The Rat Race is a science fiction novel by American writer Jay Franklin. It was first published in book form in 1950 by Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc. in an edition of 1,500 copies of which 1,200 were hardcover. The novel originally appeared in the magazine Collier’s Weekly in 1947. The novel concerns Lieutenant Commander Frank Jacklin who is blown up in a thorium bomb explosion while on the battleship Alaska. He awakens in the body of Winnie Tompkins who had perpetrated the explosion. As Tompkins, he learns of a plot by German agents to poison Franklin D. Roosevelt and he tries to warn the authorities. He continues to become involved in intrigue until another accident restores Tompkins to his body, leaving Jacklin in the body of a dog.

Wikipedia

You can read this entire novel free online courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

This is a odd book. Very Strange Indeed.

Written by a man I dug up scrolling the internet:

[John Franklin] Carter was born in Fall River, Massachusetts on April 27, 1897, as one of seven children of The Rev. John Franklin Carter. He attended Yale University, where he served as chairman of campus humor magazine The Yale Record^[1]He left Yale early to serve as a representative of the Williamstown Institute of Politics in Italy. Afterwards, he became the Rome correspondent for the London Daily Chronicle and the New York Times. In 1928, Carter began working for the State Department as an economic specialist. He then became a correspondent for the magazines Liberty and Vanity Fair. In 1941, Carter was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to conduct investigation into the loyalty of Japanese American communities on the West Coast of the United States. Carter hired Curtis B. Munson to compile the Report on Japanese on the West Coast of the United States.^[2][Carter] wrote the syndicated column, “We, The People” from 1936 to 1948 under his pen name “Jay Franklin”. It chronicled the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. In 1948, Carter worked as a speech writer for Harry S. Truman. Carter died in Washington, D.C., on November 28, 1967, at the age of 70. His books The New Dealers (1934) and American Messiahs (1935) remain valuable sources for historians of the New Deal era.

Wikipedia

He wrote under a pen name, Jay Franklin. Or partial pen name. Could be he was a spy. Why do I think he was a spy? He worked for the State Department as an economic specialist. That’s a code phrase for SPY if I ever heard one. He was FDR’s operative. At FDR’s request, He hired Curtis B. Munson who wrote the report than came to be known as the Munson Report. The Munson report is amazing because it uncovered the truth about the west coast Japanese American population but was rejected by those in power. The Munson report found that there was no threat to the security of the United States from Japanese Americans living in L.A., San Francisco Bay, and environs. The Munson Report argues that Japanese Americans were absolutely loyal and patriotic Americans.

FDR ignored the report and bused the Japanese Americans to Internment Camps where they remained until the Japanese Empire was defeated in WW2.

So what does any of this have to do with anything?

I came to the Munson Report by way of this weird novel, The Rat Race.

I was not looking for the novel.

This odd novel appeared when I Googled THE RAT RACE.

Why did I google THE RAT RACE? I was thinking about the Rat Race. Not the Novel. The Life Situation.

An earlier Blog Post of mine is called The Rat Race Revisited. That post is about me being out of work. I’m still out of work. I have done nothing to look for a job since I wrote that post. I’d rather blog than look for a job. Which brings me to the title of this Blog Post: Why Am I Blogging?

I’m Blogging because I like it.

I like it because it makes me feel safe in this scary ass world.

Life Is Scary

My Old Man, in a reflective mood between violent binges, once offered me a bit of advice: “Kid,” he said “Always be nice to people. Sooner or later you might need a hand-out. And it’s good to have a friend or two.”

Bobby Lee was not so good at taking his own advice. They finally caught up with him at the Shoals Bar in Oakland. And though he was rushed to the hospital, he was tagged a DOA and there was no epilogue. I suspect the man who beat him to death was his own stepson, seeking revenge for the violent beating he had given the man’s mother. I can’t remember the man’s name. I only met him once, at his Mother’s bedside. She was in traction and had just confessed to me what my Old Man had done to her.

