I’m making my way through Mare of Easttown and the last episode I saw, “Poor Sisyphus,” really kind of rocked my world. I was NOT expecting that ending. Given that there are half a dozen Era of Great TV shows I haven’t watched, should I ever get around to watching them I’m going to be a bit forlorn because I won’t have anyone to talk to them about them.
Anyway, I’ve seen enough of the show to be able to deconstruct who its audience is.
It seems as though there are maybe three core groups the producers are tyring to appeal to.
Middle Aged Women It took me a little bit to figure it out, but all the adult women in Mare of Easttown are very relatable if kind of drab. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of male eye candy for middle aged women. And there are a lot of Every Mother’s Nightmare scenarios in the show, too.
Middle Aged Men This is more difficult to pin down, but maybe the fact that there’s girl-on-girl action between attractive young women is a downlow pander to middle aged men? Maybe?
“Woke Twitter Users” There’s an amusing overlap, in this specific situation, between middle aged men and “woke” Twitter who generate buzz. The subplot about the lesbian daughter is red meat for the buzz-generating Twitter users.
One of the more alarming things to happen in modern American politics is how thirsty the MAGA New Right is for autocrats all over the world. The latest thug to have their Tiger Beat spread cut out and pasted on their bedroom wall is Hungary’s autocratic superstar Viktor Orbán.
Talk about what the fuck.
It’s astonishing that it feels like two eras — the late 1850s and the late 1930s — are fusing together in some sort of weird political Frankenstein’s monster. It’s like as if the leaders of Slave Power went on a tour of the Russian Empire and were impressed with how docile the serfs were. Ugh!
What really astonishes me is how all of this is happening is broad daylight and it’s not a huge scandal. It’s like how all those Republican Senators celebrated the 4th of July in Moscow — of all places — a few years ago. That was another what the fuck moment.
What we have to take seriously is the Republican Party is radicalizing in broad day light. It’s now a fascist autocratic white nationalist party. By definition, if it ever gains power again, it’s going to finally extinguish our undead democracy. Given that even an undead democracy has a natural ebb and flow to it, Republicans are going to gain power again.
And they’re probably never going to let it go.
Any discussion of this clusterfuck, however, has to address that the very thing that has allowed the MAGA New Right to gain so much power in broad daylight — Trump’s “chaos agent” nature — is also the movement’s greatest weakness. Trump flings off so much inept chaos just by existing, that he could very well start a civil war that would at least give Blue States a fighting chance at destroying the Republican Party cancer.
So, in a sense, Trump remains a macro historical wildcard. He has such absolute control over the fascist Republican Party that it’s possible he might transition us into an autocracy. And it’s also that because he’s a fucking idiot, he could bungle that same transition and cause a civil war that leads to the destruction of the Republican Party just as much as the first Civil War prompted the destruction of Slave Power once and for all.
But the fact remains — the Republican Party must be destroyed if we are to remain a free country. On a systemic, intuitional basis, the Republican Party is now fascist, autocratic and white nationalist. I’m not thrilled at the idea that the United States would ever have to go through the tragedy of civil war again, but if my only other option is to live in an autocracy like Orban’s Hungary, what the fuck else are we going to do?
And, yet, no fate but what we make. There’s still a chance that we’re going to drift towards some sort of situation where we have an autocracy — a Democrat can only become POTUS if Democrats control Congress — but the fascist Republicans will be so busy making abortion illegal and giving plutocrats yet another tax cut that they whole pushy-pushy out of windows thing will remain just a running gag for me.
Say what you will about the #NeverTrump movement, they definitely have principles. And, I think, that’s what makes #NeverTrump groups like The Lincoln Project so appealing to liberals. NeverTrumpers are so principled, articulate and passionate about how much they fucking hate Trump that they sometimes outshine liberal leadership on the subject. (I find the vast majority of liberal leadership rather timid and tepid, at best.)
Now, I have to note — the existence of the #NeverTrump movement has a spooky similarity to the War Democrats of the Civil War. So, in a sense, history is repeating itself, which does not bode well for the long-term political stability of the United States.
In fact, it’s not too difficult to imagine a situation during a Second American Civil War where President AOC picks a NeverTrumper as her veep in an effort to unite the country, or something.
That sounds rather fantastical — it is — but it is at least within the realm of possibility, the way things are going.
I guess what I’m saying is, NeverTrumpers could balloon in political significance should Blue States find themselves actively trying to destroy the Republican Party. I mean, a liberal democracy needs some sort of conservative party if it’s going to be a…functioning liberal democracy.
If there is a Second American Civil War and the “Good Guys” — read, people like me — win, NeverTrumpers would be the core of any new conservative party, for better or worse.
We really need to destroy the Republican Party, by the way. It’s gone septic and its very existence as an organization is an existential threat to our democracy.
