I’ve blogged about Mr. Levinson a few times before. Some readers of action-adventure have called him a “trash genius”–an epithet that evidently pleases Len.
I really don’t like that label. I’ve read a lot of Len’s fiction and none of it was trash. It wasn’t Tolstoy, but it wasn’t meant to be. And here’s an important point: If Len wanted to write highbrow literary fiction, in my opinion he could easily craft a novel in a league with War and Peace.
I was fortunate enough to become an author years ago. All three of the novels (so far) in my Retreads series have been Amazon bestsellers. A pleasant surprise was a type of reaction those books got from readers: that they captured the fun and excitement of the pulp and paramilitary adventure fiction of yesteryear, but with a high caliber of prose that most of the classic men’s fiction never achieved. I was shooting for exactly that combination of excitement, realism (two attributes that seldom go together) and well-crafted writing. But the praise surprised me in that readers found it remarkable. I didn’t appreciate how rare it was, because I had read so much of Len’s work… which is action-packed, well-plotted, with realistic dialog and great characterization.
Len and I have different styles, different experiences, and different areas of interest, but anybody who likes my fiction should definitely read Len Levinson.
I am happy to share another insight into Len’s writing career, in his own words:
One day circa 1979 I was sitting in the East 50s office of paperback packager Jim Bryans. I just delivered a manuscript and we were speaking about various matters that I don’t remember. Then out of the blue he asked: “Have you ever written a World War Two novel?”
I replied that I had indeed written a World War Two novel called DOOM PLATOON by Richard Gallagher, set during the Battle of the Bulge, published by Belmont-Tower in 1978.
Jim said that a publisher contact of his was looking for someone to write a World War Two series, and asked me to bring him (Jim) a copy of DOOM PLATOON for submission to the publisher. I did so ASAP and a few weeks later Jim called to say the publisher wanted to meet me.
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The publisher was Walter Zacharius who together with Roberta Grossman owned Zebra Publishing, their offices on Park Avenue South around 32nd Street. I think Jim attended the meeting but Walter and I did most of the talking. Walter told me he’d liked DOOM PLATOON and wanted me to write something similar as a series. He also said that he’d been in the Quartermaster Corps during World War Two and rose to the rank of sergeant. I distinctly remember him saying that he had participated in the liberation of Paris.
In turn I mentioned that I enlisted in the Army in 1954, served three years in the Infantry and Corps of Engineers during the Cold War, was stationed in Alaska about half of my enlistment, therefore I knew basic military life up close and personal although I’d never been in a hot war. I also said that infantry weapons during my Army years were identical to those used during World War Two, or modified somewhat, and main principles of fire and maneuver also were pretty much the same. I assured Walter that I could write about World War Two with a high degree of authenticity although I’d never been there.
I agreed to Walter’s deal, probably signed the contract then and there, walked home to my broken-down pad in Hell’s Kitchen and tried to figure whether the series should focus on one person or on a unit like a platoon. Finally I decided on one person who would be a tough sergeant similar to Sergeant Mazursky in DOOM PLATOON.
Mazursky had been based loosely on a friend named Mike, a World War Two veteran and very tough guy seven years older than I. Mike had been been ready to rumble at any moment and seemed to have no fear or caution when any conflict arose. Occasionally he threw shocking temper tantrums in public and seemed ready to punch out people. Physical intimidation was perfectly okay with him but we usually got along well and he became one of my most significant mentors, for better or worse.
Mike’s military career had not exactly been illustrious. He went AWOL numerous times during World War Two in Europe, had broken out of a stockade, and instead of fighting for his country full time, had been wheeling and dealing in black markets of France and Germany.
After mustering out, Mike attended Columbia University for a year or two, then dropped out to sell marijuana and become something of a gigolo. He got arrested at the Mexican/Texas border for smuggling marijuana and served five years in a federal prison during which he wrote for and helped edit the prison newspaper. I met him shortly after he was released in 1961, the same year I arrived in New York City.
