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Alon Preiss: Immortality? Feh!

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[This article first appeared in 2018.]

I read the other day about a bunch of rich bastards who want to live forever. Imagine it: we poor slobs in the 99% die and rot, get eaten by worms and all that, while Peter Thiel and his ilk achieve immortality, and just keep golfing and tweeting.

I guess that there is something disheartening about this potential new class divide. So if it truly came about, there would pretty quickly be an effort to fix the problem, to make the technology universal. Imagine the rage that would burn if the poor and middle class watched their loved ones die, while the rich lived on and on.

But the solution isn’t for all of us to live forever. It’s for those rich bastards to die too.

Aging isn’t necessarily a given. There is no reason why our new cells should be any worse than our old cells. Human beings are perfectly capable of reproducing, and our offspring do not come out wrinkled and decrepit. Aging is the result of a mutation; but since it kicks in late in life, after we’ve already reproduced, evolution didn’t adjust for it.

In Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt imagined a family that had discovered the fountain of youth. They not only stopped aging, but they were suddenly immune to injury.

This is not how it would really work. If the aging process were reversed, that would not be a recipe for immortality. We would still fall off cliffs and die. 1.3 million people per year die in car accidents. A few million others die in other ways. Eventually, it would happen to Peter Thiel. He wouldn’t live forever.

But it is true that if the aging mutation were reversed, then when someone falls off the cliff, he will fall off the cliff with a full head of hair and a fully functioning penis. And the odds are that he would live a much longer time with that full head of hair and fully functioning penis before falling off the cliff.

It sounds as though that might be worth it.

Still, here is the argument against it.

We Jews (or anyway, my brethren who practice) repent every year on Yom Kippur by reciting a list of sins and beating our chests in atonement; but every year, the list of sins is the same. You don’t see the rabbis scratching any sins off the Yom Kippur list. We as individuals are simply not getting better.

The most we can each really hope for is that we do not get much worse.

Even that is unlikely.

In my experience, human beings do not age like fine wine. They age like a runny dog turd on a Manhattan sidewalk in August.

How many times have you really said about an eighty-year old, You know, that guy used to be a real jackass when he was seventy. But now that he is eighty he is terrific. Or this: You know, that eighty-year old guy is a real jackass. I wish he could have more time to really improve.

So here are the two reasons to be skeptical of immortality: 1) you would be stuck with your rotten self; and 2) you would be stuck with all the other rotten bastards on the planet.

The same TV celebrities would be on the air for centuries. Jason Alexander would keep coming up with new sitcoms, still hoping for a comeback.

You would celebrate Thanksgiving every year with that same drunken uncle who hates black people and loves Trump. And every year, he would still love Trump and hate black people, because neither he nor Trump would be going away any time soon, and neither would you, maybe for a few hundred years.

Every day, you would wake and look at the web to see what sort of crazy thing Trump had tweeted that day. Why do you think you’ll ever be able to stop? With indefinite life, it would go on and on and on.

You’d have the same shitty job for centuries, with the same shitty boss. No, you wouldn’t change jobs every five years or so, the way you can today in our mortal world, because you would pretty quickly run out of companies to work for.

Every day, you would come in to work, hang around the coffee machine, drink the same coffee, talk to the same idiots about the crazy thing that Trump tweeted that day, and you would nurse the same grudges against the same idiots that you’d had grudges against a hundred years ago.

Your work colleagues and friends would not suddenly come up with new jokes to tell, or have new and more-interesting stories. If you think hearing the same jokes and stories over and over again is tedious now, imagine another two centuries of them. And don’t pretend you’d find new friends. I mean, pretty quickly you’d know everyone on the Upper West Side. You know that guy with the long beard and the obscenely tiny little shorts, with the spindly legs? Not only would you still pass him on the street every day on the way to the subway to commute to your awful job, and every Sunday on the way to pick up your bagel, but after another couple of centuries of life, you’d actually eventually know him, and really well. Do you think he has anything interesting to say?

Life would also stop improving. Every one of us has one great idea, if we’re lucky, and most of us don’t even have one. Do you think that everyone would come up with lots of great ideas if we suddenly had a few more centuries to work on it? Do you think the reason your 90-year-old uncle Saul has not had a great idea yet is because he hasn’t had enough time? The world would simply get stuck in a rut; the jerk who has one great idea (Zuckerberg, for example) would live off his one great idea for centuries, and the rest of us would drink a lot, the way we do now, but with no end in sight. We’d pretty much be stuck with Hello Kitty and Facebook for another thousand years.

I promise you that you would not become more interesting or cultured. Do you think that if you had another two hundred years to live, you would finally read Moby Dick? Would you learn about string theory?

It also seems to me that this development – a true anti-aging breakthrough – would discourage even the mildest risk-taking. Today you might hop on a surfboard, ski down a mountain or even ride in an airplane with a cavalier, “Well, no one lives forever!” Today, if you drowned in the sea, hit a tree on your skis, or went down with your plane, you’d be missing out on a few years or decades of life. But post-breakthrough, you’d be losing eternity. Think how conservatively we might  view something like crossing the street. In yet another way, Life would become more dull.

But this is not really an argument for being grateful for the way things are, or to look forward to our Heavenly reward. I have always been pretty resentful about this whole “death” business, and I am pretty sure that this is all there is, this ridiculous existence. Evolution has made human beings immensely flawed and ridiculous creatures; the indignities of aging, and the inevitable “bad death” that results, is the final bad joke.

But I guess I am saying that it could be worse.

Which hadn’t really ever occurred to me before.