“He can never come back here,” she said to me. It was her house. And when she said that I knew Bobby Lee’s number was up. Because he had nowhere else to go and at forty four he was not a well man.

Her son. He was a big guy who wore a flannel shirt. Like I said, I only met him that one time. He looked at me strange when I knocked on the door, said his mother was not available. But she insisted I come to her bedside, where she lay bandaged like the mummy. And when he saw how shocked I was to learn it was the Old Man who’d brutalized her–when he saw how genuinely remorseful I was–he warmed to me. Even bought me lunch at the local hot dog stand as a kind of send off. I remember apologizing for what Bobby Lee did to his Mother. He said it’s not your fault. And I believe he felt sorry for me. Because I liked his Mother a lot and somehow he sensed that. She had treated me well, offered me a room in her house so that I might spend time with her and The Old Man. I’d been happy for Bobby Lee. He’d found a woman (she was a retired nurse) determined to take care of him now that he struggled with Liver disease. Somebody needed to take care of him. My own Mother tried, I guess. But like everybody did eventually, the Nurse rubbed the Old Man the wrong way once too often. One day he just snapped. She got in the way of his storm and it turned ugly for her.

I always saw it as Bad Weather all the way around. My Old Man couldn’t avoid the storms, whether they were the ones that caught him or the ones he caused. Some people plunge into life like that…it’s all drama all the time.

My Mother wasn’t bad. She just made bad choices. She married my Old Man because he reminded her of Montgomery Cliff, the old time Movie Star, and because he was in the Navy, fighting in the big war against the Japanese. She thought he looked great in a uniform. She had been married to another man at the beginning of the war. He came home from the European Conflict mentally damaged and shot himself in front of her. This flipped her out, as it naturally would, and when my Old Man came along she clung to him like a life raft…It was all drama, all the time, and once it dawned on her she’d gone from a quick gunshot suicide to yet another suicide–this one a death by ten thousand fifths of Gin–it was too late. She had four kids to raise. By now The Old Man was confined at Agnew State Hospital, and even my Mother could no longer weather the storm. So she filed for divorce and turned to another form of drama, That Good Old Time Religion. But that is another story…

My point, life is scary, especially when you’re a kid and people are making all the bad moves and you happen to be in the way. I never did well in school but one thing I liked to do was read. Not school books. I would cut school and go to the public library. The big one in San Francisco. Or Salinas. Or Santa Cruz.

It was a crazy kind of thing. For me the Library was like a cave you find in a storm. I’d go in and find a quiet aisle and grab a bunch of books down and sit there for hours. Leafing through books. I felt okay in the library. I was not there to learn anything. I was naturally curious. So I’d read about Jack The Giant Killer. Or the bandit Joaquin Murrieta. Or Hitler’s Invasion Of Poland. Not because I needed to know about those subjects. I had no motive. I was simply enjoying myself…and the world could not get at me behind the walls of the Library. It was the only place where I felt completely at ease.

I felt welcome at the Library.

It was the same with College. I pretended I wanted to make something of myself. Become a Doctor. Or a Lawyer. But all I really wanted to do was sit in class and listen to the instructors. Take the classes I liked. College was a natural extension of the Library.

As long as I was in College I felt safe.

I spent nine years in College. I even acquired degrees. Only because it was expected of me. Like returning the library books to their proper places on the shelf. I’ve never used the degrees I earned.

I became a salesman and made enough money to live comfortably. Between girlfriends I rented apartments and those spaces where always lined with books. Thousands of books. It was like coming into my place you’d think you were in a wing of the library…

Maybe Blogging is a Mental Disorder

I don’t mean to categorize it that way. I’m just saying. Could be this urge to immerse myself in a book or better a room surrounded by books started out as a kind of coping mechanism, like Prozac or Group Therapy or a career in Economics. And when it no longer became necessary I clung to it anyway. Could that be it?