Mike was a very complicated guy. He could be vicious or extraordinarily gentle and kind. He could insult you savagely, then take you to dinner. He could cruelly put you down, then burst into laughter as if it was all a big joke. A deeply devoted party animal, he also was a heavy drinker and doper. Cocaine was his drug of choice. He did not believe in God, had Communist inclinations, was surprisingly well read and could talk like an educated man, which he was, or growl like a gangster, which he also was.
He also was amazingly successful with women although not exceptionally good-looking in my opinion. He vaguely resembled the actor Victor Mature combined with John Garfield, Rocky Marciano and Sylvester Stallone. He always had girlfriends even after he got married.
Once I asked him the secret of his success with women. He replied that women were attracted to confident men, but mainly just wanted to be loved. He certainly was very confident and actually seemed to love all the women with whom he was involved.
Another time he said to me: “You’re the craziest person I ever met in my life, but you SEEM normal.”
Mike was a first class conversationalist, raconteur and storyteller. I often listened to him spellbound, although his wife Maggie said he never let facts get in the way of a good story.
Mike introduced me to my first wife, a Cuban immigrant whom he called Chi-Chi. Our marriage was stormy and ended in divorce after four years because we simply weren’t compatible souls. During a period of post-divorce angst, I blamed Mike for my misery. “If it hadn’t been for you, I never would have met Chi-Chi.”
Mike replied with a winsome smile, “I only introduced you to Chi-Chi. I never told you to marry her.”
Of course he was right. My bad judgement was the cause of my unhappiness. I knew that Chi-Chi and I weren’t compatible but I was dazzled by her beauty and couldn’t think clearly, as happened often during my younger days.
Mike became the basis for my new central character Sergeant Mahoney and I decided to call the series THE SERGEANT by Gordon Davis. I was very excited about writing this series because I had been interested in war since childhood, and read many novels and historical works about war. Born in 1935, I literally grew up in the atmosphere of World War Two. I remember ration books, paper and metal drives, and regular reports of casualties. Victory was by no means certain, many setbacks were reported, and an atmosphere of desperation pervaded the land. Occasionally we schoolchildren did bombing drills where we sat with our back to walls and hoped no bombers would ever come.
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I thought my background growing up during World War Two, and three years in the Army, were ideal preparation for writing a World War Two land battle novel. My next big literary decision concerned when to start the action, but the answer seemed obvious. I should begin the novel with the D-Day landings in Normandy and then carry each novel forward chronologically.
What would the first plot be? I didn’t want to write about actual landings and the subsequent grinding fight for the beachhead because it had been done in movies numerous times, most notably THE LONGEST DAY. Instead I dreamed up a suspenseful commando style mission behind enemy lines to blow up a critical bridge that supported trains carrying German soldiers and equipment to the front.
I wrote in a state of deep intellectual and emotional involvement, and around six weeks later submitted the completed manuscript to Walter, certain that he’d love it. A short while later he invited me to his office, told me that in fact he did like the novel and would publish it BUT he pointed out that ordinary soldiers never went on commando missions behind enemy lines, and he wanted subsequent novels to be about ordinary soldiers engaged in standard World War Two front line battle action. I said okay and that’s what I gave him in the next eight novels in the series.
I loved the cover for the first SERGEANT. It really stood out on book store shelves. Subsequent SERGEANT covers were similar. Walter really understood marketing and that’s why Zebra was the most successful privately owned publishing company in America.
Looking back, I think THE SERGEANT series marked a turning point in my literary career. Somehow I gained a more comprehensive understanding of novel writing while working on its plots, subplots and characters. It was the second series that I created, the first being BUTLER for Belmont-Tower, but THE SERGEANT seemed of much higher quality than BUTLER. Many readers have praised THE SERGEANT in blogs and on Facebook, which has been most gratifying.
THE SERGEANT SERIES has been republished by Piccadilly as ebooks by Len Levinson and presently available from Amazon. He also wrote another gritty WWII series called The Ratbastards which I heartily recommend. In my previous post, you’ll find links to my other reviews (to date) of his Sergeant books.
