Eminentoes/50 Million Sold
Sundquist, Eric J.
pose increase the relative attractiveness of spending for other purposes increases; as a result, when the available income rises it is not all devoted to one purpose but tends to be distributed...
...What they have to do with is drugs, pure and simple...
...As he told a Playboy interviewer, his "old-fashioned frontier vision" of self-reliance, his em brace of traditional values of family and honor, and his belief that good and evil exist as universal values at war with one another no doubt put him at odds with "an urban and liberal sensibility that equates all change with progress and wants to destroy all conventions, in literature as well as in society...
...Oh, yes, I almost forgot...
...The expose need not be written, however...
...1926 Ridge Road, Homers ood, It 60x30...
...Extremely funny when one comes to think of it...
...Certainly not through Soviet credits...
...Then there are the Moslems, mostly Sunnis and the Shiites, a minority (thank God) everywhere else in the Arab world, but (typically) a majority in Lebanon...
...At least we don't have Dr...
...One, led by Danny Chamoun, could conceivably be said to be pro-Israeli...
...Most of all, King feeds the American appetite for consumable goods, all the edible items and events of our ghoulish pop culture...
...What King began to do, in effect, -was to create in his work strategies much like those he has so persuasively analyzed in the excellent essays on classic horror films, fiction, and television in the volume Danse Macabre (1981...
...The Shop's director, Captain Hollister, a Pattonlike hardhitter ominously nicknamed "Cap," dreams of employing Andy's powers of mental domination: "Imagine someone like McGee close to Castro, or the Ayatollah Khomeini...
...The nicest thing they said about me was their wish that the fleas of a thousand camels should infest my armpits...
...In one of King's futuristic stories, "The Jaunt," the past presidency of Hart is deemed comparable to Lincoln's...
...He was "busted in the Great Chicago Pig Convention of 1968" and went underground, biding his time...
...2094D 245 pages $19.95 For Visa and MastecCaid order, call TOLL FREE 1-/Da323-t717 and ask for operator 22...
...Most of his fiction, King has said, is "plain fiction for plain folks, the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and a large fries from McDonald's...
...In fact, my opus was reprinted in an Egyptian rag and all hell broke loose...
...Therefore, when Johnny shakes hands with the fictional House candidate, Greg Stillson, and prophetically envisions this one-time McCarthyite, antiSemitic rainmaker and Bible salesman becoming President on a conservative "America Now" platform and sweeping the world into nuclear war (initiated in South Africa), we can be sure that Stillson has been cut from the same cloth...
...The inhabitants of the Boulder "Free Zone," on the other side, readopt the Constitution, warble about liferaft earth, and rail against the era of technology and "rationalism" that has produced the plague and Randall Flagg, the ultimate nuclear terrorist: `At the end of all rationalism, the mass grave...
...It is no secret, then, that the "plague" that has destroyed America is something of a metaphor...
...If any of these propositions is correct the case for higher taxes is weak...
...Exp...
...For instance, Firestarter (1980) concerns an eight-year-old girl with mammouth psychic and pyrokinetic powers which a secret governmental intelligence agency known as the Shop wants to harness and use for military purposes...
...POLITIQ UE IIVTERNATIONALE...
...Through PRAVDA PULSE, you can put yourself in the shoes of an ordinary Russian as he reads news (including propaganda), commentary, cartoons and government announcements...
...Predictably, Johnny reads All the President's Men to catch up on recent history...
...Published biweekly (26 issues per year), PRAVDA PULSE will enable you to keep in constant touch with the changing mood in the USSR...
...Like Jackson's book, The Shining is psychologically complex...
...Taki Theodoracopulos is a European editor of The American Spectator...
...Call it the literary version of the Age of Carter...
...Even Time, the large fries of magazine journalism, has labeled him the hero of the "post-literate age," and the Village Voice excitedly found him to be an enemy of the left-a glib, sexist apologist for morality and the American way...
...In present circumstances the bargaining power of the supporters of more defense will be strong, because the President will presumably be on their side...
