A Cry from the Far Middle
Page 16
Nowadays, of course, writers may be of any gender, their spouses or partners likewise, and their domestic arrangements highly variable. And what modern writers have to say about their spouses or partners is still a load of crap.
Look, we’re writers. It’s what we do. Therefore I will skip the sugared words about you, Tina O’Rourke, and hope that my silence speaks volumes of appreciation, esteem, admiration, obligation, wonder, delight, pride, gratitude, and love (not to mention monogamy).
I would maintain an equally eloquent muteness about the other people I need to thank, but that would mean leaving their names out thereby causing them to read this and learn that writers are deplorable people. Since many of these people work with writers for a living and some are writers themselves, this would be disheartening information.
Thank you everyone at American Consequences, the free political economics web magazine where I am editor in chief.
Therefore I have no one but myself to blame for the twenty-four chapters of this book that first appeared in American Consequences.
The blame is all mine, but if you, kind reader, find anything creditable in those chapters please give that credit to AmCon’s distinguished staff:
Publisher Steven Longenecker—“Publish and be damned,” said the Duke of Wellington when a blackmailer threatened to print shocking letters by the Duke. And Steven must sometimes feel the same way about the drafts we American Consequences writers dump upon his desk. But he never gives into the temptation to send us to perdition. He keeps the magazine on the straight and narrow path to a blessed publication.
Managing Editor Laura Greaver—she can manage everything and edit anything and manages to edit out managerial noise while managing to add editorial authority to every edition. We don’t call her “Managing Editor” for nothing.
Creative Director Erica Wood—an illustrative dream for subjects that are a nightmare to illustrate, a Picasso of pie charts. She brings the light of art to the dismal science of economics. Her bar graphs should hang in the Louvre.
(As I said, American Consequences is free. Just Google us, click on “Subscribe,” and you will hear from us constantly—the way you constantly hear from other best-things-in-life-free stuff, such as your family.)
And we at American Consequences thank our friends at the clear-eyed and far-sighted financial advisory company Stansberry Research. In particular:
Founder Porter Stansberry—Odysseus of the financial seas, navigating between the Scylla of booms and the Charybdis of busts, tied to the mast of wise investment while the Sirens of Wall Street try to lure customers onto the rocks of fatal debt and equity portfolios.
General Manager Jamison Miller—as in Five-Star General. Jamison is Eisenhower planning the investment newsletter D-Day, which is every day because they’re daily newsletters invading the hard-fought market beachheads each morning. What’s more, Jamison is also in charge of making work fun—something Ike notably failed to accomplish on June 6, 1944.
Many of the chapters in this book were inspired by Stansberry Research insights and analysis, and “The Inaugural Address I’d Like to Hear” was originally published in the Stansberry Digest.
A briefer version of the preface and the chapters “It’s Time to Make Rich People Uncomfortable Again” and “A License to Drive (Me Crazy)” were first published in the opinion pages of the Washington Post under the aegis of Associate Op-Ed Editor Mark Lasswell. Mark is the Clark Kent of the Post, yanking off his horn-rims and dashing into phone booths and emerging dressed (metaphorically, I hope) in cape and tights to save the world . . . from my clumsy prose, among other grave threats.
“Woke to the Sound of Laughter” was published by Freddy Gray, editor of Spectator USA. Well done, Freddy, for letting me take a whack at the puzzling gestures of virtue signaling, but, even more, for finally importing the Spectator, published weekly in Britain since 1828, to America, a country with high tariff barriers on intelligence and wit. Freddy, I can only hope that your use of polysyllabic words, references to obscure authors such as Shakespeare, and occasional failure to remove the “u” from color and harbor do not impede your success in America’s marketplace of ideas, such as it is.
For almost forty years, my lecture agency, GTN, a UTA company, has been—try to wrap your head around this—convincing people to pay to listen to me talk. I wish GTN were in charge of my household. I’d be getting an allowance from the kids instead of the other way around, and I’d have all the dogs’ Milk-Bones. But the really great thing would be the listening. Thanks to GTN I’ve experienced a lot of it at venues all around the country. But it’s never happened to me at home.
(BTW, proposed new business model for GTN suggested by my kids and dogs: convincing people to pay me to shut up.)
