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Coming
Next Year:
What
Happened to the Children of the Roses?
Ever
since the publication of The
War of the Roses 24 years ago, people
have approached me with the question:
What
do you think happened to the children of this
ill-fated marriage?
Frankly,
I have pondered this question with increasing
interest. The Roses did have two children and
those of you who remember the ending of the
book saw them standing over their parent's
bodies which had been killed by the falling
weight of their crystal chandelier. The movie,
incidentally, treated the ending somewhat
differently. The children were off to college
and were not present at the scene. I can
recall Kathleen
Turner telling me that the scene as
I had imagined it might be too painful for
movie audiences.
Following
the novel's characters in my mind, of course,
I set out to trace how such a trauma of
separation, whether by death of parents or
divorce, affects children. No matter how one
explains or rationalizes such a situation, the
effects are profound and the wounds of such a
tragedy remain unhealed through the
generations.
The
result of my speculations will be found in my
forthcoming novel to be published next year
titled, as of now, The War of the Roses,
The Children. It will be my 26th published
novel.
The
enduring impact of The
War of the Roses never ceases to amaze
me. The movie plays somewhere in the world, I
am told, at least a couple of times a week.
When I interact with people who discover that
I wrote this novel, they will recite dialogue
from either the movie or the book.
In
Harrods in London, a man selling me ties
quoted "woof woof" when he
discovered that I was the perpetrator of this
work. He referred to the scene in the movie
when the Kathleen
Turner character is asked what she
put into the pate' she was serving her husband
in the brief truce during their
"war."
The
book has had wide use among marriage
counselors and psychiatrists and has been used
as a textbook in college courses in
psychiatry.
The
title has become part of the legal
nomenclature in divorce cases and certain
contentious divorces have come to be known as
"The War of the Roses" divorce. I
can honestly say that, for all my criticisms
of book to movie productions, James
L. Brooks, the producer and prime
mover of movie version of the "The War of
the Roses" followed the plot line and the
characters created in the novel quite accurately, for
which I will be forever grateful. And, of
course, the execution of the movie directed by
Danny DeVito
and starring Michael
Douglas and Kathleen
Turner was superb. Indeed, Michael
has often commented that the movie was the
best piece of work he has done.
Some
people have accused me of "stealing"
their divorce and have insisted that I somehow
had read their divorce papers. Others have
told me that their divorces were exactly as
described in the book. Many have insisted that
the novel is autobiographical.
My
reaction is to politely abuse them of the
thought. I have been happily married to the
love of my life for years. It is our first
and only marriage. I tell them to put it in
the category of a cautionary tale and heed its
warning. The line between love and hate is
blurry and fragile.
I
look forward eagerly to the reception of The
War of the Roses, the Children and, of
course, will always welcome comments from
readers. See The
War of the Roses Book Chat.
Suicide
Bombers: A Human Creation
Will
it happen here?
The
incidence of suicide bombing in Israel and now
in Iraq is a phenomenon that most people have
difficulty understanding. It appears to most
of us in the West as so bizarre, inhuman and
illogical one cannot fathom why human beings
would deliberately perform such acts of
self-immolation and murder. There is a
deceptively simple answer. These tragic
individuals have been deliberately and
cynically brainwashed, using techniques that a
determined group can easily apply to the
unsuspecting.
 For
more than two decades I have tried to
understand and explain the phenomena of
brainwashing. It has been an uphill battle
largely because most people cannot grasp the
idea that a person can give up his sense of
self and become so vulnerable to manipulation
that he will be willing to follow any
suggestion even if it means deliberately
giving up his own life.
My
last published novel Cult
tried to illustrate the phenomenon and portray
the difficulties of "restoring"
people to reality once they have been
subjected to the deliberate and sinister
techniques designed to brainwash people into
submission to whatever cause or philosophy the
brainwashers represent. Although I believe the
novel made its point, it stirred up a hornet's
nest of disbelief and, in some cases,
dismissal. I maintain, however, that anyone
who wishes to discover the power of
brainwashing might gain great insight by
reading Cult.
