Caged Eagle

Caged Eagle starts out as promising as anything we've read yet - it sets itself out to be a story that spans a long sweep of time, from the second world war till the dawn of this century.  It starts out in familiar territory - a squadron of Recce pilots towards the end of the war.  A lot of old friends/references/tropes are back - The Mackenzie Delta, the Falaise Gap, the Otter, a sighting of Rommel by air,  the requisite shots at Monty.  But the story's WW2 section takes up fully two thirds of the book before we are catapulted into the 21st century with a note from the main character that says "I tried to tell the story of my life in Canada from 1944 to 1998 but it was simply too much.  I couldn't hand the detail."  Oh right - why would a writer want to get into anything as time consuming the details of a story?  By this point, implausibility piles on implausibility, the characters become shrill and irritating and any sense of a story with historical sweep gets left behind in 1944.

Meta-what?

The main character of the book, Gator Peters, is a thinly-disguised version of a young Rohmer - brash, cocky, a short 20-year-old who looks 16 and is already a Mustang Pilot.  Okay so far.  But then Rohmer takes a darker turn - makes him devious, ruthless, callous.  Okay, this gets more interesting - Rohmer starts with himself and and his experiences as a template then imagines it through a black mirror.  An anti-hero - a thoroughly unlikable main character.  This isn't something he's attempted before (well, at least intentionally).  And then, and then ... we get to page 64.  Page 64 contains a photograph of a young Richard Rohmer and identifies it as a photo of Gator Peters.  What??  What kind of weird turn is that?  Is Rohmer identifying himself with his most despicable character?  Is this a wish fulfillment for a life of greed and double-crosses not lived?  Or is it just the impossible-to-resist temptation of ego gratification with no thought given to the, er, psychological undertones of writing a book featuring a character based on yourself that is nothing if not evil and then using a photograph of yourself to illustrate what he looks like?  Yeesh.

Do two EPs make an LP?

One of the characters in the book is a rich Canadian named E.P. Tyler.  Okay, you think, Rohmer has done a biography of E.P. Taylor, so that makes sense.  The thinly-veiled Tyler has many of the same details of Taylor's life - raises horses for example, which kind of make sense.  But then late in the book, Rohmer tells us that E.P. Tyler is friends with E.P Taylor.  And then it's explained that the two were often confused!  Why in the world would you create a fictional counterpoint if you're going to drag in the real thing?  At this point I expected Gator Peters to walk into a bar and run into Richard Rohmer.

Twisting by the Pool (or do I mean Telegraph Road?)

If Rohmer was to revise How to Write a Be$t $eller, he'd tell you that the only thing a reader wants in a best-seller is a twist.  No, many twists.  As many as you can squeeze in.  And you should telegraph them clearly so the reader knows they're coming.  Examples:

- Mark Tyler's "secret" background, pretending to be a poor farm boy rather than the heir to the biggest fortune in Canada.  The observant reader will know something is up when no one can mention him without commenting on how poor his farmer father must be and how little he must have to go back to.  That's because his father is a poor farmer.  Which means he has nothing to go back to.  Because his father is a poor farmer.

- Gator and his wife and son have a plane crash that (spoiler alert!!!!) Gator survives.  You'd never know it.  Perhaps the fact that Gator writes the intro to this book a couple of years after the plane crash happens may be a clue, but you'd likely miss it, as you will be busy worrying about poor Mark Tyler and how he will have nothing to go back to after the war.  Because his father is a poor farmer.

-Louise's parentage.  Brian already guessed this in an e-mail to me at the halfway point. You will too.

- The final twist (it's the last paragraph): Spoiler Alert:  Quebec votes against separation!

Caged Heat

Without a doubt, Caged Eagle is Rohmer's most sexually explicit book.  By far.  Gone are the days when he added a little to spice things up - Gator's rampaging lust not only defines his character, but sets in motion events that will take the story to it's conclusion some 50 years later.  And with this unbridled attitude towards sex, I'm happy to report he's found the perfectly suitable metaphor to add panache to the scenes:

- "He had time for a quick bath in the common tub down the hall. Had to be sure all appropriate working parts - his wing tip and the two big bombs that hung from it - were clean and fresh if the evening's operation sortie was to be successful"
- "(Julie was) flying a little close formation with his wingtip which was already showing signs of getting airborne"
- "eager Garth whose wingtip was in full extension after being flown straight onto and flattened against the moving target of Julie's hard responsive belly"
- "I'd make your wingtip fly at a speed, a slow excruciatingly wet and sucking speed it's never flown before"  (wait - what?)
- "(Jane Knight) What a gorgeous creature and, boy, did she ever know what to do with his wingtip and bombs."
-"Suddenly his bare wingtip - long, large and pulsing with his young blood - was in her caressing hands"

And FYI - yes, the first occurrence quoted above treats it as two words, the rest as one.  Surely the book's only typo.

