, whoever is ostensibly in charge is more often than not portrayed negatively. After all, things have to get wildly out of control somehow and a bad situation is undoubtedly exacerbated in a dramatically pleasing way when the people in charge make all the wrong decisions.
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Gary O. (999)
5 years ago
Very valid points, that have been raised more than a few times before, both here and on the IMDb message boards. King is very open about the influence of the Vietnam War and the political upheaval of the early 1970's on his writing.
I think your post supports the idea in the OP and by yours truly, that, after Flagg, the US government was the main villain in the book.
Like I said earlier, King seemed to have seen the US government as the main source of evil in the world.
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momur (107)
5 years ago
See, the thing I'd take issue with is placing the mantle of "villain" on the US government at all. They disappear completely from the picture, relatively speaking, and the "good group" very quickly adopt a hierarchical system that's basically a more primitive version of the governmental structure that was in place before, with the various committees. Really, the only purpose the government has in the story (from a dramatic standpoint) is to (1) create the initial crisis, which was purely unintentional on their part, and (2) to push the escalation of the initial crisis to breaking point - yes, their reasoning and methods of acting are hardly morally upright, but I see them more as being "unwitting instigators" more than out-and-out villains, the same way I wouldn't necessarily deem Harold a villain despite clearly taking some morally reprehensible actions. Both Harold and the US government/military are portrayed negatively but I see it as being more a case of King judging individuals on how they act when given a choice between the hard route of bettering oneself or the easier route of acting the same you always have, even if those actions are negative. To put it simply, they're merely severely flawed rather than full-on villainous, especially when compared with Flagg.
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Gary O. (999)
5 years ago
In this story, I can't see the government as anything but a villain because of their actions after Campion got to Arnette. Their primary goal was not to contain the virus, it was to cover up the government's role in the creation of the epidemic in the first place.
I'll grant that their role ended when the epidemic stopped, but they were far more than 'unwitting instigators' that you seem to think, Just because they had a lesser role to play than Flagg does not lessen that they were villains as much as Flagg.
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