Dear Reader (and those of you like Piers Morgan who can’t get past the cover),
Well, it’s been a busy week. I won’t recount it all here. For the most part book-media tours aren’t all that exciting – at least to hear about. At 9:05 I was on so-and-so’s radio show. At 10:15 I did you-know-who’s radio show. It can be fun for me (and it can be an awful grind, too). But save for when things go horribly wrong, there’s really no story to tell.
Which brings me to the Piers Morgan debacle. I’m not sure that I have any more to say than what I said here. Also, I think David Limbaugh’s take is right on target.
This is only my second book, so there are a lot of people more expert on this stuff than I am, but now that I have a basis of comparison, I’m starting to draw some conclusions about the process.
It’s hardly a novel insight to say that writing a book is a bit like having a baby. Though you work on it for far more than nine months (in most cases, at least), the gestation period for both feels like an eternity. You simultaneously worry that there’s something wrong with it and at the same time you’re convinced it’s the greatest baby/book it could be.
When it’s finally delivered, the people most excited about it are the ones closest to you, and, as the circle widens, the less excited people become, until ultimately their congratulations are largely pro-forma. It’s also true that people are less excited about your second book or baby than your first. I have friends on third and fourth kids now, and there are no baby showers and pop-ins to see the new bundle of joy anymore (in part because everyone’s so busy with their own kids). As the parent, you care passionately about your progeny, but everyone else is – entirely understandably – going on with their own lives likes it’s really not that big a deal.
The differences are pretty stark as well. Since humans aren’t like alien spider creatures, the initial print runs of books are considerably larger than even the biggest humanoid litters. It would be pretty scary to have a first edition of say 25,000 copies of my daughter. Similarly, when you drop a brand new book or use it to prop up the short leg of a table, you don’t go to jail for it.
But given what a wreck I am this morning, one similarity comes through more than any other. It’s exhausting. You’re up at weird hours, you’re worried how it will work out, you’re not sure if you’re doing anything right, and, of course, you’re constantly covered in vomit. Okay, maybe not the last one so much. It’s easy to lose perspective. You can get very annoyed with producers for whom your book is just one of hundreds, or thousands, that cross their desk every day. To expect them to care for your book a fraction as much as you do is like asking the hostess at Chuck E. Cheese’s to think your kid is more special than all the others. You can even get pissed at your fans. Heck, if everyone of the people reading this G-File were to buy the book today, it would be at number one on the best-seller list by next week. If every one of my Twitter followers (save the sex-spam bots) went to the bookstore and got it, it would be a massive publishing sensation. So sometimes it’s easy to drink a liter of gin, handcuff a Cartagena hooker to a motel-bathroom towel rack, and start screaming at the framed clown portrait on the wall, “Why won’t you ungrateful bastards buy it! Why!?!”
But then you realize, it’s only natural. I don’t immediately buy every book that comes out from authors I like. I don’t immediately pop in with a new Diaper Genie for every friend who has a baby, either.
What will be will be. Word of mouth is still what moves most books (at least for people without radio shows) and I think the word of mouth will be very positive and very strong. The reviews already in are great and I am told more are to come. If it doesn’t do as well as Liberal Fascism, so be it. That’s probably really bad news for the hooker in the bathroom, but otherwise I’ll be fine. I’m incredibly lucky to have the job(s), friends, and family I have. The rest is the small stuff.
Obama the Hero
I think this new ad going after Barack Obama for spiking the football is effective. And I understand why everyone is beating up on Bill Clinton’s repugnant line about how the death of Navy Seals would be really bad for Obama. How does that phone call work?
President Obama: “Hello, Mrs. Jones, this is the president of the United States. I am so sorry for the loss of your husband, and the father of your three small children. . . .”
Widow: “Thank you, Mr. President.”
President Obama: ”Hey, in the spirit of misery loves company, this whole crapstorm has cost me ten points in the polls, so I’ve got it even worse than you.”
But here’s what I don’t understand: No one, not the ad makers nor the pundits, has paid much attention to the fact that this is the view of the administration itself.
Remember when Joe Biden turned himself into a flashing idiot beacon, allowing other idiots to triangulate their stupidity to his location? Okay, okay, I need to be more specific (“You might also try making sense,” The Couch). Remember when he said the Bin Laden raid was the most audacious plan in 500 years?
Well, nearly in the same breath, Biden also explained how he sees his boss’s actions (and all the Democratic activists in the audience seemed to agree). He said, “Do any one of you have a doubt that if that raid failed that this guy would be a one-term president?” Obama, he said,”is willing to do the right thing and risk losing.”
Again, good for Obama. But clearly, his reelection prospects were a big issue. It’s almost as if these guys see the decision to kill Bin Laden as an incredibly brave bet where the stakes are his reelection chances. Kill him and Obama wins in 2012, fail in the trying and lose. I’m delighted Obama rolled the dice, but I’d prefer he hadn’t gone into it with a political wager in mind.
The Real Politicization
And another thing, all of this talk about Obama “spiking the football” misses a really important point. After all, we don’t actually know if he was making a purely political wager when he sent the SEALs in. And, as a strictly partisan matter, it is hard to denounce Obama too much for gloating, given the spectacle of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment.
But what we do know is that Obama tried to use Bin Laden’s death as a reason to support wind farms and other white elephants. Just shy of a year ago, I wrote about how Obama tried to turn the killing of Bin Laden into his “Sputnik moment.”
According to an article in the Washington Post headlined “Bin Laden raid fits into Obama’s ‘big things’ message,” the White House believes taking out the world’s most wanted terrorist is a boon for the entire Obama agenda.
The president says killing bin Laden proves that “as a nation there is nothing that we can’t do” and reminds us “that America can do whatever we set our mind to.”
When asked what effect bin Laden’s assassination will have on Obama’s agenda, White House press secretary Jay Carney explained, “We obviously think that if there is a takeaway from it, it is the resolve that he has, the focus he brings to bear on long-term objectives, that he keeps pushing to get them done. When talking about immigration reform, he keeps pushing to get it done. And I think that that was reflected in his approach to dealing with Osama bin Laden.”
Meanwhile, David Axelrod, Obama’s former White House consigliere, now running the reelection effort, says that this was all a “reaffirmation of that American determination and American spirit – the ability to do the things that some people thought impossible. And that has value.”
And then there was his “This. Is. Sparta!” State of the Union address just a few months ago, in which he tried to turn Bin Laden into the Vercingetorix to his Caesar.
If only all of America could be like SEAL Team Six! If only Americans could shut up and follow my orders!
Forget spiking the football, he wanted to take the football and suspend the rules of the game entirely. All because he killed a man who needed killing.
Book Stuff
You can always go to the Tyranny of Cliches blog to get updates on the “Tyranny tour,” but here are some highlights:
Here’s John Nolte’s wildly generous review.
Here’s my talk with NRO’s own John Miller.
Here’s the Commentary review.
Here’s the Roll Call review.
Alas
There’s no Various & Sundry section today. I wrote most of this during radio commercial breaks and podcasts, and looking for weirdness on the web is hard to do under such circumstances.