David Dubrow's Blog, page 8

Culture War: DC McAllister and Yashar Ali

For the decent things that Twitter can sometimes be good for, it is nevertheless inherently poisonous in the same way that a firearm is inherently dangerous: the moment you pick it up with the intent to use it, you’re engaging in risky behavior that can result in the destruction of another human being.

Conservative columnist Denise (DC) McAllister learned that over the weekend.

A week or so ago, McAllister was already subject to ridicule over saying, on Twitter, that the television program The View “…seems to me to be a roundtable of delusional mental midgets ricocheting ignorance and lack of emotional regulation.” Meghan McCain, who is on The View, replied with, “You were at my wedding, Denise.” For reasons known only to fans of Meghan McCain, this became a popular meme. It’s possible that McAllister was invited to McCain’s wedding because McCain was marrying Ben Domenech, the co-founder of The Federalist, a website McAllister wrote for.

On Friday, March 29, McAllister tweeted, “Trying to talk to my husband while Carolina is playing. He looks at me and says, ‘Woman, you know better than this. The game is on.’ He’s right. I slipped. Commercial comes on. I fetch him a beer. He grabs me. Deep kisses. Patience and timing, ladies. That’s the lesson.”

Yashar Ali, a left-wing journalist, felt the need to tweet this in response:

“He’s right. I slipped.”

Oh Denise pic.twitter.com/8cWlcGPtUm

— Yashar Ali

Feedback Requested on Story Idea

The vast majority of my fiction involves the fantastic, the numinous, or the supernatural in some way. It’s the kind of fiction I like to read, and people always say that you should write the stories you’d want to read. Still, it’s good to branch out sometimes and write fiction that’s a little more grounded in reality. But it’s got to be interesting. It’s got to be credible.

With that in mind, I’ve got an idea for a novel I’m working on, and I’m looking for feedback to determine if it’s believable or not.

—

The novel focuses on an actor, the son of political activists. Despite his political connections he’s a relative unknown, skating by on looks, ethnicity, and sexual orientation to make his career. He’s fortunate enough to land a role on a mid-list television show that showcases his ethnicity and sexual orientation, but it’s not enough. It’s not catapulting him to the stardom he deserves. So he creates some fake, threatening hate letters that he mails to himself, and shows them to the television studio. He figures that if they think he’s important enough to get hate mail, he’s important enough to get a bigger role with a larger salary.

No dice. A few people are properly sympathetic, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Frustrated, he takes his efforts to the next level. He hires a couple of men to beat him up (but only a tiny bit: remember, his face is his fortune) and make it look like a hate crime focusing on his politics, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. In planning this hoax, he makes some fundamental mistakes: he hires people he knows to perform this fake beat-down; he arranges for the beat-down to happen on the coldest night of the year when people are trying to stay warm instead of hunting for gay, black no-name actors to assault; he makes sure the beat-down happens near security cameras that are pointing in the wrong direction; he describes the assailants as white conservatives in one of the most left-wing cities in the country; and he pays the assailants with a personal check.

In one way, the attack is a success: his story makes the national news. Politicians, A-list actors, and journalists across the country unquestioningly swallow what is an obvious pack of lies, and amplify it as a symbol of the country’s appalling bigotry. He’s feted as a survivor and civil rights activist. Half-witted journalists conduct softball interviews designed to make him look like a suffering saint. Anyone with the gall to question his hoax is pilloried as racist and homophobic. He becomes the perfect victim-hero. A household name.

The local police, however, begin to pick at the massive holes in his account, and despite that they work for the most corrupt city in the United States, they indict and arrest him. Not in the interest of justice, as he’s told exactly the kind of made-up story they love to hear: racist white conservatives hunting for innocent black men. No, they indict him because he made the city look foolish with such an obvious hoax, pulled off so poorly. And, more importantly, they indict him because he’s shone a spotlight on the inner workings of a hopelessly corrupt city infrastructure, and that can’t happen. Almost-nightly murders are one thing: they’re bearable. Stupid hoax hate crimes are another.

The actor’s foolishness in planning and execution makes this a slam-dunk case. He’s fired from the TV show. He’s mocked for his stupidity and derided for his blatant attempt to incite a race war in the style of the Rodney King riot. Nevertheless, he protests his innocence throughout. Why not? What does he have to lose? With his political connections and first-offender status he’ll never see the inside of a jail cell. So he bluffs it out.

And it works. A former First Lady (or maybe even a former POTUS; I’m still working that out) who lived in the city where the fake hate crime took place makes a call to someone, who makes a call to the State’s Attorney, who drops all charges against the actor. He pays a nominal fee, does a few meaningless, comfortable hours of community service, and goes free. Then he does a victory lap in which he continues to maintain his innocence. When asked about why they dropped the case, the State’s Attorney gives multiple answers, none of which ring the slightest bit true. The State’s Attorney’s office is perfectly aware of how horrible this looks, how it puts the city’s fundamental corruption on full display, but simply doesn’t care. This will all blow over in the wake of the next news cycle. And if you don’t like it you can call the chaplain; he’s available for counseling.

