lbj blog

big picture.. what this is to be about, and some notes.

One of my mom's favorite books is "the power broker" by robert caro.
it's a study of one man, robert moses, and about the way he rebuilt the city of new york.
my mom taught me to love to read - it gave an escape from my father's tyranny and the dullness of suburbia.
and she taught me to enjoy the skirmishes of local government. she had been a spook in dc during the eisenhower era, before becoming a suburban housewife and citizen lobbyist for parks and libraries and such.
i was doing lit drops by age ten and working a poll at 14 and doing radio spots with a senator at 15, was 20 when i first campaign managed a statewide race, 24 when i first held office, then law school, making partner, running for judge, and then having a nervous breakdown and losing everything.
so now i'm mad, and play online as therapy.
apparently i'm mildly autistic, so being beaten by my father was unendurable,
rather than just a normal part of growing up.
in trying to understand myself, and trying to understand my father, and the times i grew up in, i'm looking closely at lbj. he's the first president i remember.
what my father was doing at home, he was doing to the country.
so when caro decided to spend the rest of his career writing wonderful books about johnson, i got hooked.
the path to power, the means of ascent, master of the senate - these are masterpieces, leading up to the 4th and final volume, with lbj as president.
they cut thru the hype and show a ruthless tortured driven man who put ends before means and let nothing stand in his way.
and he attained his goal, and became president, and created the great society -
a socialist revolution - and it wasn't enough, and he was still depressed.
it's a hell of a story.
only there's a catch. caro writes a book every ten years or so. it could be eight years before volume 4 comes out. i can't wait that long - i need to know how it turns out.
so, i started a project. i'm not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg, but in reading the background stuff, at some point i realized i could write the book myself. not like caro will. but i could rush into print with a half-assed version,
and scoop caro by telling the story myself.
and i have a marketing gimmick, one i picked up from cory doctorow.
it's called open source. you give your book away on the internet, and it sells more copies than if you didn't. it's the old idea behind shareware. it's the story of linux as told by eric s raymond in the cathedral and the bazaar.
so this blog, these first entries, are a step toward that book.
jyoti mishra first encouraged me to write a book.
wil wheaton introduiced me to jyoti and gave me books by cory doctorow and eric s raymond that explained the open source model. wil's "just a geek" is an example of how that works. wil's just a geek. wil is the actor who was the kid in stand by me who was going to grow up to be a writer. now he has.
i notice i haven't said anything yet about lbj.
so anyway, i went up to see this friend i have in milwaukee, and we went to a used bookstore, and i bought a crate of books on johnson. that was almost a year ago.
recently i figured that in order to understand johnson, i should learn something about kennedy, so a few months ago i bought a crate of books on kennedy.
it's bene interesting. kennedy is a lot like johnson - dark tragic driven ruthless ends before means.
kennedy, johnson, nixon. these were the presidents of my country during my formative years. each mad. as king george iii had torn his country in two, creating the american revolution, these three madmen took on vietnam and lost,
tearing the country apart, tearing me apart.
so i'm broken and confused and trying to sort things out.
to understand myself, i need to understand my father.
to understand my father, i need to understand lbj. to understand how lbj becomes president, you need to know something about joe kennedy and his son john.
it's a hell of a story.
so this is a place i can start making notes.
someday i hope to edit the notes into something more coherent, and take it to a publisher, if it gets that far. or i can make one copy on cafepress.
next entry will have info on what i'm reading now.

posted by gt @ 5:11 AM