David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. Stranger than Fiction
Like any number of politicians or their apparatchiks, good, bad, possibly well-meaning but potentially misguided or even far, far worse, your Mayor fancies himself quite the wordsmith, and has in recent years been tinkering off and on (mainly off) with a novel.
It is – or was – a comic picaresque in which some 190 million Americans (and millions more the world over) are felled by a militarized virus created by terrorists, told from the point of view of a few baked couch potatoes in Wyoming, who while away the post-Apocalypse watching cable news networks who simply can’t help themselves: They strive (miserably) to try to find happy-news segments behind the calamity and continue to trot out partisan talking heads to bicker over the increasingly erratic behavior of government officials.
One character contributes gamely to The New York Times’ follow-up to its post-9/11 “Portraits in Grief� series, attempting to commemorate the millions of dead in brief, glib thumbnail biographies: “James ‘Jimmy’ Picket sure did like his model train sets….� But mainly, things grow more dire for the world as our toasted protagonists sit listlessly, mocking the bloviating blowhards on the television before them (a character notes that the disaster cuts the anti-drum-machine bumper-sticker campaign off at its knees).
Eventually, President Armitage “Army� Shanks (been to Europe? You might get the joke), citing the “safety� of all surviving Americans, orders them into “security camps.� Roused from their stupor, our “heroes� try to escape to Canada, but, really, the game is up.
So much for that. Today, reality trumped my little cautionary tale. Perhaps for my next novel, I’ll just hack out a winsome coming-of-age tale or, per Gingrich and Boxer, a slightly smutty political thriller.
Comments
Go with the smut; that always sells.
Posted by: Suzy Q | October 19, 2006 6:09 AM