I find it to be an interesting period because you have, you know, now it seems like a foregone

conclusion that we were going to be bogged down in war in the Middle East. But there is a stretch

of time there where war had completely different connotations and the Middle East had slightly

different connotations. The America's military might.

And I wanted to look at sort of the cultural artifacts from that era.

And I found out, and this is what really inspired me to write this, there's a guy named Jerry Haliva who was a Republican lobbyist in California

in the 80s. And he shows up to work one day in 1989. And he's like a tan guy's got a mustache. He's

Jewish-American. He shows up and somebody has a photo of a man who's not super well known at this time,

Saddam Hussein, and it says underneath the picture somebody wrote,

now we know what Haliva does on his weekends.

He looks like Saddam Hussein.

It becomes like a joke at the office.

And then Hussein becomes more and more of a news item. And all of a sudden, this guy's like,

maybe I have something here because this is maybe the most fascinating part of researching this.

He was a lobbyist. So we worked on legislation, and this is California.

There was a bill to prevent lookalikes, celebrity lookalikes from continuing to profit from the estates of dead celebrities.

That's so crazy.

Yeah.

So like John Wayne and people like that who had died,

they had, you know, these people who make a living doing appearances. And everybody knows it's

not the real person, especially if the person is dead, but it's kind of a fun novelty thing.

And he had worked on this bill to try and prevent that. And there was an agent, Ron Smith, who was against the bill because he, you know, represented lookalikes.

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