Well, this is embarrassing. I began posting reviews of Len Levinson’s (writing as Gordon Davis) magnificent WWII series The Sergeant in chronological order after starting out of sequence with my first couple reviews back on The Two-Fisted Blog…and somehow, I skipped right over this book despite posting an Amazon review back on May 9 of 2017. So here it is, finally:
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Master Sergeant Mahoney and Corporal Cranepool have just returned from their attachment to a French unit liberating Paris. It was supposed to be cushy duty, but only the end of it was cushy–in the arms of some French floozies in a fancy hotel.
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The Sergeant and his sidekick are back just in time to meet Charlie Company’s new C.O. Captain Anderson is a young, inexperienced officer, but one of the good ones (a rare combo, in my day). They’re also just in time for one of Patton’s “recon in force” missions, to push across the Moselle and keep the pressure on the Germans.
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This installment in the series could launch a character study on the sort of men who populate the officer corps of an army. Whether a commander wants to make a name for himself, or simply doesn’t want a sub-par evaluation, it is their troops who are used like cannon fodder to enhance or maintain their egos.
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Mahoney himself has some moments in this book in which hedemonstrates more humanity than is normal for him. (Also, in this one we are introduced to PFC Butsko. I can’t help but notice the similarities between him and the platoon sergeant of The RatBastards–also named Butsko.)
I’m not sure when I’ll complete reviews for the final three books in the series…but I plan to. Meanwhile, you can read the remaining reviews of this series so far here and here.
In 2016 the DNC rigged the primary against Bernie, in favor of Hillary. This year, it appears they rigged the Iowa Caucus against him, and maybe even the New Hampshire primary was rigged to make his victory there look less decisive than it was in reality.
The charismatic puppets on TV and the relentless Deep State shills writing online “news” articles insist that the big Democrat Party donors are opposed to Bernie because he’s a socialist, and his dangerous policy proposals scare them. Half of that has some truth to it, but the other half is disinformation.
Democrats (and Establishment RINOs) have been ramming socialist policies down our collective throat since the New Deal. They have denied that they are socialist/communist and demonized everyone who made effective arguments proving such. They’ve enjoyed plausible deniability because, as they were transforming the USA from an industrial powerhouse and the most prosperous country in history into an economic trainwreck up to its ears in debt that can never be repaid; they also reduced a huge proportion of the electorate into ignorant, illiterate parasites who wouldn’t know a communist from a commuter train, a lemon from a Leninist, or a Trotskyite from a trolley car.
While the socialists (semantically disguising themselves with flattering labels like “liberal”) have systematically poisoned our economy, making themselves richer while working Americans became poorer, they’ve been able to avoid the ultimate financial collapse via unlimited deficit spending and manipulation of interest rates through some of the subversive tools they have institutionalized. They’ve been able to kick the can down the road for generations, ratcheting the noose around Uncle Sam’s neck, blaming the consequences of their socialist policies on the free market, which justifies even more socialist policies to the gullible electorate addicted to their propaganda outlets–all while denying that they, or their policies, are socialist.
Along comes Bernie (and the Squad), who openly admits his socialist ideology and intentions, and the deniability becomes less plausible. The dumbed-down TV/social media junkies in the suburbs are confused, because some of their svengalis are now admitting what most of them deny. Not only that, but Bernie is talking about tightening the noose so much, so fast, that even some of the corporate grifters of woke capital (big Democrat Party donors) would probably have to suffer consequences right along with their middle class victims.
You mean we shouldn’t have revamped the American Armed Forces based on what Hollywood taught us?
The problem is that we allow fiction to be “proofs” of reality. I can’t tell you how many times when I’ve talked about women being physically weaker than men and that this is why they shouldn’t be in combat, I get the response, “But just look at Brianne of Tarth” (from “Game of Thrones”) or even the fictionalized accounts of Joan of Arc, whose combat role has been highly exaggerated.
Fiction can be a great vehicle to change how we think, and this has happened when it comes to equalizing men and women through the preponderance of female superheroes and “strong” women in film. We have been brainwashed into actually believing women can be just like men in the physical arena.
This is simply not the case, and it’s dangerous to think otherwise.
