Reading Richard Rohmer

I'm with you both. Exodus/UK is a much better novel than its predecessors, but it shook my faith in  the author. Prior to this novel I was all too ready to accept the facts and figures he was apt to throw around. Does it really make economic sense to use tanker jets in transporting natural gas from the Arctic to Chicago? Seems not, but then I'm taken aback whenever the gas light goes on in my Jeep Liberty.

Hey, Richard Rohmer is a businessman and, according to jacket copy a "member of various boards… the President of the Mid-Canada Development Foundation Inc." You'll understand why I placed my trust in the Major-General, Colonel Pierre Thomas de Gaspé and the captains of industry.

London, July 1974 (The year of the Diamond Dogs).

But with Exodus/UK I found myself on familiar foreign territory. I've held a fistful of tickets to England in my day and I've moved my stuff - signed Exxoneration included - some fairly long distances: Montreal to Vancouver, Vancouver to Toronto, Toronto to Vancouver, Vancouver to Ottawa and Ottawa to St. Marys (resting place of Arthur Meighen, one of Joseph Roussel's predecessors). Believe me, the costs of these things haunt.

So I ask myself how much money it would take to relocate six million Britons and at a least some of their crap to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand (1975 pop.: 3.09 million)? Back in 1975, there's no way it could've been done for less than C$5000 per person ($20,315 today)… which amounts to C$30-billion ($121.8 billion today)… which means everyone is much better off just staying at home and watching Top of the Pops. I'll add that the economic devastation wrought by the withdrawal of Saudi investments would worsen greatly with two or so million empty homes being suddenly put up for sale. Good Lord, the Oxfam shops would be overflowing.

Do you dare? I do.

I dare call conspiracy!

Is it not curious that Jeremy Sands first mentions the idea of mass British emigration not six hours into the crisis? Is it not odd that he already has figures in hand that indicate two million would seek to emigrate to Canada in just such a crisis?

As with The Turn of the Screw, I suggest that things are not quite as they seem. I suggest that all is part of a plot to rid the United Kingdom of trade unionists. I suggest that crop-wielding dominatrix Jenny Powis is a government plant who was intended to incite. I question how it is that in the days before social media a crowd of 10,000 was able to gather at Trafalgar Square within two hours of the economic crisis made public.

Finally, I suggest that Prime Minister Jeremy Sands be charged in causing the death of Major Anthony Andrews of the Coldstream Guards, "whose body lay covered with a white sheet in Trafalgar Square, amid the feverish efforts to tend to the injuries of those who had struck him down." Like the car set ablaze during the 2010 Toronto Summit protests, he was sacrificed by the state.