As for the actor, his name is still known worldwide. He’s a free man. He beat the system.

—

So, what do you think? Is this a believable story or not?

Dear Dad: The Inside Story

My short story Dear Dad is available to read free of charge at CinderQ, Taliesin Nexus’s online literary magazine. It shares space with Andrew Klavan’s story Goodfellow, so it’s in great company. Before you read further, you might want to check out Dear Dad if you haven’t already.

CinderQ wanted something connected to one of my earlier works, and at the time I had just published the Appalling Stories anthology. Returning to the strange world I’d created in the short story The Bitterness of Honey was a natural fit. My stories Bake Me a Cake (satire), Melanie’s Becoming (thriller), and Cultural Overtones (science fiction) didn’t leave me with anywhere to go, but Honey was a world I wanted to return to. It posits a bizarre apocalypse scenario: environmental extremists working with the once-vanished, now-returned honeybees to return the world to a pre-technological state. The bees are back, the tagline might say, and they sure are pissed! Beemageddon. Beepocalypse.

I always liked the gray alien science fiction stories: Whitley Streiber’s Communion and other fictionalized accounts of First Contact with extraterrestrials. Are the ETs hostile, friendly, or so alien that we can’t divine their motives? My intent was to do a First Contact story with these apparently intelligent bees: awestruck humans learning that the world’s a lot bigger and stranger than they thought, and how/why they’d work with such creatures to destroy human civilization.

In Dear Dad I didn’t quite get there. Which is a shame, because the story didn’t wind up where I’d planned it, but also a good thing, because the story I still want to write remains to be told.

Instead, Dear Dad became a story about a love triangle, of sorts, with bees and sex and murder. I found it in the black space in my brain that all of my ideas come from, the black space that’s so damned hard to get into and so easy to slip out of. The Muse. The Muse’s womb. The unconscious. The creative process. Whatever.

I enjoy reading first-person perspective fiction as much as anyone, but writing it isn’t easy. There’s nowhere else to go: you’re stuck with the same protagonist, so you better like him. And the readers better like him. Contrast that with my Armageddon trilogy, a very long, epic-style work with multiple protagonists, and you can see how I might find first-person perspective more difficult to write. I always have to have a reason for the narrator to write, a format for writing it, and a way of the account getting to the reader. In the short story Her Bodies, Her Choice in Appalling Stories 2, the narrator is talking to a video camera. In Appalling Stories 3, the narrator scribbles his story on scraps of rice paper.

In Dear Dad, the narrator writes an email to his estranged father. Hence the title.

The protagonist’s relationship with his father is a heartbreaker for me. My son’s still in single digits, so he needs me and we see each other every day and spend time together. He’s my little boy and I love him. Many of my friends have older/adult children, so they see their kids less often. They’re less involved in the day-to-day. It’s part of the maturation process and it’s what’s supposed to happen. The 2019 me doesn’t like to think about how the father-son relationship will become more distant for the 2029 me, but by then I’ll be fine with it. For now, it’s bad enough that my protagonist is in a position to have that adult relationship with his father, but it’s worse that he has no relationship with his father, and is reaching out to send one last message. I wanted to communicate that anger and resentment and longing and foolishness, and I hope I managed it in some small way.

Someday I’ll write the First Contact bee story. Someday. For now, enjoy Dear Dad.

Not the End of the World: Just the End of the Benefit of the Doubt

Everybody likes to complain about how divided the country is. Consider the irony: those who bleat most loudly about our divisive politics also mouth the “diversity is our strength” bromide. Diversity is, by its very nature, divisive. Diversity isn’t strength. Unity is strength: political, cultural, and moral unity. Shared ethics. A nation isn’t strong when its population consists of different skin colors, cultures, and genders; it’s strong when its population shares a unity of purpose, mores, and love of country. The United States no longer has that strength. The diversity that our progressive betters demand that we cherish includes loathing of America’s Constitutional system of governance, its founding, its people, its bedrock principles, and its standing in the world as an economic and military titan. Their raison d’être is acting on that loathing. That’s the diversity you must embrace. Their hatred of this country is more valid than your patriotism: accept this or be destroyed.