I'd
like to hear comments from readers of Cult
(see Cult
Book Chat). It is an issue that demands
discussion and is a phenomenon that,
unfortunately and God forbid, is moving in our
direction.
Convincing
people of the dangers of this process and how
to combat it has frankly been an uphill
battle. Yet, the evidence is conclusive. The
so-called "suicide bomber"
illustrates the end result of such a practice.
Try,
if you can, to understand the logic of a young
person willing to blow himself up in a cause
in which he or she is convinced a reward
awaits him in another incarnation as a
heavenly entity. Various rewards have been
described including the one with the most
exposure that 70 virgins will await them to
provide pleasure in another life.
What
can one deduce from such an absurdity?
Firstly, the person who believes this has been
subjected to a most intense bombardment of
patently false and repetitive information and
rituals which has caused him or her to
relinquish his will and perform acts of
extreme savagery. Can anyone of sound mind
possibly understand how a young person can
give up his life voluntarily, while
deliberately taking the lives of other human
beings and, to add to the horror, be regaled
as heroes and martyrs, by friends, neighbors
and parents who accept monetary awards for
spawning such offspring?
About
the best explanation of brainwashing I have
ever encountered was in a book titled Snapping
by Flo Conway
and Jim Siegelman,
written in 1978. Subtitled "America's
Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change" it
dealt with the emergence of the cult phenomena
in America with parents suddenly confronted by
sinister organizations "capturing"
their grown children, brainwashing them, and
using them to carry out their bidding.
Throughout the seventies and early eighties,
the media was filled with reports of alarmed
parents suddenly discovering that their grown
children had disappeared into these cults and
their attempts, sometimes futile, to win them
back through deprogramming and, in some cases,
kidnapping them.
The
media in their frenetic effort to report the
new thing rarely cover such stories any more,
although the cults continue to exist, prosper
and damage hordes of young people. The
paradigm of the brainwashed illustrated by the
authors seems to fit exactly the pattern of
the suicide bombers in the Middle East.
Conway
and Seligman contend that
"brainwashing" occurs when a
comprehensive attack "strikes at the
heart of consciousness, undermining
fundamental processes of thought and feeling
that make up individual awareness, volition
and personality."
The
authors describe the process of "shutting
off the mind". They point out that
"throughout history this kind of attack
on human awareness has proved an efficient
method of controlling members of tribes,
societies and whole nations in which little
value is placed upon individuality. The state
of mind that it produces goes back to the dawn
of civilization."
The
authors call this phenomenon
"snapping."
Numerous
examples of brainwashing can be cited,
particularly the cases of Patty
Hearst and Elizabeth
Smart, but in the context of the
terror and death being inflicted by the
deluded and dangerous victims of brainwashing,
they are footnotes to the process but offer a
classic illustration of what happens to the
human mind when it is subjected to an attack
of this sort.
The
brainwashing of these young Arab boys and
girls is a horrendous and alarming trend.
Worse, to see them dubbed martyrs by those
cynical and corrupt leaders of Arab countries
is, in fact, revolting. For a parent to be
proud of her child for deliberately committing
suicide while killing other human beings is an
obscenity, a stain upon mankind.
I
note, too, that all of those who blow
themselves up are young and some, like those
who flew their planes into the World Trade
Center, educated and, contrary to public
belief, not from impoverished families. Note,
too, that it is not the older people, the
leadership, who pull the trigger on
themselves, but those sad brainwashed young
people. A far more convincing argument might
be made if one were to see members of the
governing elite of these countries strap
explosive to their bodies and blow themselves
up. We should be so lucky.
I
suppose one can be inspired by disgust. I
recently submitted a poem for a contest run by
Poetry.Com,
an important Internet website in the poetry
field that encourages poets throughout the
world and awards cash prizes for best judged
poems. My contribution follows:
Resignation
I
often wish I did not hate
It is, I fear, a human trait
But how does one avert one's gaze
From the very latest killing craze
When the young commit their suicides
To create more random homicides
And others celebrate their cause
With song and dance and loud applause
I wish I could make the case
For resigning from the human race.
The
poem has reached the semi-finals. Who knows?
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