The wild thing about the Trump Era is that to date, on a creative level, it’s completely value free. It’s like it didn’t happen. And, yet, it fucking did happen. As such, here I am plugging away at a novel that wallows in Trump Era tropes after, well, the Trump Era is, for the time being, over.
The interesting thing is this was not the case with Watergate. There were several really good movies in the 1974-1977 era that obviously were in, their own way, a reaction to Watergate. The one that pops into my mind is Network. The movie is both timeless and representative of a very specific moment in time.
And, yet, not only did the actual Trump Era produce no such art, as far as I can tell, Hollywood is going to act like the whole thing was a bad nightmare. When I’m really delusional — and maybe drunk — I find myself scratching my chin and wonder if the novel I’m working on in itself might be the piece of Trump-related art I’m looking for.
But that’s being really delusional, even for me. No cares. And never will. I just really like this novel, even if there’s a real risk it may seem dated by the time I try to sell it.
But for the want of Donald Trump actually being “the guy from The Apprentice,” the United States would either be in the midst of a civil war right now or having the final stages of its transformation into an autocratic managed democracy occuring.
That was the thing that people like me totally missed about Trump. Sure, he has autocratic impulses, but he was in the end, all talk. It wasn’t the “Deep State” that was his problem — it was him. He was an incompetent idiot with no leadership skills who just thought things would magically go his way without knocking any heads.
But where does that leave us now?
Well, the issue of the day — civil war or autocracy? — has been punted down the road for about four years. There are about six Republicans right now chomping at the bit to do what Trump couldn’t do. And if they aren’t able to manage events properly, then there will be a civil war as we transition into an autocracy.
The issue is, the United States, politically, is now a zombie. It’s a dead Republic walking. Get out while you can, because things are going to get nasty and dark and a shit ton of people may die.
It’s going to happen in the winter of 2024 the way it’s going now. Congress — now controlled by the fascist Republicans — will do everything in its power to give the presidency to Trump, Trump Jr or whatever autocrat the Republicans nominate in 2024. Either they succeed peacefully or they don’t.
If they succeed peacefully, my big mouth gets me ships to an ICE “reeducation camp.” If not, then, well, I may die because a cache of WMD is stole somewhere in the United States and the two sides start killing each other THAT way.
I have a huge amount of momentum with this novel right now. Pretty much it’s consumed my entire life, creative and otherwise. One thing I like about where things stand is I’ve come to the point where there is a total disconnect between my mood and my copy.
It’s not like when I first started developing and writing this thing when if I full of passion I somehow thought that made for better copy, when, in fact, I think the more dispassionate you are, the better copy you produce. Even though, as that screenwriter once said it helps to “hate….a lot” when writing, it also helps to be very clear eyed and methodical about what it is your goal for each individual scene is.
I’m pretty much awash in scene structure porn right now. I’m wallowing in a number of books that are really helping me take things to the next level on a scene by scene level.
I hope — hope — that I can knock out some sort of first draft soon rather than later. Then I take a break of about a month and turn around and do it all over again…then I start soliciting my beta readers.
It seems to me that if we really want to avoid the GQP seizing control in about 2024-2025 and start murdering people like me (and maybe you) we need to take a serious, serious look at national service.
In fact, I would go to so far as to say that at this point the implementation of National Service would be the only thing standing between us and autocracy or civil war. The reason is: if good old boys from the Deep South regardless of wealth or schooling were absolutely FORCED to interact with fey libtards from Brooklyn at a tender, impressionable age, then, well, maybe the two sides might come to some sort of understanding.
Maybe the GQP wouldn’t be so absolutely fucking scared of brown people and women with sexual agency that they wouldn’t want to suck the political cock of an absolute fucking idiot like Donald Trump. UGH.
This will never happen, of course.
The Right knows that I’m right and they’ll claim it’s socialism. They WANT good old boys to hate liberal progressives so they can ram through tax cuts for plutocrats. They get young hack MAGA judges in exchange.
Anyway, as I always say — the United States is fucked. Get out while you still can before the Killing Fields are opened.
I’m kind of obsessed with Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” series for a number of reasons. While I started off trying to write an American homage to those first three books….uhhhh….that’s not what’s going on now.
My novel is now a lot more scifi by way of James Bond than Larsson’s works. But there is one specific aspect of the first book in that series that now, as I begin to study scene structure I wonder a lot about — why are the first 125 pages or so of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo so….boring?
It’s just a lot of exposition and backstory. It’s a datadump. You name it. It’s just really meh. Then around 125 pages in, the whole series zoooooooooooooms by. It really becomes a page turner.
