Clearly though it was anger and disappointment that brought these people together. The way I read it, they were people who were fed up with the drift away from what they perceived as the bedrock symbols of an older America, where the old verities dominated our culture. In shorthand, they were pissed off by the way things were going in our country.

Hearing snippets of speeches by the participants of this gathering I could not help recalling what I had memorized as a Boy Scout many decades ago. It was obligatory to recite the Scout Oath and the Scout Law and it was always the opening pledge at our weekly meetings.

The oath went like this: On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my Country and to obey the Scout Law; To help other people at all times; To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

The law referred to went like this. A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.

Such caveats might seem like an echo of a long expired America. Vast changes, technological, psychological, emotional and material are coming at us so fast we seem to be losing our ability to cope. Huge gaps have opened in our civil discourse. Compromise seems to allude us. We confront each other as if we were mortal enemies. In such an environment it is easy to become panicked and fearful.

On the other hand there are many who still believe strongly in these simple bedrock principals, and often in giant social eruptions we yearn to go back and visit them again to be sure they’re still there. I think that time is upon us.

To most of the so-called intellectual sophisticates in the world I now inhabit, such pieties are often cited as naïve, cornball, quaint, clichéd and old-fashioned. I can visualize their gestures of ridicule and contempt.

I have a feeling that many of those who attended Beck’s rally were brought up to revere these virtues and are confused and frightened by what seems like an abandonment of these principles in modern America. Beck, who often seems inarticulate and bumbling, does, however, call our attention to American history and the values enunciated and fought over by our Founding Fathers. It is time revisit them.

Sadly, many Americans today are ignorant of our early history and the many rhetorical and bloody battles fought to insure our constitutional guarantees and preserve the boundaries of our nationhood. Beck, however he expresses the notion, is dead right on his campaign to revitalize our interest in American history. His passionate agenda on this issue is unassailable. For that alone he is to be commended. We’ll never know where we’re going if we don’t know where we came from.

Critics of this event in the so-called mainstream media see something sinister in the motives of the people who attended this gathering, although they recognize that there is a movement out there that is gaining considerable strength and focus.

Some critics see it as dangerous, a religious cabal, a hidden agenda for what they characterize as a right wing political juggernaut and worse, anti-black, anti-civil rights, anti-gay, anti-democratic, anti-Obama, a political Trojan horse for the Republicans, anti anything that does not fit their rigid rules of political correctness and their version of American plurality. They characterize Beck as a misguided publicity hound, pushing his own personal agenda for fame and profit. In other words a snake oil salesman, an Elmer Gantry, a manipulator, a charlatan.

To some degree they might have a point. After all, in human affairs nothing is all black or all white. But I come down on the side of this rally being a good thing. I’m with this group in their feeling that we’re drifting along a river that is taking us headlong into troubled waters.

There is ample reason for people to be frightened and uncertain. The country seems to be between a rock and a hard place. Optimism about our future is waning. Our sense of a united American family seems cracking.

On many issues we are baffled and nervous that our cherished nation is living on a fault line. People want to kill us for reasons we do not understand and do not really know how to counter.

We are fighting wars that do not have the full backing and participation of all of our citizens. We do not understand the cause nor do we fully understand the zeal and the devious methods of our enemy. Our economy is faltering. People are losing their jobs and their homes. Our politicians seem clueless. Our President talks and talks ad infinitum in what seems more and more like endless platitudes. Nothing appears to be going right. Is there any wonder people are insecure and nervous?

However you characterize this rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the amazing attendance signals that Beck has, perhaps unwittingly, struck a chord and, for the most part, it appears that these participants are decent honorable ordinary people who are feeling helpless and growing very very angry.

It is a dangerous time for America, hence my harking back to that old Boy Scout mantra.

Clichés become clichés for a reason. In my view, the Boy Scouts have it right.

The constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion is not the issue in this situation. It is a Trojan horse that misses the point, either deliberately or by design.

The issue on the Mosque’s location is about sensitivity, empathy and simple decency. There is a compact among civilized people that demands a certain level of regard for the feelings of others. We do not become raucous and loud and impolite during a funeral ceremony. We do not spit on the floors of the homes of our friends. We do not deliberately bump into people when walking in the street and normally say “excuse me” when we accidentally interfere with other people’s movement. We do not throw our garbage out of windows. We have been taught to say “please” and “thank you” and have a special regard for the handicapped and infirm.

