Q: Robert Stone has a new book out called Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties.

A: I bought it. I'm looking forward to reading it. See what I missed.

Q: You were there.

A: The first half I was in the Air Force, the second half I was in college.

I didn't participate in any momentous events, didn't know any influential people.

I got married in 1968 and I made the leap of faith, and became a writer, in 1971. Without taking the, by then, career path of attending a good writing program. As Robert Stone did.

Q: Do you relate to his experience, or agree with his conclusions?

A: I haven't read the book yet. But I would change the last two sentences from we to I and leave it, as it stands.

We were the chief victims of our own mistakes. Measuring ourselves against the masters of the present, we regret nothing except our failure to prevail.

I was a married man, a working stiff, trying to become a writer.

I didn't. Or haven't yet.

That colors everything I write. That sense of loss, unfulfilled potential, opportunity denied.

Q: Were you aware of being involved in a shift from the Great Society, the last of the New Deal social experiments, to the Emerging Republican Majority and the Southern Strategy, to divide working people by race. Or by race, gender, and sexual orientation.

A: The winds of change were blowing. As an employee, and parent, I was affected by what the government, and corporations, did.

As a straight white male, of a certain age, from the south, my star was not in the ascendant. I accepted that.

It was time for change. I didn't like the Old Boy network any better than black people or women or homosexuals did.

I didn't like being classified as an oppressor, who benefited from generations of injustice, but what could I do--I was one. Ipso facto.

Even if I felt like I had been oppressed by the Old Boys, and was now, in addition, harassed by females, blacks, and homosexuals who would act towards a person like me as an Old Boy had acted towards them as the price of admission to the guild.

Q: You can't make an argument like that about yourself. Someone else has to observe it.

A: True. And besides, terms like Great Society, or Southern Strategy, have no meaning to me, now. If they ever did.

Beat Generation.

The Beat Generation was a creation of Time magazine. And not to praise it.

Read something like Norman Podhoretz's "The Know-Nothing Bohemians," to see what they were up against.

But I didn't feel a part of what was happening. I felt estranged from it. It didn't have anything to do with me.

Any more than what is happening now has to do with me.

I am outside it, a bystander, wondering what they are going on about.

Did you see how the media talked about Gerald Ford?

It was unreal.

Like the way they talk about George Bush.

Q: Hunter S. Thompson always said they should have driven a stake through Nixon's heart.

A: Look what pardoning him did.

It let the people who are in charge now off the hook.

It didn't heal the country, or bring the country together.

It let the bad guys get away with it. It showed the fix is in.

It gave us the masters of the present.

We did this to ourselves.