Alrighty then. I wrote a lot on this next review, so I'm gonna shut up and get down to it.
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| Source: Amazon.com |
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Wow. That is the best word I could come up with to describe King’s latest work, 11/22/63. This title refers to the twenty-second of November, nineteen sixty three, or the day that President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. And it basically gives away the story, if you have a little imagination and a touch of deductive reasoning. What would an acclaimed horror/science fiction author want with the day that mid-twentieth-century America first lost its innocence (I’m waxing poetic, I know, but it seems an apt description from those of my elders I have spoken to who remember the experiences of the day - kind of like my generation and the events of September 11, 2001, or maybe Pearl Harbor Day for the earlier folks)?
For those of you who read the name Stephen King and automatically think of horrific monsters and plots with gut-twisters and blood, well... you’re half right. But we’re not talking fantastic creatures from beyond the pale in this novel. Our monster is Lee Harvey Oswald, and our story does contain gut-twisters and blood, but not in heavy slasher film-esque amounts.
The book is a historical fiction of sorts, and also a time travel science fiction story. Our intrepid hero is a Mr. Jake Epping of Lisbon, Maine, a high school teacher and semi-recent divorcee. The story begins with his account of reading an essay written by the janitor of the school he works at. Epping teaches GED classes on the side, and when he reads the janitors essay, his life is forever changed.
To be honest, I’m not going to give too many details about this book here, but I’ll save it for those who might want to read it. There is a part of the book that came about an hour before the end of the audiobook that I, as a historian, wish to tackle briefly. But it is a semi-spoiler of the plot, so I’m going to put it as a sort of addendum down at the very bottom of this review. For now, I’ll stick to the book itself on the whole.
I quite enjoyed 11/22/63. The prose is good, with King’s typical wit and his panache with a turn of phrase. The audiobook was also good, as the narrator did a good job of giving the various regional accents and made me feel like I was there. Through a temporal anomaly (Star Trek-speak for a doorway into another time, but not into another place; that’d be a time/space anomaly) Mr. Epping goes on a whirlwind tour of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The research that was done of the period makes you feel like you are there. Of course I wasn’t, as I wasn’t born until the late 1970s, so I can’t say for sure. But the feel of it is so good, you can almost smell the tobacco smoke and feel the waves of heat from the summer sun on a hot Dallas day in which air conditioning was still a luxury, and a rather ineffective one at that.
The book has a thick and involved plot that keeps you in the pages, and I found myself interested throughout the majority of the text. Mr. Epping’s trip back in time picks up the additional goals of saving several people besides the president, and you come to care about these people as if they were real. For the most part, I didn’t become bored with the book, even though at times it seemed rather long. At one point in the middle, the complicated plot surrounding Epping’s life in early 1960s America becomes a bit dull, but just as it does, King throws a curveball and things get interesting again.
Wow. That is the best word I could come up with to describe King’s latest work, 11/22/63. This title refers to the twenty-second of November, nineteen sixty three, or the day that President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. And it basically gives away the story, if you have a little imagination and a touch of deductive reasoning. What would an acclaimed horror/science fiction author want with the day that mid-twentieth-century America first lost its innocence (I’m waxing poetic, I know, but it seems an apt description from those of my elders I have spoken to who remember the experiences of the day - kind of like my generation and the events of September 11, 2001, or maybe Pearl Harbor Day for the earlier folks)?
For those of you who read the name Stephen King and automatically think of horrific monsters and plots with gut-twisters and blood, well... you’re half right. But we’re not talking fantastic creatures from beyond the pale in this novel. Our monster is Lee Harvey Oswald, and our story does contain gut-twisters and blood, but not in heavy slasher film-esque amounts.
The book is a historical fiction of sorts, and also a time travel science fiction story. Our intrepid hero is a Mr. Jake Epping of Lisbon, Maine, a high school teacher and semi-recent divorcee. The story begins with his account of reading an essay written by the janitor of the school he works at. Epping teaches GED classes on the side, and when he reads the janitors essay, his life is forever changed.
