“Reels of Justice” is a movie review spodcast in the guise of “Law and Order” where a movie is “on trial” for being a bad movie! Dylan Schlender and the rest of them who run it are very funny! “K19: The Widowmaker”–a submarine movie based on a true event, an atomic mishap on a Soviet submarine, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, was on the docket this week, with me as the defending attorney. See how good a job I did and whether I got my client acquitted, lots of fun:
I try to get these newsletters out the first of the month. This is late because I was tied up with a sudden trip I had to make to Hawaii to bring my mother home. At 88, her cognitive acuity has diminished to the point she can’t live alone. Dementia is one of the most horrible conditions I can think of. If you have read my second book, “How to Hotwire an Airplane”, you know that one of its themes is “You are your memories.” When you lose your memories, you have lost yourself, even though the body might still be alive. Read “Flowers for Algernon”—I remember sobbing when I read that book, when the narrator starts his slow, inevitable slide into senescence.
But rest assured, she is now with my brother and near other family members and is doing very well and getting the care she needs! (Didn’t want to end this part on a downer!)
One tidbit about “Hotwire”–in it, I predicted the airspace in Texas would become a shambles, owing to the inability of the FAA and the military to communicate. Sadly, that came true when the FAA recently shut down the airspace over El Paso for ten days (later rescinded) A tiff with the DoD and DHS. (If you kids can’t agree, I’m gonna take everything away…)
February was a busy month! Finished teaching the class on submarines at George Mason University. It was truncated a bit due to a weather-related cancellation of one class, but I have good faith the next one I teach, at the Fairfax campus this spring, will not be so affected.
“Submerged” went into March still the Amazon #1 Bestseller in Navy Biographies so was a bestseller for 12 months, but today was bumped to #3. It was a good run, though!
In Feb I was a guest on “Reels of Justice”, a hilarious movie review podcast created in the guise of “Law and Order” where a “prosecutor” and “Defense attorney” discuss the merits and demerits of a movie to determine whether it is “guilty” of being a bad movie. I defended “K19: Widowmaker”, a movie about a (true) atomic accident on a Soviet sub in 1961 that killed many of its crewmembers, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. Did I win my case? You have to watch the episode when it comes out! (It has not yet, but here is their Facebook page Facebook
“Google Maps Handicap” is coming along. Slowly. I am on the fence about whether I need to, or shall, make a pseudonym for “Google”, I would hate to publish it and then be sued by them for defamation. That would be a stretch, but we live in a litigious country.
I will leave you with two authors I discovered this month:
“Elyse Douglas” is the pen name of a husband-wife team that writes time travel romances, which I am sucker for. I read “Time Change” but they are very prolific; tons of others. We shall see if they become repetitive.
Joe Barret writes like I do, or want to anyway. Funny, but with a social point wrapped inside the humor. Just finished “Unplugged”, which is about, among other things, the homeless, and now reading “Managed Care”, which is about other downtrodden, unnoticed people of America.
Strongly recommend reading those books (after mine, of course!)
Until next month,
Henry Rausch
Feb 1 and winter keeps us in its icy grip. The temperature remained in the single digits at night and barely drifted into the teens and twenties during the day, here in West Virginia. A hardship to some, and not minimizing the trouble and pain the snowfall caused, but I find beauty and joy in winter’s harshness. Like a hurricane or a heatwave, Mother Nature’s way of reminding us who is in charge.
Up on the mountain yesterday, I found I wasn’t alone; it looks like Yogi woke from his nap midwinter and is searching for a pic-a-nic basket. That’s me in the picture, looking down on a frozen lake that I was swimming in just six months ago! It is a wonder of nature, and a gift to us, I think, to see such changes with the seasons. Spring is promiscuous and fecund, Summer lazy and fat, Autumn harried and hurried with winter preparations and family holidays. Winter is none of that: unhurried, austere, serene, and supreme. Think you’re going somewhere today? Look out the window, think again. Best curl up with a good book, next to the fire (or fires, I use two stoves to stay warm, a coal stove and a wood-fueled one). Needless to say, my favorite season.
