Just relaxing. I see this as a modern pop country song. I have no idea what I’m doing, but it’s nice to see if I can tell a story in a poem that’s meant to be sung.
Daydrinking lyrics by Shelt Garner @sheltgarner please give credit if you produce or perform
they say daydrinking is a red flag but if you believe that you’ve been had to me it’s all I can do with my heart still stuck on you ’cause if it won’t for daydrinking the my heart would never let set the sun on our love on that you can bet
excuse me while I order another well before five if I look at my watch I can only smile it’s time for another round another round of daydrinking daydrinking daydrinking
girls come and go that’s for sho but you’re the that fills me with me Jack as much as regret it’s five o’clock somwhere at least that’s what they say but I think I’ll just sit here and stew in my pain
excuse me while I order another well before five if I look at my watch I can only smile it’s time for another round another round of daydrinking daydrinking daydrinking
(bridge) I’m going to sober up stop full stop I’m going to drink only at night let the sober darkness give me a fright but then I reflect on our lost love remember why I, why I love daydrinking daydrinking daydrinking
excuse me while I order another well before five if I look at my watch I can only smile it’s time for another round another round of daydrinking daydrinking daydrinking
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how it’s become commonplace for ex-TrumpWorld toadies to write a book then try to get validation in the liberal media as part of a book tour.
Why is this happening?
The latest person to do this is, crazy enough Stephanie Graham who was notorious for not only never holding a press conference as White House Press Secretary, but being very, very close to First Lady Melania Trump. Those two for years were extremely tight.
But, here we are.
She’s doing a book tour and she’s saying everything people like me believed to be true during the four years of Trumplandia hell we went through, only after it doesn’t matter anymore. The fact that she might get some sweet, sweet cash from selling books probably has something to do with her changing sides. But here’s something interesting that Olivia Nuzzi write about this whole situation.
All I can think of is how, post WWII, the actions of the Nazis were described as, on a practical basis, as pretty banal. In fact, there’s even a phrase, “the banality of evil” to describe the situation.
And, I think, that’s what’s going on with Trumplandia. A lot of people who should have known better acted in their personal best interests instead of the interests of the nation and grew so drunk in their access to power that they didn’t care at all about the damage they were causing. In, fact, I would say that was what was really going on with the extended clusterfuck that was the first Trump impeachment — the administration was so spinning out of control that everyone began to completely ignore not just norms, but the law. It was only when they got caught that they started feeling bad and quitting.
It definitely looks as though barring something unexpected that Trump is going to run again and “win” in 2024 because of Steve Bannon’s 20,000 “shock troops” fucking up the actual administration of elections on the local level. And, really, it could be that all of Trump’s bullshit is nothing more than a prelude to the main attraction of someone like Mike Flynn, or Ron DeSantis, or Josh Hawley, or Mike Pompeo or…the list goes on….being an American Putin once Trump cues them up to be his fascist successor.
At the moment, I think we’re going to slip peacefully into autocracy, but for the unknown of Trump. He’s such a fucking idiot that he, unto himself, could be the very thing that pushes into an otherwise avoidable civil war.
Top Russia expert Fiona Hill said recently that, essentially, Russia’s present may be America’s future. I totally agree with her on that. And, yet, I would like to make some observations about what she said. Because, she’s right, it’s just there are some reasons why we may not slip peacefully into autocracy.
The Guns Of Red October The thing that Ms. Hill may be underestimating is how much the MAGA New Right wants political violence. How much they want even the barest excuse to run around, murdering people like me in cold blood for political reasons. As such, the thing that would otherwise happen –we slip peacefully into autocracy — doesn’t happen because the MAGA New Right is so wrapped up in the glory of violence that they feel liberals are “forcing” them to commit, that they totally miss that they could get everything they want peacefully if they’re just patient.
Trumplandia Part Duh Another quibble I have with her prediction is it doesn’t take into account what an abject, complete and total fucking idiot Trump is. He always says the quiet part out loud. He also takes the most stupid, lazy path to get what he wants and, as such, it’s easy to imagine that through sheer idiotic incompetence, Trump is personally responsible for a Second American Civil War.
