The fate of "The Book".

The book was not working. Begun as a therapy exercise in 1986, following the murder of my father, it went through a number of re-writes. An editor with a national publication company told me that parts soared beyond the dreaded blue pen, and one more rewrite ought to get it.

A technological glitch [push of the wrong button; pilot error] ate a quantity of manuscript on the final rewrite. Computers were not user-friendly in the early 1990s. I did the Bud Cort “Harold & Maude” thing: threw my arms over my head, sniveled, and quit writing for 20 years.

I dusted off the hard copy of the manuscript recently, and tried to make a new start on the final re-write. Trying to work some logic into the plot line, I suddenly had a head-snapping epiphany: the whole novel is irrelevant. It was an over-ambitious attempt to reconcile the end of the Vietnam war with some Iran/Contra hijinks, and tell a personal story to boot. I should maybe have written faster. Iran/Contra is lost to history. Vietnam is a collective bad memory. It never ceases to astound me that young people today have only a vague idea of what “Watergate” really was. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are both gone; to paraphrase the late journalist Lewis Grizzard, all great men are dead, and I don’t feel too good myself.

I teased some of my constant readers with e-mail excerpts of the rewrite. Sorry about that; it just doesn’t look to be a happening thing. In a world where chimpanzees are nominated for “personhood”, a novel about goings-on in the 1980s is so irrelevant as to be laughable. Traitors control Congress today, and the national will to win the war against terrorism is reduced to holding our breath and awaiting the next attack. I just can’t find the heart to tell a fanciful story of twenty- to thirty-year old events. No one remembers the historical context; the dusty remains of history are relegated to the ash heap of ignorance, apathy, and indifference: “I don’t know, I don’t care, and it doesn’t matter anyhow.”