Fascinating Authors

GUEST BLOG – The End of the Race

January 23, 2010
Kisumu, Kenya

Scorched cement walls, with exfoliated paint peeling in layers, follow two years of rains and the fires of election riots when Kenya’s presidential contest ignited. It’s my backdrop as I drink Masala tea and write this Blog in the Cyber café of Kisumu.

I’m a surgeon, practicing my skills in a small hospital near Lake Victoria. Not so different from Washington D.C. where The End of the Race, a political satire of American health care, takes place. In Africa the tribes compete intensely, both overtly and covertly, and corruption is as rife as the mosquitoes, perhaps even the lobbyers of our own capitol. Like epochs of drought, the decades roll along, punctuated by seasonal rains and a sparse economy of care for the indigent. A generous health coverage for the rich happens regardless of the weather.

Here the similarity ends. While Democrats and Republicans duel amidst market place differences, the Luos and Kikuyus struggle for maintenance of a single x ray machine (who ever heard of a CT?) or the unlikely purchase of antibiotics for festering wounds.

The End of the Race was written in Guatemala, and my own home in Fremont, California. It’s an assiduously researched story of the Watergate period which explores the collapse of Nixon’s political empire and suggests a code of survival for the ongoing divide of our bipolar health system. Now’s the time for all good Americans to discover how to avoid ambulance trips. To do so includes a voyage through the inner workings of the seventies and the Watergate scandal. Why and how did the infamous plumbers penetrate into the Watergate office building, ultimately destroying the architect of Détente and Rapprochement – and this despite Nixon’s landslide election victory? And why did the CIA play a significant role in this break-in, and why it has never been fully investigated? Was it really the exploits of the Democrats and the prostitute ring in the Colombia Plaza that the Plumbers hoped to expose and the CIA hoped to hide? Or was it Howard Hughes’ slush fund that Nixon wanted buried and hidden from the press? And if so, why did the Plumbers bug the wrong phones and have a key that went to Maxie Well’s desk drawer? Why did Castro’s double agents infiltrate our intelligence system so successfully, and what did they learn that Deep Throat never knew? These are questions my research answers in a fictional sketch of the big players of the seventies. There’s much more if you wish to experience space travel, nuclear power, and Pyramids. But I digress.

The streets of Kisumu are hot and traffic is dense, pushing a stream of pedestrians into crumbled sidewalks, as I finish my tea and listen for an ambulance siren. There are none here. That’s how Africa differs from the streets of D.C.. One negotiates the roads carefully, assuming full accountability for each intersection reached, each rushing vehicle. But that’s what The Race to the End is all about.