The USA has not had to face an enemy with comparable technology in a shooting war since WWII. The next time it does, it will probably suffer tactical catastrophes worse than any battle since the Little Bighorn. The combat arms are being packed with (and led by) women, foreigners, and sexual deviants, standards are plummeting, and the field grade officers who command them are fickle opportunists much more competent at backstabbing political games than at war fighting.
Nobody with the ability to prevent this scenario made any effort to do so. The public at large had been pre-programmed to accept it. And Hollywood is getting even more pozzed by the day. It will take a disaster like we’ve never seen to make Joe Public question The Narrative and demand a return to sanity. Can America survive such a disaster?
Denise McAllister’s book covers more than just Warrior Womyn in pop culture. If a lot of people read it, and realize how Homowood is mind-screwing us, they could strive to make this a better world. Read her interview with David Dubrow.
The Japanese could have taken Midway almost unopposed on their way to attack Pearl Harbor. That oversight fit into a larger pattern of miscalculations that spelled doom for the Japanese Empire.
But America’s victory was far from a foregone conclusion by the time the Japanese got serious about capturing the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” that was Midway Atoll. The “sleeping giant” Admiral Yamamoto feared was just awakening and the limping American Pacific Fleet was outmatched going into the battle. It was rather miraculous that we even had three carriers to throw against the Jap Navy. What happened once the forces squared off might be even more miraculous.
What’s nice about this film is that it builds a fairly thorough picture of the early phase of the Pacific War. It’s not just about the battle of Midway, but goes back to cover Pearl Harbor, and even ranges as far as Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo. It spends time on junior and mid-level officers I don’t remember seeing portrayed in any other movie, including a couple pilots who were instrumental in winning the statistically unlikely victory.
My apologies for writing this review too late for you to see this film in the theaters–because it was worth the ticket price. If you’re sick of most the garbage Hollywood spews out, and would like to see more good flicks like this one, then I encourage you to spend some voting dollars on your own copy of Midway as soon as possible.
Followers may have noticed I haven’t been all that productive for a while. Aside from my contribution to Appalling Stories 4, I haven’t had anything published for years. Seems like all the bloggers at Virtual Pulp have stopped blogging, too. There are several reviews we’ve been meaning to write and post for months, and just haven’t been able to find the time.
I can only speak for myself. I’ve been going through a process of change in my professional life that has contributed to my decreased production. I’ve got a job that I really like now, probably my best civilian job ever, but I’m still running like crazy to keep up with it and might still be for a while. I’ve got creative irons in the fire, but can’t make predictions about when they’ll be done. And one of those projects, sucking up a good portion of my life outside work, is an audio version of False Flag.
The audio versions of Tomato Can Comeback, Hell & Gone and Tier Zero were all produced via royalty share using Amazon Audible’s ACX partner. For a few reasons, I plan to go a different route with the third book in the series. A fellow writer suggested I record it myself. I don’t have a great voice, but that voice comes at exactly the right price: free. So I hired myself.
The recording phase of the project was bad enough. I guess most people hate the sound of their own voice played back on a recording. I was no exception, but have come to be able to live with the embarrassment. What is worse, though, is the editing.
I like watching rants by Razorfist on topics that interest me. He’s pretty funny, but what impresses me the most is his ability to rapid-fire monologues for minutes on end without getting tongue-tied. I trip over my words constantly, mispronouncing things I know damn well how to pronounce; adding extra syllables for some unknown reason; and stopping because I thought I read something wrong but actually hadn’t. So there’s a lot of editing just to get rid of that. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
While recording, one of my dogs will invariably walk into my “studio,” loudly flop on the floor, start licking himself, and/or bang his tail or leg against the desk. Cut! Quiet on the set! Take Two… The microphone I’m using now usually doesn’t pick up the loud traffic going by on the road, but a dog’s ears sure do, and Rover wants the world to know about it. Cut! Take Three… Sometimes my voice just stops while my mouth keeps moving. Maybe that’s from not enough water. Take Four… I’m hydrated now. I could go for 72 hours without any gastro-intestinal anomalies whatsoever, but try to record something, and I have to belch every few sentences. Take Five… Some days my sinuses act up and I’m really nasal. It’s okay! Keep rolling! Just keep rolling… I do my best at setting up the mike and the shield, but still wind up popping my “P”s most of the time. Being especially talented, I can also pop “B”s and some other letters that just make no sense. Take Six… Speaking of pops, my lips and tongue are prolific at producing pops, clicks, clucks, and all kinds of annoying sounds, sometimes in the middle of a word.
