"The Other Side of the Wind", Welles last film which was left unreleased, has been completed and released on Netflix for anyone interested.
The Oceans Divide: A World Of Laughter, A World Of Tears II
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So static, 10 years ago you had an idea: a deadlocked Republican establishment leads an outsider candidate with a huge media imprint and reputation as a business genius to come in, win the nomination and the Presidency, and lead the US to the brink of a second civil war.
What you got wrong was thinking that the President would actually be halfway competent in politics and in business and deliver on his infrastructure promises.
Good luck on the sequel.
What you got wrong was thinking that the President would actually be halfway competent in politics and in business and deliver on his infrastructure promises.
Good luck on the sequel.
When I told my wife that I was going to start work on this again, I mentioned that I was tempted to add a disclaimer of "The last one was meant as political satire, not prophecy!"
Weird thing is, Trump WAS a partial inspiration for this ten years ago. During the 2008 campaign, there had been some talk of him running as a Reform Party candidate or independent, and of course many of us are old enough to recall Perot's run back in 1992. Both were being sold with the idea that the same skills and talents required to run a successful business were the ones that would be most effective in a President. I think that the two jobs require very different skill sets in some areas, and definitely require different experiences and fields of knowledge. I'll let others decide whether or not my skepticism has been borne out in reality (Though to be fair, Trump's capabilities as a businessman have also been the focus of scrutiny and suspicion for some time).
I will say Walt ITTL comes off as well-meaning, but lacking in competence, which tends not to be the opinions most hold of the current president (though obviously that's more of a Chat discussion).
Read the Last TL and all I have to Say is wow, looking forward to the next chapter in this awesome tale
That's quite a long read! Thank you, and I hope you'll enjoy what's coming up.
There's been talk, but also concern over the litigiousness of the Disney company.
Sorry about the delay in an update, folks. I'm getting back to it, but my sleeping schedule has been erratic lately. My daughter has an exceedingly rare genetic condition that requires constant supervision, and there have been issues regarding the scheduling of her home care nurses (namely, she hasn't had anyone on overnight shifts for several days now for various reasons), which means that I've had to stay up with her, and try to sleep during the day while Los Angeles deals with a heat wave. Soon, I promise.
Family comes first. Take care of your daughter and we will develop patience to await your next installment.
I missed that this had been posted. That it was posted on August 30 -- my birthday -- just makes it all the sweeter.
I'm glad to hear that things are better than they were, and I'm very glad to get to read more of your writing, @statichaos.
I'm glad to hear that things are better than they were, and I'm very glad to get to read more of your writing, @statichaos.
Well, well, well! Long time.
Obviously A World of Laughter, A World of Tears was (and remains) a milestone of a timeline, and an inspiration to so many of us, including myself. I'm delighted to see you back in the saddle, continuing your story.
I suppose this means you won't be returning to A Different Path Home anytime soon, alas
(I still remember, Admiral.)
Obviously A World of Laughter, A World of Tears was (and remains) a milestone of a timeline, and an inspiration to so many of us, including myself. I'm delighted to see you back in the saddle, continuing your story.
I suppose this means you won't be returning to A Different Path Home anytime soon, alas
(I still remember, Admiral.)stirlingdraka
Donor
It is awesome to see this wonderful TL back in any form statichaos. Thank you. Your daughter comes first before this TL. I`ll re-read AWOLAWOT to get caught up before the next update.
Look, we'll pick up where we left off, all right? But cut the passive-aggressive bullshit insinuations. I want to get the story out there right, so I'm talking to you, but I'm not going to sit here and deal with lies and slander. We understand each other?
Right. Okay, so it was late 61, and I was making the rounds in New York, shoring up support for my legislative agenda. This meant talking to a bunch of East Coast asshole elites who wanted me to attend their faggy gallery shows, or those brunches where you sit around and drink mimosas and talk to rich old biddies about the threat of Negro radicals, and reds, and all that, and my God I was ready to kill myself if I had to listen to one more stuffed shirt at the opera waxing rhapsodic about Wagner while I tried to steer the conversation towards politics. I got the support, though, and people were making all the right calls to their representatives, and I was already getting some financing for my next run at the Senate in 1964, so I was ready to pack up and go back to D.C. That meant that I nearly turned down the dinner invitation that was offered to me through Alan Greenspan, who I knew through his economic work. Would have been the biggest mistake of my life.
