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I was born in December 1949, so my personal history is intimately entwined with the events of the last fifty years of the twentieth century. John Kennedy was elected then assasinated while I attended Catholic schools. The year I graduated high school, 1968, saw the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and riots of the Chicago Democratic Convention. The first time I heard about pot and LSD and drugs was in a library, looking at the covers of Time, Life and Look magazines. While in college, the VietNam war protests continued, leading to the deaths on a campus that inspired Four Dead In Ohio.
What I'm saying is this: many of us Baby-Boomers grew up in front of TVs, and Top 40 radio stations, and every kind of magazine and book and movie, that told us about a revolution that seemed to be designed to sell us things. Our skeptical attitude is a direct response to the many believable lies we've been told. The cigarettes sold on Gunsmoke turned out to cancer-causing. The 'mind's true liberation' was just another way to sell records and movies and books. The Tomorrowland we saw on Disney, where machines did the work and people had five days of leisure, has been shown to have actually happened, but the leisure is unemployment, the displacement of American workers by cheap overseas labor, and computers that take your resume and run background checks and credit checks and then sell your identity to the highest bidder.
My short story collection, Believable Lies, is about these very things. Starting in the 1970's then following characters through midlife and then to an age where seniors are offered rewards for Early Termination, I write for my generation, and for my children and grandchildren, that we might all agree on something at last.
My novel Rooster, out this fall, is a tongue-in-cheek thriller, and I'll be featuring it here as well.
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