...after friendship and betrayal by a hulking Cherokee agent, maimed by his own troops in Vietnam...
...Yes, of course, good triumphs again...
...They are not matters that can be surely resolved by appeals to objective, empirical evidence...
...PRAVDA PULSE Is impartially translated from PRAVDA, the Soviet Union's largest newspaper...
...Poland will beat him...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 King has not escaped the label, or much tried to...
...The surviving good guys group in Boulder, Colorado, and prepare for battle against one Randall Flagg and his forces of evil based in Las Vegas...
...Now an Arab calling a non-Arab a liar is akin, say, to Alexander Cockburn saying he hates rich women, or Christabel Hitchens denying she loves hirsute men...
...Yet if great horror fiction is almost always allegorical, as King says, his own fiction soon became too allegorical by half, relentlessly wallowing in the mire of post Watergate theology...
...Let the best in business trigger your mind, tempt your intellect and even tickle your funny bone...
...As in Firestarter and The Dead Zone, an instantly recognizable assortment of media cliches structures the 800-plus pages of The Stand (which nonetheless was cut 20 percent before publication...
...D...
...Rather conservative on matters of private and family morality, but from all evidence to the left of center on domestic and foreign policy, King would make a pretty good American bishop...
...These and other corporate elite reflect on what years of late nights, mistakes, success and sweat have taught them...
...Perhaps this is true, but what King's best-selling political horror novels have proved is that the monsters of America, at least over the last two decades, are simply the cartoon nightmares made familiar by Hollywood and the daily press...
...Cap Hollister and Greg Stillson Pull Up A Chair • • • and pick up The Wall Street Journal on Management...
...Out Pledge to you • Nows PuIse...
...But the group of books that followed acquired unmistakable political vibrations, and it is here that his shallow quarrel with liberalism is most pointedly betrayed...
...What do these signposts mean...
...Charlie (short for Charlene) McGee's powers are the result of-just guess-experiments with hallucinogenic drugs performed on her parents, when they were college students in 1969, by agents of the Shop...
...It's frightening how many novels of suspense I've written...
...Can this be the Stephen Kingauthor of Carrie (in which a pubertystricken girl's pyrokinetic powers barbecue her high school prom and most of her home town) and Christine (in which a wrecked 1958 Plymouth Fury cybernetically repairs itself and, driverless, mows down its enemies) and Pet Sematary (in which a university physician discovers a Iitystic burial ground that allows him to resurrect first his dead cat, then his dead son, then his dead wife...
...Indeed, President Jimmy even makes an appearance in The Dead Zone (1979) as one of many stumping candidates-Udall Jackson Shriver , Reagan, Harris-met in 1976 by Johnny Smith, whose five-year coma following a car crash has activated his latent powers of prophecy...
...after daddy sacrifices his life for his little girl, Charlie is finally forced to unleash her fury, atomizing the Shop and countless blue three-piece functionaries (the equivalent of Carrie's mean classmates...
...Las Vegas self-destructs in a local nuclear holocaust, leaving the children of the aging hippies in Boulder and the gentle reader with a heartwarming antinuke lesson worthy of "The Day After": "Don't play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever...
...In each of these three novels, King brilliantly exploits the rudimentary intelligence of his average reader, trained by a diet of newscapsules and prime-time docudrama to salivate upon recognizing certain themes and, most of all, certain pictures...
...The focal point of his essays on the fifties is the Cold War menace of Communism as it appears in, say, The Thing or Invasion of the Body Snatchers...
...Along with Carrie (1974) and the vampire novel Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining typecast King-as his editor feared, but apparently he did not-as a specialist in the violent grotesque...
...Not quite, but King's seamy scare fiction does represent a curious mix of ideologies...
...Gripping candidate Carter's hand, Johnny predicts, "You're going to be president...
...There is the pro-Syrian one led by expresident Franjieh, and there is the Falange, whose leader is the titular president of Lebanon, Amin Gemayel...
...saves the nation from the maniacal designs of Stillson...
...Which brings me to the place a little ways up the coastline, Beirut to be exact...