Whether you dub such conduct basic etiquette, or regard for the feelings of others or simple compassion, we could not exist as a civilized society without such rules of conduct. Most of us understand the motives behind outreach and forgiveness. And we do understand the meaning of that time honored cliché that “time heals all wounds.”

The idea of building a mosque celebrating the Muslim religion and as a place of worship and a community center seems on the surface benign and forgiving, an outreach that underscores American diversity and good fellowship.

The problem is that the time for healing is not over. For those who lost loved ones in the horror of the Ground Zero attack it is much too soon for forgiveness. Besides, we know who carried out this horror. Their motives are not in doubt. They believed that their Muslim faith commanded them to destroy the infidel, the non-believer, the other, those who do not endorse their orthodox concept that is at the heart of strict adherence to the principles of radical Muslim teachings.

Americans are used to orthodoxy. All religions have strict adherents who believe that their way is the only way to salvation. They proselytize, separate themselves from the mainstream and insist on strict rules of dress, diet and ritual. It is part of the American character to tolerate such conduct, often reluctantly, sometimes loudly disparaging those who practice what seems to them odd, even weird.

They don’t however kill innocent people to make their point.

Not in today’s supposedly enlightened world. Any adherent to a religion who condones, accepts or ignores such a tactic, especially those who worship under a mainstream religious umbrella, run the risk of putting their entire religion under suspicion that it might endorse such practices.

Rather than build a physical plant to worship their God, American Muslims who detest such inhuman acts would be far better served to openly and loudly protest, unambiguously and repetitively, that they reject radicalization of their religion by their opposition to killing apostates, stoning women for adultery, calling Jews “pigs and monkeys”, denying the Holocaust, supporting terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, challenging those who cite America for being complicit in causing terrorist acts against it and for declaring war on non-Muslims who refuse to convert and other comments and practices that are not compatible with our American national values like Sharia.

Indeed such refutations should be the mantra of American Muslims in their quest for separation from the actions and horrors of their co-religionists. The idea that Americans are Islamophobes is absurd. We are a welcoming people, mature in our respect for diversity. We have learned many hard lessons in our history about the sins of bias and conformity.

All we ask is that our laws are obeyed and our fellow citizens treat each other with respect, compassion, understanding and dignity, are alert to the sensitivity of others and we do not have to live in fear that if we do not comply with radical Muslim orthodoxies we are in danger of being slaughtered.

Is that too much to ask?

It was, of course, as predictable as sunrise and comes as no surprise to those of us that have been following these trends over the past decade. Indeed, it is measurable by my own experience. I digitized my thirty odd works of fiction years ago and helped Sony launch the first e-reader at the Las Vegas International Consumer Electronics show in 2007.

It took years for e-books to develop and left lots of hopeful entrepreneurs bereft and bankrupt along the way. Indeed, Barnes and Noble entered the e-book market years ago, then abandoned the project and shut it down. I clearly remember discussing this with Len Riggio who created and ran the Barnes and Noble chain at a cocktail party years ago and urging him to reconstitute his e-book thrust arguing that it was the future. Eventually Barnes and Noble reentered the market and is currently trying to play catch-up, a formidable challenge.

With more than 700 odd stores Barnes and Noble is clearly the most important player in the book business as it is presently constituted. Its business strategy now will be to build its content merchandising around the Nook, its e-reader and will try selling other items to utilize its massive floor space once devoted solely to print books.

Whatever the future for Barnes and Noble, it was and still is the citadel for mass publishing and perfect for its time, which is passing fast. Indeed, I have always mourned the passing of those wonderful old second hand bookstores that once lined the streets near downtown NYU and the many independent bookstores that were a fixture in most American towns.

It seems obvious that as the leases for Barnes and Noble bookstores expire, the company might have to abandon some stores unless they can sell other merchandise to lift their profit picture. The impact of such potential changes on the publishing business will be profound. Like it or not, the paper book publishing business and the big box bookstores that support it will have to morph into something else to survive.

Indeed, the whole present publishing feeding chain will be affected, especially literary agents, editors, secretaries, office help and, of course, printers, binders, salesman, book shelvers, bookcase carpenters, retail clerks and on and on. Think of how all this will impact public libraries.

The effect on the individual author will be gut-wrenching. Advances will shrink further. Publishing houses will downsize. Working authors who have made it to the traditional publishing ranks and appear in their catalogues will find themselves competing with more and more self-published authors who will be on an equal marketing footing on all e-reader venues.

