At a Glance:
What: Introducing an online fable about Bush and Iraq War by SLW
Greene
Where: http://slwgreene.blogspot.com
How: To be serialized, four chapter every week. First two available
now.
When: From 9/7/08-1/20/09


New Online Book Bids By-bye to Bush

In the excitement of electing a new president, we sometimes forget
about bidding goodbye to the old one.

I, for one, am not willing to let Bush sneak out the back door. I want
to give him a good bashing before he crawls back into his hole with
the ghost of Saddam Hussein.

With that in mind, I have written an 80,000-word work of fiction about
the Bush years. Like Orwell's Animal Farm, which, of course, took on
communism, my "The Boathouse" excoriates Bush, his henchmen and their
handling of the Iraq War.

I will serialize it online beginning September 7, running through the
inauguration of the next president in January. The first two chapters
are online now. It can be found  at http://www.slwgreene.blogspot.com.
I have also created a wiki at http://www.goodbyebush.wetpaint.com so
that everyone can contribute to flailing the pres as he leaves.

Each week I will release four more chapters and invite readers to add
their thoughts at the blog site or the wiki. I hope to come up with an
assortment of "tributes" that will be sent to the ex-commander-in-
chief when he leaves office. Admittedly, it might be difficult to
render all the material into a form Bush can read since he has scant
experience with online resources.

About the book:

The main characters in my fable are not Iraqis, but besieged swallows
under attack and then imprisoned by the new owner of their boathouse.
He is a bumbling commander-in-chief just like you-know-who. Captain
Don comes to the bird's rescue and the plot takes off from there.

The Boathouse works at multiple levels, from a simple story about lost
innocence to a full-blown parody of war. It traces the border where
fiction and nonfiction meet, which is where the Iraq War, itself,
seems to exist. Much of its second half deals with post-war events,
something we will also have to contend with in the near future.

The book takes the reader on a rollicking ride from an idyllic lake in
Northeast U.S. up into Canada to meet the Lord of the Black Flies in
his underground lair. Along the way, the readers meet J.P. Winslow,
the PR Pro, who brags about his efforts in starting the first Iraq
War; Lisa Norstrom, the young TV journalist, who is searching for some
"gravitas;" Cleodis T. Cunningham who preaches his "bio-bias" theory
and the three Swallows, who, many times, seem like the most sensible
beings in the book.

Spread throughout the book are the opinions of the nation's mass
media. Rush Limbaugh likens the birds to pets of the liberals, Paul
Conrad editorializes by drawing a statue of our commander-in-chief as
a bird perch, "The New York Times" offers many weighty opinions while
the "New York Post" splashes its usual poop all over its pages.
Defense Industry Daily welcomes the war by quoting that famous line
from "Apocalypse Now" about loving the smell of napalm in the morning.
Jay Leno and David Letterman pepper their late-night audiences with
gags about using peppercorns instead of buckshot so the swallows can
be seasoned on the wing.

The book is a humorous take on the serious subjects of war and peace,
certainly two of the main topics on most people's minds today. While
this is a work of fiction, its many tidbits of information — including
all the one-liners, tall tales and ironic quips — are accurate, save
for the birds' ability to talk with humans and vice versa. By
deconstructing the people and events surrounding the war, the book
provides an entertaining read along with insights into some timeworn
topics. It also depicts some of the possible post-war developments
that could lead to a bright new future.


About the author:

Stephen Greene is an American professor of journalism at San Jose
State University with a PhD from the University of London, England. He
started out writing for Irving Wallace in the 1970s ("The People's
Almanac"), worked for nearly a decade as a newspaper reporter in
Northern California and since has completed many articles and books,
including his most recent one on Southeast Asian history ("Absolute
Dreams").

His contact information is: Phone: 831 359 3294, Email:
slwgreene@gmail.com. Home Page: http://home.pacbell.net/sgreene Home
address: 1031 Taughannock Boulevard, Ithaca, NY 14850. The book's web
site again is http://www.slwgreene.blogspot.com.