The American Creed

 I'm an American.

 

I believe in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of association, choosing what to say, how to behave, and who I befriend, without unreasonable restraint by government. The sole purpose of government is to defend the innocent, punish violence, and deter aggression by foreign countries.

 

Elections and referendums that determine public policy are constitutional rights explicitly given to We The People and state legislatures to provide in keeping with common sense, advance registration and nonpartisan ballot counting in each local district, verifying the identity and eligibility of each voter.

 

I believe in the civil right of marriage, one man and one woman, who have a natural right and primary responsibility to care for and educate their children. No one can be compelled by government to harm themselves or their children by tolerating indoctrination that "cancels" free speech.

 

I believe in private property. Good fences make good neighbors. I believe in the common law right of self defense and the constitutional right to keep and bear arms to defend myself and my loved ones in the event of criminal assault, legally answerable for use of lethal force.

 

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In case of social emergency

 

Emotions are not tools of cognition. (Ayn Rand)

Bizarre things I've done

Umpired a baseball game in prison, two teams of violent felons.

Gate crashed Stanley Kubrick's mansion at night in a black taxi.

Bought country & western radio spots to elect a liberal Democrat.

Told Boris that his new machine gun was nice, but leave it in the car.

Introduced to a Sicilian, who offered: "I'll call you Count Al, okay?"

A restaurant plate of brains that a bald audiologist insisted I try.

Carpet sweepers and sock hops

 

 

Have you used a carpet sweeper? 

 

A machine for addition, subtraction, and multiplication?

 

Surely you have seen a computer before.

 

RCA video recorder 

 

 

Not strange relics of ancient history, these are the things of my youth, state of the art technology in the 1950s. I watched Leave It To Beaver in prime time. TV was black and white, three channels received by a big aluminum antenna on the roof. My grandparents lived in a town that was too far away to receive TV broadcasts, so they used CATV cable, a community antenna on a tower that was amplified and wired to a couple thousand homes — the forerunner of modern cable TV with hundreds of channels distributed by satellite. In the 1950s, there were two satellites in orbit, Sputnik (audio beeps) and Telstar (capable of relaying scratchy phone calls). Our knowledge of geography consisted of maps drawn by artists, based on land surveys and naval observations. Civil Defense volunteers scanned the skies for Russian bombers, listening for the drone of props and using binoculars in a lookout post on the roof of a tall building.

 

I'm speaking of it to say that some things haven't changed. Roof shingles and frame houses. Big storm drains. Sanitary sewers and filtration plants. Asphalt streets, concrete curbs, sidewalks, schools and universities. Dish soap. Thermostats and central heat from furnaces and boilers. Dairy and beef. Wheat, yeast, sweet corn, fresh fish, chicken, eggs. Rail and truck transport. Scheduled airlines, UPS, highways, snow plows, state parks, Coca Cola and 7-Up. Most of the world has not changed since I was a child. Computers are faster and cheaper, cars and aircraft infinitely more complicated. But bankers are still bankers. X-rays are still x-rays. We had vaccines and vitamins in the 50s. Brainy kids studied physics and calculus, engineered jet engines, power plants, shatterproof polymers, and smoke alarms. Skyscrapers, suspension bridges, and hydroelectric turbines were built before I was born.

 

The world did not begin with Facebook or fentanyl, binge viewing Netflix bullshit. When I was a kid, we had thick daily newspapers, two or three in every city, delivered by boys on bicycles, rain or shine. I did it and got a Social Security number, had to buy the papers and collect from customers. Sunday editions weighed two pounds each, a good day to knock on doors to get paid. We had home delivery of milk in glass bottles. My uncle had a milk route. His job started at 4 a.m., two hours later than his pal the town baker who made fresh fat jelly donuts and kaiser rolls five nights a week.

 

Whatever you think is cool about the modern world, forget it. Nobody had to lock their houses or cars in the 1950s. Nothing was made in China. VHF cop radios, ship to shore, and shortwave ham stations were built by Motorola and Hallicrafters. All toys were U.S. made, crystal clear 100x kid microscopes, Erector sets with hundreds of girders, nuts, bolts, pulleys, and cranks, multistage Estes model rockets, and Lionel railroad layouts with electric switches and car couplings detached by magnets. Girls had huge chemistry sets with acids, reagents, litmus paper, and test tubes. Many families had a set of encyclopedias. Men  wore stylish hats and waved to their neighbors. There were bridge parties, bowling alleys, golf courses, and fraternal organizations. Families went to church every week, dressed in their best outfits. Teens had cafeteria sock hops and Saturday night movie dates. A teenage kiss was a big deal, petting illegal.

 

I'm glad I started life innocently, my first 14 years anyway. Those of you who know my work as a novelist and unabashed chick magnet understand that I had a bizarre path of adult experience, but Walt Disney made a deep permanent impression, no matter what else was superimposed. My fictional heroes are confident, honest and courageous, like Spin and Marty, Davy Crockett, Mike Fink and, out of the night when the full moon is bright, the horseman known as Zorro.