You get the idea. All of that makes editing a chapter take about 3X longer than recording it did. And it’s tedious work. I’m oblivious to some mistakes until I’m in the middle of editing, so I didn’t repeat the line during a recording session. I’ll have to go back and re-record when the wife and kids are gone again, to reduce the ambient noise levels in the house.
So currently, I am less than halfway to having False Flag ready for publishing.
Why am I bothering to make an audiobook? Well, the publishing gurus out there will tell you it’s a promising new market for indy authors. I guess I’ll see. But I got into this corner of the publishing biz because I personally found audiobooks to be a godsend. I haven’t had time to sit down and read recreationally for a long time, but my previous jobs usually involved a lot of travelling. Audiobooks made it possible to read by proxy.
I bought and listened to quite a few Audible books. But for a couple different reasons, I cancelled my subscription. Kobo’s got a cool app that will let you read ebooks AND listen to audiobooks on your phone…but it looks like their selection is even more pozzed than Audible’s.
Which brings me to Castalia House. They’ve built their own platform, and have audio books for sale. While I don’t agree with all their authors or their founder on several issues, I was stoked about the idea of using my “voting dollars” on products from a company that is not full-commie WOKE.
So I bought The Law Dog Files to listen to on an eight hour trip. Got through about half of it and my wife called me. After hanging up, the player went back to the very beginning of the audio file (the whole book is one huge honkin’ track). I could not fast forward. No matter what I did, it started me at the very beginning so I’d have to listen to the same several hours all over again before moving on. Same thing if I try to rewind (move the slider on the progress bar) and listen to a word or phrase again (I have pretty bad hearing loss and parts of human speech fall right into the frequencies I have trouble picking up). Nope, can’t do that. No matter where I put the slider on the progress bar, it ignores my input and resets all the way back to the beginning so I’ll listen to the same six hours of recording first.
I tried a couple different audio players and had the same exact problem.
Now, it seems logical that these players have sliders on their progress bars for the very reason that a listener will want to navigate to different parts of the recording. It does not seem logical that every single one of them has a progress bar/slider that doesn’t work and that 1. I’m the only listener to ever have noticed, or 2. these tools don’t work for anybody, but listeners continue using these apps anyway. Therefore, it is entirely possible that there is something wrong with the file I bought.
I never had this problem with Audible Books. And if I had, at least their books are broken up into chapter-length files, so at worst I would have to listen to a whole chapter again. But I never had any trouble going back to the part I didn’t catch.
I guess I could sideload the file onto my computer and listen to it with a desktop version of Windows Media Player…but that defeats the purpose. I got the book to listen to while traveling. If I had the time to sit around the house or my job listening to a multi-hour recording, I’d just read the print or e-book version.
Since I ran into the same problem with different players on my phone, I contacted Castalia House and explained the issue, asking for advice. Maybe they knew of a player that wouldn’t force me all the way back to the beginning. Maybe they knew of a setting in a player I could tweak. Maybe the file they sold me was jacked up somehow.
Never got a reply.
Time passed. Still no reply, so I contacted them and explained the situation again.
No reply.
Was their “Contact Us” form malfunctioning? (I’ve had problems with some versions of those forms on this blog before.) But the trip was over, life went on, and I forgot about it.
The other day I was reading the comment section of a post on Castalia’s owner’s blog. While writing a comment, something jogged my memory about Law Dog.
Here’s what I tacked onto the end of my comment:
“…I bought the audio version of the Law Dog Files and have been having trouble with it. There might be an easy solution, but I’ve sent a couple requests for help or advice through Castalia’s help/contact us form, and never got a reply back.”