...By his own admission, King is now an American "brand name," one more of the hundreds of household, everyday consumable artifacts with which his novels are filled...
...P PRA 31 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 (both characters well played by Martin Sheen in the lamentable film versions of the two books) are incarnations of evil on the Right...
...Randall Flagg is a wonderfully drawn figure...
...One of his most compelling stories, "Apt Pupil" (in Different Seasons), portrays an "allAmerican" high school boy who becomes obsessed with the life of an elderly former Nazi hiding in America because, as he says, "I really groove on that concentration camp stuff...
...The high priest of spilled guts and maggot infestations is the new front against liberalism...
...Little did I realize at the time that The American Spectator is as avidly read among those who wear pyjamas all day while eating their dates, as it is popular in Washington, D.C...
...There are the Druse, too, whom other Moslems claim to be infidels, and even the Christians do not claim as their own...
...That is why I favor a tax increase...
...D o you know me...
...Rather, it underlines the fact that Hitler's genocide is the horror story of modern times and gives a different dimension to King's often repeated claim that good horror is allegorical and strives to "form liaisons between the real and the unreal...
...The story does not reduce the significance of the Holocaust...
...Pierce, FL 33448-4323 I Please enter my subscription to biweekly PRAVDA PULSE (26 issues per year) a 1 year $64.20 D 2 years $128.40 C Payment enclosed (in Canada add $6 U.S...
...It is a gangster state, run by Taki by gangsters who finance their activities through the drug trade...
...Thus, Stephen King, looking rather like a debonair Rod Serling in his smoking jacket, hawking American Express cards on television...
...Without Guggenheims or subsidies from the NEA, one might add...
...enterprise in motion is bound to disturb the literati...
...Let's not say that King himself, however much he grooves on terror, feeds any such werewolf...
...Lebanon today is a bit like seventeenth-century Italy, but without the manners...
...Does this make a strong case for higher taxes...
...He will soon release four new books over a fifteen-month period, beginning with a fat, longawaited novel entitled It...
...This update of Carrie, wellwritten and suspenseful as it, like all of King's work, often is, trades on a series of cliches that together describe liberal culture's fantasy nightmare of the preceding decade...
...One can think that there is no significant national security risk, even with the lowered path of defense spending now in prospect...
...He is the brand-name fascist fanatic who will appeal to the desire for order and power in the wake of recent American weakness and vacillation...
...Let me explain...
...King is not favorably reviewed-if reviewed at all-in the nation's high aesthetic organs...
...Such a beautiful example of free Eric J. Sundquist teaches American literature at the University of California, Berkeley...
...After capture and experiments...
...As for myself, I am unable to visualize any great or lasting harm coming to the United States from having taxes equal to 22 percent of GNP rather than 20 percent, whereas I can visualize an irreparable disaster resulting from spending 6 percent of GNP on defense rather than 7 percent...
...King was not surprised to be dismissed by the Voice...
...In the seventies, likewise, we have The Stepford Wives, an allegory of women's lib, or The Exorcist, an allegory of the generation gap...
...Poland...
...rawer 4323 i Ft...
...forces is itself a threat to world peace...
...One should try to bring to bear upon them whatever judgment and conclusions from history one can muster...
...Actually, it comes in for the most part through the drug trade, a trade, incidentally, that puts Colombia and Bolivia to shame, not to mention Cuba and that other socialist republic, Bulgaria...
...From the above sects spring tens of other smaller groups, like the 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...
...The same Shop, we are told, also frittered away $300,000 to study exploding bicycles for use in Vietnam, and now wants to capture Charlie and her father, Andy (the Shop has assassinated mommie, whose psychic powers aren't worth much...
...One can think that although there is an external threat the serious danger to American freedom comes from the increase in spending of the federal government, whatever that spending is for...
...P,o...
...Yow ones Irwin 5:176 How do the Soviets perceive the world...
...That depends on the strength of the case for more defense expenditures...
...The Druse are led by the Gene Wilder look-alike, Walid Jumblat...
...He will be able to demand a substantial increase in defense as his condition for agreeing to the tax increase that will enable others to get what they want, whether deficit reduction or increases in nondefense programs...
