The Worst is NOT Behind Us

Four years ago, Trump won the presidential election and that decision, not only unregretted by the millions that voted for him but by more who added their support this year, is going to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.

The visceral hate for Trump and his administration is not grounded in a repulsion to his ‘personality’ but to his utter disregard for the office of president, any American who doesn’t fluff his ego, and his rampant, naked corruption but perhaps nothing justifies loathing Trump and his entire blood and political families that his mismanagement of the pandemic.

Under a sane and competent administration this would have been still a terrible year, the disease cares not for your feelings, your economic desires, or your political preferences, it is airborne, it is contagious, and it is lethal. Around the globe cases increasing as winter descends on the northern hemisphere and the best prepared nations are fighting another front but America, divided by a tantrum throwing president and millions who followed to ‘own the libs’ and ‘drink liberal tears’ is plunging over the cliff and into a winter chaos and death.

The recent vaccines news that two different vaccines are showing potentially above 90% efficacy is fantastic but for most Americans those vaccines are months and months away, most likely spring or even summer of 2021 but the virus is here now. The virus is spreading like an uncontrolled wildfire now. The virus is killing more than a thousand every day now. Here are the current cases, hospitalized, and daily deaths.

We are all tired of this. We are all exhausted by the never-ending pandemic but it is on each and every one of us to save lives, to hold on a little bit longer, to restrain our pent up desires for a few months more and save our fellow Americans from lonely, painful, death.

The New Soviet Man

The central and critical element off a democratic system is that the loser of a contest accepts defeat and legitimizes the contest. Without this there is no democracy. The Soviets of the USSR allowed no elections because they were unwilling to accept any result which did not validate their authority. One party rule assures that you never, ever have to concede. Concession is democratic and refusing to concede is anti-democratic.

Trump refuses to concede. The GOP, with few exceptions, is either actively refusing to concede along with him or playing silent and hoping that their cowardice is unnoticed. Trump and the GOP are being anti-democratic.

Let’s be clear. This is not ‘waiting for the process.’ The process as it had been established and conducted for generations has been followed except by Trump and his acolytes. The votes are tabulated, when one candidate has a lead that mathematically can’t be over some by the remains votes the state is called, when enough states are called that the candidate has more than 270 electoral college votes that candidate is then the President-Elect.

In November 2016, to this nation’s horror, that was Trump when he breached the ‘Blue Wall’ and won WI by 22,748 votes, MI by 10,704, and PA by 44,292. Neither his opponent nor the Democratic party refused to concede for weeks, He was the President-Elect.

Biden has rebuilt the ‘Bule Wall’ with his victories in WI by 20,546, MI by 147,393, and PA by 66,334 and with the additional victories in AZ and GA his election is unassailable. No recount, which typically shifts votes by about 500, is going to change this outcome. Joe Biden is the President-Elect. To insist that Biden shouldn’t be referred to as President-Elect is undemocratic, undermine faith in the integrity of the election, and fuels the dangerous conspiracy theory that vast voter fraud is responsible for Trump defeat. With millions of devoted followers, some of whom who have already acted with political violence, remember the mail bombs sent to Democratic politicians, this is not only dangerous to our political institutions but to the citizenry as well.

Each supporter of the conservative movement has a choice, accept the results of a free and fair election by rebuking Trump and his lies or refuse to concede, damage our democracy, and become the New Soviet Man.

November’s Italian Genre: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage

Due to me running late and a minor migraine this will have to be quick.

Sunday my sweetie-wife and I watched, via Sd Film Geeks’ monthly festival of Italian Genre Cinema, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage one of the films, along with Blood and Black Lace that established and defined the giallo genre of movies that focused on lurid tales of sex and violence.

The film centers on Sam Dalmas an American author on an extended vacation in Italy. On the eve of his return to America Sam witnesses an attempted murder of a woman in an art gallery. Due to his intervention the woman survives, and Sam becomes part of the police’s hunt for the maniac who has already killed three times. Sam investigates on his own, but with surprising police assistance and acceptance, drawing the killer’s attention and becoming a target himself endangering his own life and that of his live-in girlfriend. Eventually the killer is discovered with the genre appropriate twists and order is restored.

