What is the ethical choice if Trump wins?

On October 30th, the Chicago Cubs had about the same odds of winning as Donald Trump.

Both are now more likely than ever to pull off the unthinkable. It's only been three days... and there are 7 more.

As someone who is rational and believes that evidence should be the deciding factor when arbitrating truth, I strongly believe that a Donald Trump presidency would be a tragic disaster of incomprehensible proportions. It would be no less than the death of the American experiment.

So what does a rational person do in times like these? With one week to go before this game of American Roulette plays out, I would like to examine the options available to the sane minority if Donald Trump does emerge victorious.

That these options closely mirror the stages of grief should come as little surprise.

Important note: I do not encourage, recommend, or in any way condone violent acts of any kind in response to this election. Peaceful transition of power is essential. We must fight back in other ways.

1. Ditch society
Cash out every penny, sell the house, and migrate to somewhere in the Western US (Montana?) where one could live "off the grid" as a subsistence farmer. This has a nice ideological agrarianism ring to it, and I certainly wouldn't mind living somewhere where I can see the stars at night. However it's not a realistic option for most families who simply couldn't afford do this, or who wouldn't be fast enough learners to pick up farming fast enough to make it through the first winters. And you'd need a lot of books to maintain sanity.

2. Income tax strike
If we all were to do what Donald Trump already does and not pay federal income taxes, it would grind the Federal government to a halt. The IRS couldn't possibly audit, prosecute, and jail 200 million working people. Now, most jobs sequester a significant amount of salary as withholding (that's why you sometimes get a rebate). But this is mostly optional; there is no federal mandate to withhold, and you should be able to opt out. I'm not sure this would get him out of the presidency, but it should would neuter his administration. This would take massive grassroots community organizing, and I'm not super confident we could pull it off.

3. Work strike
We could all just stop working. That would also send a message. We still can't have an economy without workers. In fact, without agribusiness and shipping, most of us wouldn't be able to eat for very long... This is dicey, and best served by striking only those industries that are not directly essential (entertainment, service, bureaucrats, finance, etc.).

4. Expatriate
My wife and I are expecting a child due within weeks of inauguration. I'm not necessarily thrilled about having my second son born in Trump-land. I'm not sure which countries would accept my family as political refugees, but with enough persistence we could probably find somewhere to go. Similar to #1, this is probably impossible for most lower/middle income folks, so it's really more akin to abandoning your compatriot than making a strategic retreat.

5. Secede
I've been a low-key proponent of California independence for a while now. The benefits of being a part of the United States are really starting to be outweighed by the costs, and on it's own California would be one of the world's great nations. The major downside to this would be that removing the golden state would leave the rest of the country hopelessly unbalanced at the national level. The only hope would be if other states secede as well, perhaps forming coastal alliances that together would be more populous than the remnant states. This would be very bad news for the "pocket" progressive areas like Austin, Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, etc. which would find themselves governed by increasingly fascist rule.

6. Acceptance
Accept that humanity is doomed; that we will never achieve a peaceful harmony with nature or ourselves. Accept that the common fate of all intellectual life is to destroy itself before it can reach the stars. Accept that not just our bodies or our societies, but humanity itself is mortal and will, in the grand scheme of things, perish soon. And try to enjoy the little things in the vanishingly brief time we do have.

Bonus! Foment a military coup d'etat
The leaders of the US armed services are people too, and the vast majority of them are incredibly talented and brilliant. Trump has repeatedly called them out as failures and knownothings, claims that have no basis in reality. If the joint chiefs of staff were to refuse to accept the election results, they could impose martial law in DC to prevent Trump from taking office. The ration thing would be to empower (gulp) the US congress to select a different President, or force Trump to resign and relinquish the presidency to (double gulp) Governor Pence. I have no idea how citizens would encourage such a coup, but that's for December I suppose.

Terminator Resistance: Prologue

Prologue

For John’s mother, fate was an obsession. To her, the universe had to be one way or the other: either she could change the future and Judgement Day could be stopped, or humanity was doomed to destroy itself. Before he met me, her son was the same way.

“If we wait any longer there won’t be anyone left to save.”

John stared at the floor and dipped his spoon back into the can of beans.

“You know I’m right.” Kate pointed toward the blackboard. “Numbers don’t lie.”

“What if our estimate for the coefficient of exposure is too low?”

Her shoulders dropped and the pointed her chin to the ceiling. “Come on, that term is super conservative and you know it.” She placed a hand on John’s back and ran her fingers through his hair. “We can bring the geiger counters and wear the suits if you want. I don’t think we’ll need them, but -“

“Fine.”