Of course, being published does not mean being read. The chances are that only a tiny percentage of un-filtered self-published books will ever find a paying audience of readers but such an outcome will hardly deter the determination of people who want to see their books available to the public and live in hopes of literary fame and fortune or simply attaining the status of “published author.” Similar aspirations are goals for many authors of books published by traditional authors as well.

There are now roughly half a million books being “published” in the U.S. split between traditional and self-published authors. Most will eventually be digitized. Envision millions of books digitized yearly as more and more self-published material enters the marketplace. Textbooks, a massive market, are quickly gaining digital traction.

It is conceivable that the number of books published each year will be eventually measured in the millions and since no digitized book will ever again go out of print it is not too farfetched to predict that the number of books in print will reach into the multi-millions and eventually the billions if books are counted in global terms and in all languages.

For the individual seriously committed author, especially novelists, the challenge will be to find his or her audience, to reach beyond the incessant chatter and make his or her voice known. Although there are many entrepreneurs out there in cyberspace who promise authors that they can achieve this feat of individualization through social networking, video exploitation, advertising and other methods of exposure the fact is that none of them can accurately equate such efforts at awareness with acceptable sales results.

As an author of novels who has been out there in cyberspace for a decade, I am trying my best to meet the challenges ahead in this new environment. Because I believe implicitly that reading works of the imagination can give one insight into the human condition and can teach us how to understand and cope with the vicissitudes of life, I am still optimistic about an author’s prospects in this disjointed new world.

To many people reading is like oxygen and, as always, compelling stories will somehow find their way to the eager reader. It is a need that must be filled.

In the patchwork and splintered world of cyberspace it undoubtedly will be harder for one’s authorial voice to be heard. At first, sadly, it may not mean fatter paychecks for the author and psychic satisfaction will not put food on the table, but I am naïve enough to believe that good works will ultimately find their audience of eager readers with money in hand. Don’t ask how this will occur. But then no one in publishing has, as yet unraveled the mystery of the how and why of what really sells books.

We are fighting two wars in two Muslim countries, where radical Muslims are dedicated to killing and maiming our soldiers who have come to the aid of their fellow Muslims who have been brutalized by their dictatorial rulers. In many of these Muslim countries, including those of our alleged allies, Christians are treated with disdain and persecuted and Jews are, quite literally, prohibited.

Ironically, we are spending billions to protect ourselves from being slaughtered by Muslim fanatics. We, the most tolerant nation on earth, who welcome streams of legal immigrants and naively believe that if we do unto others nicely, they will do the same to us.

The fact is that we are becoming a gullible nation of liars. Mostly, we lie to ourselves. Just think of all the treasure and lives we are expending to prevent Jihadist atrocities within our borders. Muslim fanatics have made us unsafe. All of us, Muslims included, have to be searched at airports, watched by cameras, open to inspection everywhere. Even our domestic military bases are unsafe from trigger happy Jihadist wannabes. We live in what amounts to a virtual barbed wire enclosure to protect us from whom? No answer required. Worse, it is deemed politically incorrect to “profile” the potential perpetrators.

I suppose such remarks will be dubbed offensive, perhaps racist even by those who believe in the golden rule aforementioned. I was brought up in the era when “tolerance” was the operative word and we were taught to be kindly and accepting of all people and all religions in this vast wonderful American melting pot.

There was one virtue most of us believed in implicitly and that was empathy, meaning the ability to identify with and understand another person’s feelings and difficulties. Yes, it is true that not everyone understood nor practiced empathy. Many of our citizens were certainly abused by people who lacked empathy. No need here to list all those of different races, religions and persuasions who were treated badly by fellow citizens who lacked empathy.

There are those among us who continue to have a deficit in this essential characteristic although we have come a long way in our education about the meaning and practice of empathy.

Americans have spent two plus centuries learning to be empathetic. It is the bedrock of our communal enterprise. Indeed, without empathy for others among us, we can hardly lay claim to being a democratic state.

Which brings me to the core of this essay. Those Muslims who are pushing to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero have no empathy. And those who support this project have no understanding of the meaning of empathy.

This controversy has nothing whatever to do with religious freedom or legality. There are mosques all over America, and lots of them in New York. Nor does it have anything to do with racism or religious discrimination or the separation of church and state. We revel in the constitutional guarantee that we are free to practice whatever faith we choose. And that applies equally to our Muslim citizens.