Thanks to GTN team members Debbie Greene, Kristen Sena, Jen Peykar, and most of all David Buchalter. Put Debbie, Kristen, Jen, and David on the case and they’d have Neil deGrasse Tyson addressing the annual meeting of the Flat Earth Society, Greta Thunberg lecturing OPEC, Dick Cheney giving a PowerPoint presentation to PETA, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez making the keynote speech at Davos.
And don’t get me started on GTN founder Don Epstein. His genius is not only in finding audiences for speakers but in coaching and cajoling those speakers into becoming brilliant public orators. Don is so good at it that, if wise heads had prevailed in certain political campaign staffs and Don had been consulted, Mike Bloomberg would have turned into the Demosthenes of Democrats and Bill Weld would have become the Win-One-for-the-Gipper of the GOP, and Mike and Bill would be running neck-and-neck in the 2020 presidential election.
Then there is the matter of public relations. An author wants a book to have a public. And an author wants that public to have a relationship with the book that’s something more intimate than Swipe Left. This is where the astute skills and discerning perceptions of Scott Manning & Associates come into play. Founder Scott Manning and his colleague Abigail Welhouse are fabulous relationship counselors. They sit down with the public and the book. They urge the public to talk through its insecurities and anxieties about the book and be more sensitive to the book’s needs. They advise the book to be more supportive of the public and more open to emotional engagement. They help the public and the book build a relationship that is so strong, enduring, and mutually respectful that even a $26 cover price doesn’t cause screaming and tears and slammed doors.
But, of course, all of the foregoing thanks would be “thanks for nothing” if it weren’t for the people at Grove Atlantic who made this book a physical reality.
And a thing of beauty, as all Grove Atlantic books are. This is the work of Art Director Gretchen Mergenthaler who has turned our hardcovers and paperbacks into fashion statements. Don’t wear Givenchy, don’t wear Dolce & Gabbana, don’t wear Prada, don’t wear Ralph Lauren, carry a Grove Atlantic book. In fact don’t wear anything at all. Just carry a Grove Atlantic book and you’ll be dressed for . . . well, that depends on the subject of the individual book. In the case of my book you’ll have a beautiful fig leaf to clothe your ideological nakedness when you’re expelled from the political Garden of Eden for having tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Or that’s what I’d like to think. Anyway, the fig leaf will look good on you.
The job of Managing Editor Julia Berner-Tobin and Production Director Sal Destro is—authors being the irresponsible and self-willed creatures that we are—to herd cats. They are good at it. If Julia and Sal had been cowpokes in the wild west, the Chisholm Trail would have been crowded with thousands of cats, all moving north at a steady pace in an orderly fashion from the litter boxes of Texas to the scratching posts of Abilene.
Copyeditor Donald Kennison is the SEAL Team Six of semicolons, the Clausewitz of subordinate clauses, the Sun Tzu of syntax, and the Washington at the Valley Forge of my tangled sentence structure.
Director of Publicity Deb Seager is so good at publici
zing things that she could get a front-page headline out of a Dalmatian having spots, set off a Twitter storm over the Pope being Catholic, and cause the House Judiciary Committee to hold a congressional hearing about where bears go to the bathroom.
Associate Publisher Judy Hottensen is responsible for sales. “Could sell ice to Eskimos” is no longer an acceptable cliché in these times of climate change and heightened sensitivity to language. (Although soon someone may well need to market Sub-Zeros to the Inuit.) So let us instead say that Judy could sell dial phones to Tim Cook, Sears and Roebuck catalogues to Jeff Bezos, and a complete set of The World Book to Wikipedia.
Editorial Assistant Sara Vitale is learning just how much assistance authors need, especially if they’re of a certain age. Sara, I know you’re hundreds of miles away in New York, but where the heck are my car keys?
And, lastly, let me return to the aforementioned Morgan Entrekin. If James Joyce had had the advantage of Morgan’s blue pencil, Finnegans Wake would have been at the top of the New York Times bestseller list every week since 1939.
And if all publishing houses were run like Grove Atlantic, the whole world would have its face in a book instead of an LCD screen. Smartphones would be used as nothing but bookmarks. Even the character who’s been hanging out in the TV room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the past four years would become a bookworm. (Morgan, can we get the reprint rights for a large print edition of Go the Fuck to Sleep?)