When you see the Buddha...

Popular history is replete with uncovering or emphasizing specific people or situations that result in significant change:

Taxes create the American Revolution…

The Armada fails…

Caesar crosses the Rubicon…

All the events and people are important but the flat acceptance of these “facts” belie the broader context that these events occurred in. Historical perspective is always cloudy at best, obscured by time, interpretation, and subjective point of view. Contemporary perspective is no clearer than historical perspective, obscured by subjective point of view, acceptance of contemporary contextual and cultural pressure, even the haze created by intentional propaganda. Evaluating any event, historical or contemporary, is at best a guess, pure speculation, or at worst intentional or unintentional echos of the ambient propaganda.

The attempt therefore is to extricate oneself from the restraints of “pop” history in the hope to discern a glimmer of what actually happened, is happening, or what could possible happen. (There is a solid argument that this is folly. All history since Herodotus is in one measure or another interpretive, but that is better suited for another discussion.)

Our divination of events in the alternative world of On The Rocks was admittedly preferenced on subjective assumptions. When we were writing the first drafts of the book, in the early 1990’s we were seeing the growth of the political Evangelical movement in the US, its embrace by the GOP, and a darker timber to the political rhetoric. ( George Bush’s lament of “Card carrying members of the ACLU” an echo of the McCarthy era “Card carrying member of the Communist party.”) At the same time the Iron Curtain has collapsed, along with the Soviet Union and the uncertain outcome of the splintering of empire. Tiananmen’s images of bravery and slaughter were fresh in our minds. The Japanese economy seemed invincible.

In that context two under employed theater types, watching their toddlers play on the beaches of Puget Sound while float planes crawled through the air and private craft bobbed in the distance could easily conjure up a slightly dystopian future with bootleggers, a broken world system, and a ragging national theocracy.

Writing the sequel now, some thirty years later, is in many ways harder. Remebering the world of On The Rocks is simple. The hard part is keeping our contemporary world out of our alternative reality, especially as lately contemporary reality bears an increasingly striking resemblance, to our imagined dystopia. Perhaps the trick is to put on blinders when we confront the keyboard. But even this is insufficient: writing a new “history” when History is being made has its own perils of …infection. But we persist. (See that’s what I mean….)