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Life intrudes.  Some of it's fun, some of it isn't so much fun.  But I'm ready to close the book on Massacre 747. Stanley? Brian?

Massacre 747 isn't much of a book at all.  There was this tragedy, and here's everything Richard Rohmer's researchers read about it.  It isn't even politically rabid in any interesting way.  You wonder if Rohmer had the idea to write Starmaggedon first -- inspired by the KAL 007 incident -- and then realised he could get another book out of his notes.

Show your work.

So what was KAL 007 doing in Soviet airspace?  Seymour Hersh concludes that it was pilot error.  The wrong numbers were entered into a navigational computer, and then the system tried to correct itself, and made the problem worse.  Rohmer dismisses this theory, and his argument, more or less, is that pilots don't make mistakes.

Which would be circular reasoning -- we know pilots don't make mistakes because they don't -- even if we didn't have the anecdotal counter-evidence of Rohmer's wartime memoirs, in which Flying Officer R.H. Rohmer fucks up roughly 2/3rds of he time.

What's left then, once you eliminate the impossible?  The Koreans weren't spying, and they weren't there by accident.  So they must have been taking a shortcut to save money on fuel.

$2,600 by Rohmer's guess.
 
And it's interesting that Rohmer, pilot and businessman, can't believe that a pilot could make a mistake, but can easily believe a corporation would kill its customers to save a couple of bucks.

I Have Seen the Future, and it Rohmers

I skipped ahead and read Massacre 747 last month.  My copy arrived the same week Ukrainian separatists shot down a civilian airliner (with Russian weapons) and the coincidence was too eerie to ignore.  Is life more like a Richard Rohmer novel -- repetitious and banal – than we care to admit?

Separation (1975) features a British prime minister named Margaret Thrasher four years before Margaret Thatcher takes office.

In 1980, Rohmer has PLO sappers in rubber rafts blowing holes in the sides of supertankers in Periscope Red.  In 2000, Al-Qaeda uses a small boat to blast a hole in the USS Cole.

In Triad (1982) Iraq uses a nuclear weapon to stop Iran from taking Baghdad.  In real life, Saddam starts using weapons of mass destruction against Iranian invaders in 1984.

In 1984’s Retaliation, Rohmer imagines Canadian banks buying American ones and making everyone crazy with awe. In 2004, Toronto-Dominion buys Banknorth, and then Commerce Bancorp in 2007.  Although the Boston Bruins are compelled to play their home games in the TD Garden, war hasn’t broken out.  Yet.

In Starmageddon (1986) Reagan builds Star Wars and it works.  You can’t win them all.

In Red Arctic (1989) the Soviet Navy and the RCMP battle for control of Canada's far north. And that was before the ice started melting.  Look, here’s the Economist, June 16, 2012:

“For half the 20th century the Arctic, as the shortest route between Russia and America, was the likeliest theatre for a nuclear war, and some see potential for fresh conflict in its opening. Russia and Canada, the two biggest Arctic countries by area, have encouraged this fear: the Arctic stirs fierce nationalist sentiment in both…
“Yet the melting Arctic will have geostrategic consequences beyond helping a bunch of resource-fattened countries to get fatter. An obvious one is the potentially disruptive effect of new trade routes. Sailing along the coast of Siberia by the north-east passage, or Northern Sea Route (NSR), as Russians and mariners call it, cuts the distance between western Europe and east Asia by roughly a third. The passage is now open for four or five months a year and is getting more traffic…
“For Russia, which has big plans to develop the sea lane with trans-shipment hubs and other infrastructure, this is a double boon.”

Spooky.  He’s like that guy who could see the future.  You know, Chris de Burgh.  And here’s the kicker, from the Economist:

“There are risks in this, of dispute if not war, which will require management. What is good for Russia may be bad for Egypt, which last year earned over $5 billion in revenues from the Suez Canal, an alternative east-west shipping route.”

What’s good for Russia may be bad for Egypt?  Not if snowshoe-wearing PLO assassins have anything to say about it.

Doe$ anyone el$e $mell a be$t seller?

If the major-general isn’t working on Red Arctic II, we may have to do it ourselves.

Richard Rohmer's Rich Man, Poor Man

Step #1: Buy a monitor.

Why do I like Richard Rohmer's How to Write a Best Seller? Because it’s so positive! You will write a best seller! You will make a lot of money!

What I don't like is the unstated: You’ve got to spend money to make money. Rohmer encourages, never once warning that the former may well outstrip the latter. Writing the Rohmer way means hiring a researcher, a typist and an editor. Follow Irving Wallace or James Clavell and you'll be travelling a year or six before so much as turning on the Panasonic tape recorder you bought.