And in case the flying metaphors soar over your head, he reassuringly uses a standard lock-and-key example like so:  "Peters did not fumble with the room key. He thrust it directly into the lock, penetrating fully and turning it immediately".

Doors in London are notoriously hard to open.

The Penistic Advantage

Okay, Brian and Stan.

If neither of you certified insanists, bolstered by non-existent credentials other than an invitation by some descript editor to vulture down

upon those who dare to artistically create,

want to talk about this awful poetry, then it’s gotta be me.

I’ll go first.  Because we’ve got less than two months left, and we seem to be hung up on Poems by Arthur Henry Ward Jr. 

Yes, it’s a shameful piece of work, and the polite thing would be to just move on.  But a deal’s a deal, and Reading Richard Rohmer means blogging them all.  We knew the risks when we stared, and I, for one, haven’t forgotten what inspired us in the first place:

the venom of green

jealousy that which shekels motivates the artistic

eunuchs dedicated to the death of the talented.

Who is Arthur Henry Ward Jr.?

Let’s say you didn’t know “AHW Jr.” was a pseudonym for a paperback writer, a political hack, and the most decorated military man in Canada.  What would you think?  If I sent you a link to these things, and your only clue was: “This person is sort of famous, but not for poetry.”

I know my first guess:

School shooter.

Arthur Henry Ward is seriously pissed off.  Poem #1: Critics.  Poem #2: Smokers.  Poem #8: Women.  Poem #10: Politicians.  He’s also had it up to here with phonies, television, nuclear war and trade unions.  He even gives us a poem (“Patience”) about losing his.  Arthur Henry Ward is a fuming virgin crank.

And he writes like a twelve-year-old.

What’s the difference between a poem and an angry diary entry?  A poem has arbitrary line breaks.  Also, in a poem, whenever you get to something you know two other words for, use all three.

That way people know you won’t be silenced, censored, cowed.

But, thanks to Brian, we know that Arthur Henry Ward (the name even sounds like a spree killer) is really Richard Rohmer.  The then 56-year-old best-selling author of How to Write a Best Seller.

So it’s illuminating to encounter his – no better word for them -- “issues” in verse.

Critics

First of all, Richard Rohmer doesn’t like taking shit from critics.  They’re just jealous, they don’t know anything, and they’re only in it for the money, cash, dollars.  So, in “Critic” these “certified insanists” are blinded by “green-eyed greed” and usually (but not always) not

thinking at all except

about his money and the next review

Brian, you run with insanists: Does literary criticism pay better than I think? Was I wrong to go into oil exploration and contract law?  Critics love the long green.  And that’s why they oughta be locked up… in the bathroom? (I think I’m reading that right.) And

prohibited from stirring either his body or his

witches brew of non-splendid, money-grubbing prose

Critics get theirs again in the poem “Private Person” – shekels-motivated artistic eunuchs, I think you know who you are – and in “Visionary”:

selective editorial synthesis masquerading as valid, shining

truth, cruel, cutting to the bone

Presumably, these are the guys getting between the author and the dream we all dream of.  (No, not "boy vs. girl in the World Series of Love.")

distant beacons of unreachable desires wealth,

recognition, promotion, conquest, emulation,

appointment, honor, employment, independence

You know, like what Richard Rohmer... uh... I mean Arthur Ward deserves.

It’s hard to say who is allowed to comment on Richard Rohmer’s work.  But if you can’t say something nice you should obviously keep it to yourself.