...It is also the best King novel on film because Stanley Kubrick set out to create a cinematic equivalent rather than a literal reenactment of the story...
...Sixty articles-informative and entertaining-representing the best of the "Manager's Journal" column...
...and we feel surely in the grip of a reawakened counterculture sensibility, now marketed with all the finesse of a master wheat-germ salesman...
...among foreign agents, the British spy network, and English queers...
...King has referred to it as "my own little Vietnam," written at a time when "we had just witnessed the sorry end of the Nixon administration...
...The shares going to each of these purposes will result from political bargaining...
...If there is more revenue it will be distributed among deficit reduction, increases in various non-defense programs, and increases in defense...
...As he has remarked, Hitler knew how to "unleash and feed the werewolf in us...
...No tax increase will be possible without his acquiescence...
...STONED IN BEIRUT It was two years ago that I reported from Cairo that Hosni Mubarak would rather live than lead, and that life in Cairo was almost not worth living...
...The Stephen King who has ridiculed the potential for sociological catharsis in his fiction and claimed that he's really just "selling public executions...
...Needless to say, virtue triumphs...
...Like television news-snapshots from the Walter Cronkite album-they are a quickly consumable past, perfectly suited for someone who, like most of the population, has been in a coma since 1970...
...0oypp...
...For whatever may be said of King's upholding of family values and universal morality, his recent books are littered with left-over fears of the military-industrial complex, bogeyman of the generation for whom JFK is a lost mythic god...
...Jason Robards thumbing through the rubble...
...The boy ends by becoming a sadistic murderer...
...Johnny Smith goes into his coma against the theatrical backdrop of the Kent State shootings and anti-war rallies...
...while he sleeps, Muskie cries in public, gas prices skyrocket, the "Troll of San Clemente" is drummed out of office, and Vietnam goes Communist...
...1i...
...Like better known heroes of the counterculture who are now among the leading entrepreneurs of capitalist piggism, King has discovered that liberal cliches are the true junk food of his generation...
...Not ever again...
...The great majority of the arms are bought through arms dealers in the open market, and as everyone knows the open market means cool, hard cash...
...A more complex messiah of darkness appears in The Stand (1978), a huge, ambitious novel in which all but a fragment of the United States population has been wiped out by a germ warfare accident...
...In the case of The Stand, however, King's very real talents and his fascination with evil are matched against his instinctual drive toward the happy ending and the triumph of liberal virtues...
...as a result, when the available income rises it is not all devoted to one purpose but tends to be distributed among many purposes...
...Date Signature I Name ; Address City - _ State - Zip `w -- IRRI r- r----Iw ---- r r a r llr w w w w r Is their system succeeding or is it failing...
...Horrifyingly, he works hard, writing every day except Christmas, the Fourth of July, and his birthday...
...Among other things, King says, he believes in God, whereas Kubrick went out of his way to inform him that he did not...
...But there was a funny side to these cowardly attacks...
...Portentous allusions to Vietnam and Nixon (always in one or another stylized pose made famous by the media) proliferate...
...Bill to: 0 Visa 0 Mastercard Account No...
...It comes as no surprise that King was a big supporter in 1984 of Gary Hart, on whom the veneer of western selfreliance covered a fondness for the good old days of amnesty, acid, and abortion...
...Still, King has complained that the film misrepresents his intentions...
...Imagine him getting close enough to that pinko Ted Kennedy to suggest in the low voice of utter conviction that suicide was the best answer...
...In Illinois call 1-IM- 42-Alt, ash lot operator 27, To order direct send your check along with the book order number (please incfude $2.00 for the first book and Sot .or each additional copy) 10 Dow Jones-Irwin...
...Nor money sent home from Lebanese workers abroad...
...Flagg is the American Mussolini, his trains running on time, his stockpiles of weapons all in order...
...Charlie's powers promise even more: a nuclear arsenal in a small child's brain...
...Lying in the Middle East is like sex, practiced by everyone in every walk of life, except the newborn and the very, very old...