I have a theory, now, that maybe it’s not that he wrote and re-wrote those first 125 pages over and over again (I feel his pain on that one if he did), it’s that he maybe changed the structure of his individual scenes at that point? I only bring that up because, well, I’m really getting into scene structure now and I’m hoping that my novel will go at a nice clip now for readers. But there is so fucking much I don’t know yet about subplots, etc. But you can’t edit a blank page as they say, they should come gradually between now and the second draft when I really start looking for people to read this thing.
While I’m a big Larsson fanboy, I’m also a very lazy Larsson fanboy — I pretty much know absolutely nothing about him other than he dropped dead of a heart attack right after he sold the first three books. And I know he was a well regarded Swedish journalist.
Other than that, nothing.
I like to imagine that we’re about the same age and, as such, we have that pretty big metric in common. But….I may be fooling myself. He could have been not my age, but a lot younger and just looked my age.
I have no idea if my suspicions about the ability of Big Tech to read my mind are true or not. But, Jesus, Tik-Tok specifically sure does do some fucking spooky things with its “algorithms.” So much so that either we need to break up and regulate Big Tech because they’re hiding a Soft Singularity from us, or we need to break up and regulate Big Tech because they’re rooting around in our minds using Digital Telepathy.
Well, maybe Big Tech can read our minds?
Let me explain.
I’m around my elderly father a lot and…for some reason, out of the blue, Tik-Tok pushes me videos about World War 2 a lot. So much so, that I’m like, “Any algorithm they may be using sure seems to be thinking about my dad, not me.” Remember, there was a point some time ago when YouTube was pushing me videos about lockboxes and the end of the world which totally made no sense for me at the time. (But did for my father, natch.)
But Tik-Tok has begun to push me weird, almost snarky, content as if it’s rooting around in my mind and wants to have some fun of some sort. The key issue is, of course, is I can’t really prove any of this. There are plenty — PLENTY — of other ways their “algorithm” could figure out most, but not all, of the shit about me that they are pushing. I’m sure they’re listening to me using my phone. I’m sure — somehow — these very words I’m writing right now are being monitored and throw into the maw of an “algorithm” somewhere to better sell me widges.
I get that. THAT, I understand.
It’s when Tik-Tok gets cocky and does a bankshot off some something only I know about my personal mental monologue that I go…hmmmm….weird. Why am I getting that if ONLY I KNOW ABOUT THAT REFERENCE. And, what’s more, some of the stuff Tik-Tok is pushing me is almost like it’s trying to help me with personal problems. Wow-we-wow.
If Big Tech has gone past simply knowing that I’m I have “CAT” on my mind all the time, but has figured out the more abstract things associated with WHY that term is on my mind all the time, then……oooooooooh boy. The national security implications of that are deep, deep, deep.
There are two I can think off the top of my head.
One is, if, say the United States really did slip into autocracy, I could see the NSA start to hunt down specific people whose minds their monitoring for “anti-MAGA thinking” (or somesuch.) Though, to be fair, I generally think that while they obviously abuse their power, in the war against MAGA, the NSA is probably the good guys for the time being. There’s a reason why MAGAQ-Trump hate “the Deep State” so much.
The other is, if a hot war broke out between China and the United States, it sure would be useful for China to have some sense of how open America’s youth would be to be, say, getting drafted. That’s some serious Soft Singularity intelligence there.
But no one listens to me. Absolutely no one listens to me.
It’s becoming alarmingly clear that my precious American liberal democracy is doomed. It’s fucked. For some significant macro demographic and economic reasons, we’re careening towards either civil war or autocracy. This is probably happening in the winter of 2024 as one side or the other freaks out over this this or that thing that the other side did.
So, with that in mind, I would suggest maybe the Left think about beating fucking cocksucker Rightwing nutjobs at their own game. So, if I was taller and more stable, here is what my platform for my Left wing MAGA wanna-be grift would be.
Legalize Pot.
Student Debt cancelation
Breakup of Big Tech
Extreme Regulation of any job-killing new tech
Return of the an actual, honest-to-God progressive income tax
National service of 18 months for new high school grads nationwide.
A serious look at reoperations for slavery
Sadly, even this is too nuanced for the dumb-dumb American electorate scared of brown people and women with sexual agency. Anyway, the point is, we’re so fucked. MAGA is going to pop out of its spider hole pretty soon and people like me — and maybe you — are going to get rounded up and either shot in the back of the head in American Killing Fields in upstate New York or put in some sort of weaponized ICE Camp.
Something pretty big that I can’t predict would have to happen to prevent this.
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