01-Jun-2006
Iron Filings
We are being massaged, now, for war with Iran – softened, lubricated, the most credible threats being tested. I don’t know if I have the energy for another war. Before our Afghanistan/Iraq caper I researched the politics, the geography, and the culture of those places. I concluded to myself that a war with Iraq would be like going to war with a bunch of fundamentalist Southern Baptists: soft people with so little in their lives they would give up nothing by giving up everything. I even wrote a book prior to the war with Iraq, my goal to assess the tenor and mood of a country as it prepares for a non-reactive war. Thus, I conclude that I am done with the Middle East and that we, as a country, should be, too, for there is little for us to gain there. Perhaps it is time to think about a war in Africa. Injustice abounds there, as do the natural resources for which our hunger never abates. The military, though, they may be getting tired of war in all these hot places. Perhaps we should declare war on Finland.
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Most of our long distance phone calls are made with a cellphone now. When we have to make a call from home we use a phone card. Since you do need a long distance connection, though, we’ve had AT&T for a long time. They charge us nothing per month and twenty-five cents a minute when we do make a long distance call – which we don’t. Recently, AT&T informed me that they would be starting to charge me $3.95 a month for this service we don’t use. What a bummer. I decided to switch the plan to Verizon, who now charges us $1.50 a month for a service we don’t use. You know where I’m going with this. Over the years I’ve made some decent money from the books and stories I’ve written and had published. It never occurred to me to charge for the ones I haven’t written. There’s a lot of those so it’s worth looking into.
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During one of those “it’s tax time” articles a picture of President Bush’s tax return was shown, including (in small type), his $3700 deduction for a Health Savings Account. I was puzzled by this since HSA’s are used primarily by the self-employed or employees of small companies. Anyone covered by a group health plan is generally not going to be eligible at all, and my understanding is that federal employees are covered by a group health plan.
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As if the James Frey Million Little Pieces fiasco weren’t enough, “big” publishing has another fiasco on its hands. Seems that Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan signed a half-million dollar deal with publisher Little, Brown & Company for her chick-lit novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. She has now admitted copying (some call it plagiarism; we in the business call it fucking theft) large sections of her novel from Megan McCafferty’s equally fluffy books, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. What really bugs me about this is that one of my true literary heroes, Kurt Vonnegut, simply a giant in American letters, couldn’t even get a major publisher to take his latest book, A Man Without A Country. There is, however, some justice in these sordid tales, since Vonnegut’s book did go on to become a bestseller for highly-reputable, if little-known, Seven Stories Press.
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Watching the news one night after yet another run-up in gas prices, I was shocked to see the president take a There’s nothing I can do about it position (that’s almost an exact quote). No fudging, no spin, just a confession of impotence – truly shocking from an administration that has perfected an Orwellian war is peace, despair is joy, failure is success explanation for nearly everything. If I were George W. Bush I would simply issue the following statement: If you think gas prices are high, they’re not.
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I was saddened to hear that Scott Crossfield just died (April 2006) in a single-engine plane crash somewhere in Georgia. Crossfield enchanted me during a mechanical phase of my youth because he and Chuck Yeager were hotshot test pilots – both of them surmounting the sound barrier flying planes that were little more than sticks of dynamite with landing gear. More than that, though, the two of them stood before the world as if to say, Anything is possible. We need to start believing that again.
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I saw an ad recently for a woman’s make-up made by Maybelline called True Illusion. It made me momentarily thankful for the marketing and advertising industry. Without them, who would ever have a reason to come up with something like that? I like the notion of a true illusion. I think it should be the subtitle of every autobiography that someone sits down to write: My Life In Words And Pictures: A True Illusion. Works for me.
G. K. Wuori © 2006
Photoillustration by the author
