I've just started reading this.
I decided to put on a 1970s playlist as I read Chapter 2.
Would you believe 'War' by Edwin Starr kicked in as the McGovern-Johnson meeting happened.
Kismet.
I don't know if changes to the timeline could be covered in extensive detail after 1/20/1977 or 1/20/1981. Perhaps in broad strokes in an epilogue post, but this is a TL about a McGovern Administration. Still, it is your call.
FWIW, I would read the hell out of a sequel thread (say one focusing on TTL's 1980's).
It's interesting that the two of you bring up these particular points.
McGoverning, that is to say
McGoverning qua McGoverning, is very much the front end of a broader, longer exercise in universe-building. There are probably other analogies I could make in other genres (maybe scifi, even alternate history itself) but the ones that come to my mind immediately (as a geek of my particular culture and generation) are over in fantasy. This is not
in any way to compare myself to titans of the field like this, just the conceptual circumstances: the most famous works of J.R.R. Tolkien (
Lord of the Rings) and George R.R. Martin (
A Song of Ice and Fire) were/are, for their authors, really just very-thoroughly-written codas to a much larger exercise in worldbuilding where a lot of the authors' own interests (most especially Tolkien's) lay with the earlier material. In my own case,
McGoverning really kicks off, rather than closes, a much broader and more lasting (up close to the present day) TLverse where a lot of stuff has already been storyboarded, some stuff falls under the heading of Divers Other Projects within the legendarium (to borrow a Tolkien word - "allohistorium" would probably be better here) and there's just acres and acres of space for the author - hi! That'd be me - to play in. Some of that's already going on in a few niche areas, y'all might even get the occasional contemporaneous glimpse of that stuff (i.e. things that are going on in the deep background space/wider world of
McGoverning offstage from the main narrative, or crop up once in a while as mentions by the characters. We'll see more of that as we go along.
And as to All That Later Stuff, well Lord-willin'-and-the-creeks-don't-rise as my mother's people used to say (it's the hillbilly
insh'allah - hi nice readers from the NSA who just data-mined the fact I used Arabic there!) I will get to it. So there may be opportunities to enjoy that stuff, I just can't guarantee it'll be in any closer proximity of time to
McGoverning than, say, recent GRRM stuff is for readers who picked up the first book back in the Nineties...
By far, this is the most educational T/L on here. I'm now a member and checked it out!
It's great stuff, isn't it, that archive? As for "most educational," I mean I try, but it really
is the Careful Readers who elevate this thread. And, as always, thanks, friend.
It’s possible I just missed this, but what’s happened with regard to the “right to be different” plank of the Democratic platform? Has it foundered on the rocks of cultural-conservative opposition in the face of more concrete priorities like MECA, or has it led to actual policy outcomes? Or is it somewhere in between?
This is a very good question. Very
apt question. We haven't seen a whole lot of that yet, and yes the McGoverners have concentrated much of their energy on matters where they can play the double-bill of getting things done that matter to
them, themselves, and things that also matter to a broader constituency, both "loyal Democrats" constituencies and "for the good of the country" constituencies. But. They have not forgotten that stuff, and when the narrative gets over the hump of the midterms we're gonna visit some of those issues a good bit more closely.
You know
@Yes , we talked in this thread earlier about things we might get to see later regarding South Africa, and I just realized - the little experiment of Rhodesia is also very likely to be altered as well; given just how complicated the Bush War could get at times, should we expect changes here as well?
Perhaps it can be tied into the fate of Jeremy Thorpe. Did you know that he advocated bombing Rhodesia to cut off its oil supplies? With him as Foreign Secretary, that may likely occur.
Anything's better than sending ships to one port and doing fuck-all else.
Another excellent topic! And, yes, as we get into Puttin' on the Brits a little bit down the way here, those issues very much will crop up. On one hand it's a live issue given the McGovern administration's antipathy to the white-settler regimes at the southern end of Africa, on another it's one of those things where Oor 'Arold would like to avoid distraction from the kind of lunch-pail issues that Oor 'Arold believes affect his personal electoral fortunes - and on yet
another hand it's exactly the kind of issue where Oor 'Arold can set his Cabinet ministers to fighting amongst themselves thereby yet again keeping any of the more ambitious among them from eyeing his job...