This is a heads-up to all my readers that I am planning to write a novel. All best-selling novels contain unforgettable and quotable dialogue and mine will be no different. I already have the dialogue down pat, but I’m still working on the plot.
The dialogue goes this way. First of all the protagonist will say “You can keep your doctor, period. You can keep your hospital, period. You can keep your policy, period.”
I’m going to use the word “period” so emphatically because I want to stress how absolute and immutable these promises are.
Then he will say, “All of this will not add one thin dime to our national debt.”
I will also have an antagonist with a memorable line of dialogue: "....the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because some guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?”
Then I’m thinking perhaps we could have a series of scandals appear as a sub-plot inside my novel. The protagonist and his minions of course will begin referring to them as “fake” scandals, and then initiate a set pattern of denial in dealing with them for the purpose of public relations.
First, he will claim he didn’t know anything about any of this until he read it in the press or heard it on cable television just like any average American citizen does. I got this idea from one of my favorite TV sitcoms in the 1960’s called Hogan’s Heroes where Sgt Schultz always says “I know nothing, nothing.”
Then he will express outrage that anyone could have done such a dastardly deed but will go on to say that if the allegations are proven to be true, he will get really, really, really mad about it and will promise to get to the bottom of it. Heads will roll. But wait, heads probably won’t roll so maybe I better leave that part out.
Then he will start an investigation, using his highly paid and highly powerful friends in high places to do the investigation to guarantee that he will receive a totally unbiased report, and of course by doing this he is able to repay them for their faithfulness in supporting him with cash donations.
From then on, any time he is questioned about any one of the scandals, he will make no comment, side-stepping the questions with a shy grin and proclaiming that the matter is still “under investigation”.
As time passes, he will hand off all queries and suppositions to his spokesman who will then pronounce it to be “old news, nothing to see here, folks, just move on.”
The next character in the book will be a young fresh-faced kid appearing to be about 14 and claiming to be a National Security Council spokesman.
He will engage in an interview with a serious news journalist asking serious questions to which the “kid” will reply with a straight face, “Dude, this was two years ago. How can you expect me to remember what I did with those talking points that far back in history?”
Finally, I will invent a bright up and coming political star who is in a high government position (but not as high as she planned to be before she appeared on five news talk shows one Sunday morning).
I will probably called her Suzanne Price in my novel. She is asked by another serious journalist a very serious question about a very serious situation in which some patriotic military people were killed and her answer on national television will be “Danged if I know.”
Oh, yes, one piece of dialogue you will never hear in my novel is “I’m sorry”. Being a prominent politician means never having to say you’re sorry.
I’m kind of thinking that I will have my story take place in an American well-established government institution filled with sick people, many of them elderly, some near death, and all they want is medical care.
They paid a high price for their medical care some years ago, but for some strange reason the people who staff this institution can’t seem to remember this, so they cast the sick, weak and elderly aside and leave them to die.
But there is still some compassion in their hearts. They want to make sure the dying have good memories of their last days, so they take huge sums of monies which were intended for medical care and first they buy beautiful draperies to adorn the windows next to the beds of the patients.
Then they purchase large mahogany desks for the entrance of the institution, and fancy new computers on which they can quickly delete databases of the sick, and of course padded desk chairs which swivel so they can turn away when they see one of the dying approach them to beg for medical help.
It is very important that they perfect these procedures early on because they have heard a whispered rumor going around that in a few more years there will be an influx of many more sick and elderly people who have bought into an implausible health care program set up by the protagonist of my novel in his earlier days. It will be designed to duplicate the exact conditions which are going on in this vast government institution about which I am planning to write.
But I’m having second thoughts about this plot. A good author wants her novel to be believable in at least a few aspects, and I’m thinking what I have described above could never in a million years actually happen in a free country. Or could it?
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