by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

On June 25, I posted my introduction to an article by Ron Unz, “JFK, LBJ, and Our Great National Shame”:

There are three topics in the U.S.’s past that are radioactive to this day: the atomic bomb, the Kennedy assassination, and the Vietnam War. They are radioactive because they say things about the U.S. and its government that few Americans want to confront. For the last several years, the alternative media and even the mainstream media have carried stories about the maladies afflicting the American soul. On a wider scale, millions of Americans have a simple gut feeling that something is very wrong. They are very right, but recovery won’t happen until Americans start telling themselves the truth about this history and conduct the searing moral examination that that truth requires.

I suspect this article won’t get a lot of hits, but it’s an important article. From Ron Unz at unz.com:

I was correct about the number of hits. They weren’t absolutely abysmal, but they were weak.

I realized as I was writing that introduction that it would be a launchpad to a much wider article. The mental gears started turning immediately. Not just because I was on to the right diagnosis of the “maladies afflicting the American soul,” but on a more personal level, because I was on to the right diagnosis concerning the sales of my most recent novel, The Gray Radiance. They aren’t absolutely abysmal, but they have been weak. The analysis behind these twin diagnoses says something very important: we have no future until we confront this past.

I was foolhardy enough to write a novel that features not one, not two, but all three of these radioactive topics. (There is one other such topic—9/11—that I don’t deal with in the novel or this article.) I never told myself that, in so doing, I might be dooming the novel to poor sales, but I did realize that it was going to be a tough sell. So, why write the book? Because important books address difficult topics, and they hold the same challenge for the writer that Everest holds for the mountain climber. What’s the point of writing unimportant books?

Collectively, the toxic trio mark a dramatic turning point for America, and America is the main character of a trilogy of which The Gray Radiance is the second volume. (You don’t have to have read the first volume, The Golden Pinnacle, to understand and enjoy the second volume.) Inspiration is like a splinter, almost painful in its intensity sometimes, and it can be extracted only by putting it on paper or a computer screen.

And inspired I was; the novel burned a hole in my brain. I outlined an intricate and complicated plot that shifts back and forth in time between the 1960s and the 1940s. I did a ton of research. I had the closest I’ve ever come to writer’s block when I reached the Vietnam section. I approached it with trepidation because there are plenty of Vietnam vets who are still alive, and I didn’t want to be called out for any obvious and embarrassing errors. My research was meticulous, but I hesitated for a long time before I started writing that section. Finally, I just plunged into it.

The first chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book: mystery layered on mystery layered on mystery. The protagonist, Nick Wozniak, a reporter, encounters a memorable cast of characters as he pursues his most important story: to discover how his father died during World War II. Perhaps the most memorable character is Matthew Pearson-Stan Boyer-Roland Hendricks, the three names for the novel’s archetypical perfect spy, emblematic of the national security state that emerged after World War II.

I aimed the book squarely at my target audience: alternative media readers of above-average intelligence. I tried to attain the same goal I gave journalist Nick Wozniak: Ideally, his flow of words went straight to their minds, and the way he wrote it was never a distraction. I’m past needing to use twenty-dollar words (although sometimes they’re the only ones that fit), convoluted sentences, and other manifestations of look-at-me! writing. I wanted this book to go straight to its readers’ minds. The only demand it makes is that the reader pay full attention. The out-of-focus or distracted reader will get little from it and will undoubtedly miss important plot points.

So, from the standpoint of style the novel is fairly easy to read. In Chapter 4, however, the reader first encounters the Kennedy assassination. There, my treatment of the toxic trio begins.

If you reject the lone gunman conclusion, you’re left with the conclusion that more than one person was involved—the definition of a conspiracy. Just the CIA-induced odium attached to the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorists” has stopped and continues to stop many people in their tracks.

For if there was a conspiracy, who were the conspirators? That question has spurred voluminous research, which has led to quite plausible hypotheses of CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and Mafia involvement, and has quite plausibly implicated individuals all the way up to Lyndon Johnson, which is Unz’s and others’ hypothesis. The subsequent coverup implicates the Warren Commission, which included the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren; a former head of the CIA, Allen Dulles; and a future president, Gerald Ford. The major media, which asked few questions and conducted almost no investigation, were definitely in on the coverup.

Do enough research on the assassination and you’ll reach the conclusion that it was a coup. This leads inexorably to the conclusion that, way back in 1963, the government and the powers behind it were not just irretrievably corrupt, but irretrievably evil. That conclusion does not go down easily, especially for the millions of Americans who still have an unshakeable faith in government. For if government was evil in 1963, it’s only gotten more so since—irretrievable is irretrievable. Team red and team blue are both part of team black.