American Self-Perception There’s a chance that when Steve Bannon gets what he wants, Steve Bannon gets what he wants. In other words, there’s a risk that the moment Bannon strangles American democracy with his “20,000 shock troops,” that is the moment the average non-MAGA person in the United States is so startled at what he’s managed to pull off that the country buckles and we have a civil war.
So, yes, Ms. Hill is right. But the verdict is out as to how peaceful everything will be.
I’m just about to wrap up a fleshed out outline for the first draft of the first novel in this thriller series I’m working on. A lot and I mean A LOT could still go wrong, but at least I have some sense of the story I’m trying to tell.
I’m in the third act of the outline and I need to distract myself for a little while to figure out how I get from point A to point B in the plot in as creative and interesting a way as possible.
One thing I like about the way I’m doing all of this is I’ve drained the process of any uncertainty or giddy excitement. This is no longer about “Wow, I’m writing a novel!” It’s now about being as serious and clear minded as possible about the process and figuring out how to tell the best story possible. It reminds me of how I felt when I was at the height of DJing in Seoul — when I cued up a song, it was just sound, not music. It was a means to an end — getting people dancing — not music that was meant to entertain me.
The long term dream.
I’m trying to follow the general guidelines of Save The Cat Writes A Novel, but I’m not sure that it’s guide for a third act jibes perfectly with the nature of my novel. But, we’ll see.
I’ve come up with such a massive universe and a macro plot that spans four novels and over two decades of time that I’m feeling pretty good. A lot depends now on my actual writing ability. I don’t want to be a good writer, I want to be a popular writer.
I want to tell a great tale that keeps people turning pages for the duration of four novel-length stories. When I started this process, I had no idea it was going to take so long. But, at last, I may be about to actually start writing a my first novel in a way that I will actually write its first draft pretty quick, all things considered.
Once I finish the fleshed out outline, I’m hoping the actual writing won’t take so long. It’s just been serious pain the butt to get to this point.
Fuck Steve K. Bannon. That piece of shit. Having said that, I have to respect him for actively organizing in the real world the destruction of American democracy at its weakest link; the local level.
As I’ve written before, the thing about Bannon is, the jury is still out if he’s just an avatar for how fucked up the United State is — like Trump — or if he’s a potential Great Man who actually puts his own will on the course of history. I’m leaning towards him just being an avatar because even though he’s putting in the hard work in the real world that Twitter liberals refuse to do, it’s still pretty easy work.
Steve K. Bannon
He’s able to do it in broad daylight and there are plenty of crazed MAGA New Right cocksuckers who are primed and ready to go — all they need is a bit of direction at Bannon’s behest.
So, I dunno.
Bannon and I are a lot alike in our ability to take abstract concepts and make them concrete. We’re at exact opposite ends of the political spectrum, however. And I’m not nearly the suck-my-own-cock-ideolog that Bannon is. So, I feel as though he’s so wrapped up in his dream of being a modern day Lenin that he is missing some key problems with his plan.
What Bannon wants to do is a replay of 2000. He wants to steal the 2022 and 2024 elections in broad daylight, but in such a way that the very thing he thinks is so evil — the liberal press media narrative — will cause a collective shrug from the population when it all happens. He’s betting that the can smother democracy in broad daylight and because the neoliberal shills of corporate media have a vested interest in keeping everyone placid he’ll get away with it.
By January 2025, the administration of elections in the United States will be so corrupted by Bannon’s “shock troops” that it will be taken for granted that we’re no longer a democracy and, lulz, why did we even care in the first place. And, I have to Bannon credit, at the moment, I think he’s probably going to pull it off.
The MAGA New Right will gently transition us from liberal democracy to autocratic managed democracy and within a generation CNN will be owned by FOX and singing the praises of our system which is just like the perfect system found in Russia.
And, yet.
This has not happened yet. This is also a possibility that everything will be going fine for Bannon until he gets what he wants. Then, instead of everyone just shrugging and letting him get away with it, there’s a massive fucking freak out and the country descends into an actual hot, fighting civil war.
But it’s one of those things that you can’t predict. The entire system is designed to keep Americans believing they live in a democracy and that there’s no need to turn to violence should that no longer be the case. So, at the moment, Bannon’s totally logical to think he can pull of a stunt like I just described.