To be honest, I’m not going to give too many details about this book here, but I’ll save it for those who might want to read it. There is a part of the book that came about an hour before the end of the audiobook that I, as a historian, wish to tackle briefly. But it is a semi-spoiler of the plot, so I’m going to put it as a sort of addendum down at the very bottom of this review. For now, I’ll stick to the book itself on the whole.
I quite enjoyed 11/22/63. The prose is good, with King’s typical wit and his panache with a turn of phrase. The audiobook was also good, as the narrator did a good job of giving the various regional accents and made me feel like I was there. Through a temporal anomaly (Star Trek-speak for a doorway into another time, but not into another place; that’d be a time/space anomaly) Mr. Epping goes on a whirlwind tour of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The research that was done of the period makes you feel like you are there. Of course I wasn’t, as I wasn’t born until the late 1970s, so I can’t say for sure. But the feel of it is so good, you can almost smell the tobacco smoke and feel the waves of heat from the summer sun on a hot Dallas day in which air conditioning was still a luxury, and a rather ineffective one at that.
The book has a thick and involved plot that keeps you in the pages, and I found myself interested throughout the majority of the text. Mr. Epping’s trip back in time picks up the additional goals of saving several people besides the president, and you come to care about these people as if they were real. For the most part, I didn’t become bored with the book, even though at times it seemed rather long. At one point in the middle, the complicated plot surrounding Epping’s life in early 1960s America becomes a bit dull, but just as it does, King throws a curveball and things get interesting again.
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| Their caption says it better than I could. Source: ProductiveGrad.com |
One other good thing about the book, which doesn’t
apply to some of the other works by Mr. King that I have read, is that it
didn’t seem to fall a bit flat at the end as some of his other full length
novels have done. I cared right up until the end. And the ending
was... good. Real good. A hero becomes a villain for a while,
but he does find a way to do the right thing and still be with the woman he
loves. The tale is, through most of its pages, a love story. Though
it does have some adult content regarding this relationship, King has the sense
not to make it explicit. Of course, this is coming from someone who grew
up in an age when what we see on network TV would be considered pornographic by
the standards of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. So do take my words with a
grain of salt.
King also is not one to avoid calling a spade a spade, so there is some graphic and colorful language in there too. If you’ve read anything else by the author, you know what to expect. And there is a bit of gore. This is to be expected from King, as he is not known to pull punches. There is a rather sickening scene where a young boy’s head is smashed by a sledge hammer. There is nothing glorified about it, and it is not pretty at all. This is, to sneak in a bit of the plot, one of the things that our protagonist is trying to stop in the past. He fails the first time, but succeeds in a later attempt.
King tackles many topics in this book that pertain to the time period he is describing. There is the “Wally and the Beav”-sense of things in some places, but King does not miss the problems that America faced in the late ‘50s, such as a lack of equal rights for all Americans (separate but equal makes an appearance when bathroom facilities are described, and it wrenches my heart that our country was ever that backward, especially in the twentieth-century), and the issues of spousal abuse (the boy mentioned earlier is a side victim of this), and the political and social culture of the time being in many ways extremely conservative.
11/22/63 describes many of the issues of the day, and paints a clearer picture of the nation’s feelings about Jack Kennedy than many Americans today will realize or, in a few cases, remember. Dallas is not a friendly place for the book’s protagonist, let alone the president. And yet the rush to see the president’s motorcade on the day of the assassination, while being full of high stakes tension and excitement due to the race against time that our hero and his fiancé are making, also sheds light on the excitement that many felt at the opportunity to see this very “American” of our presidents.
King also is not one to avoid calling a spade a spade, so there is some graphic and colorful language in there too. If you’ve read anything else by the author, you know what to expect. And there is a bit of gore. This is to be expected from King, as he is not known to pull punches. There is a rather sickening scene where a young boy’s head is smashed by a sledge hammer. There is nothing glorified about it, and it is not pretty at all. This is, to sneak in a bit of the plot, one of the things that our protagonist is trying to stop in the past. He fails the first time, but succeeds in a later attempt.
