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Wednesday, June 8, 2005
What Was He Thinking?
I'm trying to imagine what Patrick Robinson was thinking when he wrote his latest military-guys techno thriller, ScimitarSL-2. This is the last of my latest grocery store binge books. Briefly, the plot is that evil terrorists learn that if a volcano in the Canary Islands were to erupt with sufficient enthusiasm, the resulting tsunami would wipe out the entire east coast of the USA. So terrorists obtain nuclear missiles from North Korea, a nuclear-powered sub from Russia, and pay smart people in China to modify that sub so it will fire their missiles. Then they blow up Mt. St. Helen's, hurriedly claim credit, and present the US president with a list of demands which, being a liberal weenie, he decides to ignore. This leaves the noble US military to save the world behind the president's back, if they can.
Now here's the deal. If it's actually possible to wipe out the entire eastern seaboard of the US with a tsunami in this way, why would he carefully explain how to go about it...which is what this story amounts to...a detailed manual. The question is not moot. I live right where I would be most likely to get kaboomed by such a disaster. Did he write thinking that terrorists would try to do this anyway and his book could alert enough Americans to get action in time? Is it all just a political treatise aimed at helping to elect another Republican in 2008? Is the book just a bunch of silly-science, far-fetched sensationalism to sell a lot of copies and make a lot of money for him? Of course I have no idea what Patrick Robinson was thinking, but I do know that a great deal of media energy since 9/11 has gone toward speculation re. what terrorists might do to us next...and this book reads like a class in how most efficiently to achieve the greatest amount of death and destruction. For an author with a life career in the military, it's a peculiar book.
Re. grocery store books in general, right now there is an abundant harvest on the shelves at the ghetto grocery. All through the winter there were just occasional new ones. Now there are lots of new ones each time I look. That's because it's getting to be vacation time. People buy "beach books". A beach book is a huge, fat paperback full of either crazy, outrageous adventure or sex...sometimes both. Needless to say, "beach book" and "grocery store book" are synonyms. I call it literature if I might want to read it again sometime. If it's a read-and-pass-it-on job, that's a grocery store book. Why aren't any books of my recent interest in the literature category? Because they have nothing whatsoever to say except, "Ooh, let me tell you what happened. You almost won't believe it," as if a friend got your ear to tell some crazy thing that happened to him/her. Literature tells what happened as a way of telling what to think, feel, and believe, how to live your life. At least that's what I think. I gave the author of Scimitar SL-2 the compliment of wondering if he's trying to do more than just report an imaginary event. It's not a very good a story, but maybe the author was trying to be more than a beach book hack.
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