Posted on 09/02/2018 4:15:09 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Works of fiction that purport to be collections of documents—let’s call them “assemblage novels”—are hard to pull off. The Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet succeeded in 2015—and ended up on the Booker Prize shortlist—with His Bloody Project, a novel that was supposedly a collection of documents relating to a 19th-century murder. Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide, a clever fake manual for enduring the zombie apocalypse, is another recent entry in the genre.
Now comes Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a prolific tweeter (he’s @armscontrolwonk), and his 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States. The book is conceived as a 9/11 Commission-style report, issued in 2023, examining the causes of North Korean nuclear strikes on New York, Northern Virginia, Hawaii, and South Florida that occurred in March 2020. The book is a mixture of nonfiction and speculation: Every event that occurs before the book’s publication this August actually happened. The rest is the work of Lewis’s imagination.
As a piece of literature, Lewis’s book fails. The key to a successful assemblage novel is maintaining utter fealty to the tone of the documents you purport to be presenting. In other words, you can’t break character. As such, The 2020 Commission Report should be written in the dispassionate, wooden, bureaucratic tone that characterized not only the 9/11 Commission Report, but also the 1946 Barkley investigation that looked into the causes of the attack on Pearl Harbor. And at times, Lewis affects this tone. But all too often, he veers into more a novelistic, expressionist style that would never show up in a document we’re to believe was written by a group of public servants....
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
North Korea hit by a hundreds of Mitsubishi delivered tactical warheads.
I could see CNN reporting the imminent missile attacks on the US mainland with a text crawl at the bottom of the screen while their talking heads continued their spittle spewing anti Trump rants. Once the bombs detonated CNN would immediately blame Trump for provoking the Norks and use the backdrop of burning cities for their reporters to lament that Trump should have continued Obama’s appeasement policies. The American people however will demand an immediate devastating retaliation.
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