Updating Political Dialogue, and Other Considerations
My name has been made on this blog with a variety of political, social, and historical commentaries, attempting the gauge the influence of the past on the turmoil of the future. Sometimes fiction is the best attempt to understand a moment, or our moment in time (pieces under the heading of American Fairy Tales). All of these products are part of the same attempts to understand our singular moment, the motives and oppression of the present-tense. And yet there is far more to this than simply barking slurs at whichever opposition we find ourselves momentarily set against. For an update I would like to at first offer a preview of the variety of projects that for here, as well as for the larger work outside I am now consumed with, and which should be coming to both this website and a bookstore near you (I guess that means Amazon) soon.
To begin there is a new fairy tale in the works, one occurring in 1963 and dealing not so much with the assassination of a President as with the cultural psychosis that allowed such a horror to be accepted by nearly half of the American population. Additionally there are the professional projects, the biography, the study of history, the end-of-the-world fantasy that take their ideas from the chaotic beliefs of the present moment. All of these horrors are relevant to the larger premise I attempt to preach (without either radicalism or religious analogy), and it seems important that I state this prior to going any further.
Now I have been busy–very busy–writing and writing and writing on the projects that should either make me quite a bit of money and/or win me some literary prizes. Yes, this is an arrogant statement, but if nothing else I understand what leads the work of various genres into the dedicated praise of those who anonymously make academic judgment. But this is merely ambition, the ego of the writer convincing themselves they are a genius.
We should get past this. All this brief commentary is will be a vague self-promotion of anticipation promoting the still incomplete ideas I will soon present for your judgment. The story is among my favorites within the small-scale project, American Fairy Tales, that I have randomly (and occasionally published) throughout the entirety of my adult life (1992 was the first). The history book has become a project of vast importance (at least to me), on trying to understand the editorial fractures of my nation. The biography is the study of an individual who in many ways represents the last serious strain of rebellion in my home, and the novel is a conclusion to everything terrible that I see in the world and the worst case scenarios that might in fact plausibly afflict us.
All I want to say, finally, here and now, for those of us who still love our nation (and I am a US citizen, without a nationalist bone, still in love with the idea of my home), is that I suggest you read a book, one that might provide a deeper insight into the trends of both history, and a piercing example of how the same stupidity and horror continues to afflict us generation after generation, humanity never learning from our mistakes. Here, this is all and this is where I will leave us. I want to recommend the British historian Richard J. Evans’ trilogy on Nazi Germany, The Rise of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War, each a stunning example of the background of how organized society might fall into the partisan muck of hatred and singular revolutionary instinct based exclusively upon prejudice, dissatisfaction, and conflicted rage. (https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9780143034698&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-ISBN-_-used https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9780143037903&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-ISBN-_-used https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9781594202063&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-ISBN-_-used).
And yes, I know that it is irresponsible to compare any leader, either modern or historical, to the bald genocidal hatred of Adolph Hitler, and that is not what I wish to do. No, I am talking about us–about all of us, you and me and all the simmering anger outside of our windows. These studies are not about Hitler, not even about the grotesque ideology of the Nazi Party. What they discuss is society itself, about what causes such rift, such disdain, what provides struggling and frustrated minds with the need to blame one another for whatever it is we find going wrong with our lives or our nation or the whole wide world. This is not about a single leader, about a Stalin or Mao or Trump, or any other those varying successful authoritarian figure heads. What we need to consider–truly, passionately, and without whatever party affliction and smugly cynical blame game we devolve ourselves within more out of Thanksgiving dinner provocation than anything we might truly believe–what we need to acknowledge, truly, in these ticking by moments, is just how much we should blame ourselves and not just the opposition for the diminishing of our values, the dismissal of consideration, and the tragic arc of history that could so easily lead to something no one seems capable of seeing as they go out and vote for people not because they believe in them, but only because it might piss off those they disagree with.
