My high school band sold fruitcakes to raise money for band trips. We went door to door in our neighborhood (wearing our band uniforms on a Saturday morning) extolling the merits of those creations from the south Georgia pecan belt. I hated every minute of it.
Now the publisher of my novels has gifted me with a promotion (a priceless gem these days when most books are self-promoted). Friday, June 13, the first day of the promotion, you can buy the Kindle edition of my latest novel, Tender Shadows, for $1.99. The next day, Saturday, June 14, Tender Shadows sells for $2.99. Sunday, June 15, the price is $3.99. Then it goes back to the still reasonable price of $4.99.
I’m trying, am I not? But I still cringe when faced with marketing. Marketing asks people to give up something, usually money, but also time, perhaps even more precious.
Why would someone choose to expend these precious commodities to read my novels or write reviews of them or even read my blogs? Given the new world created by the internet, novels proliferate like eighteenth century political tracts. Blogs are as prevalent as misty droplets in a Seattle winter.
Nevertheless, unless you are as famous as Stephen King, you do it. Authors write. Authors sell.
One thing in my favor: I don’t like fruitcake, but I love to read. And write.
You may see the term “Tiananmen Square” frequently in the news this next week. A quarter century ago, a movement in that square in Beijing, China, for more democracy, was crushed by authorities in June, 1989. Hundreds of students are estimated to have been killed, perhaps more.
Spring, 1989, had seen the movement in China smothered by the military. However, in November of that same year, the barrier between East and West Germany in Berlin—”the Wall”—fell.
How about our democratic allies? What kind of people do these countries appoint as ambassadors TO the United States? According to a recent study of ambassadors from NATO countries (May 2014 issue of The Foreign Service Journal), not a single one serving at the time was politically appointed.
The characters in Tender Shadows differ in background and purpose and choices. They mirror society in the early twenty-first century. They include the digitally adept and the digitally challenged, the athletic and those who struggle to keep off extra pounds, the confident and the searchers.
Flying in a small plane over one of Saudi Arabia’s deserts in 1991, I read of the first attempt of the old Russian guard to bring back Soviet Russia after Gorbachev’s pivot toward the West. Boris Yeltsin, showing courage he lacked later in bringing true democracy to his country, stared them down and won the day. Russia appeared once more set on the road to what we call Western liberalism.
When circumstances beyond our control and not of our making place us in bad, even horrible situations, we can remember the lessons of Viktor Frankl. Imprisoned in a German concentration camp, at the mercy of those who hated his race, Frankl continued to develop his inner thoughts and ideas. After release from the camp, Frankl expressed those ideas in a book read by millions, Man’s Search for Meaning.
The Nazis came to power in Germany in a society of educated, middle class citizens. An unsuccessful war and economic problems led a significant proportion of the population to look for simple solutions like blaming Jews. Instead they might have examined issues like the world wide recession and its effects on Germany. They might have found a way to deal with the heavy debt placed on the country by the treaty that ended World War I. Instead, they allowed themselves to be caught in the hyper nationalism championed by the Nazis.
This period was a beginning, not of leaving my faith, but of finding a more mature faith. Before in my world, Christians were Christians, and the rest was everybody else. Now I began to see graduations within the Christian community as well as in the community of “others.” I found that I could disagree but respect those who differed with me. I am, as the apostle Paul said, still working out my own salvation with fear and trembling.
I also came to understand that some people who called themselves Christians have committed grievous sins against others. We worship Jesus who, though equal with God, humbled himself to become like us. Yet, in our arrogance, we scream at the different others as though we are God and know perfection. Now I am more aware of my own potential for error and am more willing to listen to other viewpoints.
I find no fault in Jesus, but I fear that we have clung, not to Jesus and his radical love, but to something less, Christianity as a mere civil religion. Perhaps that is why Christianity is no longer the default religion in the Western world.
1) How much more influence does a citizen gain who spends a great deal of money on a candidate compared with an average citizen who merely casts a ballot? Can votes be “bought” in the sense of understood favors toward certain policies if one accepts money for a campaign?
5) Has money trumped political parties? Do wealthy individuals have more power to win elections than Democrats or Republicans or other political parties?
Jesus is crucified, his body taken away.
For the next episode, I was privileged to work closer to the front lines. I was in Saudi Arabia working for the State Department when the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was defeated by the first alliance since World War II that included Russia.
Vladimir Putin in Russia, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the generals in Egypt, among others, push against what a short time ago seemed an unstoppable march to self-government.
Ukraine has recently struggled to return to democracy but it is hampered by the leftovers of a corrupt regime. Russia’s Putin took advantage of the country’s weakness. That is often the way dictators amass power.
The fancy name for coming-of-age stories is Bildungsroman (loosely translated: growth novel). This word is featured in a column by Christine Chaney, a professor of English at Seattle Pacific University, in the 2014 spring issue of Response (SPU) magazine.