Steven R. Boyett's Blog, page 2

Better Living Through Math

California governor Gavin Newsom warns that the state projects roughly 56% of its population will be infected with the COVID-19 virus over an 8 week period.

California population = 39.5 million56% of 39.5M = 22,120,000COVID-19 death rate = 2%2% of 2,212,000 = 442,000

That’s 442,000 dead people as a result of infections incurred over the next two months. In California alone.

Anyone still saying this is no big deal, people are overreacting, it’s a liberal plot, not gonna change your behavior — go fuck yourselves.

And maybe pull out your smart phone and do that math with 330 million and 9 billion as the starting figures. (If you’re too lazy to figure it on your cell phone, which you could’ve done for months now, because these numbers have been there the whole time, it’s 3,696,000 and 100,800,000 dead.)

Now try to imagine the emotional, economic, and physical impact of that many dead bodies in that amount of time.

Or just keep insisting you’re right, and wait two months for someone to throw lime in a pit filled with your friends, your relatives, you.

What’s That Sound?

Stop being surprised.
To be surprised by consistent and expected behavior is to be obtuse or in denial. Put yourself in their place and figure out where their beliefs are leading them.


Stop being offended.
Offense is the wrong response to being repeatedly and predictably pushed. Prevent the push. Resist the push. Push back.


Stop saying they should be ashamed.
They have no shame.


Stop asking how they can sleep at night.
Those without conscience sleep better than you do.


Stop saying that history will revile them.
History will be revised by them.


Stop saying voter turnout is the top priority.
Securing the vote is the top priority.


Stop waiting for someone to save you.

Comey was never going to save you. Mueller was never going to save you. Pelosi was never going to save you. Bolton was never going to save you. The intelligence agencies, the Steele dossier, the media, the press, Twitter, and Facebook were never going to save you. Impeachment was never going to save you. They aren’t worried about reelection, so it’s clear the election will not save you. Infrastructure is being stripped bare and will not save you. The courts are stacked and impeding rulings are being disregarded, so the law will not save you.

Anger might save you — if it leads to action. Action when you need saving means saving yourself. Saving yourself means staying active to save others.

Stop acting like a boxer who will win by sticking to the rules.
Our opponent is no longer there to box. He’s there to get rid of us and own the ring, and rules impede him. He brought a chainsaw. Stop appealing to the referee. Our opponent hired this referee after he forced the ethical one out. And after we’re eliminated our opponent will crown himself Champ for Life. He’ll claim he has no rivals, and no one will ever see any because all potential challengers will be culled and gang-walked out behind the arena and shot in the head and buried in unmarked pits.


Stop saying the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.
They don’t live in a moral universe. They are bending the arc to suit their ends.

This is who you’re up against. The time for wishing they would act like you is past. The time to reason with minds beyond reason is not only past, it never existed.

It’s time to act — not act like victims. Act up, act out, act now.

We think the sound of marching jackboots has receded into history. Our future hinges on our understanding that there was an even earlier time when that sound was not receding but approaching. When entire populations with our same faith in institutions and saviors and the triumph of moral right were trodden into ash and pits and slavery by the inundation of those boots. It’s the sound of history about to march across us, and denial has never silenced it.

The more things change….

I originally posted this when Trump was inaugurated. For the life of me I can’t figure out why it isn’t still up on my blog. But considering that events in Amerika make me think of this nearly every day, I’m making sure it’s up here. For me it remains more frightening than any horror-movie scene ever filmed.

Fight these motherfuckers.

Trump’s Reichstag Fire

Burning of the Reichstag, Germany, 1933

The Reichstag fire was an arson attack on the home of the German parliament in Berlin just one month after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. The Nazis publicly blamed the fire on communist agitators, and a subsequent emergency decree suspended civil liberties and instigated mass arrests of communists, including parliamentary delegates, which gave the Nazis a majority and enabled Hitler to consolidate his power. Speculation persists, based on circumstantial evidence, that the Nazis set the fire themselves to unite Germany against their political opponents.