I don’t know the answer to this question and I don’t intend to waste more time than I’ve already done mulling over it. I call it Blogging now because it finally has a definition.

I’m thinking back to when I had just turned forty (twenty nine years ago!) and decided to drop out of the rat race and tramp around for a while in a RV. I ended up at my kid sister’s pad. She was busy raising three kids of her own (and doing a better job in my opinion than my mother had done) and I spent some time with her, hanging out on her sofa between trips down south. In her Living Room I discovered a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Her deadbeat ex husband’s idea. A great way to educate the kids. The books stayed, he split. I say this even though he was a likable dude. I found myself liking him. Just like Bobby Lee. It’s strange how that happens. Often the nicest people are just plain bad. He was bad, yet he left a legacy of all these wonderful books. At the time just about all the knowledge you’d need to start your own personal civilization was included in 24 packed volumes.

I spent many hours on that sofa reading the encyclopedias. I’d grab a volume at random and kick back on the sofa and open it and just start reading. It could be the breeding habits of a giraffe or the death of George Washington or Nuclear Fusion or anything…because the Britannica covered everything.

The Britannica was to Encyclopedias what the OED is to Dictionaries.

My nieces would watch me reading. Jackie looking at me askance, Jessica giggling. “It’s just Unck reading the Encyclopedia. FOR NO REASON!”

And there was no reason. There is no reason. Except I’m in my warm cave.

Far from the Scary ass world.

Okay, you say, give me the upshot

There is no upshot. This is a blog. I’m sitting here at my personal table at the finest Starbucks in Marin County, the Strawberry Branch, and I’m having a hell of a time. Drinking coffee. Talking to you.

But what about that dude?

What dude? Oh, yeah. That guy that wrote the odd novel. The Rat Race. This is where the magic of Blogging kicks in. For me this magic began with the aimless browsing of library aisles when I was a kid. It was a form of exploration, discovering new things with each book and often finding strange connections in these random choices.

The speed and scope of these magical journeys increased and broadened enormously with the advent of the Internet.

I don’t even own books anymore. I still love books. But more as objects now. Like speaking antiques. I enjoy visiting Kim, my daughter’s Mom, because all of her rooms are filled with interesting books, old books, great paperbacks from the sixties she’s owned forever, always fun to read because she has good taste.

But with the internet there really is no need for books anymore. Google has changed all that. Google and a laptop. Google and your cell phone. You’re not just at a library. You’re at a fashion show. A museum. A collector’s gallery. You’re a tourist traveling the world. You’re an explorer diving the ocean, or hanging with a tribe, or viewing earth from deep space. You’re everywhere and nowhere. You’re in your private space. You’re safe…

Blogging is what you do when you do what you do with Google.

Which brings me back to this strange man Jay Franklin, the author of THE RAT RACE, an odd Sci Fi novel about a man whose soul is thrust by a bomb explosion into the body of the evil man who caused the explosion only to eventually inhabit the body of this evil man’s Great Dane.

Such a strange little book for a man of his reputation.

Jay Franklin (or John Franklin Carter) is nothing more than an obscure artifact of the New Deal now. Nobody remembers him today. Yet he had considerable influence on how the world has turned out for you and me.

I only found him because I randomly clicked THE RAT RACE. And there he was…

Turns out he’s much more than he let on to be. And I think he wrote The Rat Race because he wanted to get it out into the world (in a clandestine way) what he really was. It turns out I was correct in my suspicions. He was a Spy.

I did a little extra digging on him after I started this post and I came up with this recent article in the New York Post. Check it out at this link if you like. It sort of puts all of his strange writing into perspective: New York Post

Okay, so I think I’m done here. I’ll move on now to something else. Maybe I’ll look for a job. I better look for a job and find one pretty soon or I’ll be in trouble. Not Bobby Lee kind of trouble. I don’t need the drama. I’m a Blogger.

I layed off the Gin years ago.