Alon Preiss is the author of A Flash of Blue Sky (2015) and In Love With Alice (2017), which are both available from Chickadee Prince Books.

Margot final Illustration

Margot From Cleveland Nineteen Years Ago Last Month: New Fiction from Alon Preiss

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The ballroom of the Ramada Inn was not an ideal place to hold a rock concert in 1985. During the British Invasion, when Eddie Holaster was at the top of the charts, he filled huge arenas, but now, long forgotten, he opened for Herman’s Hermits at tiny nostalgia-fests around the United States.

Margot’s seat was all the way on the right side of the room, and a post blocked her view. It was a nice room, but it was meant for Bar Mitzvah and wedding receptions held by the well-to-do. The small stage wasn’t suited for rock ‘n’ roll theatrics, and the management had set up uncomfortable plastic chairs for the audience. Chandeliers provided the light. Margot wanted to leave.

Men in faux tuxedos sold glasses of champagne in the back of the room, and a buffet consisted of reheated food in silver serving dishes, all neatly arranged on a white tablecloth. Margot bought a glass of champagne and returned to her seat. She gulped it down too fast, eager for at least a small attack of intoxication. It worked; her mind numbed slightly.

Seated around her were fat middle-aged men in faded Turtles t-shirts, and sagging women who looked as though they still dreamed of Jan and Dean every night. Margot was not one of them.

A DJ from some local station introduced Eddie, and most of the audience slowly made their way to their seats. Eddie dashed onto the stage, and there was scattered applause, vague recognition. It had been a long twenty years.

The band had changed since the sixties. The guitars were heavier, and synthesizers had been added, but the innocuous nature of the music was the same. Eddie bounded about the stage, sang like a teenager of big dates, holding hands and dances. Most people paid little attention.

But Margot stared intently. Eddie had changed little; he was still thin, still had all of his blond hair, and his handsome, innocently mischievous face was youthful. He had an earring in his left ear, and his clothing was genuine Elvis Costello, but she couldn’t blame him for his half-hearted attempt to pass himself off as something Today, something 1985, not a has-been’s has-been.

At one point in the show he took a huge risk. It had been a sure thing in the sixties; he would jump off the stage and run through the aisle, briefly stir up chaos when he touched young, love-sick girls on the hand. But today, they ignored him. No one wanted to touch him anymore.

And later he left the stage but, before the lethargic applause could die down, he ran back for an encore. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I was going to come back anyway.” Anyway? Margot wondered. Even if no one had applauded?

After about half an hour he had performed his few hits, plus a number of Beatles’ songs, and his set was over. Most of the audience got up from their chairs and shoved their way to the back of the ballroom for more champagne and food.

Margot wandered backstage, and eventually to Eddie’s dressing room, where a uniformed security guard stood watch. “Can I help you?” he asked, but the tone of his voice strongly implied that he had no desire to help.

“Tell Eddie it’s Margot,” she said. “Margot from Cleveland, nineteen years ago last month. Tell him for me, please.”

“You wait here,” the guard said, and went inside Eddie’s dressing room. He returned shortly and told her to go on in.

Margot walked into the dressing room. Eddie slumped in a chair, smoking a cigarette. He beamed. “Margot!” he called out, too charmingly, too Englishy. “Margot from Cleveland, nineteen years ago last month. Come in!”

Margot shut the door. “I wasn’t sure you’d remember me,” she said.

“How could I forget?” he said. “Sit down, sit down. You look great; still very young.”

“I’m only thirty-four,” Margot said.

Eddie blinked. “That would have made you —”

“Fifteen” she said. “You knew that.”

“Yeah,” he said soberly. “I’m sure I did.” He brightened. “But there’s been so much time in between. We must talk. Would you like to go out for a drink? There’s a bar right across the street. Or did you want to stick around to see the stars of the show?”

She shook her head. “I’m not interested in the Hermits,” she said. “Let’s go.”

He smiled warmly and stood. “Wise choice,” he said. “Did you know that Herman isn’t with them anymore? They still call themselves ‘Herman’s Hermits,’ but they haven’t even got Herman. He’s off starring in ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ and making flop solo albums. And the only reason those wankers top billing is because of Herman.”

“I was never even interested in Herman,” Margot said.

Eddie laughed in mild disbelief and slung an arm around her. They left.

.

It was a warm night, and the stars were out. Margot looked up at his face, illuminated by the moonlight, and she felt the chill his album covers now failed to give her.

And she knew she looked good; she had kept herself beautiful and slim, and really, she had done it for him, for this night. Some women let themselves deteriorate once they were married, but she had kept hoping, thinking of Eddie, even when years went by without any news of him at all. She imagined that he and the Troggs, Davey Jones, Donovan and Billy J. Kramer were all in the same boat, but someday Eddie alone would jump overboard and swim for shore. She had such faith in him.

“The new band and I,” he said, and he took a sip of beer. “We’ve just finished up a new album. We’ve got no company yet to distribute it, but I know there are some hits in there somewhere. It’s just a matter of time, Love, before my little old face is grinning at you again from the pages of Sixteen Magazine.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I really hope so. I’ve missed you.”

“Didn’t you think,” Eddie went on, “that we were tight up there? Didn’t you think that we were just as professional as ever?”

She paused, stared thoughtfully at her drink. After a few moments fled by, he demanded, impatiently, “Well?”

“You know,” she said, “I never liked your music. It was you I liked.”

He said nothing. He gulped down the rest of his beer and lit up a cigarette.

“I want to be with you on your return trip to the top, Eddie,” she said. “Or even on your way back down. It doesn’t matter. Do you remember what you said to me in Cleveland when I left to go home?”

“No,” he said irritably. “How the hell do you expect me to remember what I said to you in Cleveland twenty years ago?”

“Eddie!” she exclaimed. “Aren’t you listening to me? I believe in you entirely. And ever since what you said to me when I went to go home … well, I’ve waited to see you again. I took a husband, of course, just in case I never ran into you again — ”

He grinned ironically. “You really took being a groupie seriously, didn’t you?”

“No, it was more. After what you said to me in Cleveland — ”

He stood up. “Love me, love my music,” he said. “All I care about is the music thing, don’t you understand? I made a mint when I was on the top, don’t you see? I don’t need to play little shit engagements like this one. I have the money. But I love the audiences a hell of a lot more than they love me.” He grabbed her hand. “Come on,” he said. “You think my music sucks? I’ll give you a sneak preview of the new Eddie Holaster LP.”

.

Back in the dressing room, Eddie stuck a cassette tape into his stereo. Margot sat and listened obediently. Eddie had done his homework, and his music was once again the sum of his influences; now, however, the Beatles were gone, and there were pale imitations of the Clash, Michael Jackson, David Bowie. She thought it was terrible. But it might catch on.

“Well?” he said smugly, forty-five minutes later.

“I can imagine that getting played,” she said. “But I don’t like it.”

“What the hell can I do to please you?” he muttered, and he sank back into his chair. “Why do I even matter to you?”

“I saw you in Cleveland,” she said, “as a favor to a friend of mine. I didn’t even have any of your records. I didn’t love your music. But I loved you. You treated me nicely. I bought all your albums after that evening so I could hear your voice and look at your face. But I never liked your songs. I’m sorry.”

He sighed and shook his head. “It’s all right, I suppose,” he said. “Of course, back in Cleveland, Margot, I thought….”

He gestured absently, he strained for the right thing to say. He gave up, and he stared at the floor.

“What did you think?” she asked. “Tell me what you were thinking about me. I want to know.”

Now he looked defeated and old.

“I don’t know what I was thinking. I can’t possibly say.” He looked up at her, stared at her face now, trying to remember.

“Why did you wait so long?” he asked.

She laughed, embarrassed.

“For a few years, I couldn’t get in to see you,” she said. “You were too famous. The crowds were too big. The girls were too beautiful. Then you were gone. Nursing your wounds, probably. I figured, closed off to the world. Probably bitter, drunk. Not reachable. I needed to wait. For years, as it turned out. Now you are….”

“Attainable?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I suppose.”

“I suppose so, too,” he agreed.

“Do you even remember me at all?” she asked.

He smiled gently. “Probably some of my memories are of you,” he replied. “I’m not sure. I know I’ll remember you now. You’re a very unusual groupie. You weren’t in love with the fame, or the music, but with me.”

“So?”

“So,” he said. He played around with the idea. “You weren’t in love with the fame, or the music,” he said again. “You were just in love with me.”

For a moment, he was quiet. On stage, the Hermits sang “Henry the Eighth.” A man and a woman laughed.

Eddie thought, and Margot waited.  

“You love me,” he said. “You really love me.”

Margot nodded.

“So?” she asked again.

“So,” Eddie said, with a tight smile. “That’s not enough.”

^^^

Alon Preiss writes fiction set in the 1980s. He is the author of In Love With Alice (2017). Available NOW from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or from ANY BOOKSTORE IN ANY TOWN OR CITY IN AMERICA

woman protesting for women s rights

Alon Preiss: The End of Roe isn’t the End of the World

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If Roe v. Wade is overturned, it might not be the disaster that many of my fellow Lefties fear.

One of the reasons why so many Democratic politicians are scared of overturning Roe v. Wade is that they believe it would make abortion illegal in most parts of the country and lead to a terrifying descent into an Inquisition-style culture war where Republicans punish Democrats for their beliefs and force women to give birth against their will.

This seems hard to deny – after all, if we look at places where abortion is mostly banned, those countries do indeed have highly conservative governments seeking to restrict rights and persecuting anyone who disagrees with them politically. So such fears may seem credible when applied to a hypothetical future without Roe.

But post-Roe, our horrible right-wing Trumpist politicians will actually need to follow through on their promises, and their promises will be to ban abortion, not just at a state level, but in Congress. A newly elected President Trump, with an emboldened MAGA Senate and House, would have run on a promise to decimate a woman’s right to choose. Last time, Trump’s anti-choice bona fides didn’t matter so much, because he was restrained by Roe; this time around, voters will take notice.

And if he does try to make good on his promises, he will face significant opposition from the American people – who, despite what the Right believes, are actually mostly pro-choice. A Gallup poll from May 2018 found that 60% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases; only 37% think it should be illegal.

This is not to say that there would be no conservative backlash – there would certainly be some states where abortion would remain legal and others where it would be banned. But the idea that overturning Roe would trigger a wave of right-wing oppression is based on a false understanding of both our current politics and our history. And it may keep the Left in power.

What about precedent, you ask? OK, the Right believes Roe was wrongly decided, but many on both the Left and Right argue that the Court, by overturning precedent that it believes was wrong, is politicizing itself.

But there’s a problem with this argument: it isn’t true. The Court has overturned precedent before, including in cases involving abortion. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, the Court upheld Roe but allowed states to place restrictions on abortion so long as they didn’t place an “undue burden” on women seeking the procedure. In 2007, the Court overturned its own decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, which had upheld a ban on so-called “partial-birth” abortions. And a leftward leaning Court has also overturned precedent, to great acclaim, most notably its pro-slavery decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford.