Where this leads us is the end of the benefit of the doubt. Every last ugly thing you’ve suspected has proved true over the last several years, barring stupid conspiracy theories like 9/11 Trutherism or Russians stealing the 2016 presidential election:

Progressives have a problem with Jews and Israel. It’s called anti-Semitism. We’ve suspected this for decades. Now they’ve proved it .
There is a shadow government (the Deep State) that has far too much influence on daily events than any unelected group should.
Progressives would rather murder babies both inside and outside of the womb than jeopardize a single vote from one of their prime interest groups: abortion enthusiasts.
Hollywood doesn’t just possess different values from ours. They seek to impose their corrosive values upon us through their near-monopoly on television/movie entertainment.
Federal law enforcement is corrupt in its leadership. The fish rots from the head down.
The vast majority of the news media exists to push progressive ideas, not report the news.
The university system is a corrupt institution that focuses on indoctrination over education.
We have a two-tiered justice system that plays favorites, and not just rich over poor.
The Republican party prefers talk over action. They’re weak and spineless and lacking in character, even the good ones.
Both political parties favor open borders for different reasons. They will be shielded from the consequences of their policies. You won’t.
Every last talking head on television, in print, and online is full of shit 99% of the time. Including me.

So now that we live at the End of the Benefit of the Doubt, what do we do?

Stop thinking about revenge. Or payback. Or how your favorite politician is going to stick it to Hillary or Mueller or anyone else. It’s not going to happen and unless you’ve been personally wronged by all the stupid bullshit going on in Washington D.C., your anger is misplaced. Don’t put your faith in politicians, even so-called outsiders. They’re all bad. All of them. They think they can run your life better than you can, even those who claim that they want to leave you alone. If you want to be angry, get mad at yourself: you believed in things that the evidence of your senses (including common sense) told you was untrue. I’m all for tribalism, and I rejoice in owning the other side as much as anyone. But social media battles won’t win the war. James Gunn is still making movies. Pete Davidson is still fucking Kate Beckinsale. These things don’t impact your life. Either laugh or get angry. Then get past it and move on.

If you want to do something about the End of the Benefit of the Doubt, live your life recognizing, in the present, how corrupt America’s institutions have become. Take nothing for granted. And, as uncomfortable as it is, you have to push back. You have to ask difficult questions, because growth comes from discomfort, not ease. We’ve lived lives of ease for too long, and it’s made us soft. Me included. During our decades-long vacation we let lunatics who believe that there are dozens of genders run our schools and make cartoons for our kids to watch. And we did it because we didn’t question the received wisdom. Diversity isn’t our strength. Tolerance of bad ideas isn’t a virtue. We are not a nation of immigrants; we’re a nation of citizens.

Push back. There are more of us than there are of them. Our leaders, such as they are, in Washington, Hollywood, the news media, and education need to be told that they’re on the fringe, not the mainstream. Question them, kick them out, humiliate them, and, when possible, reject them. They’re the enemy. They show you that every day. Why not believe them?

Appalling Stories 3 Is Live!

Appalling Stories 3: Escape from Trumplandia, is live!

Written with Ray Zacek, this satirical novella is the 21st century version of Pilgrim’s Progress, including Obama cults, Chinese super-technology, and over 25 horrible nicknames for Donald Trump!

What happens when the wokest folks you know go on a road trip through the reddest of Red States in search of the Promised Land?

45’s election didn’t just upend every talking head’s political predictions, it shredded the very fabric of space-time. The United States of America have become the Disunited States of Trumplandia, plagued by bizarre cryptids, Cthulhu megaliths, and alternate reality wormholes, all crushed under the tiny orange fist of the President Who Must Not Be Named.

Fed up with the Fanta-Faced Führer’s fascism, a caravan from the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Lightbringer seeks asylum in the Free Republic of California: a progressive paradise that waits with open arms for anyone brave enough to make the journey west…and survive.

These are their stories.

Get the book that Patrick Courrielche, co-creator of the podcast Red Pilled America, called, “hilarious dystopian porn!”

Bits and Pieces 2/28/2019

Bill Maher ruffled feathers/made headlines/pick-your-cliche in the most recent episode of his show, claiming that people who live in red states/flyover country are secretly envious of the blue state coastal elites, and want to be like them. “We have Chef Wolfgang Puck, they have Chef Boyardee,” he said. “They don’t hate us, they want to be us.” If I had it in me to be insulted by what anyone on television has to say anymore, I suppose I could muster some outrage over this. But I can’t. We rubes in the red states have seen how the elites live and don’t want any part of it. What’s telling is that Maher didn’t mention mores as a reason for this envy. He didn’t say, “We have abortion clinics on every corner, they have traditional families.” He didn’t say, “We have strict gun laws, they have personal responsibility.” And he didn’t say, “We have Hollywood, ground zero for institutionalized prostitution, sexual harassment, drug addiction, and pedophilia; they have churches.” What Maher’s proud of isn’t what we’re proud of. We just wish that the coastal elites would stay in their bailiwicks instead of moving to red states and voting for the same policies and politicians that ruined their original homes.