 

Parenthetically, I'd like to clear up the mystery that baffled Fox News. Andrew Cuomo wasn't innocent as a kid. He grew up with a gold spoon in his mouth. He sent infectious covid patients to nursing homes, instead of the USN Comfort hospital ship or the Javitz Center field hospital, to screw Trump, avoid giving him any public credit. He lied about how many died in congregate nursing homes, lied about why, lied in daily press conferences, and lied to legislators to cover up his incompetence. Cuomo got a book deal, an Emmy, and fawning CNN air time joking around with his corrupt brother, because he was next in line to be crowned with glory, in case Lunch Bucket Joe had another brain aneurism. Cuomo was considered "safe" because he was just as dirty and devious as Biden.

 

That's the difference between me and (take your pick) Cuomo, Biden, Clinton, Obama. They have to hide who they are. Hillary confessed the purpose of lying: "What difference at this point does it make?"

 

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A million words

872,000 in publication, the rest of my output archived by the Wayback Machine and shelved at public libraries, or destroyed by WGA. Screenplays had to be renewed every 10 years or they were shredded. Doesn't include my letters, emails, forum posts, published magazine articles, a couple hundred pages that I typed in a tack room by 6V lantern light, and a couple hundred more filed in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. I've written in a penthouse overlooking Sunset Boulevard, deluxe rental houses in Holland, Costa Rica, and Australia, an unheated garret in Hilversum, a basement in London, a cheap Beverly Blvd motel, maybe three dozen offices, apartments, and prison cells, capped by five years in a sheet metal Ozarks dairy barn. A million words became a difficult 40-year project.

 

Was any of it any good? Maybe about half. Do other people write a million words? Sure. Kipling did. The execrable Dickens and Faulkner. Respectable Churchill, Rand, and Hugo. I declined to compete with Beat Generation giants or biographers or fat ladies who cranked out formula romance. Chandler authored a million words, half of which were excellent. I'd like to burn every rotten syllable penned by King and his spiritual ancestor Poe. I don't think RLS or Hammett wrote a million words. Clueless Zane Grey did.

 

I'm not certain that young people read or write. I know two men who collected every Tom Clancy book. We don't have a lot to discuss. A neighbor lady collected every cookbook and diet book in hardcover, plus twenty shelves jammed full of mystical junk. Another gal inquired if I had any dragons in my latest, which I did, although he only survived a single page. The best thing to do with dragons is to slay 'em.

 

The literary enterprise is like a dragon, or it was for me, and it was for Fitzgerald and O. Henry, a hoary, insatiable, insistent, non-negotiable life taker. When a man writes (not applicable to the fair sex, who write more than men do) the business of writing is to pit your wit and wisdom against every other man in human history. No reason to attempt that, unless you have new weapons.

 

http://www.wolfdevoon.net

 

Rats!

 My masterpiece is unreadable. No doubt that Partners is brilliant, finely crafted, believable and utterly compelling. It's also sad, violent, true to the time and place in which Kyle finds a mentor, a gunslinger nearly dead to the world, and a girl who's equally courageous, destined to love Kyle as completely and deeply as two innocents can devote themselves to each other in the grit and fury of a mob war.

The language is crude and ruthless, a tough white swagger in 1975. If I had cleaned it up, the zeitgeist would vanish, none of the events would make sense. Most men who go to war swear, smoke, and shun tenderness as a debilitating threat. When a man is in love, he questions his duty to kill or be killed. No woman in love wants to lose her man or see him suffer. Kyle's gunfights and wounds are real. The end cannot be happy, icy death at the gates of hell. Told in first person voice, Kyle suffers consciously and clearly, pushes it away, explodes with callous brutality and psychological collapse repeatedly.

It's unreadable. I want to celebrate such a fine achievement, and I can't. A little laugh at the thought of something remembered. I paid an enormous emotional price to *WRITE* it! -- months of pain and daring and dramatic triangulation. The minor characters are vivid , vital, as real as you or me.

Well, rats. Forbidden to re-read my best work of fiction. I try. The opening is mostly innocent. Clever. Sometimes I can make it to Kyle's first murder, sometimes to his 2nd, 3rd, and 4th -- and the glory of a week with Karen in snowbound Door County, to live and love, alone together, one of the finest love stories wrapped in gentleness and sparkling good humor, like an island of good, a thousand miles from hell. In reality, it's only a three hour drive, and bonded together as man and wife they will endure hell together as long as they can, a matter of weeks, with increasing incisiveness and valor.

I feel like a failure, unable to re-read Partners. That's why I wrote Chiseltown, a screwball comedy that ends happily, full of preposterous fun, a little crisis fixed by friends, some insider jargon. A distinguished pal in Hollywood liked the twin sister starlets and suggested it should be a film school textbook. I can read it with pleasure, forget about the unreadable masterpiece of tragedy.

I sort of cringe when I re-read Heaven. A little too honest.

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for Janet