A Post-postmodernist with Objectivist leanings, fighting to catch up with his art after serving time as a capitalist oppressor of the people.
Doug Barone retired from corporate life after 20 years in the finance industry and is fooling everyone into thinking he is a writer. Having been a corporate strategist, finance executive, and IT executive he has found almost nothing of use to him from those years except the zany people and crazy stories that no one in their right mind could ever dream up. He uses these real life experiences in his work and this separates him from other writers who never really worked a day in their lives either.
His work, his prose fiction, is focused on power, its entanglement with emotional fulfillment, the impact of institutional concentrations of authority, and our struggles in the space created between. It deals with the ontological-deontological tension of existence in a post-postmodern world, where ideas have re-emerged as vastly powerful things even in the simple acts of everyday life. Sometimes his work allows just a bit of the mystical to cross over into reality, breaking the barriers of perception, heightening a sense of the possible.
Since this is all antithetical to the held narrative of our time, he fully expects to be pilloried by the academic left as well as the religious right, and looks forward to every lashing.
No Armageddon, Not Yet
One of the things I’m surprised about is the resiliency of the economy. Things are flattening out, opportunists are making their moves on low prices in many industries. Business is starting up again, mostly because credit is beginning to flow out of the banks.
I really thought it would have been much worse. Given the environment of the crisis, regime change in Washington being the largest and most disruptive, I would have thought by now the pavement would have been fracturing, buildings collapsing, that there would be revolution in the streets.
I said this to Shannon yesterday as we walked cross town on the way to a meeting of one of her non-profit groups that works with disabled vets, and she stopped cold in the middle of Park Avenue.
“You? I can’t believe it....