I showed up at the apartment five minutes early, because Roy Cohn does his research, and I knew that my host had a thing about punctuality. Reminded me of my mother that way. I'd also brought a box of her favorite Swiss chocolates, and a copy of her book for her to sign. I knocked. Frank, her husband, he was the one who answered. Nice guy, but didn't really leave an impression. He took my coat and ushered me into the living room where a handful of people sat smoking and talking, obviously deep in the middle of some sort of thorny issue. A woman sat catlike on an enormous, overstuffed chair in the middle of the room. The lady was obviously the leader of this band, and just oozed confidence and dignity from the way that she sat, to the way that she raised her eyebrows, to the way that...I don't know, the way that she held her cigarette holder at an angle. Frank and I, we waited off to the side for a pause in the conversation, then he made the introduction.
"Ayn, darling, this is Senator Roy Cohn." he said. I can still feel the goosebumps from when her eyes met mine. She had one of those stares that stabs you in the eyes, then goes rooting around in your soul for loose change. I smiled. Well, I smirked. Like I said, I'd done my research. Wasn't going to show an ounce of weakness, or kiss her ass too obviously.
"Senator," she said in this thick Russian accent she hadn't bothered to shake even after thirty-odd years living in the U.S. "Thank you for coming. I have long been an admirer of your fight against tyranny and collectivism, especially your work with the late Senator McCarthy." Yeah, she talked just like one of those characters from her books. She extended her hand, which, you know, I never know if a lady wants a handshake or to have it kissed, so I chose the kiss, and she rewarded me with a huge smile of crooked, nicotine-stained teeth.
"Well, I've been a fan of yours for years, Mrs. Rand," I lied. I'd spent the past two days wading through Atlas Shrugged, and not getting any other work done, just so I could say all the right things at this shindig. Great book, by the way. Really shows up the Reds as not just being wrong and dangerous to society, but also as being morally and philosophically wrong. Of course, I'd been a New Deal Democrat before switching parties, and I still liked the programs, but I didn't see any reason to let her know that. Anyway...where was I? Oh, yeah. Drinks were being served, but I noticed that no one was getting drunk, and Rand was avoiding alcohol altogether, so I followed her lead and got some tea when it was offered.
I mostly kept quiet and checked out the dynamics of the room. First off, there was no doubt, none, about who was in charge there. She'd hate the comparison, but it was like Jesus and the disciples, because they mostly sat around and debated, but whenever she made an observation, you wouldn't hear a single one raise a voice against her, and if she disagreed with someone, well, I've never seen grown adults backtrack so quickly. Let's see...you had Greenspan, who was kind of a nebbish, but okay. There were a couple of people I couldn't tell apart, because they all said the same things in the same way, all smoked the same cigarettes, all held their cigarette holders in exact imitation of Ayn. The interesting part, though, was the Brandens, Nathaniel and Barbara. They were the obvious favorites, or at least Nathaniel was. Married, but you wouldn't know it from how they looked at each other. But if I know my body language, and after decades as a lawyer I sure as hell hope I do, then there was something going on between Nathaniel and Rand. Weirder, I'm pretty sure that Barbara and Frank both knew about it. Filed that away in case I needed the info someday. I'd been planning on going after Nathaniel as the alpha dog among the acolytes to establish dominance, but if the two of them were screwing, then that could backfire.
Anyway, great conversation, which continued over dinner. Beef stroganoff, which, according to Barbara, Ayn had made herself. She was also a hell of a cook. So eventually it's my turn under the microscope, and I gotta say, I haven't been challenged like that since I was at law school. She had issues with the spending that President Disney had done on infrastructure, even though she was really into the monorails, and why we were still bogged down in Cuba, and what we were doing to keep Israel from going totally Communist. I got a chance to talk about how great the free market was, and ask her about her time running the MPAA, which she thought was a huge waste of her time in the long run. And that's when I figured I had nothing to lose, and brought up the one piece of legislation that I was pushing hard: to classify communist subversives as suffering from mental illness. Rand's eyebrows went up at that. Branden opened his mouth, then closed it again when she shot him a look. It was time to go all-in.