Here is the response to what I said:
“We don’t provide tech support for how to use basic file formats. We don’t have the time or the manpower to educate everyone on these things.
I’m not trying to sound sarcastic here, but would you contact Sony to ask them how to use the mp3 file that you bought from them?”
Translation:
“We don’t want or need your business. Don’t ever buy audiobooks from us again.”
Check. Anyway, below are the links to the Audible books I have out. The exclusivity contract with Audible should be ending in a year or two. I don’t remember everything from the agreement and their policy changes since then. I’ll have to look up the info again and see if the existing recordings can then be released to the broad market, or if I’ll have to re-record those. Either way, False Flag should be available by then.
I’d love to be proven wrong this time somehow, but Virginians and all other Americans need to be ready for a major false flag and media blitzkrieg. Politicians in Virginia and DC have a message for the American people: “We are going to infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. What are you gonna do about it?”
If Americans don’t show up to the scheduled protest in Virginia, then our domestic enemies win by default…as usual. Just as in every battle for the soul of our culture, evil wins without firing a shot when people on our side don’t even put up a fight.
Signs indicate that people on our side might not surrender as easily this time. But the globohomo Swamp no doubt has a number of contingencies to turn this into an excuse for more orchestrated infringements. Watch this video before it’s purged by CommieTube:
Here’s some important points to keep in mind, for any patriot planning to attend the event:
The Swamp is going to herd the Americans into a fenced area where they will be trapped.
Any patriots who park at the nearby, designated parking garages, will possibly be trapped in the area.
Antifa, disguised as patriots, intend to infiltrate the protest and create incidents that the Swamp Police can exploit. No matter who does what, patriots will be the villains in the official Narrative.
The Swamp has the ability not only to hack your smartphones, but jam any attempt by you to video record what actually happens. So not only can they prevent you from posting any footage that challenges their Narrative, they can prevent you from recording it in the first place. In other words, what ever lie they choose to tell the population, you will have no opportunity to prove it is a lie. There is a reason they’ve been securing a monopoly on the flow of information.
There will probably be drones flying over the area with facial recognition software. So even if you’re smart and only bring a burner phone; even if by some miracle no pre-manufactured “hate crime” doesn’t take place…they will have a list of every American who attends. This will be recon-by-fire. They can arrest potential “domestic terrorists” in the dead of night, later on, at their convenience with no-knock warrants and terminate the resistance piecemeal.
In addition to the covert Antifa infiltrators, there will be the typical federal informants and other agents provacateur on hand, not to mention the usual lineup of tribalist alt-retards screaming racial slurs to make sure sheep watching their idiot box will believe that this is all about “white supremacy.”
I don’t know exactly what will happen, but I’m afraid it will be ugly. I’d feel a lot better if some significant swamp-draining could have been accomplished by this point, but that isn’t the case. Trump is still surrounded by avowed enemies of your freedom, who hate him for interfering with their plan. Neither Sessions, Horowitz, or Barr have proven to me that the Swamp faces any serious challenges. I have no worldly advice to offer, because technologically (and in every other worldly aspect) the enemy holds every possible advantage. The only worthwhile advice I can offer is to trust in, and pray to, the God who is more powerful than everybody involved.
Back in the postwar years, there were several science fiction movies with a theme that involved powerful aliens using mind control on humanity. If you grew up watching reruns of old TV shows (before there were a zillion 24-hour cable channels), then you may have noticed the old “invisible alien entity takes over the ship via mind control of the crew” plot used a few times in the original Star Trek and nearly every episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
My Lai has no concrete connection to the atrocity in Vietnam, so far as I can tell. It’s got a similar theme to those old science fiction dramas, but with a twist: the sinister force taking over Planet Earth is neither alien nor invisible. In fact, most of us have probably encountered this villain at least once. I can tell you that a young, bored boy growing up in the backwoods with time on his hands and a rock or other potential projectile within reach is very well acquainted with this particular villain.
(That’s right: bees. Throw something into a beehive and find out how fast you can run…or how many bee stings you can tolerate.)