More than anything, Rohmer is a businessman. He sees the novel as a commercial pursuit – “Otherwise, why bother writing it?” – so it seems a bit odd that he never talks about return on investment.

I haven’t mentioned postage, which turns up in his advice in wooing agents:

Include a return envelope with sufficient stamps on it. It makes it easier all round, and it’s the polite business-like thing to do if the agent is stupid enough to reject you as an author who could make him a million.

A million. A bestselling author sells 10,000 copies of his latest – let’s say, Starmageddon, (retail price: $19.95) – bringing $19,950 in royalties. This means that at the end of the day his agent receives $2992.50.

I’m willing to wager good money that Starmageddon sold something substantially less than 10,000 copies. Will anyone rise to the challenge?

In interviews – and in the book itself – Richard Rohmer predicted that How to Write a Best Seller would be a best seller. It wasn’t. The market wasn’t there. You'd think a businessman would've recognized that.

Before we let go of Starmageddon, I think it should be noted that Captain Bart Steen is the biggest idiot in Rohmer’s stable of powerfully-bodied men.

When he catches and disposes of the spy, he must know that his ship's cover is blown. As if further evidence is needed, two Soviet destroyers chase down the Gray, forcing it to stop. Confronted by the captain of one, Steen learns that the Soviets are aware of his identity:

Steen was started. How in hell did the Russian know who he was? Then he realized the answer was very simple. The destroyer crew had simply tracked the ship’s name and flag through their computer and come up with the registration information – the country of registration (the flag) and the name of the owner.

Note to self: In future, do not use real name.

Steen was sure that, because of his high profile as a former U.S. Navy nuclear submarine commander, Soviet intelligence would have a full dossier on him.

Hey, that guy I killed an hour ago… Could he have been a Soviet spy?

They would know – and the destroyer captain would know – that he had specialized in the Soviet Union’s research and development of its own Strategic Defense System [sic] during his assignments at the Pentagon, at naval headquarters in Brussels and, finally, as naval attaché at the U.S. embassy in Moscow.

Now that I think about it, maybe it would've been better to have had someone less conspicuous lead this mission. Should I abort? Not on your life! I've fooled those Commie bastards with my hidden control panel. Good thing I saw that old Rocky and Bulwinkle Show. Boy, I sure got those Ruskies fooled!

The man is an idiot; every bit the dim bulb as chatty Lieutenant Commander Mike Doyle.

It’s a wonder the Soviets didn’t win the Cold War.

What’s there to say about Starmaggedon?  It’s downhill from the title.  The same old stuff, done like even the author has lost interest. As Stan points out, the characters themselves say they feel like they’re in one of those old James Bond films. 

It would be third-rate one, like A View to a Kill.

Or The World is Not Enough or Quantum of Solace.  Notice how no one talks about the sour, lazy lousiness of Quantum of Solace?

Maybe it would have been more fun if we’d read Starmageddon first, by accident.  As it is, things that used to make me laugh out loud in Rohmer now just make me check off the box on my Rohmer list.

The vanishing subplots.  (The crewman the captain murders on page 8.  Was he a spy? Who sent him?)  The entire business with the spy ship.  Did it make any difference whether they saw the crash or not?  Did it make any difference whether the Vice President was on board the plane or not?  What about the trade war over automobile imports?  What about the Russian ambassador?  We hear a lot about the Russian ambassador that adds up to nothing.

The endless Oval Office meetings where people show each other charts and graphs.  Apparently, no one in the administration of Space Reagan knows anything.

The boring, thinly-disguised characters who were boring to begin with in real life.  Why bother making up Space Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Rocket George Shultz?  Especially if you’re not going to dish on them?  That’s why you have President John F. Gilhooley.  So he can do it with sexy but unstable movie star Carilyn Conroe, and mobbed-up lounge singer Frank Amore can tell her to cool it, baby.  Rohmer’s Jeanne Kirkpatrick is homely and likes talking to handsome men and… that’s all.  Shultz is less than that.  Is the hysterical, self-serving Democratic politician who ruins everything supposed to be Patricia Schroeder?  What did she ever do to Richard Rohmer?

The repurposed passages from an earlier book.

Drunk Russians.

The quarter-page perfunctory sex scene.  Wow, does that guy hate writing about sex.

The ultimatum.

The rushed ending, and the late arriving, tacked-on Big Decision, in this case “Will Germany Defend Itself?”  Answer… yeah, sure, why not?