We assume that most American Muslims must, or should be, embarrassed by their jihadist co-religionists who are currently terrorizing the world as they call for the creation of a religious dictatorship controlled by those who ardently and fanatically practice their version of the Muslim religion.

Surely one can’t support such an outcome if one is truly a dedicated American citizen who believes wholeheartedly in our constitutional democracy. Ask our non-Muslim neighbors if they would like to live under such an arrangement proposed by fanatical Jihadists. Indeed, ask our Muslim neighbors if they would like to live under a Muslim religious dictatorship, including those maintained by our so-called allies among the Muslim nations. To most the answer would be a resounding negative.

The promoters of this mosque near the killing fields of ground zero have no empathy. They do not understand its meaning. It would be like placing a Nazi flag, with its detestable swastika symbol, among the colors displayed in the allied cemeteries of Normandy. Some would attempt to make the case that it would be a gesture of forgiveness. The very idea chills my soul.

Must we surrender to people who lack empathy? Must those who lost loved ones in the brutal attack on the World Trade Center be forced to relive the horror by having their sacred pyre insulted by those whose co-religionist undoubtedly cried Al-Akbar as they deliberately plunged their airplanes into the Trade Center skyscrapers.

One could suspect that the promoters of this travesty have another agenda but that is a suspicion fraught with conspiratorial implications. Where, for example, will the money come from to build this mosque? Is it meant to be a political statement? The promoters argue that this project is an act of apology and reconciliation. If so, it is far far too soon to make such a gesture. Why can’t the grieving of those who lost loved ones in that horror be respected. The wounds are too recent, too raw, too painful. The project insults their loss.

What makes it doubly insensitive is the cackling self-righteousness of our politicians and their coteries of sycophants who, it should be obvious, suffer from an empathy deficit as well.

Can’t these clueless fools imagine the outrage and insult experienced by anyone who lost a loved child, parent or spouse in this horror? Are there any among them who have experienced this loss?

Human decency demands a reversal of this insensitive and indecent proposal. Now, if ever, is not the time.

When the iPad hit the market, I pointed out that this remarkable device will be wildly successful but won’t capture the bulk of the market for the dedicated reader. One might argue that while it does provide the reader with an excellent format for the experience, there are too many divisive distractions embedded in the device to compete with the dedicated reader’s primary motive, which is to absorb the content offered by the author.

On the other hand, the device is available to Kindle and other device brand owners to download digital books they have purchased from their respective online book stores and read them on the iPad in the Apple device’s format. Kindle has a huge pool of digital books, and a record of longevity that gives it a distinct advantage over other online bookstores.

Whether or not Barnes and Noble’s new Nook digital device will catch up to Kindle in sheer volume is still in play. Sony, too is in the digital race, having been the first to introduce a portable screen reading device. Kobo, a Borders partner is now in the game as well and Google is next in line.

Another argument in favor of the dedicated reader choosing an exclusive device concerns the habits of the traditional book buyer. When a reader enters a brick and mortar bookstore, he is seeking reading material exclusively, words on paper. Normally he will sample a few pages to determine whether the book suits his interest. This sampling aspect has been dealt with by Kindle, Nook, Sony and other digital reading device makers. They allow sampling before purchase.

Content aside, there is also the matter of price and portability where Kindle shines. It is much less expensive than the iPad and because of its size easily portable. It can fit easily into a woman’s pocketbook or the side pocket of a man’s jacket.

In my various blogs on the subject I cited, too, that dedicated readers are not a dying species as some alarmist commentators have alleged. Yes, it is true that younger readers who have grown up on a diet of television apparently are more interested in visual media these days than the written word. I have argued that sooner or later they will discover that the world of the imagination, the imagery concocted by the human brain, is more powerful than anything that can be served up in the visual media.

I do, by the way, love movies, but comparing the emotional kick of a good book over a movie, I think a book wins hands down. Call it a personal prejudice for obvious reasons.

Perhaps as a writer of the imagination I am too prejudiced about the power of the written word to make anything but a purely subjective judgment on this subject. Nevertheless I will stick with the idea that expanding world-wide literacy will increase the population of dedicated readers and render the prevailing opinion that “people are reading less” a false premise.

There is another strange phenomenon occurring that might be characterized as unintended consequences and that is the explosion of self-published books that can be easily transported to electronic readers and be available on the internet. There are statistics available that self-published books are approaching an astounding 300,oo0 a year in the United States alone. The world-wide statistic is unknown but must be at least equal to that number.