The point is, the Supreme Court has a long history of overturning precedent, and it is not inherently wrong for them to do so. The question is whether Roe was right or wrong; and we will continue to disagree. But regardless of who has the right side of that question, Roe now seems to belong to the past. And this may not be bad for us, comrades. It may just be good for the Left.

So if Roe is overturned, it means that our politicians will actually need to do something about abortion. And whether you agree or disagree with those who believe in restricting abortion rights, there’s no denying that having our politicians on record about this issue can only benefit us politically. It will either lead to a backlash against the Right by women and other voters who care about reproductive freedom, or it might force Republicans to pivot away from their current anti-choice stance in order to appeal to a wider base of voters – something they’ve tried before with varying degrees of success. Either way, we get better politics and a more honest debate rather than endless posturing around an

So there’s no reason to believe that overturning Roe would trigger a right-wing takeover or a descent into an oppressive culture war. It might actually be good for the Left, by making politicians responsible for their decisions and forcing them to own an issue that they have been too cowardly to address honestly for far too long.

^^^

Alon Preiss is the author of In Love With Alice (2017). Available NOW from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or from ANY BOOKSTORE IN ANY TOWN OR CITY IN AMERICA

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Photos of the Day: Smoking

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Look, I am not an advocate of cigarette smoking, if such a person exists in today’s world.

I do not myself smoke cigarettes. I know that big corporations hid the truth for years, and many died for their malevolent subterfuge, maybe millions.

But I am a novelist, and my characters smoke. They smoke and they smoke and they smoke. Smoking is good for drama.

The excerpts below show the uses for smoking in literature. Smoking represents freedom; rebellion; sophistication; a youthful rite of passage; noirish danger. Or buffoonish ignorance. Cigarettes can mean anything.

As Steven S. Drachman notes in his short story, Smoking Girl, as government regulations drove smoking into the shadows, the shadow-dwellers found each other, poignantly. Or as Mark Laporta shows, a cigarette can be shorthand for a sort of idiotic, thuggish villainy. A cigarette sets the scene, almost any scene, perfectly. Smoking says it all.

In real life, smokers are unattractive. They smell bad. They have smoker’s face, yellow teeth. Even their hair, it’s smoker’s hair. But in photographs and and films, smoking is photogenic. Smoking looks good in movies and photos. The hand holding the match, cupped against the wind, as the tobacco ignites; the cigarette between two beauteous lips; a lovely face, engulfed in a cloud of smoke.

These excerpts and photographs are beautiful. It is deeply irresponsible to romanticize smoking. So here we go.

— Alon Preiss

I imagined that Willie, as I liked to call him, since his first name was Cyril, who wore bow ties and smoked dark, foreign cigarettes, was charmingly eccentric, urbane; a modern-day Noel Coward, but more educated.

Extraordinary Means, by Donna Levin

Cigarette me, Cossack!

Mae West, Goin’ to Town

[Eden] remembered waking up, as she had a few weeks ago, to find Roger asleep beside her, the television blaring white noise, a lit cigarette hanging between his fingers. She imagined what would have happened if she had not woken up, if the cigarette had dropped quietly onto the sheets and she and Roger had died in the fire, their skeletons wrapped together like Esmeralda and Quasimodo at the end of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.… She stared through the window, shut her eyes and let the darkness wash over her, felt herself sink into it.

In Love With Alice, by Alon Preiss

Long about 11:30 that same morning, a dark figure skulked toward the Skudderton bus terminal, passing empty lots, stepping over broken concrete slabs — with the stub of a cigarette clinging to his lips…. “Work your ass off for a guy and he goes and clones you,” muttered Blade…. “He’s gonna hear about that,” Blade added, lighting up a cigarette. Cigarettes still made sense, even if he couldn’t remember why.

The Changing Hearts of Ixdahan Daherek, by Mark Laporta

Daniel was smoking, and Susan was holding a lit cigarette between two fingers and taking a puff every once in a while, not inhaling, just looking strangely innocent and beautiful with a cigarette in her left hand, not really smoking, and talking about God.

A Flash of Blue Sky, by Alon Preiss

My fellow soldiers and I sat around in the camp smoking cigarette after cigarette and growing increasingly worried about being in the first wave of soldiers sent into Lebanon, as we had little doubt that Israeli troops would be heading north. We were clearly a second-line infantry unit consisting of older men, not the kind of soldiers that the army brass would want to send into battle. But we understood that we had one advantage for the army: we were already in uniform.

Figs and Alligators, by Aaron Leibel

“You understand what I’m sayin’, don’t you, Mrs. Wolensky?” He released her arm and took out a pack of cigarettes, tapped the pack on his hand and slowly pulled one out with his mouth. He offered her the pack with a questioning look. He shrugged when she didn’t respond and put away the pack. Then he pulled out a lighter and thumbed a flame to life…. He lit his cigarette, inhaled deeply and slowly blew smoke toward the stroller. After a few moments, he stood up, tugged at his jacket and turned to stare down at her. “You don’t wanna see me again, now do ya’, Mrs. Wolensky?”

“Oh, please, I don’t want any trouble.”

“Then we ain’t gonna have any. S’long as you understand you made a mistake.” ….

Hawkins turned and walked slowly away, trailing smoke.

The Inevitable Witness, by Ed Rucker

Charlotte shed her nightgown and dressed in a shirtwaist and skirt…. Later she would dress her hair in a chignon, how she had worn it for years, despite the changing styles. First, however, she would smoke a cigarette, a less-than-genteel habit for women, but a freedom, Charlotte swore, more important than the vote.… She rolled a cigarette, licking its thin edge, and then lighted it with a match scratched on the sole of her shoe. She inhaled, feeling guilty, because she knew she must quit … but in her guilt, she also felt at home. She exhaled and watched the plume of shame rise toward the ceiling.

Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, by Pen Pearson

Sergio sat across the table from her, and Carly was holding both his hands, playing idly with his fingers. He had a carefully maintained two-day growth of beard, long hair, and a flatteringly and expensively casual wardrobe. His faux-Communist cigarette hung from his lower lip at an impossible cockeyed angle.

In Love With Alice, by Alon Preiss

I am watching Westworld while smoking a cigarette. This is a phase of my life.

Kalyee Srithnam

“We are not monsters,” [he] said at the opening press conference. He was so tiny in this huge room, miles below its towering ceiling with intricate gold leaf. He lit a cigarette. The room was already filled with smoke. Then, to emphasize his point, he repeated himself. “We are not monsters.” He looked angry. The Western reporters began scribbling, and his eyebrows knit crossly. “I know what you will do,” he said. “You will all lead your story in the same way. ‘We are not monsters, said the little man with the cigarette.’ The implication will be ironic.” ….. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, held it in his lungs for just a moment, then blew it out rebelliously.

A Flash of Blue Sky, by Alon Preiss

“Standing here, in the street, in this light rain,” she said, and then she stopped and took a long drag on her cigarette. It was almost done, her cigarette, but she didn’t flick it into the puddle just yet, she stared at it, the little glow in the dimness. “Standing here like this, in the rainy night,” she continued, “it reminds me of one rainy night in the forest, when I was little, behind my house, hundreds of miles away from here. Maybe thousands, I don’t know.”

Smoking Girl, by Steven S. Drachman

I know I don’t smoke. I don’t inhale because it gives you cancer, but I look so incredibly handsome with a cigarette that I can’t not hold one.

Woody Allen, Annie Hall

Jimmy took the hand rolled cigarette, and Rhoda produced a book of matches and lit it. He puffed the smoke tentatively. “You can inhale it,” she told him. Jimmy tried and coughed violently. Rhoda grabbed the cigarette and handed him a glass of water. She took a drag and exhaled the smoke. “Don’t take in so much till you get used to it.” She handed the cigarette back to Jimmy. He took another puff and managed it better the second time. Then Rhoda rolled one for herself, and they sat there, smoking contentedly, and gazing out across the fallow field at the pine woods on the other side.

The Last At-Bat of Shoeless Joe, by Granville Wyche Burgess

Irina threw her carpet bag into the middle of the living room floor underneath his big TV. She sat down on the floor, and she lit a cigarette. “I will never feel guilty about this,” she said. “Smoking. I will never apologize.” The room filled with smoke. “Just so you know.” The room looked better filled with smoke.

A Flash of Blue Sky, by Alon Preiss

One of the SEALs noticed a lone Iranian soldier standing there smoking a cigarette, for the moment oblivious to the carnage around him. The SEAL adjusted his aim slightly upward and deftly beheaded the man from more than a hundred yards away. “That’s for more than twenty years of Jihadist bullshit, asshole,” mumbled the SEAL….

The Tenth Plague, by Alan N. Levy

^^^

Photos and Art from Pexels and Pixabay, and by Petar Stacevic, Cottonbro, Max Knoxville, Roman Odintsov, Oleg Magni, Masha Raymers, Kam Pratt, Merlin Light Painting, Megan Forbes, Dishan Lathiya, Ukeiri, the Digital Artist, Jessica Nunes, John Mor, Brett Sayles, Steven S. Drachman, Kalyee Srithnam, Kool Shooters, Amir Hashemi, Thais Silva and Hiew Nguyen Trong.

Biden-Cheney

Alon Preiss: NO to a Biden/Cheney Ticket in 2024

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In today’s Times, pointing to Israel’s so-far-still-standing left/right parliamentary coalition, Tom Friedman advocates for a Biden/Cheney ticket in 2024, an idea so staggeringly stupid one wonders if one of Friedman’s grandkids got hold of his password and decided to prank him.

After proposing his provocative idea, Friedman notes correctly that “America does not have the flexibility of a parliamentary, proportional-representation system,” which is why his idea doesn’t work, of course.

At this point, he should have deleted his column and written an essay about how apples and oranges are basically the same fruit.

Different political systems

“Sound familiar?” Friedman asks, in describing Israel’s politics.

Um … no.

Our political systems are different. Apples and oranges have more in common. A multi-multi-party parliamentary system requires coalition building to form a government, which is why Israeli political parties do it after every single election. In American-style democracy, parliamentary coalition building is of no value, which is why American political parties never do it.

Pointing to Israel’s totally usual coalition and proposing it as an unprecedented model for the Democrats’ 2024 ticket is like saying that Americans can get into outer space really quickly and efficiently, so why not use rocket technology on New York City buses to solve our public transportation schedule problems? Or, since Lysol is so good at killing germs, why not drink it, to kill Covid in our bodies?

Because it’s a stupid idea.

A forced analogy

Using Israel as his model, Friedman proposes that before the election, Joe Biden fire Kamala Harris as veep, convince the Dem convention to nominate Liz Cheney and then campaign together for the election.

But this isn’t what happens in Israel at all.

In Israel, the rightist candidate Naftali Bennett and left-of-center candidate Yair Lapid did not campaign together on a combined platform. Indeed, during the election campaign, they both professed no interest in a post-election coalition.

They campaigned against each other.