This film was fun to watch. The twists in the plot and the eventual revelations are mor logical than last month The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, though as with all Giallo it is important to approach the film with prodigious suspension of disbelief. Luckily this edition was subtitled and not dubbed, preserving the actors’ portrayals and enhancing the experience/ The cinematography is lush and colorful displaying the tastes that would become the signature of director Dario Argento. As a cherry on top my sweetie-wife also spotted a connection to Star Trek the Original Series. So, if you get a chance to stream this one, do so.

Do You Need Pleasant, Non-Stressful Viewing?

This year has been a very tough one for so many people and here in early November the television seems to be a device invented to deliver stress directly into people brains. However, there are programs that not only do not talk endlessly about the crumbling state of civilization but also are devoid of assault, murder, and other stressful act even when committed in fiction and I am here to bring one of those.

Travel Man 48 Hours in … is hosted by The IT Crowd‘s Richard Ayoade and follows in the wake of his program Gadget Man. Where gadget Man a program where Richard demonstrated various apps and gadgets came off as advertising way too much Travel Man is much more pleasant. (Aside from season one where there were still unfortunate elements of Gadget Man still lurking about.) The basic premise of Travel Man 48 Hours in … is that in each episode Richard travels a city bringing along a celebrity guest and that explore the location for two days, sampling food, buying trinkets, while providing a running comedy commentary. A good introduction to the series might be Helsinki which Richards visits with American actor and comedian Paul Rudd and we are introduced to a Burger King with a sauna.

Each episode runs about 23 minutes and makes for a very pleasant, entertaining, and utterly unserious break from the real world.

Travel Man 48 Hours in … is currently streaming on Hulu.

Another Cliffhanger

I despise cliffhangers. Books that leave you in a lurch for 20 years, television programs that think it’s cool to have massive dramatic shifts at the close of a season, and nail-biting presidential elections, all are terribly frustrating.

As I write this the states called for Biden total to 253 electoral college votes with Trump’s total coming up to 214. Biden needs just 17 more to win the election, Pennsylvania does it, as do any two of the other five so the odds favor Biden but until the votes are tabulated we will not know.

What is clear is that the massive crushing destruction of Trumpism has not occurred. Even if Trump is defeated, which seems likely, the electoral attraction of Trumpism will remain a potent force in Republican politics. His blatant racism, sexism, and cruelty will be a weapon available for politician with an equal lack of moral but with great talent and intelligence to wield against ‘the others.’

White, male, grievance politics are not equivalent to conservatism, but they have displaced conservatism as the motivating force in GOP ideology. There are valid issues and questions that can be approached from a conservative perspective, what is the proper role of government in the economy? where does the line lie between an individual’s rights and the collective good? These questions have nothing to do with wanting to ‘own the libs’ or inflecting suffering solely for the point of suffering. There is nothing conservative is disregarding the painful death of nearly a quarter of a million Americans because it is disruptive to your election or ignoring the rule of law because adhering to it brings a painful price.

America’s future is very much in doubt.

I Almost Feel Like a Pantser

Today is a day to turn my attention away, at least for a few hours, from the electoral crisis gripping our nation so I’m going to talk about my writing.

I am an outliner. I can’t tackle a long form piece of fiction without an outline. For me the critical junctions in a story must be known before I can start putting the words in a row. But my outlines are not all the same.

If I am remembering correctly my longest outline for a novel was a massive 87 pages and for my current WIP it is 21 pages.

However, as I am writing this novel it feels like there is so much more being discovered in the process that wasn’t even hinted at in the outline.

Oh, the act breaks are falling on the same major event and the plot aspects are proceeding perfectly on pace, but I am inventing and uncovering aspects I had not thought about that only arise as I try to fit myself into the character’s skin. Major emotional beats are coming from out of nowhere and with the foreknowledge of where I need to end up, I can incorporate them properly.

When I started I had a lot of trepidation about this project, it’s a genre I haven’t really written in before, its main character is a challenge, and knowing that it is very likely that someone already is holding expectations about it all pile on new levels of anxiety and yet it seems to be flowing rather nicely.

Here’s hoping that continues.

Lives are on the Line

Election season concludes tomorrow with the US’s official election day, this year November 3rd. The consequences of this year’s election are incalculable but include, redistricting for control of congress, America’s standing in the world, to future of deep and binding relationships with out allies, corruption of our democratic institutions, the rule of law, but perhaps most pressing and certainly most immediate if the course of the pandemic in the United States.