So, I saw on Twitter where Gawker is accepting fiction of up to 5,000 words. I would be a such a thrill to get the validation associated with getting a short story published on Gawker.
And, yet.
It’s something of a cliché within my own mind is haters who say, “Why don’t you just write a short story” when they grow frustrated with how long I’ve been talking about writing a novel (or, now, novels) without anything to show for it.
First — those people can fuck off.
Second, however, it would be fun to have a diversion that required a tight in and out of storytelling. I have a number of ideas in my mind that could be turned into a screenplay that I could instead convert into a short story.
On one hand, the validation of getting anything published would be great but it would be far overshadowed by the thing on the other hand: my almost inevitable rejection.
All these stories are really compelling — at least to me — so I’m willing to let developing and writing them consume nearly my every waking hour.
Book 1 If Lady Bird was a thriller with a middle aged protagonist. Book 2 The implications of Book 1 have come to a crisis — hero saves the day at great cost. Book 3 A Stieg Larsson influenced allegory (of sorts) about life during Trumplandia just before the pandemic struck. Ends in a cliff hanger. Book 4 We see how our female James Bond earns her license to kill. (Sorta)
I have been using brute creative force on these four novels to a great deal of success the last few days. I may finally have an outline for the first novel that is stable enough that I can begin to focus on the next steps of the individual scene summaries and actually writing scenes as well.
It’s been a whole lot of work getting to this point. I must have worked a solid five or six hours today figuring out how to make the first novel’s outline sea worthy.
Having said all that, however, my personal life is going to get in the way for a few days as part of an extended weekend. As such, I’m probably just going to read and watch movies and TV shows to psych myself up for a huge push back into writing early next week.
In some respects, this is really annoying because I was hoping to start writing again on August 1st. But, lulz, that’s obviously not going to happen.
Come to think of it, in an effort to prevent my mind from overheating, I might spend this forced pause also trying to punch up the outline of the second book in the series. The third book’s outline — which was originally the first novel — is pretty much finished. The fourth book’s outline, however, is not.
I have made great process with these four books. And I really regret talking so much about this whole thing over the things. And, yet, I’m so extroverted, what else did you expect would happen?
But one thing that writing these four novels at the same time is really helping with is as my writing improves, I’m able to improve all the novels at the same time.
Anyway. I have a huge amount of development and writing to do.
It happened again. Today I was looking at Tik-Tok and was pushed an extremely and I mean EXTREMELY specific video on my For You Page. Here’s what happened: I went to the doctor yesterday and he asked me around my alcohol consumption.
After some joking around, I admitted I drink a lot.
Ok, flash forward 24 hours and what am video am I pushed on my For You Page? A video a man having that specific conversation with his doctor. Like the literal same conversation.
Let’s go through how this is possible.
There’s the case that somehow, in aggregate, that Tik-Tok knows via my likes and time watched that people like me drink a lot and have that type of conversation with our doctors…so I got the video. That’s a fair enough explanation other than it happened 24 hours after I had that specific conversation with my own doctor.
The Future is Now.
Another argument could be made that through a combination of knowing about people like me aggregate and my phone’s location that they knew to push me that video because they knew that not only do I drink a lot, but within the last 24 hours I had been to a doctor. (This one actually seems to make sense.)
Then, there’s the more kooky explanations — at a minimum Tik-Tok is listening to me via my phone. I’m beginning to think a lot Big Tech companies do this already and Tik-Tok is just the most conspicuous.
Of course, I continue to have a lingering suspicion that Tik-Tok is much more direct than any of the above — it is somehow reading my mind.
But, lulz, that couldn’t possibly be happening, right? Right?
Way too many people have pinned their hopes on somehow everything magically going back to normal if we can just destroy Trump politically. In a sense, Trump has done all the damage he needs to do. Because he’s such a fucking idiot, he was a transitional figure.
Now that your typical ambitious Republican pol knows the conditions of the New Normal after studying Trump, we have about a dozen would-be autocrats who are chomping at the bit to finally put our undead liberal democracy out of its misery.
The current front runner for America’s Putin is Ron DeSantis. He is EXTREMELY POPULAR with my conservative relatives. Liberals hate DeSantis, so the “own the libs” box is checked. And, I’ve gotten to the point where I struggle to understand why Twitter liberals try to ascribe any logic to MAGA New Right cocksuckers at this point.
White Nationalism has gone mainstream within the Republican Party, as has autocracy and fascism. So…lulz? The historical momentum is now such that there is an open path for DeSantis to be Trump’s successor, become an autocrat through a MAGA Koch Brothers Constitutional Convention and that’s it — he’ll be POTUS for 40 odd years.