January was busy:
An interview with Gary David on his podcast “Experience by design”. I have found that no two podcast interviews are the same, each one asks different questions and brings us somewhere else. This one delved into many aspects of leadership and is more academic than others I have done.
Started teaching at George Mason University, an adult extension class about submarines. 47 students, all retired and interested in history. The final class will be on a war game the USNI conducted two years ago, “War with China 2026”. Needless to say, submarines feature prominently in it, and everyone expressed great interest in that class. I will teach it again at the Fairfax campus this spring, and I may take it on the road and teach it at other libraries and museums if I get sufficient interest.
This month marks the 11th consecutive month that “Submerged” has been a bestseller on Amazon and shows no sign of slowing down! Thank you, everyone, who read it and reviewed it.
“Hotwire” sells about a book a day, not great but not awful. I keep hoping it will break out, but maybe it won’t.
I took a break from writing “Handicap” to study a book I picked up, which really changed my way of thinking about story structure, “Story Genius” by Lisa Cron. For all the writers out there, I can’t recommend it highly enough; it changed my way of thinking about plot.
I will leave you with an invite: On Feb 10 February at 8 PM EST, I will be defending the movie “K19: Widowmaker” (2002, Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson) on the podcast “Reels of Justice”. Strongly urge anyone interested in movies to listen to a few of their shows; they “presume a movie innocent of being a bad movie,” and a prosecutor and a defender (that will be me) must make their case to a judge and jury. Great fun and also educational if you like movies.
Thank you, everyone, for reading. Until next month,
Henry Rausch, (K19 defense attorney)
Hi everyone, this is just a short note to say that I got some good news about my books.
“How to Hotwire an Airplane” was listed as a top twelve favorite for 2025 by Rosepoint Publishing! This is quite an achievement; if you look at the other authors in the list–Michael Connelly, Whoopi Goldberg, Dean Koontz, and Sara Gruen!
Here is the link: Twelve Favorite Books of 2025 – #Favoritebooks #eBooks #Audiobooks – Rosepoint Publishing
Also, I was interviewed on Gary David’s podcast last October, and it just hit. He is a professor of sociology at Bentley University, and we talked about different theories of leadership as it relates to my novels.
Here is the link: Submerged Experiences with Henry Rausch | Experience by Design
Enjoy! and, Peace.
Hi everyone and wishing all a happy New Year and pleasant memories of 2025.
Speaking of memory…
I have been thinking about memory a lot lately. Maybe, because I am at that stage of life where I have to tend to my mother’s affairs, who, at 87, has lost the ability to form long-term memories. It’s as if she has run out of tape and can’t record anything new. Every five minutes, the same questions that were asked and answered a dozen times. That affliction is very cruel. Her mind is sharp, and she can debate and speak about a subject at length, so I would hesitate to call it dementia—no hallucinations, no rabid, meandering speech, just the recorder button is inoperative. Exactly like that movie, Memento. In fact, I tell people there is nothing wrong with her that a stack of yellow stickies and a tattoo gun would not solve. That guy in Memento got along perfectly well without the ability to form memories. Well, except for the whole being used to commit murder thing. Other than that.
We are our memories. Everything you think you are, is a memory. So what happens to “you” when you lose it? Are you erased? Or is your memory, and that part of yourself, inscribed in spacetime somewhere? I touched upon this subject in my second book, “Hotwire” and I am considering writing a new book that delves more deeply into it. Biology tells us that when we remember, we are remembering the most recent memory, which becomes a copy of a copy of a copy, and thus prone to errors. We all have had the experience, I am sure, of finding an old photo that absolutely proves the old Dodge Rambler was red while you positively remember it was blue.
What if we could take a drug that allowed us, not to remember, but experience exactly the same sensory perceptions you had when the original memory occurred, say, because those sensations are buried in your cells somewhere? It would kind of be like time travel, you could go back and experience a past event, but not affect it. I think there would be a lot of people—I call them “go-backers” who would spend the rest of their lives in those memories, in a coma, kept alive by a glucose drip. And what a boon it would be for the legal profession? No more eyewitness testimony, take a pill and experience it for yourself. Would that pill show us there is an inviolate objective, truth, or would it instead reveal there is none, that reality is created by the observer?