—

I’ve watched as many episodes of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica television program as I’m likely to; you can read my general impressions of it here. Now that I’ve gone through the vast majority of it, I’m struck by how much it’s a product of a different generation, a different set of TV rules for storytelling, tone, and style. Many of the episodes were two-parters, which stretched the envelope for a time before the advent of VHS players. Tone-wise, it was far from all doom-and-gloom. The fleeing Colonists encountered many planets on which humans lived and thrived; no matter what happened with the Cylon War, humanity was probably going to survive. Everything wasn’t a world-ending emergency, unlike today’s type of apocalyptic programming. Faith and God were very important to the Colonies; Commander Adama (who had the power of telekinesis, go figure) led the Colonists to Earth based initially on religious faith, not knowledge of our planet’s location in the universe. A later episode has the Colonial Fleet meeting Lucifer (yes, that Lucifer), who can only be defeated by angels (yes, those angels) who resurrect a fallen pilot and tell the Colonists where to find Earth. This kind of thing simply isn’t done anymore in science fiction programming. Yes, many of the episodes were hokey, silly, or corny, but it had heart. And, at the time, it was all we had. I highly recommend it as a fascinating look into the popular entertainment of just a few decades ago.

—

I recently read Eleanor Bourg Nicholson’s novel A Bloody Habit and enjoyed it, for the most part. To get the most out of it, you have to have read Bram Stoker’s Dracula recently, or have more than a passing recollection of the events therein. Bram Stoker has a cameo in A Bloody Habit, and the novel reads very much like a combination of Dracula pastiche and correction of the faith-based elements of the Stoker work. The vampire hunters of Habit are miles from the dashing, stake-wielding Van Helsing and Holmwood: they’re men of the cloth who recognize vampirism as demonic possession, and treat it as such. If you can work your way through the first third’s foundation-building, you’re in for a treat.

—

Appalling Stories 3 is coming soon, and while it hews to the previous volumes’ themes, it’s a different style of work. Get ready.

 

Social Media and Politics: The Endgame

You’ve heard this story before: a guy makes a political statement on social media, and the people who disagree are so incensed that they try to get him fired from his job over it. It starts with doxing (broadcasting his personal information online) and ends with calls to his employer. Maybe he gets fired, maybe he doesn’t. A cautionary tale for the Internet Age. By now it’s acquired the patina of urban legend: Watch what you say or they’ll dox you. It happens, you know. 

It does happen. It happened to my friend R.M. Huffman. I can’t say enough good things about Dr. Huffman. He’s a practicing anesthesiologist, a skilled writer, an illustrator, a husband, and the father of small children. In addition to writing the Sweet Tooth horror-comedy series, he’s also written the fantasy novels Leviathan and Fallen, was kind enough to write the foreword to Appalling Stories: 13 Tales of Social Injustice, and wrote the short story Never Again for the Appalling Stories 2 anthology. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll remind readers that I’m the managing editor of the Appalling Stories series.)

He’s also a Christian conservative, and he’s on Twitter. Not long after the 2019 State of the Union Address, while the abortion debate was still fresh in everyone’s minds thanks to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam publicly approving of the murder of newborn infants and New York State permitting the abortion of an infant up to the day of delivery, Huffman posted this:

We could make the claim that it’s a reasonable statement: after all, sex makes babies, generally. But to a certain segment of the population, it’s inflammatory. In a brief interview, I asked Huffman why he posted the tweet and tagged the Democrat politicians:

The political milieu at the moment still involved fallout from Governors Cuomo and Northam publicly supporting legal infanticide, which is exactly what “late-term abortion” actually is. The abortion question is entirely dependent on axioms: is a fetus a living, autonomous human, or is it simply tissue in a woman’s body? That being so, I thought that tweeting out the obvious truism that sexual intercourse can lead to pregnancy, albeit with a rhetorical flourish intended to catch people’s attention, and tagging some women whose voices would resonate with the target cohort might lead to a few pre-pregnancy decisions that would obviate the need to consider abortion whatsoever. In other words, I wanted girls to be reminded that “pro-choice” ought to mean “I can choose whether or not to have sex, and if I’m not also ready to carry a child, my choice needs to be ‘no.'” That’s all.

The tweet occasioned the expected anger and invective, which ran the gamut from standard name-calling to informing him, a father of four, that he’ll never get laid. Par for the course, and nothing to get exercised about. All you have to do is flip a switch and you’ll never see it. And if you do see it, who cares? The world’s full of angry people who say things on the internet that they’d never dare utter outside of it.

Not long after the tweet got a lot of heat from progressive Twitter, someone with the pseudonym Jimbob bigguns (sic), without buying or reading Huffman’s novel Fallen, gave it a one-star review on Amazon. (You’ll note that Jimbob’s done this to another conservative author, too.) It happens. It’s nasty, but it happens. You can’t keep people from doing that, and Amazon’s too busy to look at every single review for accuracy or political bias. Just about every conservative author’s dealt with that kind of thing. It’s what progressives on social media do to writers.

