Fiddling

Fiddling with a Prelude to the novel, to set a few things. Here's the current draft:

WAS THE AMERICAN DREAM coming to an end? Sometimes it looked like it. All across the United States in the summer of 2011, old men and old women looked back at their long lives and in significant numbers reached a startling conclusion: unlike their parents of the Great Generation, who had made countless sacrifices for the benefit of their children, they were leaving the world in worse shape than they had inherited it. Their parents had survived the Great Depression, defeated Hitler and fascism, and come home to establish a post-war economic boom that made the American Middle Class the envy of the world. The Great Generation had energized the American Dream and handed it to their children on the proverbial silver platter.

   Today's elderly provided no comparable legacy. Growing up in the 40s and 50s, coming of age in the 60s, making their marks in the 70s and 80s, the elderly found themselves with a more attractive past than present tense. They were retiring in a world on the brink of bankruptcy, in a country stuck in unending Middle East wars against a nebulous enemy, in a culture that increasingly distrusted and downright hated science, leaving Nature's growing anger at intrusive human activities to be explained by mythology and religious texts, as America flirted with the possibility of theocracy.

   Yet the elderly did not feel guilty about this dismal state of affairs. They had not created these problems. They were victims as much as their children and grandchildren were. In a true democracy, citizens took responsibility for their governments but governments in their lifetime, whether Democrat or Republican, changed very little that mattered. Voting for change did not mean you would get it, not even when your candidate won. The decisions that shaped the essentials of life were made by invisible powers. Some called it a shadow government of black ops, others a conspiracy of international corporations. Whatever it was, it existed in secrecy behind the elected government's facade of democracy to make sure the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. You only disagreed with this if your bank account encouraged you to.

   Under these circumstances, few over 70 would choose to be younger. No one wanted to grow up in the world as it was today.

  In Portland, Oregon, one such old man was Carlton “CJ” Jones, a retired history professor, who had a funeral to get to.