Memory, time, and consciousness all seem to be intertwined. We can posit a theoretical “now”, but the more we try to look for it, that slippery rascal eludes us! Because as I type “now” at a point in so-called “time”, it recedes into the past. To consider it, I rely on my “memory.” In fact, all my so-called “consciousness” is experienced via memory. Consciousness is not “real-time”. Does the act of visiting a memory create time and consciousness, or is the other way around?
And don’t get me started about the afterlife. If there is an ”afterlife with a “you” in it, then it must have our memories, because all we are is memories. One of the protagonists in “Hotwire” makes that point explicit: “Not even God can take away your memories, because if She did, “you” wouldn’t be “you.” So the old saw about not being able to take it with you is nonsense. You can’t bring a flat screen TV or a McMansion with you to the afterlife, but you can bring your memories. So, invest in your memories, not TVs and McMansions! I think this is what Matthew (16:19-20) meant when he wrote:
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.
He wasn’t talking about giving money to the church. (Which, not surprisingly, happens to be the interpretation favored by preachers.) He was talking about investing in your memories.
My wife and I argue about different memories. Like, she remembers, “I told you to take the laundry out of the dryer” and my memory is “Nope.” I try to explain to her my theory about multiverses—“now” is like a sliding knot on a frayed rope, and the past is the individual strands. We can both agree on “now” but as soon as it slips into the past it is subject to fraying into multiverses, all true, but different. In my strand of the multiverse, she did not tell me anything about the laundry. In her strand, she did. At that point, my strand gets thoroughly pounced. Hers is like a battleship hawser, mine, a gossamer.
Anyway, that’s book #4. In the last newsletter, I promised the first chapter of Book #3, “Google Maps Handicap” (with “Google” changed to a name that won’t get me sued). It is a draft, but maybe enough to give you an idea where it is heading. Comments and reactions greatly appreciated. Here it is!
Book #1—“Submerged” continues to astound me. This month marks the tenth in a row it is an Amazon bestseller. This past month I gave 3 talks on podcasts, available here. For January, I have no appearances scheduled, but I am teaching a class at George Mason University on submarines. It promises to be exciting but a lot of work—quite different to teach an entire class than a one-hour talk!
Book #2, “How to Hotwire an Airplane” is showing signs of life, with 1-2 copies a day sold! Yay! Anyone who has read it, I would sure appreciate a review.
That’s it ‘til next month. Thank you for reading, and I hope your memory—whatever that is—of reading this is a pleasant one!
The thing they don’t tell you about writing is that once you have a few books out, much of your time is taken up by promoting them, rather than what brought you to the endeavor, writing!
This month was busy, four podcasts and one talk at Cascades Library, but I still got some time to write, and work on “MilYun Maps Handicap.” It s still plugging along, if not exactly screaming. I will have the first chapter on the “Freebies” section of the website next month, I promise!
Submerged is still going great guns, now in sub-10,000 rankings of Amazon sales (reaching 2600 at one point, out of 48 million titles listed!) This month it will be a bestseller in two of its categories for a ninth consecutive month! Thank you to everyone who read it and sent reviews or emails.
I had a very nice interview by Terrri Lynch of “Tracer Rounds” on Military Broadcast Radio this month. Then two more on Daniel Cherkas’s podcast, one on Submerged and one on Magical Realism, which is a theme of my new book, “How to Hotwire an Airplane”. I have always been intrigued by the idea that there is a hidden order to what we perceive, that we may sense but not comprehend, and the book explores that.
The other podcast was with Gregory McNiff of New Books Network, I will post it to my podcasts page when it hits.
On Nov 25th, I hosted a talk about Submerged at the Cascades Library in Sterling, VA, and it was literally standing-room-only! (The organizer, Jeremey Worley, had set out 30 chairs and had to keep setting up more as people came in!) A big thanks to Jeremy. I thought that would be my last, but he said a few people came up and wanted to see it again, so I may have a few more at Loudoun County libraries next year. Stay tuned!