And, yet, if Bannon get what he wants, well, he might just get what he wants. It could be that the moment it becomes clear that his effort at nullifying any Democratic win at the local level has been successful, the average non-MAGA person may grow so enraged that, well, some pretty dark shit happens.
Or, to put it another way, the moment Bannon succeeds, may be the moment he fails. Political historical events like the type Bannon is plotting don’t happen in a vacuum. There would be some sort of consequence and potentially a lot of unintended consequences.
In honor of Qanon cocksuckers thinking something magical is going to happen as a part of “Red October,” I’ve decided to spam their searches for the term by using it gratuitously in my post titles until I don’t feel like it anymore.
America has a very 9/10 vibe to it right now. It feels like Something Big is going to happen at any moment, which will totally change the media narrative. I have no idea what it is, but something.
But let’s talk about the endgame to all of this — what’s going to happen to United States?
Well, there are a number of different scenarios. Let’s go through a few of the more interesting ones.
Balkanization In this scenario, the United States ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. There’s a lot of talk about a civil war, but in the end, we just don’t have it in us and as part of the Election Crisis of 2024 – 2025, three major states, California, Texas and Florida peacefully leave the Union. Then, the rest of the United States buckles and you have a significantly weaker — and poorer — rump USA. In a sense, this might be seen as the Soviet Union Endgame.
Civil War (Blue State Victory) In this scenario, there’s a civil war, we bomb ourselves into oblivian, but in the end, Blue States win and we enter a New Age of a stronger, more powerful and more united country. We will look back at what happened around this time as the American Crisis of The 21 Century. There will be an entirely new world order because of the numerous limited nuclear exchanges that took place while we were using WMD on ourselves. But there’s a chance that Humanity might have seen how close it came to its own destruction and realizes it needs to unite going forward. Civil War (Red State Victory) In this scenario, the opposite happens. Red States, win a Second Civil War because Blue States are simply too weak willed. Also, the Red States are willing to use WMD to make up for their smaller economies and populations that they win through sheer bloodthirstiness. Military Junta With this one, we have a very bad, very brief crisis where the US military steps in for a few months or even years while organize a Constitutional Convention. It’s a very scary, for unstable time, but we’re able to rework the Constitutional enough to placate both sides for a few more decades. This would be similar to a number of Constitutional amendments that were frantically proposed around the beginning of the first Civil War in an effort to prevent it from breaking out. Autocracy With this, we gently — and peacefully — slip into autocracy in such a way that not everyone even realizes we’re not longer a democracy. Gradually, over a decade or more, however, the United States and Russia begin to grow identical in their politics to the point that they’re often compared as being clones of each other. Center-Left leave the United States in the millions and the country begins to retreat into itself just as China is growing in strength. The Age of Democracy will be replaced with The Age of Autocracy and we all slowly cook alive because nationalism grows to be the most powerful thing in the world.
American Taliban This is the darkest ending. We have a civil war and because of the extensive use of WMD, something akin to an American Taliban springs up out of the chaos — specifically in the old Deep South. They’re extreme and they murder in cold blood en masse anyone they disagree with. Their existence will be the central political problem of North America for at least a generation.
The original reason why I started working on a novel of any sort was my pure, white hot rage against the Trump Administration. I had no idea what I was doing, but I had a lot of energy and decided to work on a scifi novel that would talk about the major themes of the era.
It soon became clear that my ambitions were simply too huge and I would never have the resources to finish what I had come up with. Flash forward three years and I’m in a very different situation. While I’ve again come up with a massive creative project, this time I’ve got a handle on what it all means. And, much to my own shock, it’s not a massive sci-fi series that I’m working on, but rather a thriller series.
The fictional baby in question as a fictional adult.
This happened in large part because there was always one book that I was able to read over and over again and that was Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire. At first, the book I was writing was very much Stieg Larsson fanfiction.
And the, gradually, everything changed. The story was fused with an array of other themes, ideas, inspirations and it was not fanfiction, but it’s own unique story. What was one book was split into two with a cliff hanger connecting the two books.
Then the one thing I totally never expected to happen, happened: Trump was not able to steal the 2020 election.