Politics

Months ago, when we were reading Triad, Stanley noticed that Rohmer presents the novel’s big idea -- America, Russia and China should run to the world – as a good thing, without any supporting evidence.  Arthur Henry Ward’s on board, though, in “Visionary,” dreaming of 

…the coming together of the

political leaders of all the nations of the world

to surrender their sovereignty in whole or in

part to a weaponless Universal Government

That sounds kind of “big government” to me, but I’ve lived in America for a long time.  And it’s hard to reconcile with Ward’s other poems, where he complains about

socialism swamped

nations dedicated to redistributing wealth

and

the bloating

blinding-spending public employee masses

and the government Canada already has…

spending far beyond the financial resources

it collects

and

the stench… of trade unions

What do you think now, Stan?  How can Rohmer and Ward hate government and pine for more government?  Would taxes have gone down if the United States had merged with the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China in 1985?  Would trade unions have had more power or less?  Is it possible that Rohmer/Ward hasn’t thought this all through?

Sex

In How to Write a Best Seller, Richard Rohmer advises his students to use sex scenes sparingly.  The reader probably expects at least one, but yeech.  Don’t do any more than you have to.  In his own work, Rohmer tends to keep it down to about one three-line incident per blockbuster, and it’s probably just as well, judging by Arthur Henry Ward.

Because, thanks to Poems, I now know the phrases “penistic advantage,” “countless predecessor copulators,” “the intended inserter,” and “whether willingly or unwillingly… open mindedly but close leggedly.”  Wish I didn’t.

I've got to disagree with Brian, when he suggests that the cover of an exposé like Massacre 747 should have at least a passing resemblance to the incident described inside.  Not the point at all, as the Master himself explains in How to Write a Be$t $eller:


"The objective of the artwork is to make the jacket eye-catching, to make it catch the browser’s roving eye. After all, if he doesn’t stop and look, he’ll never pick up the book, which is what you hope he’ll do next.  Once he has it in his hand, he will be entranced and captivated by the artwork and the kaleidoscope of seductive colors and suggestive intertwined forms…"

You're getting hung up on details.  Where the Russian plane was and what the pilot could see when he shot down Flight 007.  (Although that's the alleged point of Rohmer's book.) As Ronald Reagan once explained, "facts are stupid things."

I think Massacre 747 has the best -- coolest, least-amateurish -- cover of a Rohmer since the American paperback of Ultimatum.  The rest of Rohmer's covers run the gamut from botch to disgrace.  The effect of the average Rohmer cover is to make you think design is impossible.

Have you ever been in an Abercrombie & Fitch?  They smell bad, the music is terrible, and the walls are covered in photographs of hulking, shirtless teenage creeps.  And you think: I get the message, but you're working way too hard to get me not to shop here. 

Like the cover of Periscope Red.  Message:  I asked a dimwit to draw this cover with his left hand. Please don't read this half-assed book.  It will only make you sad.

I guess Balls! is okay.

Red Arctic is the shortest Richard Rohmer novel – not half as long as Balls! – so why is it such a mess?

Let’s begin with the premise: Evidence is discovered that in 1763-64 a randy circus freak from Yakutsk claimed a bunch of islands for Mother Russia by spreading his seed and replicas of an “enormous silver buckle” throughout the Arctic Archipelago. Twenty-three or so decades later, Dr George Marshall, “the Osgoode Hall authority on international law”, finds that the claims are valid.

No need for a second opinion. Newfoundlanders are advised to prepare for the arrival of the Danish Navy at L’Anse aux Meadows.

The Soviets find Dr Marshall’s opinion so convincing that they begin set up camp, quite literally, throughout the Archipelago.

Again, no need for a second opinion. That said, the Politburo feels it necessary to get a ruling from the International Court of Justice.

Q: Why do both? Why not just wait for the Hague?

A: Because this is all part of Operation Red Arctic.

Q: Yes, but why risk “World War III” when you are certain that the ruling will go your way?

A: “Conflict and consequence are the basis of plot”, writes Rohmer (emphasis his) in How to Write a Be$t $seller. The man may be a lawyer, but he knows that when it comes to conflict guns, missiles and flights in planes with half-inflated tires trump legal argument.

Of course, Rohmer is much more than a lawyer. What he is not is an archeologist, a preservationist, an archivist or historian, which is why we have Inspector Frank Boychuk, RCMP, disturbing a grave, pawing through 18th-century logbooks, and flying about the country with irreplaceable documents and instruments of the highest importance.

I’ve got a sextant in my room. Want to see it?

Something I noticed early on with Rohmer, but have never addressed, is his problem with time. We see this with the many hour-long meetings found in his fiction. Dialogue, which amount to transcripts, never matches the length. I was thinking of this during the scene in the King Eddie bar – the one in which sexy Raisa walks dodges gawkers “like a ballerina slipping through the defensive line of the Denver Broncos.”