They were then forced by circumstance, after the election occurred, to combine votes in order to reach a majority and take power, and then, once in power, to use their majority to pass legislation.

Israel always rules by coalition; America does not

Israel’s current coalition government is not the revolutionary development that Friedman seems to imagine it is.

As Friedman must surely know, there have been numerous left/right governing coalitions in Israel. For a while, it was something of a tradition. Labor and Likud would campaign against each other, but after the election was over, neither would win a majority of the vote. Then, because anything other than a Likud/Labor coalition would mean allowing some awful fanatical small party into government, Labor and Likud would form a coalition for the good of the nation.

This has happened over and over again in Israel. Not in America.

Having Liz Cheney as veep also would not provide Biden with a majority to pass legislation, which is another way our system of government differs from Israel’s.

Indeed, the best way to achieve a governing majority for the Dems is to keep anti-Trump Republicans in the Congress.

Cheney would be more effective endorsing Biden from the House, then as a Representative voting for Biden’s agenda and for a Democratic speaker.

Liz Cheney would lose the election for Biden

Furthermore, in a general election, Cheney would bring no votes.

As I noted, unlike Israel’s current government coalition, she would not and could not give Biden her voters to form a governing majority. That’s the way Israel’s parliamentary system works, but not ours.

Her name on the ticket would lure not a single Republican voter to the Dems. Run of the mill Republicans hate her more than they hate Biden, and so her presence on a Biden ticket would make them less likely to vote for Biden.

Friedman states that a Biden/Cheney coalition would need to jettison legislative priorities in favor of a platform dedicated solely to opposing Trump. He compares this to Israel, where he praises the coalition as one that will never make peace with the Palestinians, as though that were some kind of terrific development.

But in Israel, most voters don’t really care anymore about seeking peace with the Palestinians. In America, voters do care about electing a government that can get things done.

Government needs to promise to improve people’s lives

Outside of never-Trumpers, only less-partisan, bread-and-butter Republicans would ever vote for Biden, and they would vote for him for bread-and-butter reasons, not partisan concerns. Never-Trump Republicans like the Lincoln Project and David Frum would be happy with a Biden-Cheney ticket that promised to do not much of anything, but they would have voted for Biden anyway, and otherwise convincible, bread-and-butter Republicans would not be thrilled by a government whose platform would consist of setting aside legislative priorities in favor of condemning the candidate that they voted for last time.

These convincible Republicans would see such a ticket as a Trump-bashing orgy, dedicated not to getting things done for the American people but, instead, to condemnation of Trump and everyone who ever voted for him.

Voters prefer a government that actually improves their lives. Which Trump would promise to do.

Cheney on the ticket would drive away progressive voters

Cheney on the ticket would also tamp down enthusiasm on the left.

Friedman mentions in passing that an alternate ticket could be Harris-Romney, but he doesn’t mention that a Biden-Cheney ticket would meaning firing America’s first Black female veep in favor of a rightwing white person, a decision guaranteed to create outrage. Dropping Democratic priorities to lure that rightwing white person to the ticket would be the final nail in the national Dem Party’s coffin, maybe one from which we would never recover.

So this decision would please never-Trumpers and drive away progressives and less-partisan Republicans, a recipe for Trump’s victory in 2024. This decision might help the American Communist Part rebuild its base back to its 1950s 2% heyday, as progressives radicalize. As a Trotskyite, I would not be unhappy to see the Communists return to our glory days, but it’s not the result Friedman has in mind.

This is an awful idea.

^^^

Alon Preiss is the author of In Love With Alice (2017). Available NOW from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or from ANY BOOKSTORE IN ANY TOWN OR CITY IN AMERICA

Illustration by Steven S. Drachman

Historical fiction

How to Write Historical and Biographical Fiction

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The Brooklyn small press, Chickadee Prince Books, has published a number of novels that cover real historical events, and inevitably includes passages in which real-life figures play a pivotal role.

Some of these books feature those historical figures as their main characters, such as Pen Pearson’s Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, which tells the lightly fictionalized story of poet Charlotte Mew, and Granville Wyche Burgess’s The Last At-Bat of Shoeless Joe, which imagines a fictional 9th inning tale for the real-life baseball player, Shoeless Joe Jackson.

Other books, such as Steven S. Drachman’s Watt O’Hugh trilogy, Jay Greenfield’s post-war opus, Max’s Diamonds and Alon Preiss’s political satire, A Flash of Blue Sky, feature real individuals and historical events, in varying degrees of fancifulness, to advance a mostly fictional tale.

Here, four of these authors tell how they get inside the skin of the real-life characters that they have chosen to include in their novels.

Poet Pen Pearson on dramatizing the poet Charlotte Mew

Alone on the Isle of Wight, Charlotte could imagine she was still twelve years old and that Freda, almost two, was her sole responsibility. The Mew children would walk from the farm at Newfairlee to St. Paul’s Church on a dirt road, alongside cow pastures and alfalfa fields swelling with the August heat. Spatters of rain from dark, swollen clouds would stir the dust, and drops would pool on the packed earth like dew on grass. In the gentle rain, the dust, the alfalfa, and the clover would blossom together in a phantasmagoria of scents. Freda would beg to be picked up and carried so her shoes wouldn’t get muddy, and Charlotte would show her how to catch the raindrops on her tongue while Anne and Henry walked ahead of them.

— From Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, a novel by Pen Pearson

The generic designation biographical fiction is oxymoronic, at least on its face.

How could a book about a historical figure be fiction?

Take the above excerpt as an example. What’s fact and what’s fiction?