Then things got really ugly. At the time, his Twitter bio mentioned that he’s a practicing anesthesiologist.

Dr. Kat got the ball rolling with this tweet:

Not satisfied with simply linking to Huffman’s personal information, she added this statement: “It’d be funny if his ratings blew up with a sh*t ton of 1 *’s from his negative tweets.” Now Dr. Kat is coyly suggesting that her followers try to destroy his professional rating over words he posted on the internet. (Funny how she won’t spell out the word “shit,” but doesn’t scruple to attack him professionally.) They’re not his patients. They’ve never interacted with him on a professional level. Dr. Kat has never worked with him. And yet they’re trying to affect how he makes a living. This is not just malicious, but fraudulent.

So it’s bad, but not terribly damaging. Do most people check those ratings before allowing Huffman to treat them? Hard to tell. But this is where Dr. Kat’s buddies signal their intent to go for the real prize: getting him canned. The Launch Journals says, “Would be kinda great if this hill he’s choosing to die on also kills his current employment situation.” And Jaynie Campbell is only too happy to oblige by posting a list of Huffman’s hospital privileges and telling people to report him to the Texas Board of Medicine. Because of what he said on Twitter. Not because of his professional conduct as a physician. Not because of how he practices medicine. But because he said something she didn’t like.

When Jaynie Campbell gets called out for posting this information with the intent to get him fired, her response is, “It’s all PUBLIC information.” As though posting it on Twitter and encouraging people to destroy his career is perfectly reasonable because his information is readily available.

Last Stand in Oregon couldn’t wait to tell the world that he’d reported Dr. Huffman for professional misconduct over words on the internet. Huffman never treated him.

MIMI Pro wasn’t satisfied: “Make copies of his Facebook page and Twitter account.”

This encouragement to contact Huffman’s employers continued for some time, including suggestions that Huffman might rape an unconscious patient. Even though he never said anything of the kind. Even though none of them have seen him in a professional capacity.

Me: When did you first learn that people actually did contact your employer?

Huffman: As soon as I saw the first tweet that contained (inaccurate) hospital names and contact information, I knew they would. Anonymous leftist fascists aren’t bluffing; they really do want to ruin your life. To answer the question, though: the day after, when the CEO of an anesthesia group that mine occasionally associates with called me and told me that several hospitals had been asking him about the tweet. That’s when, as a personal favor to him and at his request, I deleted it.

What’s remarkable about the mindset of the people trying to put Huffman out of work over his politics is that they feel perfectly justified in doing so. Donna Jergentz, exulting in her cohorts’ efforts, said, “It’s just starting. I’ve heard of people doing stupid things online – throwing a medical career away for Politics? What a fool.” Nobody threw anything away. A mob is comprised of individuals, and individuals perform individual actions, including the attempt to destroy a man’s medical career. Over his Politics (sic).

Tina Desiree Berg simply saw the attempt to put Huffman out of work as the consequence of his problematic opinions. If you have the wrong thoughts and have the temerity to express those wrong thoughts, you shouldn’t be able to make a living.

The best justification for all of this came from A Cranky Yankee, whose magnum opus must be read to be believed:

Me: How has this affected your career?

Huffman: It hasn’t, because I scrubbed my Twitter feed entirely. A hospital administration that was a recipient of the doxxed information looked at my timeline and decided that my Christian, conservative beliefs about human sexuality were discriminatory to the “LGBTQ community” and thus violated hospital bylaws. I was given the choice to delete my account or face disciplinary action. Reluctantly, and with much counsel, I simply deleted my Twitter history instead of fighting a battle that I’d win, but would still hurt me professionally. My wife didn’t like me spending time on there anyway.

You’ll notice that the majority of the people trying to get Huffman fired use anonymous accounts. It’s a good strategy, because it shields them from similar attack. The anonymity makes them feel safe to say and do anything they want. Those few who have gainful employment and, presumably, something to lose, are protecting themselves with that anonymity.

The difference between social media and a firearm is that you don’t need a background check to use social media. Like a firearm, it’s a tool. It’s often very destructive in the wrong hands, and most of the time you only hear about how terrible it can be after someone’s been hurt by it. But it’s not intrinsically evil. Few things are. You just have to use it properly:

Never talk about politics on social media, even with people you agree with.
You’ve ignored 1., or you’re planning to. Fine. Never use your real name, use your real photo, or make references to your family while you’re on social media.
Choose an anonymous handle, one that you haven’t used elsewhere. Anonymity is key.
Don’t disclose any personal information on social media.
Don’t take anything other people say on social media seriously.
Don’t take what you say on social media seriously.
Use social media for 5 minutes a day, at most. This is not a joke.

Like it or not, there are many, many people out there who are angry, hostile, and petty enough to put you out of work if they take a mind to. We can explore what makes them tick another time, but suffice it to say that there’s more than enough ugliness out there to make you realize that even if you’re not at war with them, they’re at war with you. Act accordingly.