...This is where government announcements make anything the Egyptians say sound like the Sermon on the Mount...
...His fascination with Hitler (almost as omnipresent as Nixon) is meant to improve, not contaminate, us...
...And treat yourself to this treasury of business wisdom...
...They'll share their views on universal management topics-from exploiting the new technology to corporate terrorism to sex and romance in the office...
...She then fulfills Andy's plan to go public with their story: On the last page she spritely marches into the editorial offices of Rolling Stone...
...Ever since the Lebanese "civil" war began back in 1975, people have wondered at the ability of the Lebanese to equip private armies with the latest weaponry, and to make use of that weaponry in a manner so profligate it would make a World War I general feel like Silas Marner...
...Of course it was only a matter of time before the champion of adolescent horror appeared as a pitchman on the "glass teat" (in Harlan Ellison's phrase), the medium that sets the standards for his vast audience of word consumers...
...rl~s: ~~wwwwwwwwtarrtettlat News Pulse, Inc...
...Lebanese politics have as much to do with the science and art of government as the Ayatoilet has in common with compassion...
...Monstrosity "appeals to the conservative Republican in the three-piece suit who resides within all of us," he has argued, "because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings...
...As Malcolm Muggeridge once said, everything is true except the facts...
...So pull up a chair...
...It is now 1985-or, as he renames it a la Pol Pot, "the Year One, year of the plague"and his time has come...
...The sainted editor of TAS was called names that even I would dare not repeat, and the poor little Greek boy fared worse, much worse...
...Are they afraid or are they ambitious...
...Like the fascinating Flair pen and other new products Johnny has missed out on, they are brand name items (KENT STATE, WATERGATE) meant to substitute in the King reader's mind for history, for thought...
...tnC, guarantees that 0, at any time, PRAVDA PIrLSE does not m®et your expectatlone, you can cancel and we'll refund the full amount of your unused subscription...
...and] been resoundingly defeated in Southeast Asia...
...Ford will] beat himself...
...One can think that cutting defense spending increases military strength by forcing the Pentagon to become more efficient...
...the novel is its imaginary version, a virtual catalogue of pop paranoid images generated by the nation's Vietnam-Watergate-CIA complex...
...at its deepest levels, it explores the trauma of family violence and children's hidden emotional lives, combining those themes with a tale of gothic horror...
...Flagg is the anti-Christ, a magical amalgamation of marine renegade, Ku Klux Klan killer, and Weatherman revolutionary (he has been acquainted with mass murderer Charlie Starkweather, Lee Harvey Oswald, and SLA terrorist Donald DeFreeze...
...NY, TN, residents add appropriate sales tat...
...Again, virtue triumphs, as heroic Johnny "if you could go back in time, would you kill Hitler...
...And like the Big Mac, King sells in exponential numbers-some 50 million copies to date of the nineteen volumes written under his own name and the recently revealed pseudonym of Richard Bachman...
...liar...
...Illinois residents add 7 x. sales tax...
...as such, he suggests that King's imagination works best, not just at the borders of the grotesque (rotting corpses, vampire attacks), but also at the borders of human evil, whatever its political denomination...
...it's an opportunity to sit down with the likes of Don Burr, Hisao Tsubouchi and the directors of McKinsey and The Boston Consulting Group...
...They actually said I was a...
...Order No...
...You may disagree with some of the things they have to say...
...His best novel, The Shining (1977), is a haunted hotel story inspired by Shirley Jackson's classic suspense novel, The Haunting of Hill House...
...Not only that, but eight of King's macabre tales have been made into profitable movies (he's done original screenplays for two others), and he is making a big move into the booming audio and video cassette market...
...Where does the cash come from...
...but you will more often than not find the articles filled with valuable ideas and fresh insights...
...There are three Christian groups...
...These are the kinds of things one must think about in deciding whether a tax increase would be good or not...
...One can think that an increase in U.S...
...Of course one experimental subject clawed his eyes out, another was paralyzed, and another dozen or so have since committed suicide...
Vol. 18 • December 1985 • No. 12
