I’d like you to come on in to a deeper, a darker corner
of the study in which janet lang and I are writing,
The Armageddon Letters.
it has to do with our fears
of what certain reactions might be to the book.
Now we’ve written books in the past, and you always have- as an author-
you always have to think about some array of reviews that you might get.
If you’re going out on a book tour,
you know you go to different audiences and people sort of try to imagine
like what questions they might ask,
or if people are really upset what they might accuse you of -that sort of thing.
Well, here, this one is just loaded with possibilities that are kind of awesome to contemplate.
First of all, it involves Kennedy.
There are an amazing number of people out there
and I guess you’ll have to take this on faith right now, but you wait…
you wait til this book comes out- The Armageddon Letters by Blight and lang-
and then you go into the web and you will find an amazing number of people talking about the assassination of President Kennedy,
and I don’t want to go in to what connections they might make,
but you will find out that this is a place where very strange people congregate in virtual space-
very strange people with a lot of really really different theories about Kennedy.
Castro-
there has never been a more fractious or controversial person in U.S. history than Fidel Castro.
Our policy, the U.S. policy towards Cuba-
I mean it only- basically there are two groups:
one is “We’ve been way too hard on Cuba,”
and one is “We haven’t been nearly hard enough on Cuba.”
That includes the Missile Crisis.
“We should’ve bombed the hell out of ‘em. I mean Fidel, he’s, technically he’s still alive.
His brother’s running the country.
I mean if we could just bomb the hell out of those people and put somebody else in there,
we wouldn’t have all these problems in the hemisphere,
and for awhile even in Africa and the Middle East where Castro was sending his people.”
On the other hand there are people who say, “That’s why Castro is the way he is.
We keep threatening him. He keeps being a hero to his own people
and as long as we keep threatening then the regime,
whether he’s running it or not but the communist regime in Cuba it’ll be fine.
It’ll have lots of legitimacy because people are gonna think
well we better hunker down here and pull behind this regime because you know the Americans might invade us again.”
Well, uh, that’s another thing.
Now, can we do anything about this as authors?
I mean you can’t dictate the kind of review that you get unless you write the review yourself.
But you’re not allowed to do that. It’d be like giving your own eulogy at your own funeral.
I mean all you’re allowed to do is put your epitaph on your tombstone,
but you can’t give a speech at the tombstone lauding your traits and dealing with your detractors.
You can’t do that. That’s for other people to do.
The deepest fear we have with regards to the Armageddon Letters,
though doesn’t really relate to Castro or Kennedy or Khrushchev or any of that sort of thing.
I think our deepest fear is that you won’t get it. You won’t feel the tension.
You won’t feel really scared in the moment as Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro did.
And if you don’t get THAT part of it from a combination
of our book, films, the blogs- the Armageddon blogs by these three characters-
If you don’t get THAT somehow out of all this,
then I think we’re probably not going to be happy that we’ve gotten involved in this.
So that’s something I think more than the reviews, more than the “official reviews,”
more than the ideology, more than being taken apart by the right wingers and the left wingers.
I think our deepest fear since we’re trying to go right past all that crowd
is that you out there who don’t identify with any of this stuff…
it just doesn’t quite register.
I have to also say that every time we turn our computers on in the morning,
we start reading that stuff and you might, if you were there,
you might detect just a little bit of nervousness
that we didn’t accomplish our main objective-
which is to reach out and pull you into this
to an extent that you actually become deeply concerned now
about something that happened way back when.