Save Us, Johnny!

I just made a jaw-dropping discovery, which is rare. It's not often that upon finding something out I'm so surprised that my mouth opens, or my monocle flies off. It happens all the time in cartoons, though. Anyway, I just heard that Mitt Romney named L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth" as his favorite book. I read that novel, which is sort of awful, when I was 14. It actually came with a soundtrack, written also by L. Ron Hubbard. If memory serves, there was a lot of grunting and a synthesizer.

So Mitt Romney not only read Battlefield Earth, but it's his favorite book. This is going to give more fodder to his enemies than the "varmint" comments a few weeks ago. It's a long book; at least 900 pages, maybe a lot more, so there is plenty to work with. Especially in that book. I was into Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Piers Anthony, Arthur C. Clark, Douglas Adams and just about any Hugo Award winning author back then. This is before the age of John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut and Dostoevsky. Besides being essentially a pulp science fiction novel (check out that cover), Battlefield Earth is rife with Scientology metaphor. The humans only find the ability to overthrow the vicious aliens through the use of a consciousness expanding machine that is, ironically, used by the aliens to make humans more intelligent and useful for slavery. Yup. Without the use of such a machine, we have only Tom Cruise and John Travolta to deliver us from the Thetans which are preventing us from realizing our full potential.

Does anyone out there have the soundtrack, on tape, that came with the book? I remember that "music" more than the book itself.

In other news, I have yet to receive any news about the newspaper writing job. I'm almost certain that I'll be told to, "go piss up a rope" (my late grandmother's favorite insult). It's not bothering me, though, as I'm familiar with my numerous limitations.