Traditional publishers in the United States publish about 275,000 books a year, which means that in the US alone nearly a half a million books are being published. With self-publishing exploding one can envision a backlist that will soon approach many millions of books, eventually billions. In cyberspace nothing will ever go out of print.

For the serious author who hopes for a respectable readership, whether self-published or traditionally published, the challenges are enormous.

This tells me that the passion for authordom, both fiction and non-fiction in all the various genres is accelerating at an enormous rate. Of course this does not mean that readers are rushing to absorb the content of these self-published authors, but it does tell me that the appetite for creating reading material is growing exponentially. Such offerings have got to result in attracting readers, even if the response to the self-published offerings may be too fractionalized for breakout sales possibilities.

Indeed, there is a growing industry of alleged facilitators who for a price, believe they have the answer for authors who wish to rise above the chatter and build an audience on the Internet. So far I am rather cynical about their efficacy. No one has as yet come close to finding that answer.

Nevertheless what all this implies is that the written word is far from expiring and the appetite for reading is growing.

Within the next few years numerous reading devices will hit the market. With the ability to read books on smart phones and this proliferating electronic book explosion the traditional publishing industry will be stood on its head. Granted, readers will lose the professional screening and mediation of editors which could make the offerings of book less interesting and appealing. On the other hand the market will expand to bring in talented writers who were often rejected by publishers for purely market reasons based upon fickle sales histories. It will be up to the reader to discriminate and carefully choose his material.

As for me, a lover of books, to whom reading is one of the most profound experiences available to human beings, I find I am reading more books on screens than I had read in paper versions. Apparently, others are agreeing in droves.

I’m not talking about my present “me” but my “me” of more than half a century ago when I was writing a column entitled “Pepper on the Side” for a weekly newspaper in Long Island of which I was the editor.

I was in my early twenties, filled up to the brim with my know-it-all self, on a narcissistic binge that pushed me to believe that the sun rose and set on my brilliance, insight and wisdom. I was intoxicated with the power of my words which sailed out weekly to what I believed was a readership that hung on my every word.

What Noonan wrote about in her column was the depressing lack of “adult wisdom” that had been cast aside in recent years by younger people who were now in charge of making all the crucial decisions in government and in every other walk of life.

Her implication was mostly political, since she was despairing of the recent course of depressing events now afflicting the country. But it was her larger message that I took personally.

In the column, for example, she cites the imaginary advice of an older man to a younger man.

“Son,” she wrote in the voice of the older man, “being an enraged, profane, unmoderated, unmediated, hit-loving, trash-talking rage monkey is no way to go through life.” Whack, whack on the exposed tush of the old me.

What Peggy saw was millions upon millions of old “mes” parading around in the government, on the internet, shouting through their technological bullhorns, raging everywhere, on social networking sites, wading in the fetid swamp of the infinite blogosphere, fulminating on op-ed columns, on TV, YouTube and videos and everywhere that talking head pontificators opine in loud and ugly rants as if they truly knew what they were talking about.

What it amounts to is an insane tsunami of bullshit, putrefying the air from the White House, the Halls of Congress, the media, the Internet in a running open sewer of garbage, “unmoderated and unmediated”.

Don’t you just love the way Peggy put it?

The operative word is “change”, change everything, toss away the wise, the good, the proven, bludgeon those grey-haired fools who can be conveniently blamed for all those rotten decisions that have brought us to despair and on the verge of a financial precipice and in the bullseye of a terrorist madness that could atomize us into radioactive dust.

Does one detect the old “me” in this diatribe?

What Peggy means is that the balance between the old and the young is out of sync in every field of endeavor that “change” requires. She implies that intelligent decisions are made not by youthful impatience alone, but tempered with hard experience and historical insight.

Part of the problem may be that the divide between the generations has become too wide to effectively bridge. The speed of technological development has left many of the older generation technologically illiterate, relegated to perceived irrelevance by those brought up on computers who are now leading the charge in the digital revolution.

Therefore in the mind of the younger hotshots those of us without the technological skills are therefore just plain irrelevant and stupid and shunted aside when important life changing decisions must be made.

Of course, it can be argued that it is the young that have brought us these technological advances. Think Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook and on and on.

Have all of these truly amazing technological advances made it a better world? You be the judge? As the argument goes: Aren’t we living longer? You bet. But are we living better?