The COVID-19 pandemic has, due to the bungling of this administration, killed more than nearly a quarter of a million people in America. Our winter of discontent is unlikely to become glorious summer with the narcissistic, intellectually challenged, corrupt crime family of the Trumps still occupying the administration.

To save the nation, Trump must be turned out.

To save our national soul, Trump must be turned out.

To save our lives, Trump must be turned out.

Here is a chart showing the course of the pandemic in the US and it’s plain that the projections of horrific and unsustainable.

8_US Cross Curves

People often say vote like your lives depend on it, this election is not hyperbole.

The Problem with Frankenstein Films

Being a universally beloved and known property that exits in the Public Domain there is rarely a shortage of adaptations, reinterpretations, and extension of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.

The last really big elaborate adaptation came from producer Francis Ford Coppola and director/star Kenneth Branagh with 1994’s Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. I remember seeing this one in the theater and being, well, underwhelmed.

It has a fantastic cast, Branagh as Frankenstein, Robert De Niro as the Monster, Helena Bonham Carter as Elizabeth and a slew of other great actors of the period, but that couldn’t put the film over the top leaving it as just a couple of hours of entertainment.

I think there’s an element that James Whale and the four writers of the 1931 Universal classic Frankenstein got correct that many later editions failed at and that is getting straight to the point of the story.

The 1931 film opens with Frankenstein’s fiancé concerned because she hasn’t seen her love in sometime. After collecting a mutual friend and an old instructor they head to his lab and barge in on the night of creation. Bam! We’re off and running.

1994’s adaptation returns to the novel’s framing device of an arctic explorer coming across Frankenstein, near death, and hear the tale told as flashback. (A flashback that violates Point of View with Frankenstein recounting details of scenes he never witnessed, but the novel does this as well.) We sit though extended sequences of Frankenstein’s life, his loves, his slowly building obsessions until finally we get to him creating life.

The truth of the matter is we don’t care about the backstory. It holds no suspense. Ask nearly anyone what happens in Frankenstein and they’ll tell you a scientist makes a living monster from dead body parts. This exploration of growing obsession is pointless. We know where he ends up, we know what he is going to do, and unless you have invented a unique take wholly divorced from the source material, you’re just boring us while we wait for the subject matter that brought us to the theater.

Man, I Miss Role-Play Gaming

Last year I launched a role-playing campaign of Fantasy Games Unlimited Space Opera, featuring the worst edited rule book in the history of professional RPGs. This was a return to basics for me as my most successful RPG campaign had been Space Opera ones back in the 1980s and this new campaign included players from those glorious times.

And then 2020 happened.

My novel launched at the start of America’s pandemic induced lock-down and the regular game session were suspended.

COVID-19 took a beloved friend from our circle of gamers.

And still we are restricted, desperately dodging the virus as best we can.

I so miss those twice a month sessions with my friends. Laughing, playing, and having a great time.

I suppose it is possible to have a zoom game, but it wouldn’t be the same.

This will pass but until it does there is little we can do but be smart, be safe, and try to survive.

The Final Six Days — Hopefully

America’s presidential election day, the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November, is next week. Where once this day represented the day voters actually went to the polls and cast their ballots this year more than every it is the termination day following weeks of voting and with luck and a motivated electorate, we may have the election’s resolution Tuesday.

If the election is close and with a number of states not counting their mailed in ballots until election day itself it could be days or even weeks before we know the outcome, notwithstanding other intruding events such as court challenges attempting to shut down vote counting early. One persistent fear is that of a ‘red mirage.’ Because supporters of the President are more likely to discount the dangers of the pandemic they had been telling pollsters that they plan to vote in person while Independent and Democratic voters have stated a clear preference for mailed ballots. This could lead to a situation where votes cast in person and reported election night favor Trump but are no reflective of the final result because mailed ballots have yet to be counted. However, if the turnout is high and the results are not close then the hazard of a red mirage is far less likely.

As of this writing 538’s average of national polls has Biden with a lead of 8.5 points and their election model is projecting his odds of winning at 88%, significantly better Hillary Clinton’s odds at this point last cycle.

I am still hoping and can see it is far from impossible that not only does Biden crush Trump is a 1980 style route but that the GOP suffers massive defeats at every level of government throughout the union.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur