Above It All

Joe Doakes from Como Pak emails:

Many people want to be authors. They crave the adulation of fans, going to cons, signing books, being able to work in their bathrobe and getting checks in the mail. Few people really want to be writers. Writers are miserable people who spend most of their time alone, have poor relations with their families and live in other worlds because this one doesn’t work for them. But to be an author you have to be a writer first. (Paraphrase of Lois Bujold.)

There definitely are days when I feel that way.

Joe Doakes

I’m suddenly longing for the dignified grace of Jimmy Carter.

5 thoughts on “Above It All

  1. It’s impossible to tell what historians a decade or a century from now will say about a president. But in the case of Obama, what would they find praiseworthy? Massive losses to his party, not a strong showing in either of his election wins (53%-46% in 2008, 51%-47% 2012). Slowest period of economic growth since the depression. Race relations worsened under Obama, not unexpected as members of the underclass fought over a shrinking piece of the economic pie. Rise of Isis, inability to contain Putin, and turning Libya into a failed state (though that was really Hillary’s fault, I suppose).
    The other day someone asked if, maybe, Obama knew about Hillary’s home-brew email server and tacitly approved.
    I don’t think that Obama and Hillary communicated much when she was Secretary of State. I never got the impression that they spent hours together, designing US foreign policy. I think that they mostly dealt with each other only when they had to, and used intermediaries.

  2. I can’t wait for Johnson’s update to Modern Times. May he live that long.

  3. MP – you’re using the wrong metric. Don’t you remember the Obama administration telling us about the number of jobs “created or saved”? Why, if he hadn’t been such a bold, decisive leader, his party would have lost the elections, the economy would have been far worse, and foreign policy would have been a disaster, unlike the minor mopping up that he left for his successor. Dude, he won a Nobel Prize, how much more do you want?

  4. As an author I cannot begin to tell you how many times I tossed and turned with unresolved plot problems from 3:00 to 5:30 AM. And, Joe, it’s not that we want to spend most of our time alone, it’s just that we eventually learn to hate most of humanity for being dense. However, my cynicism has shown me where true light originates and it’s not other people – and it’s certainly not from me!!! And, as regards the Obama legacy, all I can say is his metrics are truly the intersection of wishful thinking and Common Core mathematics.

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