A little about my book. It was started several years ago, long before I’d heard of Barack Obama or Sarah Palin. And while the Obama revolution was happening, I wondered if I had to revise the novel, as the country seemed to be heading in a very different direction compared to the years under Bush. My president – Charles Winchell – is a Bush-esque character, a fundamentalist Christian who poses as the anti-Christ so he can start World War III and bring about the Second Coming. Along the way, he starts believing that he’s Jesus as well.

It was my most paranoid fantasy of what dry-drunk Bush jr. might think in his most private thoughts. I’ll admit, I thought this desire for the apocalypse was actually on the radar of the Republican party. Why else would they try to curtail efforts to protect the environment and enter into wars that make the world more volatile. It all seems very aggressively self-defeating, almost with purpose. And the rise of Barack Obama seemed like this kind of fear and paranoia could be a thing of the past.

But then came Sarah Palin.

She’s a deeper fanatic and inspires a deeper fanaticism than George Bush ever did.  So I’ll least pat myself on the back that I was right about some of the instincts of this country.  But I’ll admit this: Sarah Palin is a far more riveting fictional character than Charles Winchell.  I could never invent a celebrity-obsessed wonder-woman who carts around her disadvantaged child to prove her pro-life bona fides.  I think what attracts people to Sarah Palin is what attracts people to any movie star: even when they’re off the screen, they seem a little unreal.  Except with Sarah Palin, people tout how “honest” and “real” she seems, which is exactly opposite of the case.

Nor could I invent a world in which this seems like a good idea. How can you watch this and not be terrified. A world in which “loving the homeland” is popular again – said in a dark, demon’s voice, without irony.

The novel covers dual stories. On the one hand it’s about a writer who’s dreaming about people who turn out to be real, so the world of internal consciousness is becoming a reality. The writer and the president are after the same thing: evolution. The president is trying to achieve it through war and his version of religion. The writer is trying to achieve it by writing a book. But if you want a sense of what the presidential half of my book is about, this is a pretty good start:

Posted on December 4, 2009 at 11:42 am
http://www.theamericanbookofthedead.com/2009/12/04/sarah-palin-charles-winchell/
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Tags: Sarah Palin