“Hotwire” is not selling great! I feel like a parent with one successful son and one still living in the basement! But I have hope it will find an audience, and that hope was strengthened when I got an incredibly nice review in the Vietnam Veterans Association magazine! Among other things, the book is about a Vietnam vet healing from trauma, and I was over the moon to be featured in their magazine (and also get a very nice review!) So there is hope for that book yet, I think!
Besides PTSD and magical realism, “How to Hotwire an Airplane” is about illegal migration. I tried not to make it a polemic and present a balanced view of the subject. If you want to know my actual (nuanced) views on the matter, I wrote a blog about it on my website. (along with a few movie reviews, whatever strikes my fancy!)
That’s it for this month! Thanks for reading! Peace to all.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a story about a man who pretended to be a turncoat for the Nazis, who broadcast propaganda for them during the war—think “Lord Haw Haw”, “Tokyo Rose”, Jane Fonda. Except, he was really a spy for the allies. But he does such a good job of broadcasting propaganda that during the war, his German master tells him, “I suspect you are a spy. But it doesn’t matter. Whatever use you have been to our enemies, you have been uncountably more to us.”
The story is set in a prison cell and told by flashbacks; the protagonist is about to be executed for war crimes by the victors. At the last moment, he is given a reprieve: Someone in government vouches for his story, he was really a spy for the good guys.
The man hangs himself that night in the cell, because he knows the truth: He actually did help the bad guys; he pretended too well to be one of them.
In the beginning of the book, Vonnegut writes: “This is the only book I’ve written where I know the moral, so I’m telling it to you here: ‘Be careful who you pretend to be, that is who you are.’”
Pretending. That is theme of the new movie, “Renta Familyl”, which my son and I watched last night. A struggling actor played by Brendan Fraser goes to Japan to pursue a gig, and life doesn’t go his way. He ends up taking gig acting jobs. That brings him to “Rental Family”, a uniquely Japanese outfit that sends actors to serve in roles for people—wedding participants, funeral attendees, friends, lovers, dads. Hard to understand, but it is a real Japanese thing and makes sense in a country fast de-populating itself because they have lost the taste for, well, screwing and making babies.
The gigs he takes can be divided into three groups: the well-intentioned, the vile, and the morally gray. He acts as a friend to a fellow who needs one. The man knows he is renting a friend, but he doesn’t care. The rental family actor is kind of like a sex worker, providing emotional comfort, not physical—an analogy made explicit in a scene with, well, a sex worker, with whom he has a liaison.
Then there’s the vile: the company’s best business is for an actress pretending to be a cavil weakling’s mistress and make an abject, fulsome apology to the pathetic man’s wife, who more often than not takes a slug at the actress.
It is in the morally gray gigs that the movie becomes fascinating and holds a mirror to our lives. He pretends to be a father to a winsome 11-year old girl (who steals every scene.) Cruel? Maybe. Is the girl’s joy any less real because he has been hired for the role? When is a lie okay? Would you tell your mom she is dying on her deathbed? When is a lie a compassionate act? Tough questions.
In the other morally gray gig, he is hired by an aging actor’s daughter to pretend to be a journalist, to boost the man’s ego. A job turns into a friendship, and he risks both his livelihood and his life in Japan to help him. Wrong? To whom, exactly? The man dies with a friend. Was the actor any less of a friend because he was paid?
These are the questions the movie asks, and it’s the best kind of movie, the kind that lets you answer the questions itself. It doesn’t offer any facile solutions, only questions.
I loved it. Four stars.
A down and out loser, nurtured by internet conspiracy theories and fed a diet of wild raving, half-baked ideas, kidnaps a high-powered CEO because he is convinced that she is the Queen of an alien race come to enslave or destroy the earth, and holds her captive in his mom’s basement.
Here’s the spoiler: She IS an alien queen come to destroy the earth! And that’s the LEAST interesting part of the movie.