I said "Look, I've spent pretty much my entire adult life either prosecuting commie spies, investigating them for Senator McCarthy, or finding other ways to counter their pernicious influence on our great system of government. So I get how if someone is poor, uneducated, just plain stupid, or some combination of these things, then it can seem appealing. It teaches you that you're not responsible for your own actions, your own place in life, and that it's all the fault of the capitalists who are actually making things. Now, if someone's stupid, then there's nothing to be done about that except to ignore him. If someone's just misinformed, then they can be educated, and you're leading the way on that front. I'm not worried about them. What I'm looking at is the Reds on college campuses, like we saw at Berkeley, or when that crazy woman tossed a grenade during the inaugural parade. I'm thinking of people like the Rosenbergs, who I had the great pleasure of sending to the electric chair for their crimes against freedom. You have people of real intelligence, of extensive education, people who depend upon reason and logic to make their living, and yet they can't check their own premises, as you put it. Even when it's spelled out for them. That sort of thinking, and thinking may be too strong a word for it, that sort of delusion that people hold fast to in the face of all evidence to the contrary...I mean, this isn't just the wrongheaded support of the income tax, or Social Security, or other simple lapses in logic. No, the only thing that we can call it is insanity, like schizophrenia or paranoia. Only worse, because it's catching, and spreads like the Spanish flu, only even more devastating. Only thing to do is what we do with other crazy people who pose a danger to themselves and others, which is to lock them up and treat them until they're not crazy anymore." I wiped my mouth as if I was taking a pause, but really, I saw that Barbara was chomping at the bit to respond, and I was ready to give her enough rope to do so.
Sure enough, Barbara comes back with "That's an interesting theory, Senator, but there are a couple of things wrong with it. First off, the American Psychological Association isn't going to automatically agree with your findings, as I'm unaware of any training that you have in psychology or psychiatry. Second, I'm not sure how you're going to pass this, since the civil libertarians are already trying to roll back some of the measures you implemented, and frankly, while I have no use for collectivists, people have an inherent right to be wrong about things."
"Why the hell should I care about the civil libertarians?" I snapped back. "Civil liberties, what, like those Reds at the SCLU who cried crocodile tears over that kid who got ripped apart in Little Rock, but didn't have a thing to say when Disney and Hoover nearly got blown up, and Jimmie Dodd was crippled for the rest of his short life? The ones who threw a tantrum when we killed an actual terrorist leader, Elijah Muhammad, but didn't even acknowledge his victims? As far as the APA goes, all we need are a couple of friendly shrinks to testify in front of Congress. My colleagues are a pretty mixed bag, but with a couple of exceptions, I think that we can get them to see the light. Look, don't think that I'm doing this just because I hate Reds, even though I do. This is about the kind of country that I want to live in, and if I ever have kids, it's about the kind of country I want them to live in. This isn't about spite. This is about what I want, and I'm willing to put everything on the line to make sure that I get it. Anyone standing in my way needs to get the hell out of my way, and anyone who supports me needs to stand up right now. Anyone in between...I don't have time for them. I won't even waste my scorn on people who can't commit one way or the other."
Rand gave me a long, cool gaze, again looking straight to the back of my brain. I held the eye contact, didn't even flinch. She looks over at her lover. "Nathaniel," she nearly purrs. "What is your opinion?"
He looked back at her, obviously trying to figure out what she wanted him to say, and how to say it like he was the one who came up with it. Finally he saw some sort of sign, and gave me a nod. "I...agree. In fact, I've been exploring similar themes in my own work. There must be a mental defect of some sort that can cause someone to break with reality in that manner, a disorder of cognition that would cause one to abase oneself to the degree that causes one's self-esteem to plummet so drastically that he is willing to live his life for others, and have others live their lives for him." Barbara looked furious, but wisely kept her mouth shut.
"You're a psychiatrist?" I said back, feigning surprise. Like I said, I do my research.
"Psychologist, actually. And yes, if you need an expert witness, I'd be more than happy to testify." he replied.
"Great. I'll have my office call you, and we'll set something up." I looked at Ayn.
"Mrs. Rand, I think that this is going to be a fruitful relationship for all of us." She smiled back.
"Call my Ayn, Senator."
"Call me Roy, Ayn."
-Retired Sen. Roy Cohn, quoted in World Of Tomorrow: America In The 1960s by Studs Terkel
Right. Okay, so it was late 61, and I was making the rounds in New York, shoring up support for my legislative agenda. This meant talking to a bunch of East Coast asshole elites who wanted me to attend their faggy gallery shows, or those brunches where you sit around and drink mimosas and talk to rich old biddies about the threat of Negro radicals, and reds, and all that, and my God I was ready to kill myself if I had to listen to one more stuffed shirt at the opera waxing rhapsodic about Wagner while I tried to steer the conversation towards politics. I got the support, though, and people were making all the right calls to their representatives, and I was already getting some financing for my next run at the Senate in 1964, so I was ready to pack up and go back to D.C. That meant that I nearly turned down the dinner invitation that was offered to me through Alan Greenspan, who I knew through his economic work. Would have been the biggest mistake of my life.
