B. U. G. S.

“As dead as network TV” was one expression I heard on a sit-com.

Books are deader. They keep growing in sales a bit, but in comparative terms, which is all that counts, the publishing industry is dead in the water in hte area whta interests ME, which is POWER. It used to be that a book led the way for a new fashionable idea, the magazines and New York press gave them proinence, then Mommy Professor gave them to Mommy Teacher and so forth.

Now ideas do not come from books. In fact, by the time you see a book on a subject you are reminded how far behind the publishing industry is. It is hard to imagine HOW far behind they are. Let’s start with network news, which I haven’t seen in months. They led off with a story that we have all heard a dozen times that day.

You got it on cable and you got it on the net. By the time the Rathernuts get to it it is like seeing a rerunof You Are There from the early 50s. And that is a delay of hours. Publishing is a delay of MONTHS. And it is getting WORSE, not better. Mainline publishing is the only form of commmunication that is actually getting slower.

And there is NO fresh blood on the idea front. It wasn’t exactly flowing before, butnow you have to have an agent to submit aq book. What is worse, agents used to take money to read your manuscript, so at least you could BUY your way into a try for a modest sum. Now they don’t even do that. Established authors only.

Of course I never had to pay for it myself.

I mean an agent reading my MS.

New authors do break into novels, where the money is, but that has always been notoriously difficult and still is. That is a bit more open because it is the life blood of publishing, the cash cows like Stephen King. But idea books are not payers. An idea is what the publishing bureaucracy, thousands of them, at least ten of whose names do not end in stein and two of whom do not live in New York or California, decides on.

If this sounds extreme, I refer you to the one time my name appeared in the New York Review of Books. Every author’s name published inside had his name onthe cover. The cover that time was hilarious. Every name there sounded like something made up in a Nazi hit piece, so Jewish that it would sound extreme in a synagogue.

And there, somewhere near the middle, was Robert Walker Whitaker, the kind of name New Yorkers think only happens in a YIDDISH hit piece!

In 1981, the only reason I did The New Right Papers was to get a major publisher for my contribution to put my idea of Societal Property Rights before hte public. So I did a whole book so I could FINALLY counter the standard conservative line that borders should be open “to the free movement of goods, capital AND LABOR” to which both Buchanan and Sobran then subscribed.

I wrote a whole book to get two words into the mainstream where even political commentators would see them:

“Labor VOTES.”

It took two years of effort to get my first book published, and that only because the time had come. In 1974 William Rusher had FINALLY come to the conclusion that conservatives could NEVER win while they kept faith with their octogenarian moderate wing, and they would have to dirty their hands and get the “Wallace vote” that no one was going after, and that, becauesof tradition, fell to the Democrats. So he did the Foreward to A Plague on Both Your Houses, which got it published.

By a MINOR publisher.

So getting ideas to the public was like shooting with a muzzle-loader. It took FOREVER and luck to get anything into the only place where ideas were introduced, up at the New York end of the barrel. The rest ofhte loading took forever, too, as you poked the concept in in interview after interview about abook you had b een desperately tired of when you sent in the galleys.

Now the muzzle-loader is competing with a machine gun. And I don’t mean the old 600 rounds per minute WWII stuff and that every M-16 delivers. I mean those things that fire 15,000 to 20,000 .50 rounds per minute and make excellent artillery. And that is good way to think of the spread of ideas today:

Te publishing industry and its minions are still jamming a concept down the barrel and firing their one shot a year, which leds to the New York Times which leads to Dan Rather or whoever the Edward R. Murrrow is right now.

Meanwhile the internet is throwing lead, not by the minute, not by the second, but by the millisecond.

“As dead as network TV, as rotten as publishing.”