Tom Glenn's Blog, page 74

Computer Outage

My desktop computer, from which I post daily to my blog, has stopped working. The earliest repair date I could get is next Friday. So between now and then, nothing new will appear in the blog. My apologies.

Historical Fiction? (2)

When I chose to use real events in my novels and short stories, I never foresaw that critics and others would begin to refer to my work as “historical fiction.” That’s defined as fiction that has as its setting a period of history and attempts to convey the spirit, manners, and social conditions of a past age with realistic detail and fidelity to historical fact.

How can stories about what I lived through myself be historical? These things didn’t happen in the far-flung past. They occurred during my lifetime. Granted, I’m getting on in age. But I’m surely not old enough that my experiences are to be considered “history.”

Or am I? So often these days, at my presentations and readings and book sales, I meet people who are grandparents but weren’t even born when Saigon fell. My presentation on my role the 1967 battle of Dak To in Vietnam’s highlands describes events of more than 53 years ago. And I’m regularly the oldest person at events I attend. Maybe I am turning into an historical figure.

And maybe I should exploit rather than downplay my age. I’m already well past the average life span of American males. But I don’t look my age and am still athletic. Each year that passes, I become more unusual.

Maybe it’s time to welcome being an historical figure. Maybe I’ll give it a try.

Historical Fiction?

Critics of my writing often point out that my novels and short stories are fiction in name only. I plead guilty. The events described in my stories really did take place. I fictionalize them by showing fictional characters—rather than myself—participating in the events depicted.

Sometimes to disguise reality, I change the time frame of events. My novel, Secretocracy, is set during the Trump administration. It tells of the president’s persecution of an intelligence budgeteer. In real life, I was that budgeteer, but it was not during Trump’s presidency. The project I refused to fund because it was illegal and violated treaties with other governments was so highly classified that I suspect few were aware of it. I, like the protagonist in the novel, was severely punished for my recalcitrance. On the president’s orders, I was stripped of my security clearances and assigned to a warehouse in the slums with no job, hoping that I’d resign in protest. I didn’t. The president’s term ended, and I was exonerated.

More typical is Last of the Annamese, my novel set during the fall of Saigon. Every incident in the story really did occur. I was there. I saw it happen. I escaped from Saigon under fire on the night of 29 April 1975 after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets.

Then there’s The Trion Syndrome. That is a fictionalized tale about a man coping with Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI), which I suffer from as a consequence of the many instances of being in the midst of combat on the battlefield while assisting U.S. and friendly forces with signals intelligence—that is, intercept and exploitation of the enemy’s radio communications. The methods the protagonist uses in Trion to live with PTSI are not the ones I used, but his experiences—including not being able to remember the events that brought on nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks, and irrational rages—are my own.

More next time.

Smoking (2)

Eventually, in my quest to give up tobacco, I gradually replaced the nicotine gum with ordinary chewing gum. And these days, I’m slowly teaching myself to do without gum of any kind.

But I didn’t escape unscathed. In 2013, I coughed up blood. My doctor at the time told me not to worry about it. He diagnosed me with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). I brought up blood again in 2015. This time he sent me for a lung x ray. I had had a large tumor in my right lung.

After almost a year of maximum chemotherapy and radiation, a surgeon removed the upper lobe of my right lung in November 2015. I learned later that the cancer came close to ending my life, but that my overall excellent health was the key that allowed me to survive. I had been a runner and weight lifter most of my life, but coincident with the lung surgery, I had a knee replacement which the surgeon bolixed, leaving me with a slight limp. My running days were over, and I wasn’t able to resume weight lifting until 2020 when I recovered completely from the surgery. I’ve gradually gotten back into the routine. Even so, I can’t match the weights I used to lift in my twenties.

And I’ve never returned to the physician who failed to diagnose my cancer in 2013.

So I’ve paid the price levied on smokers. Thanks to my healthy lifestyle, I came through it alive. I only wish someone had told me in my teens what price I would pay for my addiction to cigarettes.

I can’t complain. These days I’m healthy as a horse. And even though I went on writing during my recovery, I lost working time due to illness. Now I have to hurry to make up the loss.

New Book Review

My review of the novel  My Good Son set in China is now on the internet. You can read it at http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/bookreview/my-good-son-a-novel

Please comment and let me know what you think.

Smoking

These days, I rarely see people smoking. Pipes, cigars, and certainly cigarettes are no longer in fashion. What a blessing.

When I was growing up in the San Francisco bay area, literally every adult I knew smoked. Cigarettes were universal, pipes and cigars somewhat rare. When I turned eighteen, my parents gave me as birthday presents a carton of cigarettes and a lighter. No one seemed to have the slightest hint that smoking was bad for one’s health.

At the University of California, Berkeley, where I did my undergraduate studies, I didn’t know anyone who didn’t smoke. We even smoked in the classrooms while class was in progress. I worked part-time throughout those years, and everywhere I worked, including restaurants and coffee shops, everybody, hired help and customers both, smoked.

I enlisted in the army immediately upon graduation from college and learned that all soldiers smoked. Typical was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who left the army (and became president) seven years before I enlisted. He reportedly smoked six packs of cigarettes per day. Every formation break was announced with the words, “Smoke ’em If you got ’em.”

Upon leaving the army and going to work for the National Security Agency (NSA), I was again among smokers. NSA immediately sent me to Vietnam where I spent most of the next thirteen years, escaping under fire when Saigon fell. Once again, every soldier and Marine I worked with smoked, and smoking among the Vietnamese was universal for men.

