Prometheus 6

It's like they really think they can change reality by describing it differently. 

Before the Storm Clouds, Nothing but 'Blue Skies'
By Jennifer Frey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 6, 2007; C01

Lynne Cheney wants time to stand still. Not now, not in this present tense of bloodshed and bile, where she is the stalwart wife of a vice president vilified as a warmonger. She wants the past back, she wants then. [P6: You shouldn't have married the Personification of Evil.]

Which is why her new memoir stops in 1959, when Lynne Cheney was just graduating from high school, her life scarcely yet lived in a Norman Rockwell America, where girls twirled batons and played competitive jacks, and boys joined "car clubs" to work on their Chevys. Back then Lassie always came home.

The book -- titled "Blue Skies, No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family," published by Threshold Editions, the Simon & Schuster imprint helmed by family friend Mary Matalin -- includes no discussion of Cheney's adulthood. There is nothing about her academic career or her tenure as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. And there certainly is nothing about life as the wife of a controversial politician, Dick Cheney.

What Lynne Cheney has written instead is a homage to her childhood, her husband's childhood and the American West -- specifically Casper, Wyo. -- where they were raised. A place and a time she describes as "heaven for little girls" and "paradise for little boys."

"Is it nostalgia?" she says, balking a bit. "Nostalgia implies to me, a little bit, you've got your rose-colored glasses on at all times. And I certainly do mean this book to be a valentine to the place and time I grew up. But there are also just sort of facts you can look at, and I think the facts form a different pattern then than they do now."