James Leonard Delaney has got a lot on his mind.
“Americans need two things to carry on?entertainment and news of a good bargain,” he says, hunched over a table in a small, hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant just off the square, not touching his salad.
For a man who has lived 77 years, most of which he seems to have spent utterly stunned at the way American society has been turning, he seems in near perfect health. Aside from his two hearing aids and a limp begging for a knee-replacement, one would be hard-pressed to put him a day older than 55.
But after his extensive years of observing human behavior, he knew action was needed, if for anything, his own sanity.
“I had written so much for the government printing office in Washington, I just had to get some of this off my chest,” Delaney explains.
The product of Delaney’s purging is a book titled Now and Then: 20th Century Change In America, chronicling what Delaney sees as a downward spiral the American culture has taken since the early 1900s.
“It’s an indictment of the mainstream media, it’s an indictment of our public school system, it’s an indictment of the judiciary, and many of the institutions that we take for granted,” Delaney says.
The book is a semi-autobiographical account of the author’s life, his experiences and how he saw the world working then compared to the modern world. It is highly critical of U.S. foreign policy, including legislation like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) and FTAA (a combination of the previous two, as he explains it), the mainstream media’s refusal to comment on these things, and a myriad of other topics that have worked their way into American culture.
Delaney also coins the term T-H-E syndrome, which he defines as the fact that “one can not face the television public unless teeth/hair/eyes are surgically corrected” in the book.
Shuffling through various notes, letters and documents, he explains that he is working on an updated addition tentatively due out in December.
Delaney was born in the Nashville area and grew up around here. He joined the Air Force in 1957, leaving in 1967 when his hearing left and has studied earth sciences at the University of Montana and the University of Oklahoma. Although he worked towards it extensively, he never finished his Ph.D.
“The Air Force came calling again and I decided I would stay there instead,” he says.
“I wear two hearing aids now, thanks to the United States Air Force jet engine,” he explains. “I sacrificed in two wars, Korea and Vietnam, I gave up my ears and my reproductive capabilities; I’m sterile as this table,” he says, knocking on the wood top.
His sterility, he explains, comes with working with too much uranium-238.
After describing everything he has done for his country, he continues: “America has no manufacturing power today,” grabbing his t-shirt, pointing to both of his hearing aids, and pointing to several things surrounding him as he sits and repeating “China” after each.
“Corporate America wants it that way,” he adds. He offers a wry smile and continues, “It’s all in that book.
“You won’t see any of this on ABC, NBC or CBS,” he insists. “What you see there is Brittany Spears, Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith, which is why I’m living abroad next year. I can’t stomach that kind of society.”
Delaney has carefully planned his life as an expatriate, starting in Australia and slowly moving northeast until Ireland.
“I asked my doctor if I would be able to throw out my hypertension medicine when I left the country. He said, ?Yes James, I think you will,’” Delaney explains, adding that he does not plan to be around for the next presidential election.
“I have no family and nothing keeping me here,” Delaney says. “I just want to think and write.”
