Monday, October 17, 2011

Primer for Presidential Candidates


“Run Sarah, Run,” reads the last sentence of my book, Flirting with Misadventures, which was published by FriesenPress last month (9/2011), and available in hardbound, paperback, and electronic editions at the publisher’s shopping cart, among several outlet portals.  With her announcement last Wednesday that she was vowing out of the presidential contest, Gov. Palin might just have doomed the marketing prospects of the book.  However, the principles undergirding my arguably premature prognostications on her presidential prospects were by no means undermined by the political calculus of her deliberations leading to a none-candidacy.  In fact, the essay, written in July 2010, made ample allowance for precisely the decision she officially made public last week.

On page 313 of the book my disclaimer was unmistakable:

I have not met her in person but less than fifty pages into “Going Rogue” made me feel like I shared most of her adventures of growing up. I succumb to that exhilarating feeling of having gallivanted away the anxious exuberance of my formative years in the edge of the wilds with her, notwithstanding that I was born in the evacuation camps of WWII Philippines, roughly half a globe away, more than two generations ago, and a civilization removed from her narratives.

She is a breath of fresh air in a political atmosphere traditionally choked with the putrescence of political posturing on just about any issue imaginable.

Of all the politicians in the national landscape, Gov. Palin just happens to be the least conventional (cf, p 312):

Living out her philosophy rather than philosophizing on life is what Gov. Palin is all about. The main reason she gets the vitriol of the traditional career feminists is her putting their hypocrisy in sharp contrasting relief to her reality.  She has proved to the world and to the feminists’ shame that there need not be any conflict between motherhood and a professional career, politics included.  Furthermore, it definitely did not take a village to nurture her brood of five, more than twice above the national average fertility rate for this country.

I have painstakingly demonstrated elsewhere in the same book {chapters 11, 18, 19 & 20} that to as much as pay a lip service to the narrative of Man-Made Global Warming as the gospel minted in Copenhagen purports,  you have to be either intellectually incompetent, or politically dishonest, or both. 

This is the first of two crucial smells test I have for presidential candidates, namely:
1)         How would your administration propose to redeploy the enormous human and infrastructural resources at the Federal government’s disposal already invested to promote and implement the popularly accepted Global Warming agenda?

2)         How would your administration propose to deal with the intricacies and ramifications of baseline budgeting?

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Book Promotion Frails and Thrills

Book Promotion Frails and Thrills

As I endeavor to map out strategies (or is this what may be called brainstorming?) to get maximum exposure/visibility to the Flirting book released last month by FriesenPress, google-searching the title for the most recent (new arrivals, if you will) ads on a daily basis has become part of the chore.  For reasons not readily available to my reckoning, three most recent sightings had given me the most buzz.

Those were its appearance in the Japanese market, in the Polish market, and the Italian market.  It is somewhat easy to come up with coherent rationale for the first to markets.  A significant portion of my story had a Japanese setting.  In fact one of the sequel titles I’m entertaining for the book is “Yamato Interludes,” which is intended to narrate some of the seemingly trivial escapades I indulged in during my studies in Japan.

The Polish as aspect of the picture can be accounted for by the fact that my wife, Krystyna, was born and bred in Krakow.  With a significant deficit of fluency in the Polish language, the presence of the book in the Polish marketplace sort of compensates for my communications handicap with her family and friends.

The Italian buzz is a more difficult one to account for.  I just have to chalk it up to my conscious identification of my mindset as a product of what Edgar Allan Poe dubbed as “The Grandeur that was Rome.”