King tackles many topics in this book that pertain to the time period he is describing. There is the “Wally and the Beav”-sense of things in some places, but King does not miss the problems that America faced in the late ‘50s, such as a lack of equal rights for all Americans (separate but equal makes an appearance when bathroom facilities are described, and it wrenches my heart that our country was ever that backward, especially in the twentieth-century), and the issues of spousal abuse (the boy mentioned earlier is a side victim of this), and the political and social culture of the time being in many ways extremely conservative.
11/22/63 describes many of the issues of the day, and paints a clearer picture of the nation’s feelings about Jack Kennedy than many Americans today will realize or, in a few cases, remember. Dallas is not a friendly place for the book’s protagonist, let alone the president. And yet the rush to see the president’s motorcade on the day of the assassination, while being full of high stakes tension and excitement due to the race against time that our hero and his fiancé are making, also sheds light on the excitement that many felt at the opportunity to see this very “American” of our presidents.
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| Lee Harvey Oswald. Source: Web of Deception.com |
Lee Harvey Oswald is detailed extensively in the book as well, and this brings in some of the most interesting parts of the story. Oswald becomes a character who we can have a little bit of sympathy for, as he appears to be something of a fool and a smuck. And yet at the same time, his ignorance is not an excuse for the treatment his wife, Marina Oswald, received at his hands. The story behind Oswald is fascinating, and King weaves the historical events that led up to his sniper shots from the sixth story of Texas School Book Depository into his own tale quite skillfully. You are really rooting for Epping to stop the assassination by the end. But there is a flip side to saving JFK’s life, and that is the catch that brings the book to its conclusion. I won’t spoil it, at least not unless you want to scroll down a ways and see my input on that previously mentioned detail that I wanted to cover.
Needless to say, as King repeats over and over, the past is obdurate. It doesn’t want to be changed, because that also changes the future. Luckily for our hero, a quick trip back through the revolving door of the temporal portal can fix the mistakes of the past and put things right. If only life had these convenient temporal portals located like ATMs for the average person. You could undo some really stupid things you had done with little or no fuss. Maybe someday. Then again, such a futuristic convenience would probably end up being mis-used and get humanity into trouble. Like the recent April Fool’s Day prank perpetrated by the online electronics sales outfit, TigerDirect.com, which sent out an email with an ad for a “home nuclear reactor,” the KubeX15. Sure would have been cool to have, but I can see people hacking the thing to get at the Plutonium that the advertisement said came with the device. Talk about a way to get back at a neighbor you didn’t like. No more cherry bombs over the fence to scare his noisy pet poodle. Now you could just toss a miniature nuke and then wait for the miniature mushroom cloud.
For those who are curious, here is the TigerDirect.com ad for the "Kube X15" Nice April Fool's Day prank, guys.
Ok, that is it for this review. I could do it more justice, but really, if this review has whetted your appetite at all, you should just go read the book yourself. It is worth your time. At least I sure thought so. If I did have any gripes, they are small. For one, King is his regular self when it comes to a touch of hubris in his writing. I always get the feeling that he is telling the world: “look how awesome I am!” Of course, he is really super successful, so I suppose the point is not without its validity. And like I said, the book does get a tad slow in the middle as our hero gets well established in his 1960s Texas life, and then King uses an old wheeze - to good effect, but it's still very Deus Ex Machina - to get things going again.
These faults are forgivable, in my mind. The payoff was worth it. So yes, this one is definitely recommended. Now, if you want some spoilers to a key part of the plot, scroll down and I’ll pontificate some more.
Still with me? Good enough.
