Jacqueline Susann’s 1973 novel “Once Is Not Enough” is filled with enough drama, heartbreak, romance, intrigue and sexual indiscretions to send any family into therapy for decades. The central character, January Wayne, returns home to New York City after being hospitalized in Switzerland for nearly three years. That part alone rivals the best (or worst) any Mexican telenovela can deliver. In many ways the world she left three years earlier hasn’t changed, but in most others, it’s radically different. As is befitting a Susann story, January encounters a plethora of strange figures: one of the world’s richest women; a vile magazine editor; a hyper-masculine novelist; and a physician with salaciously ulterior motives, among other cretins. Almost sounds like one of my old family gatherings!
To some extent “Once Is Not Enough” is a commentary on the myriad social upheavals in the U.S. at the time of its publication. Right now, though, I wonder if many Americans have been suffering from subtle amnesia – or are just innately sadistic.
A generation ago we had a president who launched an unexpected war upon a Middle East nation that – along with a slew of heavy tax breaks for the wealthiest citizens – culminated in the worst economic downturn in almost a century. George W. Bush used the horrors of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to justify an invasion of Iraq less than two years later. To date that fiasco has cost the U.S. an estimated USD 6 trillion. That’s just in hard U.S. dollars. But the cost in mental and physical health is immeasurable.
Now we’re at it again. The Trump Administration has attacked Iran – one of the U.S.’s most loathsome enemies. Until 1979, we had a cordial diplomatic relationship with Iranian leadership, including the late Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He had risen to prominence in the immediate aftermath of World War II and guided Iran into something of a progressive new era.
But Pahlavi had also instituted a repressive dictatorship and exhibited an extravagant lifestyle for him, his family and others in the small elite class. His ardent efforts to Westernize and secularize Iran, along with depending strongly on the United States, alienated his own people and culminated in a student uprising that forced him and his family into exile. The same uprising ambushed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979 that led to holding several Americans hostage for over a year.
It was our first battle with radical Islam and it caught the U.S. completely off-guard. At the time the “Cold War” was still raging, and the Soviet Union remained the most serious foreign threat. Iran wasn’t on the radar of diplomatic instability.
Recently the Trump Administration invaded Venezuela to capture its president, Nicolás Maduro, who the world has denounced as an illegitimate leader. A global coalition of democratic states claims Maduro ascended to the Venezuelan presidency in January 2019 after a rigged election. Somehow, the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections in the U.S. come to mind whenever I hear the term “rigged election”.
Now Trump has set his sights on two more foes: Cuba and Colombia. Cuba has been on the American shit-list for over 60 years, and Colombia has a long history of political assassinations and drug trafficking. Bush had used the excuse of nuclear weaponry to invade Iraq, and even critics later admitted the country was better off without its brutal leader, Saddam Hussein. The world would be better off without many autocrats – including Trump.
But is it the duty of the U.S. to remove every such character?
We all know the adage that, when old men go to war, young men die. Right now, though, it seems when the billionaire class goes to war, the middle and lower classes die.
And here we are again. Once may not be enough in regards to love, sex and a good back rub. But one war is always one too many.
My first edition copy of “Once Is Not Enough”
Chief Writing Wolf 