Given the accelerating rate of the Trump administration’s policy implementation, and refusal on the part of law-makers and -enforcers to act against unilateral decisions emanating from the executive branch, I have become worried that — barring suspension of the election itself — there will be some equivalent to the Reichstag fire around the November midterms. (Admittedly it would have more effect before the 2020 presidential elections, but I don’t think he’ll wait that long.) My paranoid guess is that such an event would take the form of an assassination attempt, a high-profile bombing or terrorist attack on U.S. soil, or possibly a lethal confrontation at an immigration protest.

Such an event would cause a powerful, knee-jerk public reaction.  It would transform or silence many voices previously resisting the Trump regime, and make pariahs of those who still voice their opposition.  This finalization of Trump’s consolidation of power would conceivably catalyze the suspension of due process (which we are already seeing) and the implementation of martial law  (which he has already threatened).

The retirement of Supreme Court Justice Kennedy has opened the likelihood of the appointment of a solidly conservative new justice and an overwhelmingly conservative SCOTUS. This republican gain does, to me,  make the Reichstag-fire notion less likely than it seemed a few days ago.

But we are much farther along on the road to dictatorship than most people realize, and while the path back to a representative republic narrows by the day, the presidential, congressional, and public reaction to a “Reichstag-fire” event would be the point of no return. By the time the American public realizes it’s been played, it will be too late — and those who already support this administration won’t care that they’ve been played, because they’ve already armed themselves to defend the players.

Three years ago this sort of speculation would be solidly in tinfoil-hat territory. The fact that it now seems feasible, even if it turns out to be wrong, is a huge indicator of how far into the crazy our nation has ventured.

The Forever Vote

In May, Trump eliminated the position of cybersecurity coordinator on the National Security Counsel. Nothing has replaced it, and all intelligence agencies have sounded the alarm that the voting process is every bit as vulnerable to hacking as it was in 2016.

Such continued vulnerability certainly appears deliberate. This has caused me to wonder whether, shortly before the midterm (though possibly before the 2020 presidential election), Trump might suddenly see the light and warn the nation: Our elections are vulnerable! Can be HACKED! Can’t have a vote that’s rigged — MUST SECURE!

He would sign an EO delaying national elections until such time as a designated government agency or committee can deem them to be secure. The Republican congress, as invested as Trump is in not being ousted by angry Democrat and disaffected Republican voters, would back this.

It’s consistent with Trump’s pattern of creating a crisis, blaming someone for the crisis, and “solving” it in a way that solidifies policy or political advantage in his favor. Subsequent  determination of secure elections would never transpire, and ensuing accountability would attenuated by the attention devoted to putting out the fires of other burning crises.

One reason I don’t find this scenario outlandish is because the Republican congress is clearly not concerned about the public reaction to their policies. They haven’t viewed  defection from within their own ranks as consequential. For some time now they have avoided their constituencies at town halls.

They aren’t acting like delusional martinets who don’t realize how unpopular they are, and they don’t act like a soon-to-be-evicted party that’s trashing the house before the new tenants arrive. Look at Mitch McConnell’s long-game actions and success. He’s the chief strategist of a group that clearly has no uncertainty about being around in 2020 to run interference for Trump, and feels no accountability to his increasingly disaffected base. Maybe they know the fix is in. Or maybe they know there’ll be no vote.

On Trump’s end, delaying the vote would be a substantial stepping stone toward moving to extend the term of his presidency — a desire he’s already expressed.

In any case, such a proposition — allegedly for our own good —is something to watch out for.

Civility and the Pointed Finger

To demand that I meet the architects of savagery with civility is to insist that I negotiate with an adversary in a language that he does not speak. It forces my acquiescence and yields me nothing else, while at the same time yielding him a moral high ground he has previously unoccupied.

Speaking to your opposition in a language that he will understand is not the same as adopting his ethics or rationale. It is instead a statement intended to have little room for misinterpretation by the party to whom it is directed. Because if there is any language in which the current GOP is fluent, it’s the language of restriction. Of denial. Of oppression. Of ostracism.