Me: What are you doing differently RE: online behavior now, versus before this foofaraw?

Huffman: From now on, the little I tweet will be strictly related to art and writing projects, which was the intended purpose of my having a Twitter account in the first place. My political efforts will be focused on local and state politics, where real battles can be won; Twitter victories are meaningless, but an online horde of angry liberals upset because you told them that sex can make babies can cause real-life damage. It just isn’t worth it.

A mature person learns from his own experience. A smart person learns from someone else’s experience. Despite my deeply-held opinions about politics, the culture war, and similar subjects, I’m finding that expressing these opinions on social media contributes more to noise than signal. I just don’t have anything original to say on these topics; at least, not that can be communicated in 280 characters or less. Combined with the knowledge that the internet is filled with undiagnosed psychopaths who are perfectly happy to destroy your life simply because you express an opinion that differs from theirs, and it makes using social media to say anything except for the blandest of things a fool’s game. The heckler’s veto works. Their endgame is to silence all opinion different from their own.

Let the psychopaths have Twitter. They own it, they run it, they populate it.

Appalling Stories 2 Excerpt: Deprogram

For the Appalling Stories series, entertainment is paramount. Yes, we intend to push back against left-wing agitprop infesting genre fiction, but if it’s a boring story, or, worse yet, right-wing agitprop masquerading as genre fiction, it wouldn’t fit. For my story Deprogram in Appalling Stories 2, I wanted to extend the craziness of multiple genders and the criminalizing of traditional morals to the next level, positing a future that hinted of Dystopia without bludgeoning the reader with details. Here’s an excerpt:

—

After a final glance at the security monitor, Grayson got up from his desk, left his office, and waited in the reception area for his new clients. They hadn’t signed the contract, but he knew with perfect certitude that by the end of the meeting they would leave his office scared, hopeful, and lighter by $250,000. They always did.

Smoothing his necktie, Grayson played his favorite pre-meeting game: which spouse would open the door first? Definitely Evelyn. Pat was still transitioning, and the male-to-female types tended to go overboard with the wilting flower routine until they worked out the hormonal quirks and relational friction. If he was wrong, he’d do leg day twice this week. If he was right, he’d treat himself to an extra shot of—

The door opened and Evelyn walked in, followed by her wife. Both medium-sized, average-looking types; the security monitor’s shitty resolution hadn’t picked up the lipstick on Pat’s teeth or Evelyn’s puffy eyes.

“Good morning,” Grayson said with a relieved smile, keeping his hands where they could see them. “I checked each of your ProReg profiles ten minutes ago. I take it you both still prefer to be referred to as Ms. for the purposes of this meeting? I apologize if I’ve made an offensive assumption.”

Evelyn smiled and nodded. “Yes, that’s right. But please, call me Evelyn.”

“Of course,” Grayson said. “Pleased to meet you.” He turned to Pat, eyebrows lifted in polite expectation.

“Ms. Papasian-Smith,” Pat said. She clutched her Nouveau Spade purse in a tight grip, but he noticed that her right hand twitched on meeting him: suppressing the handshake habit she’d acquired in decades of being—no, living as a man.

Keeping his expression bland, Grayson bobbed his head. “A pleasure. Please, call me Grayson or Mr. Dahab. Or even ‘hey, you’; whatever suits.” He didn’t wait to see their reaction to the weak joke as he led the way to his office. “Please have a seat. Would either of you like coffee or water?”

Nodding at their demurrals, he seated himself behind the desk and steepled his fingers. “We need to get something out of the way: there won’t be any monitors or recordings during this meeting, due to the…sensitive nature of what we’re about to discuss. With that in mind, I understand that you’re putting yourselves in some danger by consenting to being alone with me. I was born and continue to identify as male and cis, as you’ve no doubt seen from my ProReg profile. If that makes you feel unsafe, we can stop the meeting right now and you’re free to leave with no hard feelings. Is that all right?”

Evelyn looked at Pat, who made a show of thinking about it before nodding. “Yes. That’ll be fine.”

“Good,” Grayson said, folding his hands. “I got the broa—er, the less-detailed story in your email. Can you tell me a little more so we can decide what our next steps might be?”

As Evelyn opened her mouth to speak, Pat leaned forward and barked, “What’s your success rate? How can we be sure we’ll…I mean, our daughter, she…” Her mouth pursed into a glistening red asshole shape, and as she reached into her purse for a Kleenex, sobbing, Evelyn grimaced and patted at her shoulder.

Grayson turned, opened the mini-fridge, and pulled out a bottle of water, which he placed on the desk within both women’s reach. “I understand how difficult this can be,” he said, once Pat’s storm of crying had blown over. “However, I should probably warn you that what you—what we’re dealing with is extremely dangerous. These terrorists…these…cultists, they’ve mastered the art of brainwashing. I can’t deprogram someone with a snap of my fingers. It’s a long and difficult process, and at the end, sometimes I don’t succeed.”

