Editor’s Note: Since March, PJ Lifestyle has been highlighting some of the most innovative fiction writers at the recently-launched new media publishing platform Liberty Island, featuring interviews and story excerpts. Click here to see our collection of 24 so far. We’re going to continue periodically introducing new contributors but now we continue a new series featuring many of these writers talking about their upcoming books and dialoguing about this question:
“Liberty Island has identified itself as the home of the new counterculture. In what ways does your book exemplify this?”
To learn more check out this interview Sarah Hoyt conducted with CEO Adam Bellow: “It also has a unique mission: to serve as the platform and gathering-place for the new right-of-center counterculture.” Also see COO David S. Bernstein’s recent essay here in which he defines Liberty Island as, “an imaginative playground where brilliant and creative people can test their ideas without being harassed or threatened by the new breed of ‘community activists’ who police thought and speech in the media.” Bellow’s new cover story at National Review, is also out this month: “Let Your Right Brain Run Free.” Finally and importantly, support Liberty Island’s crowd-funding efforts here where you can pre-order the upcoming novels and learn about other incentives.
See Part 1 with Michael Sheldon’s answer here and Part 2 with Stephen McDonald’s answer here
The old counterculture was advertised (and subsequently mythologized) as Youth Speaking Truth to Power and Sticking it to the Man. Forty years on, the old counterculture has become The Man and everything they hated about him: repressive (for our own good, of course), controlling (“Momma’s gonna keep you safe and warm”), and above all, determined to keep their hands on the levers of power. As the prophet Pete Townsend told us, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
How am I part of the New Counterculture?
First, my novel is just a good yarn, rather than tedious propaganda relating that life is meaningless and people are terrible. In The Big Bang (Lonesome George Chronicles, Vol. 1), a series of coordinated internal attacks stagger the nation in August of 2008, unleashing a domino of assaults from enemies foreign and domestic. As America reels from this catastrophe, a jihadist invasion shatters the weakened nation. In the broken rubble of our country, citizens find themselves tested in the crucible. From the last elected President of the United States, on the run in a country no longer his own, to the movie star hunting desperately for his lost daughter, to ordinary men and women struggling to survive under the boot of the invaders, The Big Bang weaves together the stories of the people of a new America in a history of events that have not yet taken place.
The Big Bang has good guys and bad guys. This division between good and evil alone makes it transgressive. I also spend some time having a journalist discuss the way the press appointed themselves Protectors of the Realm, outlining the ways they have actively worked to deny and discredit the good that was done for the world by America and her President in the years leading up to 2008.
Maybe that’s Sticking It to the Man: using actual facts to demonstrate how the Fourth Estate has evolved into a Fifth Column, killing us softly with TV, movies, and novels that weave the myths the Left uses to control what its subjects think, say and imagine.
I also Speak Truth to Power by deconstructing the pervasive myths the Left and their acolytes have peddled for years. You know the ones I’m talking about:
- Conservatives are bad, mean, and have a poor fashion sense
- Government and central control are the keys to a happy life
- The only way to be safe and secure is to let Big Bro the Democratic Party take care of you
- The biggest failing of any Liberal is that they Just Care Too Damn Much
I take some shots at those, too, jabs at what “everybody knows” to set up the haymakers to come.
Now it’s Liberty Island’s turn to put their thumb in the eye of The Man. I’m happy to be one of those thumbs.
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