One of the key plots of King’s 11/22/63 is that the protagonist, Jake Epping, manages to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK in Dallas on the book’s title date. This act starts a chain-reaction of events that completely changes the future to which Epping returns. The 2011 that he comes back to is quite different than the one we all know and recognize. I found King’s speculations on this alternate recent-past (I’m writing this review in early April of 2012) to be fascinating, and so I’m going to spell out the details of the alternate history that Epping discovers when he comes back through “the rabbit hole” into his present time, and then add a few comments of personal observation on them. Here goes:
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| The headline if JFK wasn't shot? Source: Red Room.com |
JFK was not assassinated. Obviously. That
was a key plot point of the book. He then went on to be re-elected in a
presidential race against Barry Goldwater in 1964. LBJ didn’t become the
president, but remained VP.
The search for the man who stopped the assassination of Kennedy became the focus of the conspiracy theories that in our time stream are made up of things like “The Shooter on the Grassy Knoll,” and “The CIA and/or the Mob actually had Kennedy killed,” and like that. But of course they never found Epping. He traveled back to the future, and so left no substantial evidence to be found and questioned as to his motives for saving JFK. Was he a savior, or part of the plot? That was the question that grew from Epping’s return trip to the future, which only he knew about. To everyone else, our protagonist simply dropped off the face of the earth.
Meanwhile, Kennedy expected to sweep Goldwater in the ‘64 election, but won only by forty electoral votes. In his second administration, Kennedy declared that Vietnam was less a threat to America than segregation and civil rights issues. This made lots of people unhappy, as Communism was still seen as being potentially the greatest threat America faced at the time. Troops in Vietnam were not increased significantly, and they held the region around Saigon without moving out much further into the countryside. A siege mentality, if there ever was one.
JFK sent money instead of troops to Vietnam. He also attempted to orchestrate the civil rights reforms of the ‘60s from the top-down, which failed miserably. Republicans and Dixie-based Democrats held Kennedy’s reforms at bay in Congress and JFK eventually gave up. His parting comment: “White America has filled its house with kindling. Now it will burn.”
Next came race riots. While Kennedy was distracted by these, Saigon was overrun by the North Vietnamese. Public opinion swung against JFK. A month after the fall of Saigon, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. He was supposed to be saved by Epping’s trip to the past through a coincidental chain of events kicked off by the stopping of Kennedy’s assassination. But this didn’t happen. The assassin of Martin Luther King turned out to be a rogue FBI agent. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was implicated, even though the assassin was not under orders from Hoover to kill MLKjr. Chicago went up in flames over Martin Luther King’s death, as well as a dozen other cities.
Governor George Wallace was elected president. Earthquakes racked the country. Wallace couldn’t do anything about these natural disasters, so he firebombed race-riot-riddled Chicago into submission. He then turned to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and gave him an ultimatum. Either leave Saigon free, or see Hanoi nuked. Ho Chi Minh didn’t accede, so Wallace had Hanoi nuked in 1969. The date is stated as being 24 years to the day that Truman had Nagasaki hit with the A-bomb “Fat Man” (this date seems fancifully coincidental to me, but King was the author, so he can choose what he liked). Wallace's VP? General Curtis LeMay. How ironic.
The search for the man who stopped the assassination of Kennedy became the focus of the conspiracy theories that in our time stream are made up of things like “The Shooter on the Grassy Knoll,” and “The CIA and/or the Mob actually had Kennedy killed,” and like that. But of course they never found Epping. He traveled back to the future, and so left no substantial evidence to be found and questioned as to his motives for saving JFK. Was he a savior, or part of the plot? That was the question that grew from Epping’s return trip to the future, which only he knew about. To everyone else, our protagonist simply dropped off the face of the earth.
Meanwhile, Kennedy expected to sweep Goldwater in the ‘64 election, but won only by forty electoral votes. In his second administration, Kennedy declared that Vietnam was less a threat to America than segregation and civil rights issues. This made lots of people unhappy, as Communism was still seen as being potentially the greatest threat America faced at the time. Troops in Vietnam were not increased significantly, and they held the region around Saigon without moving out much further into the countryside. A siege mentality, if there ever was one.
JFK sent money instead of troops to Vietnam. He also attempted to orchestrate the civil rights reforms of the ‘60s from the top-down, which failed miserably. Republicans and Dixie-based Democrats held Kennedy’s reforms at bay in Congress and JFK eventually gave up. His parting comment: “White America has filled its house with kindling. Now it will burn.”