I believe what Peggy was getting at, perhaps subconsciously, is that technological change does not trump human nature, which has remained constant and consistent throughout the ages. Why not heed the lessons of those who have traveled a long distance on the rocky road of life? This appears to be the central question at the heart of her essay.

Do we simply obliterate the old values altogether and superimpose totally new and untested changes on our society. What do we really want in terms of a future for our progeny?

Yes, my old me deserves the rebuke Peggy has perpetrated through her words. I hope that the old me did not do any terrible harm. Luckily, I self-corrected sometime later when I felt the sting of experience affirm the truth that I was a hot-headed immature semi-idiot at the time. But then, I was a rookie in life. Thankfully, I didn’t have my hands on any of the levers of power.

It is not often that one finds a wise head embedded in our overwrought media. Her column is worth a hard look.

If you attached a pipe to the Internet, by that measure you would have enough hot air to heat the entire earth under a suffocating cloud that would make the direst predictions of global warming a mere glowing ash in a spent bonfire.

I am a miniscule consumer of but an atom of what is out there in cyberspace. Normally, I “read” ten or more on-screen newspapers and visit about the same number of so-called information aggregators while browsing through countless other sites: each offering a gaggle of opinions from every spectrum of worldwide political bias known to man.

This usually occurs after I devote forty minutes or less to the home delivered paper edition of the New York Times, a habit I am unable to break after decades of effort. There is no rehabilitative cure for this malady although it does require a daily dose of blood pressure medication. It is only after this feeble attempt at comprehension that I tackle the informative treasures of the Internet. That takes another half hour of my time and I am not a speed-reader.

I note that I have just written four paragraphs and I would be quite surprised if a potential reader who has stumbled across this tome has “read” more than the first paragraph. To them I say welcome and stick around.

In fact, I truly believe that most people in our distracted society do not read past the first paragraph of a body of words. Perhaps I am exaggerating and should use sentence instead of paragraph. Considering the limitations of time, such a method seems to have a certain logic.

For example, when reading the New York Times, I have only to read the first sentence to know exactly what an editorialist or op-ed pundit is writing about. Same old same old. Nothing really new there. Editorials are ho-hum. Op-ed mavens are repetitive and predictable. This one is a self-righteous do-gooder. That one bleeds for the impoverished. This one can’t get Sarah Palin out of her craw. That one is universally nasty. That part of the pundit stew takes about five minutes. I’ll spend a lot more time with those wonderful offbeat feature stories.

When I visit the Huffington Post, I know at a glance what each blogger or alleged reporter has to say, usually by reading the first sentence. Once you’ve established the bias, you know exactly what’s coming next. Ditto for The Daily Beast and the various aggregators like Drudge. I do nose around for something new and original. Occasionally a nugget does emerge, but it is rare.

For those who are politically like-minded the reinforcement is salutary, like a warm shower, and the readership is likely to exceed the first paragraph, perhaps all the way to the third or fourth. None of this dismays the writer of this predictable word-bloat. The writer is so caught up in his or her own brilliance that he truly believes that the reader has stayed with him until the end of his effusion. Present company excepted of course. What in the world are you doing staying with me this far into my profound exposition?

Actually, if you continue to develop the “one paragraph” habit you could get so good at it that all you need is a single word to absorb the piece. Eventually, you might even be able to merely glance at the words and in a quick blur get the gist of the writer’s thrust. I am not yet at that stage, but I am getting there.

Of all those gajillions of words being pumped out in cyberspace and onto the imploding printed material, I am willing to bet the barn that most people “read”, perhaps the word should be “glance”, at less than the tiniest sliver of information. The irony is that those who earnestly spend the time at this ignoble occupation truly believe that they are well informed citizens able to make considered decisions on such items as polling, political candidate preferences and other matters that require their participation in the democratic process.

Perhaps I have inadvertently stumbled upon a strange phenomenon. I am beginning to suspect that there are far more writers out there than committed readers. I am astounded by the number of people authoring self-published books, both through e-books and print on demand technology without even considering the amount of composition that is being spewed out on the Internet via e-mails, text messaging and through the infinite social networking sites.

I assume these book writers follow the usual patterns: memoirs, spiritual musings, self-help, instructional material, children’s books, young adults and adult fiction in every genre imaginable. Indeed, they are easily uploaded by authors to all the publishing sites and are available for purchase. It is a thriving business for author exploiters.