“Bugonia” is an exploration into how real-life “masters of the universe”—not space aliens, the ones who reside in the corner offices, fly on private jets, and pay less taxes than the lady who cleans the toilets–do enslave us, and wield powers that will, if not actually kill us, make our lives a captive living hell. The movie riffs on the theme of bees—Teddy is a beekeeper; Michelle (the alpha-queen CEO) also espouses an admiration for them. And well she should! They are the perfect metaphors for us, you and me, today. A tiny .000001% of billionaires lord vast powers over us (the worker drones, in this not so subtle analogy).
You don’t have to be much of a conspiracy theorist, or live in your mom’s basement, to realize that to a large yet carefully made-invisible extent, we are subject to the whims and dictates of a ruling elite. Sure, we hold free elections–for candidates who are bought and paid for by that elite, because the cost of perpetually running for office is so high.
Why can’t we have election reform like in the UK, where costs are kept down because running for office is restricted to a scant six weeks before the election? Of course we can! All we have to do is get our representatives to vote for it. You know the same people who owe their allegiance, their fealty, and most of all their office and perks to the cabal writing the checks. Fat chance.
One billionaire bought one of the last free newspapers in America, his company publishes 86% of all books published on the planet, and sells us some huge percentage of all the crap we buy.
Another billionaire single-handedly controls access to space, sells a fleet of robot cars, and (in his spare time) reshapes our government to his choosing. A third owns most of the free housing stock left in America.
The story follows Teddy and Michelle in a series of escalating verbal exchanges. If what Michelle says sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve heard it before, every time the corporate shills talk down to us as if we were recalcitrant children. (Think of the last conversation you had with the HR lady.)
“Let’s dialogue this.”
“I think you are following a false narrative.”
“You are living in an echo chamber.”
Speech designed to put you in your place, to make you doubt yourself.
As the movie events become more desperate, Michelle finally admits that, yes! She is an alien queen! And as it happens, we ARE conducting experiments on you, a failed ape-excuse for a species.
Teddy responds like the dog that finally catches the truck; he doesn’t know what to do, and things end badly for Teddy. For the rest of the human race as well, as the alien queen teleports up to her spaceship and sprays a galactic can of Raid on us, thus ending the experiment.
That is the ultimate message: they do control us, and can wield that power to wipe us out at their whim. Bleak, but refreshing in its honesty. Let’s enjoy it now, worker bees, before they use the Raid on us.
If you liked this, follow my blog at www.henryrausch.com/blog/
All of us love a good WWII movie. Curl up on the couch, click on Netflix or YouTube, settle down to a great yarn where the good guys are unequivocally good and the bad guys are, well, literally Nazis. “Gosh, if I were back then, I would have been one of the resistance,” you tell yourself. “Fought those bastards. Maybe I would have smuggled Jews out of the country like that Schindler guy.”
Oh yeah?
The sad truth is it is easier to be brave while watching a rerun of “Force Ten from Navarone” on your couch than when facing the proximate and inevitable ends of said bravery. Most of us would probably behave as the majority of Germans did–have a certain inkling that things are not right but shrug and figure that “The authorities know best.” Very few have the temerity or moral courage to stand up to an oppressive regime. We would have most likely been one of the many that when the reckoning inevitably happened, would bleat, “I didn’t know” or worse, “We were only following orders.” It is hard and dangerous to do otherwise, easier to accept an administrations’ lies, even though you know in your heart that something is horribly wrong.
There are times in a person’s life, and a nation’s, when we are called to stand up for what we believe. To go beyond the lies, reach deep down, and do what is morally right. This is one of those times.
This nation is executing a calculated program of ethnic cleansing. Our Supreme Court ruled that a human being’s race can be used to snatch people off the streets. That is happening, not just in isolated incidents but as part of a systemic policy. Jack booted thugs with no identification and faces masked conduct pogroms of terror—smashing windows in an unconscious echo of Krystal Nacht, cudgeling women to the ground, shooting pellets of poison gas. They are incentivized to do so by a bounty system, so it is understandable that they are not too picky about who they pick up. “It’s not our guy,” one ICE agent is recorded to have told his colleague. “Doesn’t matter” the other responds. Hundreds of US citizens and aliens with legal status have been rounded up in indiscriminate raids. They terrorize communities while descending from the sky on ropes, a scene taken out of the dystopian and terrifyingly prescient movie “Brazil.” Our conscience recoils at the images, yet the carnage continues.