Next came race riots. While Kennedy was distracted by these, Saigon was overrun by the North Vietnamese. Public opinion swung against JFK. A month after the fall of Saigon, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. He was supposed to be saved by Epping’s trip to the past through a coincidental chain of events kicked off by the stopping of Kennedy’s assassination. But this didn’t happen. The assassin of Martin Luther King turned out to be a rogue FBI agent. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover was implicated, even though the assassin was not under orders from Hoover to kill MLKjr. Chicago went up in flames over Martin Luther King’s death, as well as a dozen other cities.
Governor George Wallace was elected president. Earthquakes racked the country. Wallace couldn’t do anything about these natural disasters, so he firebombed race-riot-riddled Chicago into submission. He then turned to Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and gave him an ultimatum. Either leave Saigon free, or see Hanoi nuked. Ho Chi Minh didn’t accede, so Wallace had Hanoi nuked in 1969. The date is stated as being 24 years to the day that Truman had Nagasaki hit with the A-bomb “Fat Man” (this date seems fancifully coincidental to me, but King was the author, so he can choose what he liked). Wallace's VP? General Curtis LeMay. How ironic.
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| Gov. George Wallace. Source: LockerGnome.com |
Wallace is assassinated in 1972 by a person was
obviously didn’t agree with his policy of “might makes right under God.”
Hubert Humphrey became president in 1972. Natural disasters, based
in part on the fact that our protagonist Epping has changed the future so
dramatically and things are unraveling in the space/time continuum, are getting
worse. Fundamentalism blooms and religious extremists began a wave of
terror across the country and across the world.
India and Pakistan go to war. It quickly turns nuclear. Bombay and Karachi are wiped from the map in nuclear fire. Radiation spreads globally. The U.S., China and the Soviets stop the war between India and Pakistan by threatening to bomb both nations into oblivion.
In 1976, Ronald Reagan became president in a landslide. In 1979, the Iranian embassy crisis still occurs, but instead of only 66 hostages, the number is closer to 200. Hostage’s heads roll on Iranian TV. Reagan keeps from nuking Iran, based on the experiences of Vietnam, but he sends in massive amounts of troops to invade Iran. All the hostages are slaughtered during the conflict. Al Qaeda begins to form at this time. They do roadside bombs all over the place.
The Beatles unite to do a peace concert, which turns into a bloodbath after a suicide bomber strikes the concert. McCartney was blinded. The Middle East goes up in flames soon afterward. The Soviet Union collapses in civil war. Hard-line communist fanatics begin selling Soviet nukes on the black market. By ‘84, the Middle East’s oil fields are all nuked. An energy crisis many times worse than we face in our day is the result.
Clinton become president in the late ‘90s, but he had a heart attack at the ‘04 convention and Hillary Clinton becomes the president afterward. Meanwhile, JFK had died in 1983 of natural causes. Regions of the United States secede and go off to other nations, such as Maine, which becomes a part of Canada. Things look bleak. People say that God is going to tear down the world. The world is on the brink.
As to my commentary, I found this section of 11/22/63 to be fascinating. As both a historian and a person who is interested in alternative timeline theory, the ideas presented by Stephen King here are really amusing to me, in a dark sort of way. For instance, George Wallace becoming president of the United States. Talk about ironic. I know there was talk about him running for the highest office in the land before he was actually assassinated, but... to think he might have led our country? That’s just crazy.
And the idea of an energy crisis spurred by a small scale nuclear war (relatively speaking, what about using nuclear weapons is small, anyway?) in the Middle East? Whoa. For years the possibility of catastrophic war in the region has kept major power players in the international community, the United States not the least of these, in the internal affairs of nations that we probably wouldn’t have anything to do with if they weren’t sitting atop mountains of crude oil. Nice touch on Clinton killing over with a heart attack. Too bad King didn’t throw something in about Monica Lewinsky, but that would have been just a bit too trite here, I’d guess.
