Chamblee54

The last paragraph of Still Life With Woodpecker begins “Even with aids, their hearing was only partially restored”. This refers to hearing aids, not HIV.
SLWW was written during the Carter administration, and yet talks about the last quarter of the twentieth century. PG recently re read SLWW. With the exception of the Tea Party, we are thirteen percent into the twenty first century. The book, however visionary, wrote about the last quarter, etc, while discos were considered the latest innovation in entertainment. The eighties and nineties had a few surprises. AIDS was science fiction when SLWW was written.
One is cocaine. In SLWW, many of the leading characters thought tootski was great fun. A few years later, a Republican administration pulled a double whammy on the patriotic public. On the one hand a war on drugs was trumpeted, with many liberties counted as casualties. While this was going on, another branch of big government was using cocaine importers to take guns to terrorists in Central America. PG remembers those days as the time when he quit trying to make sense of current events.
Another theme of this book… despite it’s flaws, it is still tons of fun to read … are the hidden messages embedded in the package for Camel Cigarettes. This package was introduced in 1913, according to SLWW. This was the same year as the start of the Federal Reserve Bank. In 1914, a horrendous war started in Europe. American managed to get dragged into this conflict, and the modern era started.
1913 was the first year of Woodrow Wilson as POTUS. His election was facilitated by a third party run by Teddy Roosevelt. He had previously been promoted to POTUS by the suspicious murder of William McKinley. This was followed shortly by the mysterious Camel package, and the Federal Reserve Bank.
The 1992 election also featured a third party helping to elect a Democrat. Bill Clinton balanced the budget, and got impeached over a blow job. You can’t make this stuff up. It is understandable that SLWW did not see it coming. This was written like David Foster Wallace. Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.