October marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, and to celebrate a generation’s escape from nuclear annihilation here comes The Virgin Missile Crisis, my comic novel that revisits those seven days when the world stood on the brink, asking the burning question: WTF?
With the exception of a sentimental send off to Christopher Hitchens, I don’t traffic much in fiction, which is odd because I actually value fiction over its sober and oh-so-serious sister, non-fiction. Just this week, another example of why that is materialized when the estimable Charles Pierce posted his take on the trial of John Edwards. Now for my money, nobody in the whole blogosphere writes with more color and flair than Charlie Pierce. But read his post in all its brilliance, and then read this bit of fiction by Bob Dylan:
“Oh, help me in my weakness”I heard the drifter say/As they carried him from the courtroom/And were taking him away“My trip hasn’t been a pleasant one/And my time it isn’t long/And I still do not know/What it was that I’ve done wrong”
Well, the judge, he cast his robe aside/A tear came to his eye/“You fail to understand,” he said/“Why must you even try?”Outside, the crowd was stirring/You could hear it from the door/Inside, the judge was stepping down/While the jury cried for more
“Oh, stop that cursed jury”/Cried the attendant and the nurse“The trial was bad enough/But this is ten times worse”/Just then a bolt of lightning/Struck the courthouse out of shape/And while ev’rybody knelt to pray/The drifter did escape
Dylan wrote
The Drifter’s Escape more than 40 years ago, yet it still manages to get to the essence of what Pierce has to say contemporaneously about the Edwards case, less the transitory whosits, whatsits, whensits, and wheresits. A hundred years from now Dylan will still be the word on justice gone bonkers. Likewise, Shakespeare will be the word on the struggle for political power, Dickens the word on being born into misfortune, Milan Kundera the word on the unbearable lightness of being. When all the bloggers have become dust in the wind and there's no news left to fit in The New York Times, our fictions will endure.
From the back cover:
One week in '62...all the Baby Boomers nearly went Boom!
It’s the Cuban missile crisis, and Marty LaRosa is in a panic that the world will blow up before he has a chance to lose his virginity. Marty swings wildly between his high hopes for a bright future and his dread of impending doom. His optimism is manifest in his campaign for re-election as class president; his pessimism is manifest in his manic seduction of his total tease of a girlfriend, who’s reluctant to give up the virginity she hopes to carry into a post-apocalyptic new age in her family’s fallout shelter. Our story cuts back and forth between Marty’s hometown and John F. Kennedy’s war council, drawing on the official Kennedy Tapes to glimpse a president facing the ultimate test of leadership. And as the seven days of The Virgin Missile Crisis unfold, the lives of JFK and Marty LaRosa move pell-mell down parallel tracks: a man with his finger on the nuclear trigger, a boy with his finger on the trigger of teenage ecstasy.
And so, perhaps, may
The Virgin Missile Crisis become the last word on teenage angst under threat of nuclear holocaust. Who knows? If that too glorious to behold event is to happen, it starts with you, dear readers…
here and now.