“Not…Any Actual Nation, Living or Dead”
The standard disclaimer appears in many novels, including this one: No character is based upon any actual person, living or dead. Some might suggest the addition here: Greater Lolómé and Lesser Lolómé are not based upon any actual nation, living or dead.
And yet, why bother?
It isn’t that the living examples are so few that any particular one can justifiably be singled out as inspiration for this novel.
It is that there are so many that it is impossible to say which contributed most to the composites that became my fictitious Greater and Lesser Lolómés.
How many Greater Lolómés do we have, for instance? Iraq, Iran, Somalia, North Korea, Serbia, Russia, India, and China, just to get the ball rolling. And Lesser Lolómés? Kuwait, South Korea, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Tibet, for starters.
No doubt the news will bring us several more of each by morning.
And of American administrations—caught in the middle, lost and blundering in a world of such furious animosities and reviving imperialisms, always in recent years tentative and uncertain, hesitant and unsure, in search of an elusive peace that can only be achieved by facing up to, not sliding out from under, its harsh and rigorous demands.
This manuscript was delivered to the publisher in September 1994, but time is relatively unimportant here. Spin the wheel on any of three recent American Presidents, two Democratic, one Republican, and the story is the same.
Stop at almost any day—it will be a day of noisy American threat, empty American bluster, futile American bluff and bombastic statements of high, but quickly abandoned, American principle.
Stop at almost any day—it will be a day of American ducking, dodging, weaseling, double-talk, retreat, and evasion of great-power responsibility—anything to avoid biting the bullet—or grasping the nettle—or whatever metaphor you want to use for having the simple guts to exercise American power, as a great power must exercise it if it wishes to remain a great power.
Such is the state of affairs as the old millennium ends and the new begins. The wheel spins, the cycle repeats. Yesterday’s history is today’s and tomorrow’s. The more it changes, to quote the ever-cynical but frequently accurate French, the more it is the same thing.
Therein—not in any one day or any one nation but in most days and many nations of this unhappy era—lies the inspiration to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings and the decline of great states. The pattern, unchanging, grinds on. Only genuine courage, foresight, and unflinching firmness in the just and judicious use of power can reverse it.
In these days when the men who hold power in Washington are afraid to use it, either from fundamental lack of character or an overweening desire to win votes—or both—courage, foresight, and unflinching firmness are far from being in control of the foreign policies of the United States of America.
No one nation, no one act of equivocation, provided the inspiration here.
Nowadays, it is everywhere.
—Allen Drury