Wait, I did laugh out loud once:

“I’m talking to you in the clear, Bart.  Whatever I say to you might be overheard, so I have to be cautious.  First, you should know you’re right in the center of the Soviets’ favorite testing range for their PL-5 intercontinental ballistic missiles and for the Strategic Defense System weaponry they’ve been developing.  They do this testing from a place just to the west of where you are, on the Chukotskiy Peninsula.  Since the mid-1980s they’ve installed at their main base there 115 multiwarheaded ICBMs, both the SS-16 and the PL-5.”

Let’s see… what else don’t we want the Russians to know we know?  I guess that’s it.  On a personal note, my ATM PIN number is 12345, I leave my house key under a rock by the front door, and J. Edgar Hoover will be blowing me in the dressing room at Frederick’s of Hollywood tonight from 8 to closing.  I wish I could tell you more, Bart.  But you never know who could be listening.

" To her right side was Scott's boss, secretary of defense Carl Berger.  Scott had a lot of confidence in Berger, a wealthy California insurance agent.   He was a Vietnam veteran who had risen in the ranks of the army reserve to a brigadier general.  He understood the military and the Soviet threat, and he was a scrapper".  And he learned about the military and the Soviet threat by..... selling insurance?   This biographical detail is never mentioned again.

Which is the greater number:  the combined ICBMs in both the Soviet and American arsenals in, let's say 1986 (the year the book was written) or the number of times Russia is referred to as "the Motherland" in Starmageddon.

Of Rommel & Patton, Starmageddon, Reagan and Mulroney

Aired in 1987, uploaded to YouTube in 2013. Fourteen months on the site and it's garnered all of 27 views (my visits account for three). It's an interesting interview in that Rohmer shares his opinion that Star Wars is doomed, but only because the shuttle is grounded and Reagan is soon to be out of office. My favourite part comes in discussing Brian Mulroney:

When the fire starts he throws gasoline on it instead of something to put the fire out. And that has been Mr Mulroney's biggest difficulty. And the handling of the Sinclair Stevens affair is just another graphic example of that - not only does he throw gasoline on it, when he flips to the other side and changes his mind, he throws alcohol on it.

I chortled.

Starassacre 767

There seems to be some confusion about when Starmageddon takes place.  It takes place far enough in the future that the Strategic Defense Initiative works – and it works like a charm – and close enough to when it was written that all other technology is exactly the same as the day KAL Flight 007 was shot down.  Same fighter jets, same airliners, same missiles, same radar, same beacons, same radios, same inflight “delicious breakfast.”  (Same East and West Germany.) Because Rohmer had paid for that research, for Massacre 007, and it was still fresh and tasty.  So Fall, 19200083. 

Brian, I know you’re inclined to chalk this up to Rohmer pulling another Patton’s Gap/Rommel & Patton, Separation/Separation II.  And selling the same thing twice with a new cover.  But I think it’s something deeper and prettier than that.

I think, in order to believe in the Strategic Defense Initiative, you had to set aside everything you knew about the nature of matter and time.  I think that’s what its fans loved about it.  The only thing between it working in theory and it working in practice was physics itself.  In hack screenplay terms this is known as “a buy.”  You have a place where your story starts and a place where you want it to end up, and you have a buy in the middle.  A little coincidence. An accident. An inheritance. A magic spell.  A friend at City Hall who owes you a favor.

The jail cell has an air duct, and the air duct is just big enough to crawl through.

How was SDI going to overcome everything we knew about science?  Top scientists were going to figure it out.

If we could knock down all of Russia’s ICBMs, what would stop them from using their bombers, cruise missiles and submarine-launched missiles?  Well, they just wouldn’t, that’s why.  Because they’d be so disheartened.

It’s a buy.

When Reagan said, “Here’s my strategy in the Cold War: We win, they lose,” it wasn’t bluster, really.  It was a script note.  Now figure out how we get there.

When does Starmageddon take place?  It takes place inside Ronald Reagan’s brain. It takes place now and in the future.  In a parallel universe where Reagan is president forever. 

Before we talk about Rommel & Patton (AKA The Hour of the Fox) I want everyone to acknowledge that I was right, and it was going to boil down to a last page decision to accept an offer or not.

(Kelly clicked the heels of his shiny boots together.  Fools! Incompetents! Why didn't they listen to me!)

So yes, Richard Rohmer can reduce even the great tides of history to a series of meetings and an up-or-down from the head office.  Richard Rohmer's Life of Jesus would be fifteen Last Suppers, followed by JC taking an offer to God, "What if this cup passed from me?" and God saying No.

I haven't even read the jacket copy on Starmageddon, but I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that Earth is running out of something (despite the best efforts of our wise, quasi-military planetwide government) so we have a war with aliens over space minerals, and after a while they send us a peace offer and a plan to merge technologies.  Will we accept? Is it a trap?

Will Z'rk deposit 20 billion credits into our space account?