Evelyn’s head snapped up. “What happens then?”

“I call the police, who’ll take her away.”

“Oh, Gaia,” Pat sobbed, and dabbed at the corners of her eyes.

Blinking, Evelyn said, “But we wouldn’t tell—“

“I can’t take that chance,” Grayson said, lifting his hand. “If your daughter’s really caught up in this, and from what you told me in the email I’m sure she is, then she’s joined an organization that bombs hospitals, shoots schools, and burns down shopping malls. The WLA makes the freedom fighter 9/11 terrorists look like Outdoor Scouts selling cookies. We could all be sent away for the rest of our lives if we’re caught aiding and abetting even one of these WLA types. Or worse.” He tapped his index finger against his forehead.

Evelyn covered her mouth and looked away.

Voice soft, he added, “But Ms. Papasian-Smith asked a good question. My deprogramming success rate. It currently stands at ninety percent. Nine out of every ten kids. That’s good odds. And I can guarantee that there’s nothing I won’t do to save your daughter from these monsters.”

Glancing at her wife, who shredded a damp tissue and stared into her lap, Evelyn said, “Okay. What do you need to know?”

—

For the rest of Deprogram, as well as several other short stories on subjects ranging from satire to science fiction, check out Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice.

Battlestar Galactica 1978: An Overview

“There are those who believe that life here began out there: far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. Some believe there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive…somewhere beyond the heavens.”

I was only in single digits when it was first broadcast, but I’ll never forget watching the original Battlestar Galactica television series. Most science fiction programs like Star Trek, The Invaders, and even My Favorite Martian were relegated to UHF back then. A high-budget network television show with dogfighting spaceships, scary robots, and aliens was special. Even the comic books were cool. We all wanted to be like Starbuck or Apollo. Adama was the wise grandfather we wish we had. And who didn’t want to pilot a Colonial Viper?

As I watch it today, Battlestar Galactica‘s flaws become more evident. It could be that it’s a different viewing experience when you’re not seated six inches from a wood-framed color TV, wide-eyed and absorbing uncounted roentgens of radiation. Or maybe it’s got real problems. Nevertheless, it’s still an entertaining program, and worth talking about. We can discuss the 2003 remake at a later time. I’ve got all the DVDs.

The most striking thing about the show when you first watch it is the music. Both sad and stirring, it fits perfectly within the theme of embattled humanity fleeing for its life across the blackness of space. It conveys both loss and dignity, grief and unbowed heads.

Casting and performances were uneven, but hit the mark where it counted. Lorne Greene inhabited Adama, and to those of us who never watched Greene in Bonanza (why would you when Star Trek reruns were on), he nevertheless became a favorite actor. A great leader of men. His rich, deep voice conveyed both wisdom and authority, and he was very rarely wrong about anything. You’d follow Adama to the end of the universe if he asked, and would be honored by the request every centon. Dirk Benedict as Starbuck was the perfect lovable rogue: smoked cigars, drank, played cards, joked, womanized, feared commitment but possessed fierce loyalty, always with an eye for the main chance. You rooted for him, or for Richard Hatch as Apollo, the strait-laced fighter pilot who always did the right thing, and did it by the book. The other characters were, for the most part, interchangeable except for Herbert Jefferson Jr as Boomer and John Colicos as the evil Count Baltar. No one else stood out.

The child character Boxey was a problem. His pet robot dog Muffit was a problem. Even as a small boy I hated them. Perhaps I was born a cynic, but back then I knew they’d only been put into the show to cater to young people like me. Perhaps if Muffit wasn’t so obviously a performer in a robot dog suit or if Boxey hadn’t been so irritating they might have been better received. As it was, they were an unwelcome distraction that took you out of the show.

There’s a fundamental decency to the characters, themes, and storytelling that’s completely absent from today’s television fare. The people of the 12 Colonies believed in God. They prayed to Him, these ancient, starfaring people who had a different Bible, a different set of legends and heroes. They had marriage and codes of honor and were appalled at the necessity, when all else failed, of putting their women on the front lines of combat in Colonial Vipers. The miniseries’s pilot, Saga of a Star World, reflects late 1970’s Cold War concerns, with the Cylons filling in for the Soviets as a dreadful, implacable enemy. This Cold War comparison becomes even more stark when Sire Uri, a leader among the surviving humans, suggests that they should dispose of all of their weapons to show the Cylons that humans are no longer a threat. The Cylons would presumably call off the war and sue for peace: a perfect metaphor for the demand for nuclear disarmament in the face of Soviet aggression. We know how that ended up in the real world, and the people of Battlestar Galactica were at least as wise as us in refusing Sire Uri’s suggestion.

