I really like historical fiction.

It is more accurate than regular history because a book on history is read by a few thousand bored academics while those of fiction have hundreds of thousands of history fanatics, and since the development of Google, they are really stinging.

The kind of crap you find in the average history book would be cut to shreds by hisfic fans.

You would think that it is critical to get history while the generation being spoken of is still living. As one who lived through seventy years of it, I assure you that it is NOT the case.

A I have pointed out, the story of World War II as told by the young guys who fought it in the early fifties, bears not the slightest relationship to what the old guys say now.

They say that in politics, a year is forever. The same is true in terms of recent history. No one but me remembers the Permanent Meat Shortage, and that is just one example. If a G.I. talked about being on the European Front, he invariably said that his real enemy was not the Germans, but the cold and the rain and other misery.

You will never hear that from any of the Weakest Generation today. Every one of them was John Wayne. Every one of them liberated Death Camps.

In a real war you almost never see the enemy.

But these observations about the Weakest Generation apply to every age.

So it makes very little difference whether the generation that lived it is alive or dead, because they will believe everything everybody else believes.

This is a realization I came to in my early teens. I would be talking to people who were obsessed with something that was big deal and they absolutely forgot it when I brought it up a month or so later. Now this is routine for me. But back then, before the Twilight Zone, it was the Twilight Zone.

As a new teen, I could not believe that the person I was talking couldn’t even remember what was considered a national event, much less his own fanaticism about one side of it.

It is literally true that the Weakest Generation was not actually IN the War they fought. But the lesson is MUCH more general.

Very, very few people remember even their own reactions to the history they lived through.

I got paid for my predictions. I made accurate predictions because of the fact that one learns the future from what has already happened. My secret was that I remembered what REALLY happened.

But to do that you have to remember what happened.