(I think Tyrone Braxton could've nailed Karen Kain. I don't mean this to sound at all sexual.)

Read the dialogue that follows aloud and you’ll find that just over a minute elapses between Raisa sitting, downing her white wine, and leaving with Boychuk.

Did anyone else notice that Boychuk orders wine for Raisa before she even arrives? How weird is that? And what a missed opportunity! She would’ve asked for vodka – which would’ve raised a red flag.

Pun intended.

But then there’s so much weirdness in Red Arctic, isn't there? Why is the RCMP in charge of everything? Why is Staff Sergeant Inspector Boychuk in command of the Armed Forces? Why can’t satellites detect Soviet activity in the Arctic Archapelago? Where are the American submarines? Why is the rest of world so silent? What makes Mikhail Gorbachev and the American president so chummy? Why is everyone so knowledgable about the 1989 Progressive Conservative budget?

I see the making of a drama set in the King Eddie bar (w/ dialogue drawn from the original):

Admiral Blank, CAF: The Mulroney government killed us in that 1989 budget and we’re paying the price now. 

President of the United States: Not only was morale crushed, every capital program for tanks, aircraft and other essential replacement equipment was ‘deferred’, meaning cancelled. 

Constable Joe Palmer, RCMP: Of all the dumb things to not go for a nuclear-powered sub. It’s the only kind of vessel Canada could get up here under the ice and look after defending these goddam waters in wartime and exercise sovereignty in peace time [sic]. We had the whole thing organized.

Inspector Frank Boychuk, RCMP: Yeah, it just took some goddam politician to blow it out of the water just the way old Diefenbaker destroyed the Avro Arrow program back in 1957 

President of the United States:  Since the 1989 political castration of your military, you’ve got nothing, no defense [sic] capability to use up there at all. 

The 1989 federal budget was delivered at the end of April. Red Arctic hit bookstore shelves in time for Christmas.

“Ohio” was released the month after Kent State shootings.

It’s like that.

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.

Thing$ I Learned from How to Write a Be$t Seller

-- Rommel and Patton (AKA Hour of the Fox) was originally going to be called The Rommel Legacy, and was going to be an alternative history of post-war Europe, if Rommel and Patton had negotiated an armistice in 1944.  Rohmer writes:

“That kind of historical novel isn’t everybody’s cup of tea…”

Or, apparently Rohmer’s.  The final book is 100,000 words about Rommel thinking about an armistice, but having a car accident instead.  The war follows its historical course.

“Now all I have to do is write it…”

Or not.

-- Retaliation, Rohmer’s business procedural about a Canadian bank taking over an American bank wasn’t inspired by a internal memo from an unnamed Canadian bank called “How to Take Over an American Bank.”  Rohmer was thinking about it before he came across the memo. So there.

-- Rohmer is aware that, in most literary works “conflict grow(s) out of character.”  This well-worn path the master eschews.

“In my fiction the characters and actions are designed to carry the message I want to get across… The characters personify institutions or nations.”

What’s that Fitzgerald line about characters, and starting out with a generalization and ending up with nothing?  Well, not that.  Rohmer starts out with President America and ends up with a be$t $eller.

-- When Rohmer bases a character on a real person, he is guided by a legal and artistic vision:

“I always have my thinly disguised character doing good things.”

Too many writers of potboilers make up terrible things about famous people and let the reader guess whom they might mean.  (Result: Entertainment)  Rohmer answers to a higher standard.

-- Rohmer freestyles his novels, and doesn’t like it when people monkey with what comes out.

“You can dictate your thoughts into a machine or directly to a stenographer… That’s the technique I use.” (p.62)

“When I got the manuscript back, the editor had altered almost every sentence in the book.  It took me four days to erase 98 per cent of the changes.” (p.106)

Drop the mic.

Stan asks: "Does it seem like he wrote this backwards?"

When Richard Rohmer wrote How to Write a Be$t $eller was he kidding? Was something like Triad actually planned?

This is a question so important I think it's worth breaking in two.

1. Did Richard Rohmer believe he knew what he was doing?
2. Why did nine of these terrible books become Canadian best sellers? We’re a nice country.

How to Write a Be$t $eller answers the first question.  Rohmer thinks he’s learned a thing or two about giving the people what they want.  I don’t know the answer to the second question, but I’ll make a guess… at the end of this post.