Charlotte Mew and her siblings — Henry, Anne, and Freda — did spend summers on their uncle’s farm on the Isle of Wight, where their father was born. They did walk to St. Paul’s together. And Charlotte did think of her sister Freda as her own child. Everything else–the dirt road, cow pastures, alfalfa and clover fields, and the meadowlark’s song (in the subsequent paragraph) — were derived from my own memories of summers on my grandparents’ farm in Soldier, Iowa.

In other words, the substance is factual, the remainder, “fiction.”

My aim was to dramatize the essential truth of Mew’s life as I understood it. That understanding came primarily from research, but also from my own experiences, memories and imagination.

Novelist Alon Preiss, on dramatizing the horrible story of Cambodian despot, Pol Pot

With Saloth Sar center stage in the [Cambodian] government, something changed within him. He looked the same, more or less – the same bucktoothed smile, the same round, fat face. But he was different now, a different person lived within him. For when Saloth Sar took control of Cambodia, an ancient Cambodian spirit named Pol Pot settled easily into his body, a spirit that had been waiting silently in the forest for eons. Pol Pot had come into being in the Big Bang, had floated through the universe, through the clouds of gas and the empty space, waiting for man to evolve. But no human ears had ever before heard his name spoken, until that one day when Saloth Sar spoke the name – Pol Pot – for the very first time. He said it in a very quiet voice, hesitantly, but to his ears the name boomed like thunder. Within moments, the country fell to the whim of a dark spirit who thrived on mothers’ tears and the anguished cries of children. Saloth Sar’s soul disappeared, banished forever to some netherworld prison. “Call me Pol Pot,” Saloth Sar’s lips demanded. To the public, he would not admit that he had once been Saloth Sar; he would not admit that he had once been raised by court dancers. He would not admit that he was an eons-old evil spirit inhabiting the body of a gentle, unremarkable man. He claimed instead to be an obscure rubber worker who now, through some happy quirk of fate, just happened to control the life and destiny of seven million people.

— From A Flash of Blue Sky, a novel by Alon Preiss

I’ve been really obsessed with what happened in Cambodia for as long as I can remember; I was especially incensed at the role that a local Congressman, Stephen Solarz, played in reviving the Khmer Rouge as a fighting force, after they were overthrown by the Vietnamese, and re-elevating the Khmer Rouge’s murderous leader, Pol Pot.

Interestingly, to describe the relationship between these two men, Pol Pot and Stephen Solarz, in my novel, I fictionalized Solarz as a character named “Stephen Solomon,” and I made him a senator, but I didn’t rename Pol Pot.

At the time that I began work on the book, both of these terrible men were still alive, although they have both since died, Pol Pot probably murdered, while Solarz was widely repudiated and thrown out of office, and he died in disgrace.

It was easy to explain Solarz’s behavior. Solarz was an amoral American politician, and he thought that his campaign against the Vietnamese would make him look “tough on Communism,” which people cared about during the 1980s, and boost his profile, the Hell with all the people who would die as a result.

But Pol Pot was a different story. He was originally a French-educated intellectual named Saloth Sar, a really nice guy, by most accounts, a gentle soul who was drawn to politics to help the poor, and wound up running the most murderous regime in history.

What could explain the transformation?

In my novel, when Saloth Sar took power in Cambodia, a neak ta prey, an ancient spirit, possessed his body. What happens to people when they get elevated to the head of government? You have these nice fellows, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and so on, good students in college, they know people I know, vacation where I vacation. Then they get into politics, and they order assassinations. Pol Pot is just the most extreme example. I couldn’t order someone’s death, sit there in a meeting and order someone killed. How do they do it?

There is something evil lurking in the air, waiting for a human spirit to get that kind of power, and then it swoops in, and that’s the end of that. It may not be an ancient evil spirit, but it’s evil, whatever it is.

Steven S. Drachman on bringing Oscar Wilde to life in the old West

The train pulled out of the station in Denver, puffing smoke, making a racket. A gleeful Oscar Wilde waved from his compartment in the third car, contagiously enthusiastic over what we had all just suffered. I was a bit rueful that he wouldn’t accompany us to [Nebraska]. I’m quite sure he could have done something to distract the gunmen there. And, anyway, I would miss him.

I bumped into him again in 1882 in Arizona, where I saw him take down four other men in a gunfight. The gentleman was good with witty repartee, but he could also shoot, and he could fight. So while I understand him to have been skilled with your “comedy of manners”, the guy was also pretty tough when he wanted to be.

— From The Ghosts of Watt O’Hugh, a novel by Steven S. Drachman

When I was researching my first book, a historical fantasy novel about the adventures of Watt O’Hugh, a Time Roaming shootist in the old West, I decided to set some scenes in Leadville, a really fascinating city in Colorado; it is a sleepy little town now, high up in the mountains, with some appeal for mountain bikers and hikers, but in the 19th century, it was a real metropolis.

I was excited to read about the celebrities who visited Leadville in its prime, and even more excited and touched to learn that Oscar Wilde had included Leadville in his American speaking tour, and that he had been wholeheartedly accepted by the miners there. I included in my book some of Oscar’s own odes to the population (“large, blond-bearded, yellow-haired men in red shirts, with the beautiful clear complexions of those who work in silver mines”), and Oscar became a Watt’s sidekick through some of his more harrowing experiences.

