It seems clear to me that fucking MAGA Nazi Republicans want to replace the “administrative state” with the “moralistic state.” There will be a 30% VAT rather than any form of income tax. Meanwhile, all sorts of white angry Christian morals will be imposed on hapless Americans who just want to be able to edit a tweet.
That, at the moment, seems our fate.
At least on a macro level, that’s what we’re drifting towards. That move towards a moralistic state has a huge amount of historical-political momentum behind it. And, honestly, as much I as I don’t want to even think about it, the only way to avoid such a horrible fate is a massive political clusterfuck in the guise of something like a second American civil war or revolution.
I don’t want that. I hope it doesn’t come to that. But….oh boy…..
One of my big fears as an aspiring novelist is that somehow, someway, the conceit of my novel will somehow be rendered moot by someone’s independent idea. Well, apparently there is a new Amazon series will be set in the Stieg Larsson Millennium series universe.
My homage to that universe is so totally different from what he wrote all those years ago that I don’t THINK there will be a problem. My main fear is what somehow, because form follows function, that even if my novel series is totally and completely different that somehow, someway, something I have come up with will be just close enough in creative proximity that, lulz, I have to scrap what I’ve worked so hard on.
I suppose it’s possible, but at the moment, it’s not probable. It is something to keep an eye on, I suppose. And, if nothing else, it encourages me to throw myself into a second creative track so I can have a back up plan ready incase my absolute worst fears become a reality.
As I find myself working on a second creative track in the guise of a novel, I also find myself mulling about an existential flaw in pandemic fiction. It’s such a glaring flaw that it’s a serious pet storytelling peeve on my part.
The guise of my irritation is two fold.
One is, it is absolutely impossible for any virus, no matter how virulent to kill off 99% of the population so quickly that humanity doesn’t bounce back within 40 to 60 years. And that’s the second part of my pet peeve — you can’t “unlearn” some pretty basic elements of the modern world.
As such, even if you wiped out 95% of the white, first world Western world, you have millions — maybe even a billion — of brown poor people left untouched by any pandemic, even if it’s of a The Stand level of potency.
This, from a storytelling standpoint, brings up an interesting idea — if you combine humanity snapping back within no later than 60 years with the sources of population being in remote areas of South America, Africa and, maybe, the East Indies, what kind of world does that created down the road?
So, I think someone —maybe me? — should write a novel or screenplay about systemic racism that flips the script on the modern racism problems we have in the world. In this new future world, white people are blamed for the horrific effects of a pandemic a few decades before, to the point that they live in conditions similar to the horrible problems we find in America’s inner cities.
Of course, there is a real risk that all of this would come across as, well, racist. But I think if you made it clear what you were trying to convey, that you MIGHT be able to get away with it.
For all the ridicule that the center-Left echo chamber is throwing at new House Speaker Mike Johnson, I can tell you that his views are pretty much the sweetspot for many, many hyper conservative people within the American electorate at the moment. To the point that I could see only the growing de facto trend towards always having a female Veep being the only thing preventing Trump from picking him as his veep in 2024.
But for the fact that the United States is either going to stop being a functioning democracy or collapse into civil war / revolution, I would suggest that Speaker Johnson is on the fast track to being a POTUS at some point in the near future. His positions are so fucking absolute and fucking extreme that he’s just what the doctor ordered for the small, but potent portion of the Republican electorate that seems to run the country these days.
So, I don’t know what to tell you.
I will tell you though, that if Speaker Johnson becomes POTUS we will no longer be a democracy — or even a “Constitutional Republic.” We’ll just be a plain old autocracy.
I’m a man of peace, a man of ideas. And I hate conflict and violence to the point that I struggle to watch conflict — of any sort — in movies and TV shows. And all my anger towards MAGA, I’ve channeled into a six novel project that uses subtext to rant about how much MAGA Nazis suck.
Having said all that, we really need to accept that there is a good chance that there will come a day in the near future when MAGA and the Nazis are seen as historical equivalents. In fact, I would propose that MAGA Nazis are going to lead to the death of more people than just regular old Nazis. The population of the United States is just so much bigger than Europe in the 1940s and the power of the United States is such that, oh boy.
So, late 2024, early 2025 COULD be it. Either we turn into a MAGA Nazi autocratic state or we have a civil war (Reds) or a revolution (Blues.) Or, since I can’t predict the future, maybe we’ll somehow punt all our problems down the road again. Maybe some outside force really will save us from ourselves, like Mueller, She Wrote seems to believe.
This third draft of my first novel is getting a LOT better. But I continue to develop and write it in a vacuum so…I don’t know. It could be that, lulz, this is nowhere near where it needs to be.
But I still have hope. Keep the faith and all that. I just have to believe. I may — may — take a little bit of a break the next day or so. I want to clear my mind before I wrap up the second chapter. I have totally reworked the second chapter to the point that it’s a fresh new take on the general events I want to depict.
One less-than-obvious element to all of this is I need to vary the length of my scenes. At the moment, my scenes are just under 1,000 words. I want them to range between 500 and 1,200 words to give the reader some subtle ebb and flow to the progression of events.
Anyway, wish me luck, I guess. I really need to get out of the first act and into the rest of the story. Once I do that, things SHOULD move much, much faster.
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