The special effects were good for the time. A common complaint was the frequent reuse of certain special effects shots: dogfights, ships exploding, Vipers leaving the flight bay, etc. I already mentioned the unfortunate Muffit. Still, they don’t get in the way of the plot. The Cylons were creepy, with their absurdly shiny bodies and that red, endlessly scanning eye. Despite the uniformity of their electronic voices, they’re not emotionless robots: they experience anger, concern, and fear. Some even carry swords. There’s a Cylon culture buried somewhere deep in their reptilian past, but we don’t see much of it. Lucifer, Count Baltar’s erstwhile dogsbody, has a disquietingly effete, refined voice, but his sparkling robot head is too small for his body and he’s difficult to be afraid of. All in all, Battlestar Galactica‘s illusion is imperfect, but functional.

Unfortunately, the show had problems throughout its run, with high budgets, terrible mid-season episodes, and dwindling viewership. It didn’t last past a single season. Galactica 1980 failed to recapture the magic and didn’t last long, either.

Nevertheless, it still holds up. If barely.

“Fleeing from the Cylon tyranny, the last Battlestar, the Galactica, leads a ragtag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest: a shining planet known as Earth.”

Reading Can Be Agony

Some of my writer friends tell me that writing is agony. Dragging words onto the page can be like pulling teeth. I agree…sometimes. At other times the words just pour out. I wish it were the latter all the time, and I envy those who seem to be able to turn on the spigot at will. More often than not, however, writing hurts.

Reading can hurt, too.

Sunday, January 27 was Holocaust Remembrance Day. I wanted to commemorate it in some fashion, so I purchased Elie Wiesel’s Night, which I’ve always wanted to read. It’s his account of surviving the Nazi death camps at Auchwitz and Buchenwald. It’s beautifully written. It’s a nightmare. It’s everything you dreaded and feared about such an experience, multiplied a thousandfold. Wiesel’s account finds new ways to stick a knife into you on every page, from banal cruelties to horrific betrayals. You can survive such experiences, you can come out the other side and find (some of) your loved ones, you can rejoice in their deliverance, and you can still carry the dreadful, soul-scarring burden of what happened until the end of your days. Despite the anguish, it’s necessary reading.

News about New York’s new abortion law has been at the forefront of late. Virginia has decided to go one further and is discussing post-birth abortions. Infanticide. As unbelievably disgusting as this is, abortion in America is not the Holocaust, and comparisons to the Holocaust will not only fall short, but serve to minimize the horrors that the Germans inflicted on the Jewish people (and to themselves; the crime will always stain them). I’m not sure if the pro-life movement simply lacks the vocabulary to separate the two things or is simply looking to scrape some of the sickening cachet off the Holocaust to bring home the notion that abortion is horrible, but it’s a foolish, uninformed, alienating comparison. Nobody who’s read Night would make that comparison without knowing, deep down, how false it is. The world has enough unique, appalling crimes to choose from without lumping them together for convenience’s sake. I believe life begins at the moment of conception. And abortion is not the Holocaust.

—

Reading Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World was another painful experience, but for different reasons. I never met Andrew, but I became a big fan of his work in the early days of Big Hollywood. I’ll never forget the day I learned he died: it was early morning in our house in Colorado, and I was feeding my baby son his bottle when the phone rang. My wife. She’d just left for work. Probably forgot something. I answered the call, and she told me that she’d just heard on the radio that Andrew Breitbart died. It was a kick in the gut. The right, which had only just started to get wise to the fact that the Culture War was for keeps, had just lost its most fearless warrior.

That’s what makes Righteous Indignation such a difficult read, even eight years after it was published. Despite everyone’s best efforts, which are often very good, his departure is still keenly felt. He had a clarity and courage that you couldn’t help but admire, and to read about what he’d planned to do after the book was published is terribly sad. He died young, with a wife and small children, and it’s a great loss. The media treatment of the Tea Party back then is the same as the media treatment of Trump voters, except that the media hates Trump voters even more than they hated the Tea Party. The cycle repeats.

The book itself is an amazing primer on media malpractice in the age of the internet, and goes through not just the history of progressivism as it’s practiced in America, but Andrew’s personal history. How he jumped into the Culture War, and why. Fascinating stuff, even years after its publication.

For a real treat (heh), take a look at the acknowledgments at the back of the book. Andrew was friends with everybody. Now the right’s become irrevocably fractured. Establishment vs. Culture Warriors. The Establishment humored the Tea Party because they knew it was, essentially, not a danger to their power structure. Despite a few Establishment pols getting primaried (and losing), their sinecures, think tanks, and publications were safe. Trump’s election changed that. It showed us that the Establishment lives for one thing: maintaining its status. Now that this status is threatened, these Trumpists have to go. Hence the fracture.

Without Breitbart, there wouldn’t have been Trump.