B. U. G. S.

The first part of explaining where this transformation from a lecture to a seminar is for me to explain my attitude towards how we got here.

As I have said, the real money in writing is in ghosting. I have ghost-written everything, from books to articles to off-hand quips to short replies to news releases to endless numbers of speeches.

The most cathartic experience of my life was when I sat down in 1975 and wrote my OWN book. It made me no money, and I wrote put it under my name because no one else could take responsibility for it. The reason for this is in the title:

A Plague on Both Your Houses.

If you look at Plague today you will wonder what all the excitement was about.

Which is precisely why it was, to my mind, such a success. National Review had a review of Plgue called Read This One! by one of its senior editors. Its publisher did the Foreword.

But Plague was such a vicious attack on conservatives that the publisher of NR had to exempt himself in the Foreword from my acidic comments on William Buckely, founder and owner of NR.

Right after NR’s publisher wrote the Foreword and a senior editor demanded that NR readers “Read This One!” National Review had a cover article attacking me and the book called “To the Nashville Station,” an illusion to Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Stattion when he came back to Russia in 1917. The idea was that I was leaing conservatives into a working-class revolution.

And that was just the confusion on the right.

Leftist reviews poured out, saying that while the book claimed it was damning both liberals and Democrats and the Republicans and the establishment right, it was really only aimed at the left.

Noneof them mentioned National Review’s front-page attack on me. None of them mentioned the number of conservative congressmen who would walk up to me at a cocktail party and then ostentatiously turn their backs.

More than one historian has pointed out that Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense was as necessary to American independence as Washington and Bejamin Franklin were.

Plague was as influential in making the Reagan Revolution as Paine was in making the one two centuries before.

And the reson Plague was so successful was precisely because if you read it today, you would wonder what all the excitement was about.

That is because everybody now takes for granted what I was considered such a heretic for writing.

It drove my loyal wife up the wall to see writers stealing whole blocks of my ideas without any acknowledgement. I was proud of it.

A major part of the reason I was so tolerant was because the book was, as I say, cathartic. What I did was spend two years writing and rewriting a book that simply explained why human beings act the way they do.

As I wrote it, I learned from it. I began the book by thinking of condemning PEOPLE. I ended up condemning the HOUSES conservatievs and liberals had built, and how they had come to build them in usch an awful way.

So it came to me as no surprise that people who made a living writing and commenting would us what I wrote and never mention my awful name. Most of them picked what I had to say third-hand, and had no idea I had come up with it.

By the time I finished, I was mad at hardly anybody. In the end, my reaction was to laugh at people was being so shallow and unquesioning.

That is why the book was so successful that its success wasn’t even noticed.

And that is also why I was the least popular person on Capitol Hill. People can take a diatribe. But when a professional exposes them naked to the world the way I did, they never forgive.

Explaining this to my loyal German wife, who wanted me to have the credit I deserved, was not possible. Even now, long after our divorce, she is still angry about it.

A couple of years ago I received an e-mail from her with another of my filched ideas in it.

But as you become older, you can either become bitter or you can achieve understanding. And if you are becoming a bitter old man, I would highly recommend that you try skydiving without a parachute.

This long enough for one piece. I hope what I write above will explain how it fits into the general picture I am trying to draw.