But the men and women and children are all illegals, right? We are just defending our country. We are being invaded! (You parrot from the administration’s talking points.)
Setting aside the US citizens and aliens with legal status who have been rounded up–yes, they are here without legal status. Here is a surprise you won’t hear from the administration: It is not a criminal offense to be in this country without proper authorization. It is a civil infraction, on a par with a traffic ticket. Not a crime. However, it is a crime to cross the border without permission, and the two populations of the undocumented in this country are roughly split: 40% arrived legally, overstayed their visa, and have not committed a crime, and the rest entered illegally. Perhaps a distinction without a difference, but worth mentioning when the media and administration start shouting about “illegals.” And how despicable is that term? You might commit a crime, you might commit several. (You might commit 34!) But you are not ‘the crime’. You are in no circumstances “an illegal.” If so, our president, convicted of 34 felonies, is most certainly an “illegal.”
Everyone ever born had a mother who loved them. They were born with a certain human dignity. No person—not even our president–is “an illegal.”
Semantics aside, let’s address the main issue: Yes, we need a functioning method of enforcing our borders and letting in the polity we choose, no question. But after Reagan granted amnesty in 1987, there were no undocumented immigrants in the country. How did this suddenly become a problem?
Well, it’s not because we can’t defend the border—essentially no one is crossing illegally right now, due to a heavy military presence there. If the US wanted to, it could have stopped the influx a long time ago, in a succession of both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The reason we have a large undocumented population in the US is that it serves large business interests to allow it. Undocumented immigrants are the perfect disposable labor force—they don’t do pesky things like ask for higher wages, or unionize, or insist on complying with those inconvenient OSHA rules! And contrary to Fox News’s breathless reporting, they commit fewer crimes than citizens do, for good reason—they want to keep a low profile. They are the perfect “overflow” labor pool—economy gets too hot, kick some out. Need workers, let more in.
We are being sold a bill of lies. Undocumented immigrants are in this country because big business wants them here. We could end much of it today by mandating the use of the E-Verify system, which checks that the SSN used to on an I9 form is legitimate. This would stop all the “gray workers’ who use false SSNs and whose pay is documented by W2s. We paid for it, why is E-verify not mandatory? Ask who benefits from not using it.
You, and I, and all the undocumented immigrants are pawns of the moneyed interests that are ostensibly against illegal migration while they profit from it and ensure it continues. They can get away with this because it serves the administration’s interest to create an “us vs them” dichotomy—the exact approach that a certain well-known historical figure in those WWII documentaries used. We shake our heads at the “murders, thieves, rapists (some of them might be good people), and while we are distracted, big business laughs all the way to the bank.
Yes, we need to fix this system. We need to enforce the border standards so that we vet people who come the US and not just rely on the business interests to do our recruiting for us. The US needs people. We need, on average 2.1 births per woman merely to maintain the population. Right now, the “replacement rate” is down to 1.5. What’s the matter with that? GDP—the economic output of the nation, is a product of two factors: The number of workers times productivity per worker. Productivity can only increase so far. We need workers to sustain increases in our GDP. Recall the definition of a recession: two consecutive quarters where GDP drops.
So why not kick out all the “illegals” and start from scratch with a cogent system that defeats the business interests’ goal of cheap, easily subjugated labor? Two reasons: One, our economy is built on this quasi-slave labor. It would take a huge dip if we were able to suddenly kick everyone out, one from which it would be difficult to recover. We are already seeing signs of this happening in the building and service industries.