That’s when I did an assessment of where I was and realized that with Trump out of office, I needed to do something radical. So, looking around, I realized there was a obvious fix — go backwards and time and develop two novels from the massive backstory that I had come up with for the two novels I was working on.
At first, I thought this was going to be a breeze. I had two solid plots in my mind and things were going really fast. Then, however, it soon enough became clear that I have a huge ego and am very demanding of myself. This is when I saw Mare of Easttown and was both shocked and inspired by what I saw. It was so good, that I realized I needed to up my game.
Mare of Easttown
And, so, here were are.
This first book now is being written with my impression of Mare of Easttown in the forefront of my mind. So, this first book is very different than one might think from someone who has studied one of Stieg Larsson’s books and used it as something of an informal novel writing text book.
But I’m feeling pretty good. I have shifted the focus of the novel from the abstract of owning a newspaper to the very concrete crisis of possession of a baby. The issue is I have a lot of thinking to do. I have to flesh out an element of this story that I didn’t even realize needed to understood better.
Yet, thankfully, at least I know which direction to go at last.
I love to run scenarios, so here goes: what if the long-feared La Palma Mega Tsunami crashed into the American East Coast? What would be the practical political implications for the United States?
Of all the ways that the United States might collapse into chaos, the extremely unlikely occurance of a La Palma Mega Tsunami is actually something that would do it. If you pretty much destroyed a huge swath of the American East Coast, the ensuing chaos would be so staggering that all those fucking idiotic cocksucker MAGA would finally get the MAGA-themed “revolution” they seem to think is going to happen at any moment.
The government would be so overwhelmed by the catastrophe that there would be a huge power vacuum across a massive portion of the country. All the macro problems that are drifting towards some sort of existential resolution in the 2025 timeframe would happen all at once RIGHT NOW.
But, hopefully, this is never going to happen — or won’t happen anytime soon — and we won’t have to worry about such a horrible thing happening.
This first book in the series I’m writing is definitely finally come into its own. I’ve fleshed out the first half of the outline to my satisfaction. But now that I’m in the second half I’ve smashed into an existential problem that I’ve only begun to fix.
That existential question was: why?
The baby in question grows up to look something like this later in the series.
Now that I know that “why’ is the central issue of the story, I can do a significant creative reset. Another thing I’ve decided to do is make the central issue of the entire story not the abstract of a newspaper, but the very concrete problem of possession of a baby.
All of these changes hinge on something I didn’t even realize was a problem — the current piss-poor development of a very crucial character in the story. But all of these problems are beginning to fix themselves now that I realize that was what was causing problems to begin with.
The story, overall, is getting much better. It’s just going to take some time to flesh out these elements of the story that I just hadn’t even thought about before.
Now that I understand what the problems to fix are, things should move a lot faster. I no longer have unknown abstract problems to work with, but very concrete issues that can be fixed by simply doing a lot of thinking and daydreaming.
It’s very easy for Twitter liberals to get really worked up and to place on the blame America’s impending political clusterfuck solely on the shoulders of this or that person, as if we could somehow magically get rid of them then all of our problems would be solved.
This is so dumb because everyone from Trump to Bannon to DeJoy isn’t the problem, but, rather a symptom of our problems.
That someone like Trump could become president with the help of someone like Bannon is simply the practical application of severe macro problems in our politics. A prime example of what I’m talking about is what happened post-election day in 2020.
All these people who popped up to help Trump’s slow moving attempt to illegally stay in power were simply opportunists. Someone, somewhere, was going to pop up to do the very same thing. Who did it specifically did not really matter.
But let’s talk about Steve K. Bannon.
Steve K. Bannon
He likes to see himself as Lord Zod, destroyer of the administrative state. I think, in fact, he may have even compared himself to Lenin. Such suck-your-own-cock self-aggrandizement is pushing it, but not by much. Here’s what happened last time, with John Eastman trying to end our democracy.
While it’s highly like that someone like Bannon would have sprung up as we careened towards the Fourth Turning, the verdict is still out if he is A Great Man like Lenin who not just was a part of history, but MADE history. But even Lenin needed the conditions for him to strike.
