Aside from everyone agreeing in general that cannibalism is bad, it's very much a do-your-own-thing kind of world. Auntie Em and the rest of the travelers have to learn to live and let live when they meet several tribes of Oz that appear to exist for no purpose understandable to us plain folks. Perhaps the most culturally impenetrable are the residents of Fuddlecumjig, who are puzzles who scatter themselves whenever anyone comes near so that you have to put them together before you can talk to them or indeed get some lunch. The Fuddles do this, apparently, because it's what they do, and the neither the narrator nor the travelers need much more justification than this in the end. They realize that the Fuddles have provided them, the travelers, with hours of amusement as they have been forced to put together anyone they wanted to talk to. While your anthropology classes might want more in the way of in-depth analysis it's a interesting theory about the way we interpret other people: that it's largely based on our own thoughts and needs rather than anything intrinsic about themselves.

Ultimately Dorothy and her traveling companions head home and encounter the news of the impending invasion, which of course Ozma has discovered in their absence through means of the Magic Picture. (Ozma, a conscientious ruler, spends a good deal of energy keeping apprised of the state of the nation through various magic means that I wish we could make available to Congress, who never seem to know anything about anything really important that's going on.) Ozma makes an important decision as the head of state: she refuses to fight to save her kingdom. Interestingly, almost all of the other citizens of Oz within her circle of friends disagree with her on this and yet support her right to make the decision because they see the moral underpinning to her argument (that it is wrong to destroy any living creature). More fine philosophical distinctions. Discuss among yourselves.

Ozma is also the kind of ruler who can take a good suggestion.When the Scarecrow finds a nonviolent solution to the problem, she implements it immediately, and none of the bad people so determined to enslave and destroy wind up with so much as a scratch on them, and most of them are painlessly rehabilitated. The worst that happens to the Emerald City is that some of the flowers in the palace gardens get trampled.

It's a book about culture clash and the message, in the end, is that while it isn't simple and it isn't easy, even enemy nations can coexist peacefully if there's even one party involved willing to enforce peace by peaceful means. This isn't a popular message today, but it is a point of view I think it is necessary for all of us to remember still does exist. I hope that on a global scale we can put it into play someday even as we ourselves deploy it on a local scale in our towns and suburbs and farms.

Even those of us who aren't as educated as the Shaggy Man (who has been "to Mexico and Boston and several other foreign countries") or Professor Wogglebug (who distributes knowledge in pill form to his students so they'll have more time for sports) can see that the issues raised in the book are still, after eighty-nine years, important and difficult ones. We would do well to discuss them with one another -- in our college dorm rooms, for instance.