It’s important that in depicting these characters, we hew closely to what is historically known, and never invent situations that contradict what is definitely known about the individual. (I was really critical of a film called Disney Christopher Robin, which reinvented Christopher Robin Milne in extremely ahistorical ways, a pack of lies disguised as entertainment.) I always thought of Oscar as personally extremely brave, and as a result his character developed in some interesting ways as the trilogy progressed. But just as I wound up depicting J.P. Morgan as someone who really didn’t care about money – trapped in a world he never loved – and came to think of him that way, when I read Oscar’s words today, or watch The Importance of Being Ernest, I can’t help but think of Oscar as someone who might well have taken down four Western toughs in a gunfight in Arizona.

In my mind, my Oscar has become the real Oscar, and maybe I’m right.

Granville Wyche Burgess on justice for his hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson

“Don’t do this, Lefty,” Joe implored. “I’m havin’ a great series. You’ve lost a game, sure, but you can win the next one. We can with this thing!”

“It won’t work, Joe. The fix is in. Chick’s been keepin’ us informed. You gotta have something to drink around here.” He moved towards a cabinet, searching.

Joe grabbed him by the lapels. “Forget about the damn booze for once, will ya’? Sure, Gandil’s been talkin’, but I ain’t been listenin’. I don’t wanna know. I just wanna play ball. I wanna win the World Series!”

“You think them gamblers care what you want? What do you think’s gonna happen if we don’t follow through on what Gandil said we’d agreed to? These men are rough. We both got wives, Joe. We gotta think about our families.”

“If they want to have me knocked off, let them do it!”

“You stupid son of a bitch!”

“Don’t call me ‘stupid’!” Joe cocked his hand. Lefty flinched. But Joe suddenly stopped himself, and turned to leave the room.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m talkin’ to Comiskey in the mornin’!” Joe answered over his shoulder.

“Don’t do it, Joe!” Lefty called after him. But Joe was gone. “Dumb Cracker!”

— From The Last At-Bat of Shoeless Joe, a novel by Granville Wyche Burgess

My book is about the historical character Shoeless Joe Jackson and his involvement in the Black Sox scandal of 1919 when 8 Chicago White Sox baseball players were accused of conspiring with gamblers to be paid to lose the World Series on purpose. Since there are no recordings or videos of what actually happened, I enjoyed using my imagination to create dramatic scenes.

FACTS: We know that on October 4, 1919, in the middle of the World Series, a Chicago pitcher, Lefty Williams, came to Shoeless Joe’s hotel room to deliver his part of the payoff. We know Shoeless Joe always claimed he was innocent, that Chick Gandil told the gamblers he was in when he’d told Chick “no!” Here’s part of a scene fictionalizing those facts. Shoeless has thrown the payoff money of the floor. Charles Comiskey is the White Sox owner.

The scene above reinforces Joe’s anger that, because he couldn’t read or write, many people thought he was dumb. It sets up a conflict for him about protecting his wife when he is called to testify in his trial. And it foreshadows Commissioner Landis’ edict banning any player who even listened to talk about a fix and didn’t report it to his boss was guilty.

And all because I knew that Lefty Williams tried to give him some money in a hotel room.

^^^

Granville Wyche Burgess is an Emmy-nominated playwright and novelist. He is the author of The Last At-Bat of Shoeless Joe, a novel about Shoeless Joe Jackson, published by Chickadee Prince, and which is available on Kindle, and in paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and your local bookstore. Follow him on Facebook.

Alon Preiss’s most recent novel is In Love With Alice, which is available  from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or from ANY BOOKSTORE IN ANY TOWN OR CITY IN AMERICA.

Steven S. Drachman is the author of The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third, which is available in paperback from your local bookstore, Amazon and Barnes & Noble; it is also available as a Kindle e-book. Read his blog, or follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Bloomsbury’s Late Rose, Pen Pearson’s novel about Charlotte Mew, is available in paperback and ebook at Amazon, B&N, all over the web, and at your favorite local bookstore. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

Audere Fiction

Editor’s Pick: Cutting Edge Fiction in Audere

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At Audere, we publish fiction and non-fiction, drawing from the great authors at Chickadee Prince Books, among other places.

Alon Preiss’s most recent novel has been praised as “a complex, magical web of love, betrayal, and secrets that spans years and continents” (Foreword) and “a spellbinding love story that is both intimate and universal” (Clifford Garstang), and we brought you some samples of this great writer’s fiction. Saturday in Yaroslavl tells the story of a young woman’s disastrous attempt to escape from the Russian provinces to Moscow. In Falling in Love with Alice, a young couple in the 1980s share a romantic idyll on the other side of the world, and wonder, Is it really love, if it lasts only a few days?

In Audere’s fiction pages, we span the centuries. We rediscovered a great old fairy tale called The Dovecote, by Violet Jacob, which is a story about a military coup in a magical kingdom, which kids and their parents will all enjoy; and, with the beautifully written Stardust, in which a dreamcatcher chases stardust to the end of the night, we bring you a new fantasy short story with a non-binary slant, by a young poet who remains, for now, anonymous.

In our comics section, we’ve introduced new strips by the talented Craig Eastland, and looked in the vault for long-forgotten classics like “Bertha the Siberian Cheese-Hound,” “Petting Patty,” and, especially, “The Yellow Kid.”

Finally, no one has done more innovative work in these pages than the science fiction novelist Mark Laporta, who has spun a half dozen great serialized stories in Audere. In Moonrock, a lunar contractor yearns for adventure and learns too late that, sometimes, boring is good; in Granular, a brilliant physicist and confirmed rationalist confronts the waking nightmare of a shattered universe; and in the inventive noir-SF serial, Insective, a gang of human activists shifts tactics from civil disobedience to full-blown terror, and a season of discontent begins — which a certain alien detective is sure he never signed up for.

Stay safe, and see you soon.

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