This is the point in this post when I point out that I know myself well enough to know that if we really did have something as horrific as a civil war that *I* might just find myself in a historic situation. That sounds really fucking delusional — and it is. But I know myself well enough to know that either I’m going to die the first day of any civil war or I’m going to somehow weasel myself into some kind of leadership position in Blue State forces…somewhere. It may not be much, but would be a shit ton more than what I’m doing with my life right now.
But that is really fucking delusional thing for me to say at the moment.
The reason Bannon is so dangerous is he is attacking the very fiber of our liberal democracy. He’s attack it at the local level where it is its weakest because the requirements for participation are so low. These are usually filled with just average people off the street who believe in civil society and want to help out.
Bannon, meanwhile, wants to do to these otherwise pretty mundane offices what Trump has done to SCOTUS — fil it with a bunch of MAGA New Right ideologs who will come through for Trump (or DeSantis, or whomever) when the time comes in the 2024 – 2025 time frame (or the 2022 mid-terms.)
And, yet, the best laid plans of mice and human tumors often go awry. Bannon is probably going to be successful in destroying our democracy, but he also might be successful in destroying our democracy. There will come a moment at some point between now and January 2025 when Bannon’s plot will just about to succeed and, yet, it will not have totally succeeded. Here’s why we migtht have a civil war instead.
Republicans have come to glorify political violence Something you see a lot these days within the bullshit echo chamber of the MAGA New Right is the belief that because “liberals won’t leave us alone” that they are being “driven” to extremism. There’s a lot of leading not-so-vague talk as to what all this would ultimately mean. But it’s clear that for a number of “thought leaders” within the MAGA New Right that they have accepted that at some point in the future, they’re going to have to resort to violence to get what they want.
Republicans no longer believe in democracy It is now clear that like any good fascists, Republicans no longer believe in democracy unless it’s for the specific purpose of gaining and keeping power. This view of the system they’re supposed to a part of leads them do extremely distablizing things that help push the country to the brink.
Trump 2024 Just Trump being the 2024 nominee would, in itself, be enough to cause a civil war at some point in late 2024 – early 2025. He just has a special knack for “owning the libs” in such a way that if he stole in 2024 election and said the “quiet part outloud” that Blue States would grow so enraged that it would be they, not Red States, that left the Union and caused a Second Civil War. But Ron DeSantis is polling exceptionally well at the moment, so either Trump politically shivs him at some point, or he co-ops him, making him his VP, opening the door to DeSantis becoming America’s Putin at some point down the road a little bit.
Steve K Bannon. Bannon and his toadies are actively working to destroy the framework that we use to administer free and fair elections. So, it’s very easy to imagine a situation where this gambit works in ways that Trump himself is too idiotic to pull off personally and it will be so egregious that, again, Blue States leave the Union and we have a Second American Civil War.
Extreme negative polarization We’re in for a bump four or so years, no matter what, because negative polarization, on a systemic level, has reached a critical mass. When one of your political parties is fascist and would rather crash the global economy instead of even appear to work for the good of the nation — you got a problem.
A lack of shared values As the big blow up on Twitter in the last 24 hours about a Stephen Colbert song and dance gag about getting vaccinated proves — we can’t even agree on what’s funny. A combination of this and negative polarization is leading to the United States being two nations, one Red, one Blue and when we get around to attempting to elect the next president, the system simply won’t be prepared for the passions it will stir up.
A potentially historic miscalculation on the part of Republicans It’s possible that, much like European powers in the lead up to WW1, when the time comes and Republicans have a choice between peacefully transitioning us into autocracy or fucking with us all so we want to take up arms, they will choose the latter not because they have to, but because they want to. It’s possible that by the 2024 — 2025 period, Republicans will see a civil war as their only choice to consolidate power, even if it’s clear that they could get everything they ever wanted within the system they so obviously loath.
There will be one last death struggle for our democracy and either, like in 1861, we manage to crawl ourselves back from being dominated by Slave Power or, lulz, we don’t and Bannon is named reichsfuhrer.
One thing that is key to understand about Bannon. He is doing the one thing that so many so-called “Resistors” on Twitter can not or will not do — he’s doing real shit in the real world. He’s doing the hard work of effectuating his personal vision in the real world.
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