Hmmm... what else? Oh yes, the idea of JFK pushing social reform from above, instead of it coming from beneath. My Civil Rights Movement history is a bit thin, but it does seem to me that this was one of those causes that was best as something that came from the people, and not from legislation from above. I don’t know if American would have accepted the idea if it had been something they were getting from the president, no matter how respected he may have been. Look at Obama Care. Granted Civil Rights and Health Care are fairly diverse subjects in comparison, but the idea can be broken down to similar precepts. People need something. If the government tries to tell everybody how it will be done, it strangles. I think, and this is just me and I’m happy to say I’m no expert here, that some things we just have to work out for ourselves. And sweat and bleed for it. Unfortunately, health care is not going to wait. But I’m getting off on a tangent here. Sorry.
India and Pakistan going to war and it turning nuclear? That is an interesting subject for speculation. They could do it. Especially if the U.S. and the Soviets didn’t use their regional influence effectively to counter-balance the two sides before things turned really hot. The Soviets were typically India’s ally, and the U.S. was Pakistan's. Now-a-days, India is more neutrally aligned, though they never were a true Soviet client state in the sense that some others were. And Pakistan is not a friendly place to America, at least not in ideology. But books have been written about the U.S. relations with Pakistan, so I’ll wait and read one of those and then get into this story. Another day then on that one.
Last on the war front, the U.S. presence in Vietnam. That is a tough one. Would less troops been any better than what was done, or would more troops really have made a difference? I wasn’t alive at the time, and I’m guilty of being an armchair general here. Personally it appears from my studies, albeit non-exhaustive though they may be, that more troops at an earlier phase and a dedicated effort to crush the NVA and attack North Vietnam directly would have been better than what we did. Better yet, not get involved in that mess at all. But that would have been political suicide at the time. So instead, we had to bleed to learn an important lesson. We can’t export democracy. Nor can we make things better at the point of a gun. Good thing we got those lessons, huh? Oh, wait. I forgot. We didn’t.
Ok, enough pontificating. All these events that I have talked about are murky at best, and the possible scenarios if things went differently are vast. After all, Epping goes into the past in King’s book in an effort to avoid these sort of problems. The theory he was working from was that for one thing, if JFK lived he’d avoid the increase in forces in Vietnam and thousands of young Americans would have benefited by not being maimed or killed over there. But King’s alternate future just makes up for that in other ways. You can’t really change the past, I think the message might be. Good thing we can’t really try.
Learn more about 11/22/63, by Stephen King from Amazon.com
India and Pakistan go to war. It quickly turns nuclear. Bombay and Karachi are wiped from the map in nuclear fire. Radiation spreads globally. The U.S., China and the Soviets stop the war between India and Pakistan by threatening to bomb both nations into oblivion.
In 1976, Ronald Reagan became president in a landslide. In 1979, the Iranian embassy crisis still occurs, but instead of only 66 hostages, the number is closer to 200. Hostage’s heads roll on Iranian TV. Reagan keeps from nuking Iran, based on the experiences of Vietnam, but he sends in massive amounts of troops to invade Iran. All the hostages are slaughtered during the conflict. Al Qaeda begins to form at this time. They do roadside bombs all over the place.
The Beatles unite to do a peace concert, which turns into a bloodbath after a suicide bomber strikes the concert. McCartney was blinded. The Middle East goes up in flames soon afterward. The Soviet Union collapses in civil war. Hard-line communist fanatics begin selling Soviet nukes on the black market. By ‘84, the Middle East’s oil fields are all nuked. An energy crisis many times worse than we face in our day is the result.
Clinton become president in the late ‘90s, but he had a heart attack at the ‘04 convention and Hillary Clinton becomes the president afterward. Meanwhile, JFK had died in 1983 of natural causes. Regions of the United States secede and go off to other nations, such as Maine, which becomes a part of Canada. Things look bleak. People say that God is going to tear down the world. The world is on the brink.