The Gray Radiance develops the theme that the evil received its impetus from the atomic bomb. Even before the unnecessary horror of Hiroshima, the nation’s rulers had seized control of the deadly device from the scientists who had invented it. For four glorious years, their power to destroy the world made them the world’s absolute masters. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and breeds absolute arrogance.

The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949, checking U.S. power. During the ensuing Cold War, the U.S. government called itself “The Leader of the Free World.” In fact, it was head of a federated global empire held together by the usual imperial glue. A semi-free republic became an unfree national security state, run by a Deep State cabal many of us have come to know—at least its contours—and despise. COVID tyranny and bringing us to the brink of nuclear war are only the most recent in the cabal’s long string of depredations.

The Vietnam War was the inflection point for the decline and fall of the American empire. The Gray Radiance shines a light on its lies, hypocrisy, incompetence, corruption, atrocities, and horror. What bravery and honor there was came from individuals who fought it, and the novel shines a light on that, too. The treatment they received when they returned home was often scandalous. Over 58,000 never returned. A large number, but it’s scandalous as well that most Americans don’t realize that millions of Vietnamese died (the Vietnamese never considered themselves two separate nationalities). That has been the pattern—American casualties dwarfed by local casualties, the latter ignored—in all of the U.S.’s subsequent wars of choice.

Vietnam’s legacy is shame, not because the U.S. lost but because the U.S. lost part of its soul. If it’s possible to reclaim that part, it can only be done through acknowledgment, examination, remorse, and correction. Vietnam has been consigned to the same dark attic as Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Kennedy assassination. They are the stuff of nightmares—death—the national security state’s genesis and handiwork.

Millions of Americans know something is very wrong, but they won’t climb the drop-ladder to the attic. Few understand how these nightmares have led to America’s continuing intellectual and moral deterioration, most recently: COVID hysteria, deadly vaccines, the Biden puppet presidency, and the U.S. on the brink of nuclear war. Without that understanding, continued deterioration is a certainty.

Ayn Rand could have stated her philosophy in a tract that would have been read by a small fraction of the millions who have read Atlas Shrugged. She understood that a great novel seizes its readers’ imaginations because it tells the truth in ways no other medium can. It transports far beyond mere facts, dry tracts, and essays, no matter how well written.

People don’t read novels the way they once did. They spend hours in front of a TV or in the playpens of social media but say they don’t have the time. However, the obituaries for novels are premature. There will always be those who want more than screen-based culture, such as it is, and writers with truths that can be told only in a novel.

I knew The Gray Radiance was asking potential readers to climb the drop-ladder. I didn’t mention the bomb, the assassination, or the war in my publicity for the book, not wanting to scare them away before they even looked at it.

My doubts were assuaged by my brilliant proofreader, Kate Jones, whose praise was effusive. She found the typos and other mistakes, but she wouldn’t touch a thing about the actual story.

I suppose I get degree-of-difficulty points for putting the toxic trio in a novel. What I really want is more readers. Not because I’m pursuing either fortune or fame from my writing. I knew before I wrote my first novel that I would never find a place on anybody’s bestseller list. I write because I love it. People ask me how I discipline myself to write. That’s never been my challenge. Rather, it takes a monumental effort sometimes to tear myself away from writing and tend to my financially sustaining pursuits.

I want more readers because The Gray Radiance is the best thing I’ve written, not despite the “difficult” themes, but because of them. And because it has the other elements of any novel that deserves to be read—an original, compelling plot, memorable characters, and a style that focuses attention on the story, not on the writer.

There are readers who seek those elements; perhaps I should have directed my publicity towards them. The Gray Radiance will find its audience, sooner or later. I call attention to it now, before it gets lost in the shuffle, for those readers who have the curiosity, intellectual capacity, and desire to read challenging books and have rarely found them. For those readers, I make a simple statement: here is a novel that deserves to be read and will reward the investment of your time and emotional energy.

And what about America, the main character in my projected trilogy? America is circling the drain and its downward spiral will continue. Too many refuse to think. Nothing is more dangerous than that refusal and the failure to grasp reality, past and present. America cannot be made great again until we understand how it lost what greatness it had. That understanding may not come until after it hits bottom, if ever; but The Gray Radiance radiates light in the darkness.

On a wider scale, millions of Americans have a simple gut feeling that something is very wrong. They are very right, but recovery won’t happen until Americans start telling themselves the truth about this history and conduct the searing moral examination that that truth requires.

If not now, when?

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