Boomer Family Untied From the 60s

Happy Wednesday, Stroock's Books reader(s).

We got a spot of rain here in New Jersey last night and are supposed to get more on Thursday. Let's hope so. Local reservoirs are about half full and the state is wracked with small wildfires. 

A dear friend from college is turning 52 today. We congratulated him and said he should celebrate by finally coming out. 

Fun fact, we filed yesterday's post from an exam room in Morristown Medical Center. We ourselves were not the patient. Rest assured that everyone is just fine, A-Okay and everything is back to normal. We walked into the empty ER and the nice lady at the front desk sent us right back. The polite, competent (and really young) medical staff got us in and out of that joint in two hours. We passed the time by mocking our fellow North American and his socialized medicine which would have taken a couple of hours just to admit us.

Yesterday we described Family Ties' Steve and Elise Keaton as a couple of ex-Hippies who had turned into respectable middle-class types. Quite right. We should take a look at the couple's politics more, because they were a fascinating 80s cultural phenomenon. Steven had radical roots. He attended many anti-war protests. He was once an editor at a radical hippy magazine called The Scavenger.  Steven wrote a play called A Draft Card for the Burning. He openly associated with former 60s radicals wanted by the FBI. 

Time passes, as is its wont. Marriages happen, children arrive, mortgages are taken out. Those children must needs be cared for and mortgages paid. By 1982 Steven is a producer at the local PBS affiliate. Elise is an architect. These are facts of life in 1982, and hilarious in retrospect in 2024. Even funnier, Steve and Elise didn't settle down in San Francisco, or some other hippie heaven. The Keatons live in Columbus Ohio. Why Steven even likes to take in the Ohio/Ohio State game. Sorry folks, one can't get more American outside of laboratory conditions. 

Stop Anti-Semitism has issued its college and university Juden Hass report card. Four schools get an A grade: Baylor, Elon, Clemson, and the University of Mississippi. The south has always been a friend to the Jew. Sadly, our grandmother's own LSU didn't make the list. Actually, several southern schools received mediocre or failing grades, but reader(s) will get the point. And most of the northern schools on the report are run by Jew hating communists. Dang Yankees....

Disgraced former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle is a plagiarist and fabulist. He is also a moron. Via Breitbart, Barnicle laments the decline of cable news:  “I don’t know how we make ourselves relevant again because we can’t compete with 20 second snippets on an iPhone, walking up the street and getting your entire news digest of the day in less than a minute on your phone as you’re walking in a crowd with coffee in one hand and your phone in the other. I don’t know how we catch up to that.” Barnicle still doesn't 'get it'. Cable news isn't competing with Tik Tok. It's competing with Joe Rogan and Adam Carolla, and Pod Save America and hundreds of others of current events podcasts that people listen to while on the way to work, or at the gym or doing household chores. Idiot. 

We sigh forlornly as we consider what to write next summer. Too early? No. It's only six months off. We think perhaps we may be over thinking the Medieval novel problem. Our bookselling strategy relies on the backlist. People buy one World War 1990 novel and then buy another and another, and another...We're employing the same strategy with the Great Nuclear War series. There's plenty of overlap and vertical integration between the two. And honestly there would probably be some overlap with an entirely different kind of novel eg, Medieval warfare. But maybe not enough. Let's say we write The Bastard's Conquest. It sells well. We write another, and another...