The only really useful book I’ve ever read about screenwriting is Save the Cat.  (He says, having never sold a screenplay.) Everything else was either a waste of time, for thinking about writing instead of doing it, or an out-and-out shuck.  If the people who wrote those books knew how to write and sell big money screenplays, they would.  And they’d keep the secret to themselves.  But Save the Cat was written by a guy who really did write big money screenplays that were turned into awful movies you wouldn’t watch to win a bet.

And then he died.  So you can enjoy Save the Cat without envy.

And Save the Cat is really good.

Save the Cat says: Do you want to make money or not? Follow this formula and write a movie they’ll show at the mall. Don’t write about your summer abroad.  Don’t write about French history.  Don’t waste everyone’s time.  Write about an FBI agent undercover at some place amusing. Make sure your likable lead learns something. The end.

The problem with Richard Rohmer’s How to Write a Be$t $eller is that Rohmer never learned how to write a best seller.  He just wrote nine.  And -- I don’t want to keep hammering this nail -- they’re terrible. And not in a fun way.  It’s impossible to imagine reading one for pleasure.  So, like the author of Save the Cat, he wants to tell you: “forget art, just follow this formula,” but there’s no formula to Rohmer. 

It’s just this block of exposition and this airplane trip and then this next block of exposition.  (Or, maybe twice a book, a piece of action fought out between ancillary cyphers, ending up exactly where it began.)  Is it the same President of the United States in all the novels?  Does it matter if it isn’t?  Sometimes he likes to say “I’m from Texas” over and over; other times he doesn't.

So Rohmer doesn’t know what to tell you.  He wrote these half-assed slogs and people bought them anyhow. It’s like writing a book called how to inherit money.

Here’s Rohmer’s advice:

Make sure your characters have no backstory. 

If you use real people, don’t say anything untoward. 

Don’t describe things much.

Don’t reveal information until you absolutely have to.

No swearing.

Add as little sex as possible.

Do you see the pattern here? 

It’s all about playing defense and not screwing up.  You will write a (Canadian) (business, politics or war) bestseller unless you do something stupid.

And I think that might be the answer to the second question: Why did people buy these books in the first place?

Were there 200,000 Canadian businessmen who loved Arthur Hailey so much that they’d read any old crap, as long as it was slightly like Arthur Hailey, and it was on the rack at the airport and didn’t have too much cursing?

Is that the real $ecret of the Rohmer $ystem?

Random thoughts on How to Write a Be$t $eller

First things first - does it seem like he wrote this backwards?  There's not a lot of evidence that he read too many other best sellers.  Shouldn't he have read, say, the 10 best-selling books from the last 5 years and looked for similarities, consistencies, patterns, etc?  Instead, he comes up with his theories of what a best seller is and then looks for examples to prove his point.  And when he does use an example - the titles of the top 10 best sellers from a random week in 1983 to show you how important a title can be - 8 of the 10 don't mesh with his theory that the title should tell you what the book is about.

In this incredibly slight book (125 very stretched out pages), was there a  minimum number of times he had to mention the words "best seller".  I'm guessing "4 times per page" might be an underestimate.  By the end of the first few pages, it's obvious that "best seller"  denotes a genre unto itself - that's the only thing worth writing, so why are you considering anything else?

His notion of the best seller gets to be weirdly obsessive - it reminds me of that episode of The Flintstones where Fred decides to get rich as a songwriter and he's only going to write one kind of song -hit songs.

Rohmer tells us that there are only two fundamental kinds of novels - character novels and action novels.  The latter is the way you want to go if you want to write a best seller, otherwise you're wasting the reader's time by making him read too much about a character when they are here for action, action, action.  Would it be mean to mention James Bond, George Smiley, Lew Archer, Travis McGhee, Jason Bourne, etc etc, here?

So I imagine a good example of the extensive research that one is supposed to do in preparation for writing can be seen in the extensive quotes throughout the book from the likes of Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift or Anthony Powell - all of which were major influences, I'm sure.  In fact, Exodus UK could have been the 13th volume of A Dance To The Music of Time.

Great advice:  "Avoid using words your reader won't know".