As to my commentary, I found this section of 11/22/63 to be fascinating. As both a historian and a person who is interested in alternative timeline theory, the ideas presented by Stephen King here are really amusing to me, in a dark sort of way. For instance, George Wallace becoming president of the United States. Talk about ironic. I know there was talk about him running for the highest office in the land before he was actually assassinated, but... to think he might have led our country? That’s just crazy.
And the idea of an energy crisis spurred by a small scale nuclear war (relatively speaking, what about using nuclear weapons is small, anyway?) in the Middle East? Whoa. For years the possibility of catastrophic war in the region has kept major power players in the international community, the United States not the least of these, in the internal affairs of nations that we probably wouldn’t have anything to do with if they weren’t sitting atop mountains of crude oil. Nice touch on Clinton killing over with a heart attack. Too bad King didn’t throw something in about Monica Lewinsky, but that would have been just a bit too trite here, I’d guess.
Hmmm... what else? Oh yes, the idea of JFK pushing social reform from above, instead of it coming from beneath. My Civil Rights Movement history is a bit thin, but it does seem to me that this was one of those causes that was best as something that came from the people, and not from legislation from above. I don’t know if American would have accepted the idea if it had been something they were getting from the president, no matter how respected he may have been. Look at Obama Care. Granted Civil Rights and Health Care are fairly diverse subjects in comparison, but the idea can be broken down to similar precepts. People need something. If the government tries to tell everybody how it will be done, it strangles. I think, and this is just me and I’m happy to say I’m no expert here, that some things we just have to work out for ourselves. And sweat and bleed for it. Unfortunately, health care is not going to wait. But I’m getting off on a tangent here. Sorry.
India and Pakistan going to war and it turning nuclear? That is an interesting subject for speculation. They could do it. Especially if the U.S. and the Soviets didn’t use their regional influence effectively to counter-balance the two sides before things turned really hot. The Soviets were typically India’s ally, and the U.S. was Pakistan's. Now-a-days, India is more neutrally aligned, though they never were a true Soviet client state in the sense that some others were. And Pakistan is not a friendly place to America, at least not in ideology. But books have been written about the U.S. relations with Pakistan, so I’ll wait and read one of those and then get into this story. Another day then on that one.
Last on the war front, the U.S. presence in Vietnam. That is a tough one. Would less troops been any better than what was done, or would more troops really have made a difference? I wasn’t alive at the time, and I’m guilty of being an armchair general here. Personally it appears from my studies, albeit non-exhaustive though they may be, that more troops at an earlier phase and a dedicated effort to crush the NVA and attack North Vietnam directly would have been better than what we did. Better yet, not get involved in that mess at all. But that would have been political suicide at the time. So instead, we had to bleed to learn an important lesson. We can’t export democracy. Nor can we make things better at the point of a gun. Good thing we got those lessons, huh? Oh, wait. I forgot. We didn’t.
Ok, enough pontificating. All these events that I have talked about are murky at best, and the possible scenarios if things went differently are vast. After all, Epping goes into the past in King’s book in an effort to avoid these sort of problems. The theory he was working from was that for one thing, if JFK lived he’d avoid the increase in forces in Vietnam and thousands of young Americans would have benefited by not being maimed or killed over there. But King’s alternate future just makes up for that in other ways. You can’t really change the past, I think the message might be. Good thing we can’t really try.
Learn more about 11/22/63, by Stephen King from Amazon.com
A parting comment is in order, even if I've said more than my piece for one day:
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| Source: LOLsnaps.com |
Speaking of conspiracies... You'd think the tabloid journalists and the regular "pop" journalists would get together and agree on what the story should be. Or maybe it is a conspiracy to see just who it is that Americans are listening to at the check out counter these days.
Well that was a long post...very interesting though. I love a good time travel story.
ReplyDeleteMy friend Nicole wrote (via Facebook): "I too feel that the new day doesn't begin until I have gone to bed and woken up. It used to drive Damien crazy when I worked overnights."
ReplyDelete