There are more than half a million “books” being published every year in the English language alone. Over fifty percent of these titles are self-published with the other half or less published by traditional publishers. With the continued ease of publishing technology one could easily imagine this number to reach millions within a year or so with a backlist at some point in the future approaching over a trillion. Think of the dollar amount being expended, not only on producing the books, but also on the various marketing ploys required to get these books noticed by potential readers.

If we add to these authors the vast amount of bloggers that are pounding away on their keyboards, offering their various nuggets of personalized opinions and instructive material, you get a writing population that is staggering.

Consider, too, that these heavy breathing wordsmith’s are competing with a vast array of visual content providers, pointing their lenses at every manner of human adventure and concocting an endless menu of cartoon animation and you begin to understand that words might actually illuminate the imagination with far more power than the contrivance of the merely visual.

As for the primary subject of this essay, my first paragraph analogy may have a very short shelf life. With so much being written, I wonder if one’s judgment on reading further will be best served by creating an enticing title and, barring that, the mere look of the type of font being used as a reader’s lure.

To tell you the truth, I am overjoyed to see so many writers enter the literacy fray and I wish them luck in their effort to connect with readers. The next essay I write will be about readers to whom getting to the end of a book or blog is a sworn commitment.

As to how many “readers” have reached the end of this essay, I dare not contemplate. But for those happy few that have remained I hope they will consider the expenditure of their time useful.

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They’re paranoid. It’s in their DNA.

This is why they built their railroads with a wider span, which meant that the trains had to be raised when crossing borders to replace the undercarriage to enter foreign space.

That is why the KGB became the most paranoid intelligence culture in the world on this very basic theory: Trust nobody, not even each other. Once you destroy faith in everybody, you destroy faith in yourselves.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Russian culture, their music, their art and above all, their literature. I’ve been there. I have Russian friends.

I love their eternal soul searching, their gloomy view of mankind, best articulated when fired up by vodka, their dark and eloquent musings.  It’s all part and parcel of their paranoia. Enemies are everywhere, not only national enemies, people enemies, mood enemies, philosophical enemies, geographical enemies; the devil is just around the corner and his evil influence is everywhere.

It is the reason behind exiling people to Siberia, behind Stalin’s murderous reign, behind the bloody history of the Czars. It is quite obviously the reason for this harebrained spy episode. Do you really believe that Putin didn’t know? It was probably his idea.

What did George Bush really see when he looked into Putin’s eyes? We must assume he knew about the Russian spy invasion and gave our side the green light to track the perpetrators. Maybe he decided then on a tit-for-tat response and could have sent our own spy teams to live in the suburbs of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Could be one of our own spies leading a tour of the Hermitage or mixing cocktails at the Moscow Hilton.

For years I’ve been trying to figure out why Raskolnikov killed that old lady in Dostoevsky’s, “Crime and Punishment.” None of the learned explanations by the literati and psychology mavens could ever explain his motivation to me that made any sense. I have finally gotten it. The man craved his paranoia. Without his paranoia he was merely a useless clod. It is paranoia that excites the Russian psyche. It is the Russian drug.

In fact, looking back over my reading of Dostoevsky’s novels, I can now conclude that most of his main characters were paranoids. It is an affliction that threads its way throughout Russian literature, which of all distinctively national works of the imagination, is one of my favorites.

Why then would the Russians send all those people to the States to learn about us when they could find anything they needed to know, without a fraction of the expense, by consulting Google? Obvious. They need their paranoia.

The most enduring episode of paranoia in Russia was the case of Rasputin, known as the mad monk, who was the so-called spiritual advisor to the Czarina Alexandra wife of Czar Nicholas. A visit to Wikipedia will give you a bird’s-eye view of this fellow who became the embodiment of the full menu of Russian paranoia including the fall of the Romanov dynasty, the defeat of the Russians in World War I and the rise of Communism.

What in the world were these Russian spies after? Think of the elaborate training, the subterfuge, the expense, the bureaucratic infrastructure, the funding problems, the sheer chutzpah of the enterprise. Worse, what did it cost us to track them for a decade? What a total waste of taxpayer’s money, both ours and the Russians.

Some say there are thousands of these spies inhabiting our suburbs living in houses owned by the Russian government. I wonder if they were mortgage-free or are the Russian owned homes now headed for foreclosure.