Ron DeSantis
As I keep saying, I keep vacillating wildly thinking we’re going to slip peacefully into autocracy and thinking we’re going to have a civil war. If DeSantis is the GOP’s 2024 nominee then we’re definitely going to slip peacefully into autocracy. From what I can tell, he’s proven himself an adept governor — other than killing his electorate by seeing the COVID health crisis exclusively through the lens of partisan politics — and, as such, he could easily shepherd us into autocracy.
There are a few known unknowns, however, most of them deal with a 300 lb sack of shit known as Donald Trump. It would be pretty historically ironic if Trump shived DeSantis politically and so disrupted our now near-inevitable transition into a Russian-style managed democracy that we had a civil war instead.
The thing about DeSantis is if you combine how popular he is with the MAGA New Right base with his likely ability to hoodwink liberal soccer moms in the suburbs — he’s got a winning combination. To the point that he might even be able to win the 2024 election outright, no nullification on the part of a MAGA Congress needed.
It’s easy to imagine DeSantis wins fair-and-square and soon enough enough banks hard right into autocrat land and there will be absolutely nothing we can do about it. That will be it. He’ll start ranting about how we need a Constitutional Convention to “pass a balanced budget amendment” and when it is called up somehow, mysteriously “religious liberty” will be codified in the Constitution and presidents will be elected for seven years, not four.
At the moment, that seems to be our fate. People like me will be murdered in cold political blood by ICE — one way or another — and that will just be America until we get so hot that we all have to move to Canada.
Zeroth Law A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. — Isaac Asimov
By Ender
The most powerful nation in the world is careening towards an existential choice: autocracy or civil war. I hate violence. I hate guns. Hell, I hate conflict. But we’ve approached a historical moment when the average self-aware American needs to do a gut check: what are you willing to do to maintain and, if necessary renew, the American Covenant?
As such, I feel forced by the human, American equivalent of Asimov’s “Zeroth Law” to say that given that I would rather die on my feet a free man than live on my knees a slave to MAGA that maybe we should begin to prepare for civil war. This is an extremely risky option.
There are no assurances that we, “the Good Guys” would win. A simple glance at the first Civil War is a huge warning not to think about it — from 1861 to 1863 the CSA had a very, very good chance of winning. That’s one of the many things about war that sucks so bad: you just never know. You could end up killing a lot of people and still not achieve your war aims. Just ask the multitude of Iraqis and Iranians that died in the early 1980s.
But at the same time, the MAGA New Right is telegraphing their objectives. They want the United States to be an autocracy, a managed democracy. They are doing this in broad daylight. If you look at the Twitter feed of people like Jesse Kelly, it’s pretty much full of the exact same things I rant about, only from the exact opposite end of the political spectrum.
What I fear, he wants, and vis versa.
I’m not proposing you buy a gun or anything — please, for fuck’s sake don’t — but I am saying you have at best about four years (January 2025) to get your affairs in order before we either slip peacefully into a Russian-style autocracy or we have a civil war of some sort.
If you have the means, buy a passport and get out while you still can. If you’re like me and don’t think you’re going to have the means to leave, you need to start to game out what you’re going to do. In some respects, a lot of this is macro and out of the hands of any one person. The choice of civil war or autocracy isn’t really in my — or anyone else’s hands.
But if we do have a civil war — which I pray we won’t — freedom loving people have to get over themselves and start thinking on an existential level how they can help the war effort. I know myself well enough to know that I’m probably going to throw myself into the revolution should it happen. I’m a good writer, speaker and organizer.
Should history decide to give me the opportunity to help save the United States, I’m going to answer the call.
Or, put another way, don’t let yourself be cowed by the civil war talk of the New Right. Rather, call their bluff and start to game out what you might do on an individual basis to combat those fucktards when the moment comes. The Blue States have a huge advantage when it comes to their economies, political unity and concentration of population.
The issue is, just like with the early days of the first civil war, if the Blue States will have the wherewithal to fight fire with fire. It could be that the Red States will sucker punch Blue States and while they’re recovering simply strangle what’s left of American democracy while Blue States recover from the inital blow.
But the Zeroth Law tells me, on a personal, abstract basis what to do.
By writing these four novels at once, I get to flesh out everything in a way that makes sense. In a way, I get to write one huge fucking novel that happens to be broken into four pieces.
With this first novel, I really like how I have strict conditions I have to work within. I know what is going to happen in the next three books and, as such, some things are out of my control. In a way, that makes writing the novel a lot easier.
I still have no idea what I’m doing, so I still feel as though I’m spinning my wheels at times. But these days, I’m using brute force to get myself where I want to be.
I really — really — want to have something finished in a big way by around the end of August. That is an arbitrary deadline that hopefully will force me to work a lot harder for a lot longer when I have the mood than maybe otherwise.
It’s a lot of work and a lot of fun. I am growing embarrassed by how much and how long I’ve written and talked about this project. I would just shut up, but I’m too much of an extrovert.
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