By the time Vietnam fell in 1975, people were finally starting to pay attention to the doctors who had for decades been warning us that smoking caused lung cancer. Chastened, I began the long, slow process of weaning myself away from tobacco. Little by little, I replaced cigarettes with nicotine chewing gum which, at the time, was only available with a prescription. Only years later could the gum could be bought without a prescription.

More next time.

Abnormal Times

I’m living in abnormal times, and I’m tired of it. I yearn for the return to normal.

These days are a departure from normalcy for a set of unrelated reasons. First was the presidency of Donald Trump that turned the political world on its head. Then came the coronavirus lockdown that has lasted more than a year. And now the cicadas are out, filling the air with their screech and littering the ground with their ugly bodies.

All this will end. Already, the new president, Joe Biden, is working to correct the depravities inflicted by Trump. The lockdown is ending as more people are vaccinated, masks are gradually disappearing, and people are meeting face-to-face. And while the cicadas haven’t hit their peak yet, I know they will disappear at the end of the month.

But the normal I once knew is gone forever. Biden will not only reverse many of Trump’s worst policies but is already introducing massive changes of his own that will alter the face of America. The changes will help. But the world as I knew it will no longer exist.

The cicadas will eventually fade away. All they will leave behind is unpleasant memories and buried eggs that will hatch seventeen years from now.

And the lockdown? As is becoming clearer to me by the day, the normal we’ll arrive at is not the normal I was used to before all this began. We’ve learned, among other things, that people can work very effectively from home. We now know that remoted meeting, with all participants using computers and webcams, works as well as face-to-face get-togethers. We found out how easy and effective it is to order goods online rather than buying them at a store. I suspect that we have become fonder than ever of eating in restaurants, something we couldn’t do for a year. I expect the number and popularity of restaurants to grow.

So yearn as I may for a return to the normal I knew before all this began, it’s obvious we’re not going back there. We’re going somewhere else instead, and I’ll have to adjust to whatever “normal” turns out to be.

The Cicada Plague

I was shocked to learn that the infestation of cicadas currently darkening my life is expected to last until the end of June. I don’t know how much worse it can get. Outside my house, dead cicadas lie everywhere, a few feet apart. The air is filled with them flying about. And the sound of their constant screech fades only at night.

The cicadas’ presence prompted me to look up the old testament story of the ten plagues that God visited upon the Egyptians to force them to release the Jews to travel to what is today Israel. Those plagues were water turned into blood, frogs, lice, gnats, diseased livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness for three days, and killing of firstborn sons.

Any one of those is far worse than the influx of the cicadas. So I can comfort myself that God is not punishing us. For all that, the cicadas are becoming more of a curse as each day passes. Their demise and disappearance can’t come too soon for me.

The Republican Strategy (2)

Despite colossal effort on the part of the Republicans, their appeal to working-class people is rapidly weakening. More and more people see through the Republicans’ positions and realize that the Republicans are working to restore their control even if it requires lying and hiding the truth at an unprecedented scale. Why else would the Republicans block a national commission to investigate the January 6 Trump-incited attack on the U.S. Capitol? Why did they twice acquit Trump of impeachment charges in the face of overwhelming evidence? And why did 147 Republicans in Congress vote to overturn the proven validity of the November election? Republicans, in other words, insist on cleaving to the Great Lie—that Trump won the election—in the face of undeniable evidence to the contrary. In sum, their actions are inviting more and more people to desert the Grand Old Party.

To the degree that Trump continues to hold the Republican party in his iron grip, the party will continue to decline. According to a Washington Post article in January, Trump’s false or misleading claims totaled 30,573 over his four years in office. And he encourages violence against his opponents. Vox reports that “dozens of people enacted violence in Trump’s name in the years before the Capitol attack, according to a 2020 report from ABC News.”

In short, Republican allegiance to Trump and his values portends its defeat. Trump’s popularity is waning by the day. Unless the party breaks decisively with Trump, its supporters will dwindle.

My sense is that the Republican Party as we know is will soon cease to exist. And unless it alters its strategy, it will remain the minority party for the foreseeable future.

The Republican Strategy

Republicans in the U.S. are outnumbered by the Democrats. According to Wikipedia, 31 percent of the U.S. population declare themselves to be Democrats while only 25 percent call themselves Republicans. The largest segment of the population declares itself independent, some 41 percent. But when those independents are asked their leaning, 50 percent express a preference for the Democrats; only 39 percent prefer the Republicans. However you count it, Democratic voters greatly outnumber Republicans.

The expected and honorable thing for Republicans to do is to improve their policies and candidates to appeal to more voters. Instead, their strategy is to reduce the number of people voting by making voting more difficult, especially for minorities who most often vote for the Democrats. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “as of March 24, 2021, more than 361 bills that would restrict voting access have been introduced in 47 states, with most aimed at limiting mail-in voting, strengthening voter ID laws, shortening early voting, eliminating automatic and same-day voter registration, curbing the use of ballot drop boxes, and allowing for more aggressive means to remove people from voter rolls.” The Washington Post described the effort as “potentially amounting to the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction.” In sum, the Republican strategy is, as one commentator phrased it, “If you can’t beat them, cheat them.”

Many working-class people sympathize with the Republicans because of the latter’s conservative and religious policies on cultural matters. These same people don’t seem to realize that when they vote for the Republicans, they are voting against their own interests, supporting leaders who want to suppress voting, reduce taxes for the well-to-do while maintaining them for the working class, diminish labor unions’ power, and prevent raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour. The Republican’s power base is those with money who want to hold on to it and keep the impecunious riff-raff (ordinary working people) under their thumb and deprived of power.

More next time.