Bees have decided that it’s time to take the planet back from humanity. Much like a demonic entity, they start by possessing the body of a human, and can then control it from within. The method of possession is rather grotesque, but is similar to how parasites perform mind control in the animal kingdom. Using one human host, the bees can entrap and infiltrate others. The human hosts then become drones, nurses, or queens, just like their tiny insect puppetmasters.
When the story opens, the bees’ plot for world domination has been wildly successful, but there is organized human resistance. One particular guerrilla band uses guns, flamethrowers, and Molotov cocktails to bring smoke on a hybrid colony of bees and their human thralls. Hoowah! The mayhem is quite gratifying. Their destruction of a hive/village would no doubt be considered equivalent to the My Lai massacre by the bees and those controlled by them.
I haven’t asked author David Dubrow anything about this story, but I’d be astounded if he denied that it is a parable–probably on more than one level.
The way the bees spread their control smacks of “the domino theory,” for starters. For regular readers of this blog who have seen me refer to our collective enemy as “the Hive Mind” (when I write about the left wing, the SJWs; or the institutions they dominate like Hollywood, academia, Big Tech, the DNC, etc.), you might see this for the perfect metaphor that it is. Once a person is melded into the Hive Mind, any potential or capability they once might have had for independent thought is subsumed by whatever The Narrative is during the Current Year.
(For instance: the Leftist Hive Mind once vehemently defended the First Amendment, in order to push pornography, junk science, and Marxist propaganda. But now that they’ve transformed the culture, brainwashed the masses, and secured power for themselves, they are trying to eradicate the First Amendment [with “hate speech” legislation, selective application of “separation of Church and State” arguments, etc.] so that no thoughtcriminals can challenge any aspect of their Narrative.)
This is an overtly politically-focused review (shocker, eh?). But My Lai doesn’t sledgehammer the politics at readers the way I often do on this blog. The political message is there if you want to notice it, but it’s not overbearing and there are possibly many readers who would miss it altogether…just like how the last few generations have been unaware of the underlying messages in mainstream entertainment.
My Lai is one thought-provoking story in Appalling Stories 4–an anthology that is well off the beaten path.
Have you noticed how the Swamp Media and their Deep State fellow travelers in Washington like to accuse people who disagree with them of being Russian agents? President Trump, Tucker Carlson, Roger Stone and everyone in between have been slandered this way.
These same projecting partisans used to love denouncing their political opposition as “McCarthyists.”
You know what the problem with that is?
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s accusations were accurate, and have been proven so.
Look at maps of Europe and Asia before and after WWII, to understand ultimately what was accomplished by it on a geopolitical scope. That will help you understand why FDR was so desperate to get America involved and insure that the correct ideology prevailed.
While no one can excuse Japan’s belligerence in those days, it is also true that our government provoked that country in various ways — freezing her assets in America; closing the Panama Canal to her shipping; progressively halting vital exports to Japan until we finally joined Britain in an all-out embargo; sending a hostile note to the Japanese ambassador implying military threats if Tokyo did not alter its Pacific policies; and on November 26th — just 11 days before the Japanese attack — delivering an ultimatum that demanded, as prerequisites to resumed trade, that Japan withdraw all troops from China and Indochina, and in effect abrogate her Tripartite Treaty with Germany and Italy.
…The bait offered Japan was our Pacific Fleet. In 1940, Admiral J.O. Richardson, the fleet’s commander, flew to Washington to protest FDR’s decision to permanently base the fleet in Hawaii instead of its normal berthing on the U.S. West Coast. The admiral had sound reasons: Pearl Harbor was vulnerable to attack, being approachable from any direction; it could not be effectively rigged with nets and baffles to defend against torpedo planes; and in Hawaii it would be hard to supply and train crews for his undermanned vessels. Pearl Harbor also lacked adequate fuel supplies and dry docks, and keeping men far from their families would create morale problems. The argument became heated. Said Richardson: “I came away with the impression that, despite his spoken word, the President was fully determined to put the United States into the war if Great Britain could hold out until he was reelected.”
Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World
Well, this is embarrassing. I began posting reviews of Len Levinson’s (writing as 
across the Moselle and keep the pressure on the Germans.