Every book needs a villain:  And here that would be the Publisher.  More unscrupulous even than the hit man in Separation 2

Physician, heal thyself: "Use dialogue whenever possible to replace otherwise boring descriptive passages"

Whatever:

"...stories about how a fat girl in New York copes with her sexual problems. Whatever." (pg. 16)

"...your daily stint at the typewriter or whatever is over." (pg. 65)

"Buy yourself a treat when you finish the first hundred pages.  Take a week off after two hundred. Whatever." (pg 66)

" Write and ask if they'd be interested in seeing your novel about growing up in the Arctic, or your expose on trout fishing, or whatever."(pg. 91)

So, we're finished with book #6, right?

Of the twenty-five or so remaining Rohmers, the one I most want to read is How to Write a Bestseller, because Balls! has planted an idea: Rohmer begins his books with the ending in mind, but has no clue as to how he’ll reach same. This hardly matters because every false start and each dead end contains something he wants to impart. I doubt the man has ever cut so much as a sentence in his entire career.

Balls! is the least Canadian Rohmer thus far. The novel’s hero, Sam Harris Joey Kowal Hugh Baker John Hansen Mark James, is an American. Canada doesn’t even come into play until page 163. Though White House staff advise otherwise, Albertan Peter Lougheed Lockhart, the prime minister, is a patsy, always at the ready to fly down to Washington. Hansen calls him Peter; Lockhart calls Hansen Mr. President. That the prime minister's unfounded fears of American invasion and annexation prove to be correct is a fluke, supported by the author's oddly skewed world view. In Rohmer’s geopolitical reality, Canada is in a perpetual state of threat because the Americans want our energy. The reaction of the Soviets, the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, and the United Nations to American invasion and annexation is never considered.

A queer anti-government vein runs through Rohmer's big Balls! (his biggest novel thus far). TransState shuts off the heat in 350,000 homes before bothering to inform New York's Governor Sharpe. Company president Sam Harris is kind enough to offer advice: “The question of how to handle this from the people’s point of view – emergency measures, the National Guard, the Army, the federal government, police, traffic, telling people what to do and getting them organized – that’s your bag, sir.”

Uncle Mike talks back to the TV, demanding that Sharpe fix an hours-old crisis that is the fault entirely of private industry. Meanwhile, nephew Joey announces that he will not - will not! - take his wife and infant twins to an emergency government shelter. He gives his brilliant middle finger to the Governor, Sharpe's advice and his offer of support, then takes to the road in a dangerously overloaded station wagon. Minutes later, finding himself stuck in a supernatural snowdrift, Joey expects government rescue. It never comes. So much for the Nanny State.

I wonder whether Joey’s lack of faith in Sharpe might have something to do with the fact that Rohmer's leaders of men, businessman and politicians exclusively, are forever throwing hyperbole into hyperdrive:

• “What we’re listening to is probably the most important decision outside a declaration of war,” says swinging bachelor Angelo Grazzi as his company shuts off supply lines.
• Governor Sharpe considers the loss of heat in 350,000 homes “the most profound crisis and emergency the country has ever seen.” He will later describe same as “the worst single disaster that has ever occurred in this country.”
• Vice-President Mark James tells the President that the country may be at “its weakest point since the Revolution.”

The Civil War can’t compare. American lives lost in the Spanish Flu Pandemic are forgotten.

The greatest tragedy in Balls! is that the Buffalo Disaster could have been avoided if only the President had chosen a career the energy industry instead of politics. Don't take my word for it - no less an expert than Petro-Canada president Bill Hooper describes the politician's off-the-cuff tanker plan as “Clever, very clever. Ingenious!”

What is that plan? Purchase and retrofit underused ships to carry natural gas.

Of course! [head slap]

The United States government will do what the private sector won’t. It will spend billions to get gas to Americans, righting a dangerous situation created by the energy companies. Lest you think that the country is descending into socialism, Vice-President James reassures: “We believe in the free enterprise system. So we’ll get out as quickly as we can.”

God Bless America.

Q: If, as Governor Sharpe states, the lives of close to a million Americans in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York State are at risk, how is it that loss of life is limited to the City of Buffalo?

And on that note, the revised Richard Rohmer Body Count:

Ultimatum: 1
Exxoneration: 200 (approx.)
Exodus/UK: 18*
Separation: 5
Separation Two: 1**
Balls!: 19,228***

* 17 according to Separation;18 according to Separation Two.
** does not include deaths first described in Separation, which is “the same book, yet different.”
*** may or may not include the 40th President of the United States.