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PHILIP KRASKE's avatar

Hi Kevin. Hope all is well with you. Here's a dialog from my second novel, Mockery:

"There are loads of historical examples. The Kennedy assassination, for example.

Kennedy slumped against Jackie. He didn’t slump, he jerked back—probably from a bullet hitting him, but we’ll never know for sure. But slumped is the word ev￾eryone remembers. You can even fi nd slumped in histo￾ry textbooks. Or Watergate.” She put on a newcaster’s voice: “‘What did the president know and when did he know it?’ I say: Who cares exactly what and when? His aides were doing everything except raping nuns; Nixon should have resigned. The what-and-when crap

only allowed him to stay in the White House longer. And then there’s the classic: 9-11. C’mon, Sam: what’s the framing word there?”

I was still trying to take all this in. “No… no idea.”

“Yes, you do. C’mon: when you think of the Twin Towers and 9-11, what’s the fi rst word that comes to mind?”

“I don’t know… ‘Collapse’?”

“Of course! Collapse. Which says what? That the buildings couldn’t take the impacts or the fires or whatever. Or at least that the basic problem was the buildings. And that’s that. It doesn’t matter now if ten thousand scientists sign on to the towers falling as a result of pre-placed demolition explosives. It doesn’t matter a bit. Until they make a full-scale, frontal attack to refute the word collapse, forget it: they’re not going to move public opinion one inch. And believe me, that’s going to take a lot more work than fi nding explosives in the dust samples."

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