Downtime
What am I going to do for dinner?
Groucho Marx has been quoted as saying, “I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me as a member.” It’s an old joke, but with a twist or two, it is essentially the protagonist’s credo at the outset of my completed novel, Downtime. Downtime is a layman’s vision of the approaching apocalypse.
This dark comic tale is seen through the eyes of hapless Melford Blintze, a literate, sensitive, and timid man who is tormented by private insecurities and the excesses of a vulgar society going to hell. Blintze doesn’t believe the end is near; he believes that it’s in progress. He comically strains our sympathy with his moral indignation and paranoia.
The setting of the novel is near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Jonathan Moss a former senator from the Midwest,. is in the middle of his second term. A shaky coalition of Al-Qaeda-supported terrorist Shiite Muslims, North Korean operatives, and old Soviet loyalists have taken over an ICBM missile base in the southern part of the Ukraine. This places the U.S., Israel, and other Russian republics on alert status.
America, suffering from chronic economic malaise, has lurched farther to the right on the political spectrum. Although having grown progressively isolationist, the U.S. is still burdened by the weight of a bloated military.
Strangely, the crisis is kept at an emotional distance by Mel’s urban society. It is, as observed by Mel, a society not only prepared for death, but willing, and even eager to accept it. As an offshoot to the nuclear showdown, Mel is unwittingly involved in a mad terrorist plot by his crazed economics professor. As the tension of approaching Doomsday mounts, Mary, an attractive Washington agent, rescues Mel not only from the terrorists, but also from his lack of self-respect.
This dark comic tale is seen through the eyes of hapless Melford Blintze, a literate, sensitive, and timid man who is tormented by private insecurities and the excesses of a vulgar society going to hell. Blintze doesn’t believe the end is near; he believes that it’s in progress. He comically strains our sympathy with his moral indignation and paranoia.
The setting of the novel is near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Jonathan Moss a former senator from the Midwest,. is in the middle of his second term. A shaky coalition of Al-Qaeda-supported terrorist Shiite Muslims, North Korean operatives, and old Soviet loyalists have taken over an ICBM missile base in the southern part of the Ukraine. This places the U.S., Israel, and other Russian republics on alert status.
America, suffering from chronic economic malaise, has lurched farther to the right on the political spectrum. Although having grown progressively isolationist, the U.S. is still burdened by the weight of a bloated military.
Strangely, the crisis is kept at an emotional distance by Mel’s urban society. It is, as observed by Mel, a society not only prepared for death, but willing, and even eager to accept it. As an offshoot to the nuclear showdown, Mel is unwittingly involved in a mad terrorist plot by his crazed economics professor. As the tension of approaching Doomsday mounts, Mary, an attractive Washington agent, rescues Mel not only from the terrorists, but also from his lack of self-respect.
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“The Doomsday Clock: symbol of the threat of nuclear war maintained since 1947; the time, which is set to the relative danger of global catastrophe, has fluctuated from 17 minutes to midnight to 2 minutes before midnight (when the U.S. tested the hydrogen bomb in 1952); set back from 6 minutes to 10 minutes before midnight in 1990 in response to the end of the Cold War as eastern bloc countries moved toward democracy in 1989; set back to 17 minutes before midnight in 1991 as the fall of Communism was in progress in the former Soviet Union and its satellites.” With the threat of Al-Qaeda and other terrorist-groups and the bellicose rumblings of North Korea, involving a multitude of weapons of mass destruction, the clock had moved ahead to four minutes before midnight.
—Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago
“The Doomsday Clock: symbol of the threat of nuclear war maintained since 1947; the time, which is set to the relative danger of global catastrophe, has fluctuated from 17 minutes to midnight to 2 minutes before midnight (when the U.S. tested the hydrogen bomb in 1952); set back from 6 minutes to 10 minutes before midnight in 1990 in response to the end of the Cold War as eastern bloc countries moved toward democracy in 1989; set back to 17 minutes before midnight in 1991 as the fall of Communism was in progress in the former Soviet Union and its satellites.” With the threat of Al-Qaeda and other terrorist-groups and the bellicose rumblings of North Korea, involving a multitude of weapons of mass destruction, the clock had moved ahead to four minutes before midnight.
—Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago