The Duke Of Oil

Two years ago, in a blue funk over the Bush re-election I wrote most of two novels, The Chinese Century and The American Diaspora.

The second book was based on the idea of building an international financial market with its own laws, self-contained, then staffing it with disaffected American liberals. A virtual Homeland, if you will, centered in Johannesburg, South Africa, where I read the central city had been virtually abandoned by whites, its centerpiece, the 50 story Carlton Center, standing virtually empty.

Little did I realize how close to reality I was writing. Because it seems business conservatives, fearful their own control over the American Republic may fail, are now moving to Dubai, where they can create just such an unregulated market on the backs of the region’s vast oil wealth.

Dubai’s ambitions go way beyond Halliburton. For years the Emirs have understood that oil is finite, that other businesses must be built, and that a financial center holds much longer-lasting power than any industrial site ever can.

Dubai’s reach extends into media through Al-Jazeera, into energy use with Emirates Air, and the City of Dubai is fast becoming a combination of Houston and New York, with the razzle-dazzle of the first city’s glory days in the 1970s and the sophistication of the latter in its.

This is not the kind of story I can tell or report on. I have no desire
to live in Dubai. But I know many Americans will be moving there. It
has everything a good American conservative can ask for. It has a
racist class system. It has supine labor, virtual slavery. It has
wide-open financial markets. It has all the amenities an American
conservative would want, and the rest are available discretely or (at
worst) they’re a plane ride away. It has hospitals which, for cash
dollars, will give you better care than any American hospital can. And
it has permanence in power, it is a literal monarchy, so no "liberal"
movement need be tolerated, ever.

For someone like Dick Cheney, Dubai is heaven.

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to finish American Diaspora.
If the need arises I have the files on my hard drive and can re-post
them here.

Then I’m going to launch the third book in what’s turning into an Alternate History trilogy, dubbed The Duke Of Oil.

The idea is as I’ve described, a conservative diaspora centered on
Dubai’s trading center, with Dick Cheney taking the role which Virgin’s
Richard Branson took in the earlier book. I have no idea where the plot
is going to go, but I promise to give you one installment per week, and
see how it goes.

It may sound silly, committing to two wildly different projects at
once, one fiction and one non-fiction. But that’s how I roll. When (if)
something sells in book form, I hope to sell the rest.

Meanwhile, enjoy. And if you’re a book agent or book publisher, drop me a line.