It boggles the mind. Can you just imagine the industry that will suddenly emerge, multi-million dollar book deals, movie and television shows. It throws the old spy melodramas into a cocked hat. That bombshell Russian beauty is sure to have a vastly profitable career.

But then I shouldn’t complain about Russian paranoia. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for their affliction. They must have thought that my penniless grandparents were a profound threat to the sovereignty of their State, which prompted them to come to America.

Books have been my life, both as a writer and a reader. I am well aware that younger generations seemed to have eschewed reading, surrendering instead to the lure of other distractions, of which there are many. I’m not sure this is true and I do not explore statistical analysis to prove the point.

I can only judge the joy of reading by my own experience. Nor can I pinpoint how reading became my passion. Perhaps it was because my mother was a passionate reader of popular novels. Between her domestic chores, she would tuck herself away on a living room easy chair and read those novels which she got from the lending libraries that were a staple of life in those days, where for pennies a day you could read books borrowed from a store in the neighborhood without going to the public library which was a longer distance from our modest Brooklyn apartment.

From the age of eight or nine, I haunted the Stone Avenue Children’s Library in Brownsville, about a mile from our home and I can remember arguing with my older cousins on the literary merits of my choices. To me such adventure series as Bomba the Jungle Boy, The Boy Allies, The Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift were the epitome of literature.

It was only years later that I learned that these books were created in a writing factory founded by a man named Stratemeyer who had a stable of writers who ground out these books according to strict guidelines. It didn’t matter to me. I loved them.

I suppose I graduated upward to Robert Louis Stevenson’s great adventure books like Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and those three great books by Nordhoff and Hall, which began with Mutiny on the Bounty and, if I remember, ended with Pitcairn’s Island. I’m sure, given the time, I could name a hundred others. But it was somewhere around age sixteen or seventeen with the sap rising that I began to seriously widen my range. There was nothing, nothing to compare with my discovery of those great writers who gave joy, solace, insight, wisdom and meaning to my youth. They thrilled me and are permanently engraved in my memory.

Many are out of fashion today and that is a pity, although I seriously believe some will be resurrected and once again revered. Some still are although it may not be fashionable to admit it.

I love the short stories and novels of Hemingway, Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, John O’Hara, Thomas Wolfe, John  Dos Passos. John Steinbeck, W. Somerset Maugham and numerous others. In college my European novel class at NYU under the brilliant tutelage of Dean Ranney brought me the joys of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Balzac, Anatole France, Thomas Mann, Stendhal, Victor Hugo and numerous others. Many still resonate and have morphed into the popular culture in another incarnation. Les Miz is a good example.

And no literary education could ever be complete without the novels of Dickens, Eliot and Trollope, Austin and the Brontës and later ones like those of George Orwell, Doris Lessing and countless others. Indeed, if one hasn’t read Orwell’s Coming Up for Air or Lessing’s The Fifth Child one has missed a blast of glorious insight and two great stories.

It pains me to hear that some of my favorites are not considered in the top rank of great writers in the eyes of the so-called literary establishment. As one who does not believe in literary cliques and fashion, I can still root for the resurrection of the passionate novels of Thomas Wolfe, (not Tom), the great short stories and novels of John O’Hara and Somerset Maugham. Indeed, who, but the most elitist literary snobs, can dispute the wonders of Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra and Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Stick around long enough and they will make a well-deserved comeback. At least, I hope so.

Call me an ingrate for clinging to such nostalgic hero worship and toting up my own list for grand literary achievements. Oddly, I feel somewhat sad for those who have not partaken of those wonderful writers. In my day, most of my peers had read those works and we could discuss them for hours on end. Today getting even any book discussion going is rare, except perhaps in the formal setting of a book group. In my day a book discussion was a common staple of conversation.

I don’t much care what the so-called literary establishment thinks and champions. The writers I have cited thrilled me and still do. Some time has anointed as classics. Others are waiting their turn. Indeed I have learned to trust my own judgment in what I read and what I write and to hell with the prevailing opinion of others. Not all. Merely most.

Indeed being anointed a literary heavy is often transitory. As proof name ten winners of the Nobel Prize for literature. Stumped? Try five. Do the same for the Pulitzer, then the Booker. This does not mean that I don’t love the novels of my contemporaries. Philip Roth comes to mind.

Reading is a deeply personal experience and reading works of the imagination is one of the great joys of a fulfilled life. If people eschew reading, they impoverish themselves.

Authors Guild Article