The second reason is moral. These people were tacitly allowed to work here by a system that exploited them. In a myriad of ways, we allowed them to share in building our nation, and they deserve some rewards for that effort. Consider a thought experiment: You sign on with a startup company and work hard for them for many years, expecting a payout when your stock options mature. There were some discrepancies with your work history, or maybe your diploma, when you hired on, but you were assured that it was not a big deal. Years you toiled, and when you are about to reap the fruits of your labor, you are unceremoniously kicked to the curb because the discrepancies that were known and ignored now loom large.
Many say that this is “jumping the queue” and unfair to people who came here “legally.” Setting aside the hilariously blatant hypocrisy of this statement by people whose descendants did not come in any “legal” fashion at all (much of the land gained by the simple expedient of taking it and murdering anyone who disagreed), I submit that by working here for a time and staying out of trouble, they have earned a right to stay. Don’t believe me. Believe Patton. On the eve of his invasion of Italy, this is what he told his troops:
“When we land, we will meet German and Italian soldiers whom it is our honor and privilege to attack and destroy. Many of you have in your veins German and Italian blood, but remember that these ancestors of yours so loved freedom that they gave up home and country to cross the ocean in search of liberty. The ancestors of the people we shall kill lacked the courage to make such a sacrifice and continued as slaves.”
Patton, in his inimitable way, was making an astute point. Being American does not come from an oath, an allegiance to a flag, or an F16 flyover at a football game. It comes from a certain courage to forge into the unknown and seek a better life for yourself and your family. In many ways, these immigrants are the most American of all of us, imbued with the spirit of courage and hard work.
What this administration is doing—rounding up brown-skinned people—is wrong. Stand up to it. In 20 years or so they are going to make documentaries and movies about this time in American history. You don’t want to be one of the guys that viewers boo at.
The Father of Invention
My kids always accuse me of taking credit for inventing things. In their deluded and semi-formed minds, just because I discovered something on my own does not mean I invented it. For instance, I am positive that I invented the term ”Press the reset button” to mean forgetting what is passed and focusing on the now. I distinctly remember coming up with that term one morning in August of 1979 while hitchhiking from the Grand Tetons and I was particularly remorseful of something that had happened. A few years later, Bingo! I started hearing people using that term. My kids point out that other people probably had the same idea, and just because I thought of it and didn’t know other people used the term doesn’t mean I invented it. As I said, deluded.
I had to admit the kids were right in one case: In my upcoming book, “Google Maps Handicap,” two lunkheads inadvertently bring about the demise of the GPS system. This ushers in a new age of comity, depolarization, and general bonhomie, because people have to ask each other for directions and come to find out that the other guy is just like them, bonded in their inability to read a map. I didn’t have a term for this, but was sure I invented the concept.
So imagine my surprise when I was interviewed for a podcast this month by sociologist Dr. Gary David, Professor of Sociology and Professor of Information Design and Corporate Communication at Bentley University. We discussed my books, published and upcoming, and when I described my theory that destroying the GPS would help us because people would have to rely on each other more, he said, “Yeah, that’s a common theory in sociology, called Collision Theory.” Well, kids, I will give you this one. But even if I cannot take credit for inventing this theory, I will take credit for publishing a novel about it next year.
Talking with Dr. David was an enriching and edifying experience, and I am looking forward to listening to it when it hits next January or February. His schedule is here.
Besides the podcast, this month I gave a talk at the Loudon County library in Leesburg. One fellow showed up with a well-thumbed copy of my book and asked very pointed questions. I loved it and relished that he read it and came with questions. Bring it!
Speaking of Submerged, this November marks the 8th month in a row it has been a bestseller on Amazon, and still going strong! Keep reading and thank you, wonderful readers!
In November, I have two public appearances:
A live podcast on Military Broadcast Radio on 18 Nov at 8 Pm Eastern. This will be my first live podcast. Can’t wait to hear what comes out of my mouth.
A talk at the Cascades library in Loudon County on November 25th at 7 pm.
For people who wanted more of either Submerged or How to Hotwire an Airplane, your prayers have been answered! I published two chapters that I omitted from Submerged and an alternate ending to Hotwire on the Freebies section of my website.
Thanks for reading and happy November!
Peace,
Henry Rausch