The accusation levied against such shunning is that it is evidence of liberal hypocrisy, because it proves intolerance on the part of a group that claims tolerance as a necessary trait. The GOP may very well be considered free from such an accusation because the GOP has never claimed to be tolerant.

But what those who level this accusation fail to understand — and what, sadly, many of those accused don’t seem to realize, either — is that such alleged  incivilities are a personal declaration that a line of demarcation has been crossed.  That a social code, an ethos — which by definition draws boundaries between behaviors that are acceptable and those that are not — has been violated.

Though you may be held to account by this declaration, you have no obligation to rationalize it to anyone. A moral decision, a declaration of unwillingness to aid, abet, or silently condone unacceptable behavior, needs no rationalizing.  It’s an announcement that you are confident about which side of a moral and ethical line you are standing on — and that you will not be timid about pointing to those who cross it and calling out as wrong, as unjust, harmful as to the precepts of your society.

For some time now the GOP has understood  this in its very DNA. It feels no obligation whatsoever to explain itself, and it understands the tactical advantage of demanding that their opposition is obliged to.

Incivility to the architects of savagery. Own it.

Elections as Magical Thinking

People keep chanting “November is coming!” as if it’s going to be a climactic episode of A Game of Thrones. Chanting about the Blue Wave as if repetition will make it so.

Your vote will mean nothing if the voting process is not secure — and virtually nothing has been done to guarantee that it will be secure.

Ask yourself why not, and a host of obvious answers reveal themselves. Chief among them: Because those most likely to be adversely affected by the outcome of a vote don’t want it to be secure.

These are politicians we’re talking about here. If they were worried that an insecure vote would cost them their seats, they would contort like Cirque du Soleil acrobats to guarantee the electoral process. But they’re doing nothing. How brightly red must this flag be?

Don’t wait for November. Act now to secure the vote. Call your representatives.

Our voices mean nothing if they aren’t heard. Make sure your vote counts. Then cast it.

On Passing the Torch

         “What do you want us to do, imitate you? Tell you how great you all were? Okay fine: You built a really impressive world. But it’s broken now and you won’t throw it away and you’re mad because we don’t want it. You want us to live by rules that have nothing to do with the way our world works and you hate us because we won’t. You are lost gods. What’s pathetic is you’re lost and you’re still around and all you do is bitch because we don’t appreciate you.”

         “We’re trying to pass the torch before you forget how to make fire.”

         “Your torch blew out thirty years ago. You go ahead and hold onto it. One day we’ll bury it with you. And then we’ll go on and live without you in this world, the one you couldn’t adapt to. It really will be our world then and we’ll figure it out just fine. We’ll make fire our way. We’ll make history our way. So fuck you. Fuck all of you.”

         And suddenly I understood why I was crying. Under that cracked overpass on a crumbling freeway in that dead world. At some point recently but without realizing it I had already buried my father, buried his world and buried the whole selfish lot of them, and I was grieving, and grieving all the harder because I knew I would move on. Because all of us would bury them and move on.

–from Elegy Beach (2009), by Steven R. Boyett

Satan’s Honda

A brimstone milestone for my car:

Signing & DJing @ Borderlands SF

Borderlands Books in San Francisco is having a huge 20th Anniversary celebration on Nov. 18. There’ll be a ton of writers autographing their books. I’ll be signing at 5:00 PM, along with Ken Mitchroney, my co-author on Fata Morgana.

At 4:00 PM I’be DJing the party  (except for my signing slot, when I’ll be playing a recorded mix), then DJing the sponsor party afterward.

 

Borderlands has been a fantastic supporter of my work, and I had a blast DJing their party last year (the live mix, Funk by the Book, was released on Groovelectric), and I’m really looking forward to this year’s. If you’re around, stop by and say hi!

Borderlands Books

20th Anniversary Party

Saturday, Nov. 18, 2017

12:00 – 6:00 PM

866 Valencia Blvd., San Francisco, CA