I showed up at the apartment five minutes early, because Roy Cohn does his research, and I knew that my host had a thing about punctuality. Reminded me of my mother that way. I'd also brought a box of her favorite Swiss chocolates, and a copy of her book for her to sign. I knocked. Frank, her husband, he was the one who answered. Nice guy, but didn't really leave an impression. He took my coat and ushered me into the living room where a handful of people sat smoking and talking, obviously deep in the middle of some sort of thorny issue. A woman sat catlike on an enormous, overstuffed chair in the middle of the room. The lady was obviously the leader of this band, and just oozed confidence and dignity from the way that she sat, to the way that she raised her eyebrows, to the way that...I don't know, the way that she held her cigarette holder at an angle. Frank and I, we waited off to the side for a pause in the conversation, then he made the introduction.
"Ayn, darling, this is Senator Roy Cohn." he said. I can still feel the goosebumps from when her eyes met mine. She had one of those stares that stabs you in the eyes, then goes rooting around in your soul for loose change. I smiled. Well, I smirked. Like I said, I'd done my research. Wasn't going to show an ounce of weakness, or kiss her ass too obviously.
"Senator," she said in this thick Russian accent she hadn't bothered to shake even after thirty-odd years living in the U.S. "Thank you for coming. I have long been an admirer of your fight against tyranny and collectivism, especially your work with the late Senator McCarthy." Yeah, she talked just like one of those characters from her books. She extended her hand, which, you know, I never know if a lady wants a handshake or to have it kissed, so I chose the kiss, and she rewarded me with a huge smile of crooked, nicotine-stained teeth.
"Well, I've been a fan of yours for years, Mrs. Rand," I lied. I'd spent the past two days wading through Atlas Shrugged, and not getting any other work done, just so I could say all the right things at this shindig. Great book, by the way. Really shows up the Reds as not just being wrong and dangerous to society, but also as being morally and philosophically wrong. Of course, I'd been a New Deal Democrat before switching parties, and I still liked the programs, but I didn't see any reason to let her know that. Anyway...where was I? Oh, yeah. Drinks were being served, but I noticed that no one was getting drunk, and Rand was avoiding alcohol altogether, so I followed her lead and got some tea when it was offered.
I mostly kept quiet and checked out the dynamics of the room. First off, there was no doubt, none, about who was in charge there. She'd hate the comparison, but it was like Jesus and the disciples, because they mostly sat around and debated, but whenever she made an observation, you wouldn't hear a single one raise a voice against her, and if she disagreed with someone, well, I've never seen grown adults backtrack so quickly. Let's see...you had Greenspan, who was kind of a nebbish, but okay. There were a couple of people I couldn't tell apart, because they all said the same things in the same way, all smoked the same cigarettes, all held their cigarette holders in exact imitation of Ayn. The interesting part, though, was the Brandens, Nathaniel and Barbara. They were the obvious favorites, or at least Nathaniel was. Married, but you wouldn't know it from how they looked at each other. But if I know my body language, and after decades as a lawyer I sure as hell hope I do, then there was something going on between Nathaniel and Rand. Weirder, I'm pretty sure that Barbara and Frank both knew about it. Filed that away in case I needed the info someday. I'd been planning on going after Nathaniel as the alpha dog among the acolytes to establish dominance, but if the two of them were screwing, then that could backfire.
Anyway, great conversation, which continued over dinner. Beef stroganoff, which, according to Barbara, Ayn had made herself. She was also a hell of a cook. So eventually it's my turn under the microscope, and I gotta say, I haven't been challenged like that since I was at law school. She had issues with the spending that President Disney had done on infrastructure, even though she was really into the monorails, and why we were still bogged down in Cuba, and what we were doing to keep Israel from going totally Communist. I got a chance to talk about how great the free market was, and ask her about her time running the MPAA, which she thought was a huge waste of her time in the long run. And that's when I figured I had nothing to lose, and brought up the one piece of legislation that I was pushing hard: to classify communist subversives as suffering from mental illness. Rand's eyebrows went up at that. Branden opened his mouth, then closed it again when she shot him a look. It was time to go all-in.
I said "Look, I've spent pretty much my entire adult life either prosecuting commie spies, investigating them for Senator McCarthy, or finding other ways to counter their pernicious influence on our great system of government. So I get how if someone is poor, uneducated, just plain stupid, or some combination of these things, then it can seem appealing. It teaches you that you're not responsible for your own actions, your own place in life, and that it's all the fault of the capitalists who are actually making things. Now, if someone's stupid, then there's nothing to be done about that except to ignore him. If someone's just misinformed, then they can be educated, and you're leading the way on that front. I'm not worried about them. What I'm looking at is the Reds on college campuses, like we saw at Berkeley, or when that crazy woman tossed a grenade during the inaugural parade. I'm thinking of people like the Rosenbergs, who I had the great pleasure of sending to the electric chair for their crimes against freedom. You have people of real intelligence, of extensive education, people who depend upon reason and logic to make their living, and yet they can't check their own premises, as you put it. Even when it's spelled out for them. That sort of thinking, and thinking may be too strong a word for it, that sort of delusion that people hold fast to in the face of all evidence to the contrary...I mean, this isn't just the wrongheaded support of the income tax, or Social Security, or other simple lapses in logic. No, the only thing that we can call it is insanity, like schizophrenia or paranoia. Only worse, because it's catching, and spreads like the Spanish flu, only even more devastating. Only thing to do is what we do with other crazy people who pose a danger to themselves and others, which is to lock them up and treat them until they're not crazy anymore." I wiped my mouth as if I was taking a pause, but really, I saw that Barbara was chomping at the bit to respond, and I was ready to give her enough rope to do so.
Sure enough, Barbara comes back with "That's an interesting theory, Senator, but there are a couple of things wrong with it. First off, the American Psychological Association isn't going to automatically agree with your findings, as I'm unaware of any training that you have in psychology or psychiatry. Second, I'm not sure how you're going to pass this, since the civil libertarians are already trying to roll back some of the measures you implemented, and frankly, while I have no use for collectivists, people have an inherent right to be wrong about things."
"Why the hell should I care about the civil libertarians?" I snapped back. "Civil liberties, what, like those Reds at the SCLU who cried crocodile tears over that kid who got ripped apart in Little Rock, but didn't have a thing to say when Disney and Hoover nearly got blown up, and Jimmie Dodd was crippled for the rest of his short life? The ones who threw a tantrum when we killed an actual terrorist leader, Elijah Muhammad, but didn't even acknowledge his victims? As far as the APA goes, all we need are a couple of friendly shrinks to testify in front of Congress. My colleagues are a pretty mixed bag, but with a couple of exceptions, I think that we can get them to see the light. Look, don't think that I'm doing this just because I hate Reds, even though I do. This is about the kind of country that I want to live in, and if I ever have kids, it's about the kind of country I want them to live in. This isn't about spite. This is about what I want, and I'm willing to put everything on the line to make sure that I get it. Anyone standing in my way needs to get the hell out of my way, and anyone who supports me needs to stand up right now. Anyone in between...I don't have time for them. I won't even waste my scorn on people who can't commit one way or the other."
Rand gave me a long, cool gaze, again looking straight to the back of my brain. I held the eye contact, didn't even flinch. She looks over at her lover. "Nathaniel," she nearly purrs. "What is your opinion?"
He looked back at her, obviously trying to figure out what she wanted him to say, and how to say it like he was the one who came up with it. Finally he saw some sort of sign, and gave me a nod. "I...agree. In fact, I've been exploring similar themes in my own work. There must be a mental defect of some sort that can cause someone to break with reality in that manner, a disorder of cognition that would cause one to abase oneself to the degree that causes one's self-esteem to plummet so drastically that he is willing to live his life for others, and have others live their lives for him." Barbara looked furious, but wisely kept her mouth shut.
"You're a psychiatrist?" I said back, feigning surprise. Like I said, I do my research.
"Psychologist, actually. And yes, if you need an expert witness, I'd be more than happy to testify." he replied.
"Great. I'll have my office call you, and we'll set something up." I looked at Ayn.
"Mrs. Rand, I think that this is going to be a fruitful relationship for all of us." She smiled back.
"Call my Ayn, Senator."
"Call me Roy, Ayn."
-Retired Sen. Roy Cohn, quoted in World Of Tomorrow: America In The 1960s by Studs Terkel
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