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.
I love me some Spotify and I keep trying to think of ways to make sure it thrives. And one scenario would be that it merge with Netflix. Apparently, Spotify has a real problem with Apple mooching off it because of a 30% VAT it imposes on any online transaction via its devices.
Or something like that.
Anyway, the point is — I could see a lot of synergies if NetFlix and Spotify became one user interface. It would be an all-encompassing user steaming media experience.
Though, I will note that one interesting addition to this combination would be Siris XM. I would definitely like access to Howard Stern via my Spotify account. That would be pretty cool.
At LAST, it’s possible that I MAY have something akin to a stable first act. A lot of my problems with the first act are bullshit and arbitrary. From what my Beta Readers have told me, the issue for most people is they just want the story to flow and make sense.
My heroine KINDA looks like this.
All this futzing around with the specifics of scene sequence is not something that most readers notice or care about. They just want to be able to read the novel all the way through.
Now, issue that I’ve found myself worrying about is the number of spicy scenes in the first act. Too often, I’ve leaned into the nature of my heroine’s personal life to show some sexual activity and I just don’t know how much people will tolerate it — especially in the first act.
But I’m doing all of this in a vacuum. I just can’t keep spinning my wheels. I have to, at some point, realize that the point is to get this third draft done so I can go through and edit it.
So. As such, I’m trying to write as much as possible as quickly as possible now so I can get out of the first act by the end of October, 2023.
The fact that Saturday Night Live had sketches entirely in Spanish without subtitles has kind of rattled my cage. The reason is, I fucking hate MAGA and yet I found something about it rather grating to the nerves. If it bothered me, then, Lord only knows it probably bothered those 60,000 low information swing voters in five states that will determine the 2024 election.
Add to this how my conservative relative to this day is extremely angry about what happened with COVID and I have a lot of conservative sentiment within my mind to process. If we had a functioning democracy — and no Electoral College — I might switch from a center-Left party to something closer to a center-Right party.
But, lulz, I just don’t have that as an option. So, fuck it, I’m just going to have to double down on my center-Left love of democracy and prepare to potentially risk my life and scared honor for that love. I say that because I believe the best way to fix a lot of these cultural problems is more democracy, not less. So, yes, there are some extremes on the far Left, but the answer is not to turn the United States into a MAGA Nazis white Christian ethnostate.
Anyway. Only time will tell, I guess. I can’t predict the future. Maybe everything really will work out.
So. It definitely seems as though we may have about a year before the United States either slips peacefully into autocracy or we have a civil war (Reds) or revolution (Blues.) Yes, I suppose it’s possible that some sort of third way might happen whereby Biden wins and that breaks the back of MAGA, but….oh boy. Not putting a lot of hope in that one.
All the macro signs at the moment point to Trump winning in 2024 and, soon, enough, the entire post-WW2 global world order is thrown up in the air. And that’s just internationally. Domestically, the United States will become a white theocratic ethnostate, probably as the result of a Constitutional Convention that puts MAGA enabling acts into the Constitution.
Or, put another way, the issue is how bad are things going to get? I mean, my fears of catastrophe are growing so serious that I’m thinking about the need to buy a Ham radio. Because if things really go tits up, communication will be something that we will be sorely lacking.
But, to date, I’m more interested in working on my novel to worry about something so dark. If that changes, then, well, there you go.
Because of how, collectively, Americans are a pretty laid back bunch, I struggle to imagine a situation where there might be any sort of mass revolt against Tyrant Trump should he win a second term. Because of his age, Trump will be seen as a transitional figure, with the result being whomever his successor is being the person who finally throttles our dying democracy.
And, really, much like how Augustus was able to transition the Roman Republic into an Empire, as long as Trump and his immediate successor don’t touch the First Amendment, they should be fine. Even if elections are meaningless, as along as Americans feel as though they can bitch and moan about what’s going on around them, there won’t be any problems in the streets.
But this is Trump we’re talking about.
Trump loves, loves, loves, to besmirch anything and everything that is considered sacred, so it may be almost inevitable that soon enough, Trump will start to attack some pretty basic Constitutional rights. Ironically enough, as long as he doesn’t touch the Second Amendment, his supporters will lulz our descent into a Russian-style autocracy.
But we have to accept that Trump’s second term will not only be one based on revenge, but also will take all the parts we hated about the first term to the next level. So much so, that the entire post-WW2 global liberal order will be thrown up in the air to the point that a full blown WW3 might break out because America pulls out of NATO and South Korea. What’s more, as all of this is happening, a good 1 million smug wealthy liberals will flee the country — at a minimum.
I still, however, struggle to imagine a scenario whereby there might some sort of Glorious Revolution on the part of Blues that might involve a General Strike and that kind of thing. Americans are just too complacent to do such a thing.
The only reason why I even keep writing about this issue is there are some macro trends at work that are extremely alarming. One of America’s two major political parties is now fascist and only see elections as valid if they win them. But I can’t predict the future. Maybe “Mueller, She Wrote” is right and somehow MAGA will evaporate into the mists of political history and everything will work out because some court ruling saves us from ourselves.
I’ve finally come up with a heroine who is, in her own way, just as interesting as Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander. But there’s a downside to her being so unique. Because of how dumb people can be, and how fixated on sex they can be, it’s very possible that the fact that my heroine is a part-time sex worker (stripper) may overshadow anything else I have to say with this novel.
The character has A LOT of agency — she owns the club she strips at, for what it’s worth — and I like how having the two elements of her life slam against each other leads to some interesting situations. This time of wild dichotomy was successful with Bill Hader’s TV show “Barry” and there’s no reason to believe I can’t find similar success with this novel.
But I AM a smelly “CIS white male,” and, as such, there will be a small, woke cancel culture mob element of the audience who will come at me from the left on this issue. The very element of the novel — validating sex work — that would cause a transgendered undocumented twentysomething woman to be heaped with praise will cause me to be pillared.
At least, that’s my fear.
But, I can’t help who I am or how old I am. I really like the character I’ve come up with. I will admit that my heroine doesn’t have nearly the fucked up youth that Lisbeth Salander had, but, surprise, I AM setting up the life of my real heroine — the novel is set in late 1994, early 1995.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see if I manage to query this novel successfully or if the entire world will collapse and I have to use a Ham radio to find out what’s going on with the broader world.
Any debate about the sexual orientation of Taylor Swift usually starts with the wrong question. The issue is NOT if Tay-Tay is “gay” or “queer,” the issue is — how else would one of the most famous women in the world act?
As I keep saying, because we Poors can’t wrap our little poor minds around how things work in the rarified heights of celebrity, a lot of people like Tay-Tay just keep their same-sex bed hopping on the DL because it’s not worth the trouble.
Now, things have changed a great deal — at least for celebrity women. The general public just shrugs most of the time when this or that celebrity starts a same-sex relationship. Though, I have to admit that if the rumor I’ve heard about Shailene Woodley being married to a woman turned out to be true, it would give me pause for thought.
The point is — given her wealth and cultural power, it’s almost a given some, if not all, of the chatter about Tay-Tay sharing a bed now and again with a woman is probably based on some grain of truth. She just doesn’t feel like having to deal with The New Yorker writing 10,000 word think pieces about What It Means For White Liberal Women That America’s Sweetheart Is in a Same-Sex Relationship.
This, of course, brings up the issue of what happens when Tay-Tay finally does settle down and get married and have kids. Those events, unto themselves, will be cultural supernovae.
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