She froze. “Fine?” She took a step back and twirled in place. “We’re finally getting out of this goddamned bunker and all you have to say is ‘fine’?” He swiveled his chair to face her. Her eyes widened and she dropped her hands to her sides, fingers splayed.

“What, are you excited or something?”

Kate rushed into his lap, straddling him. The chair wheeled back and clanged into the desk. She kissed him hard on the mouth and slapped him on an oblique. “A little,” she said with a smirk.

 John dropped the can of beans to the floor.

A while later, they entered the elevator. Kate grabbed the large copper handle and rotated it counter-clockwise. The cage rattled and began its ascent. 

“We haven’t been in this elevator since Judgement Day,” John said staring straight ahead. “We don’t even really know what happened to the TX.”

“WHAT? I’M HAVING A HARD TIME HEARING YOU. WHY DIDN’T THEY THINK TO BUT A COMM SYSTEM IN THESE SUITS?”

“WHAT?! NEVERMIND!”

A minute passed. The elevator finally jolted to a halt.

“What did you say before?”

“I was just saying that we don’t actually know what happened to the Terminatrix.”

“Oh. If she were still alive she’d have come for us years ago.” She pushed on the door, the heavy lead swinging slow. “I’d never tell you ‘don’t worry’. That’s stupid. But we’ve gone through every detail a hundred damned times John.” She gestured for him to go first. “It’s time.”

He didn’t make a move. “You keep saying that like it makes us safe or something.”

She looks him in the eyes. “We’re never safe.” 

“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said all day. Ladies first.” He thrust his hand out, mirroring hers. Kate rolled her eyes and took a few awkward steps forward. “Remind me why we stopped training in these things?”

“Because you almost passed out last time we tried them, and I thought we had at least six more months to prep.”

“Oh. Right.” 

The two survivors plodded forward through the destroyed chamber. 

“Where are the helicopter wrecks?” John asked. “There should be two in here, one for the TX and one for the 101.”

“They must have been obliterated by the nukes.”

John took a geiger counter out of his suit pocket and switched it on. There were a few faint clicks, but nothing dramatic.

“I don’t think so. It doesn’t look like the bunker took a direct hit.”

“Umm, John. Look around, I think it got hit.”

“No way, not enough rads. There’d be something left.”

Kate walked further from the elevator, out of the shadows. “Oh my god, John look.”

The sky was marble blue, spotted with thick clouds. The sun slid out from one of the clouds, causing John Conner and Katherine Brewster to raise their hands to their foreheads. 

“John, the sky-”

“The SKY John.”

“You said there’s no radiation here?”

“Check for yourself.”

Kate’s geiger counter confirmed his previous readings. She clicked off the helmet of her suit and removed it carefully. She took a deep breath in through her nose. 

“Oh man, you don’t even know how much you miss it.”

John removed his helmet and drew in.

“Holy shit yes. Fresh fucking air.”

“So if it wasn’t nuked, what cleared out this place?” Kate asked as she climbed out of the lead-lined rad suit. John couldn’t help but glare at her rippling arms, slick with sweat up to the shoulder. “You think you can handle these guns Johnny boy? Remind me why you made me do all those pull-ups?”

“So you’d look extra sexy in that tank top.” This earned a snicker. “So, why weren’t we nuked?” The snicker faded fast. Kate snapped into Dr. Brewster mode.

“Well, same reason they never came to come terminate us in the bunker: TX never bothered to let SkyNet know we came. As far as it knew, this is just some dusty old bunker with no one in it because it had disabled the early warning systems.”

“Fair enough, though I guess that theory assumes machines can be arrogant.” They were both out of their suits now, a hot wind blowing at them across the desert.

“Also explains why there’s no welcoming party up here.” She ducked back into the shadows cast by the remaining structure. “Jesus I’m going to burn to a crisp in like ten seconds out here.”

“Amazing what a giant ball of pure fusion can do to the skin, even from 92 million miles away.”

“Aww, you’re cute when you’re trying to sound smart.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Oh come on, I’m just teasing.”

“The Terminator.”

“What about him?”

“Remember when we were heading out to my mom’s cemetery and he tossed his damaged fusion core out the window?”

“Yeah, it blew sky high. There was a mini mushroom cloud and everything. Damned near swept us off the road.”

“He must have -“

“That sneaky metal bastard!” She punched John on the shoulder. He winced in what could have been fake pain. “I bet he stuck his other core right into her teeth. What do you think he said right before it went off?”

“Hasta la vista?”

“You ah tuhminated.”

The both chuckled and the impression.

“Levity is guud, releases tenshun,” John quipped. 

Kate raised her eyebrows quickly in recognition. As she swept her auburn bangs, matted with sweat, off her forehead, a solemn expression took over her face. “Okay John Connor. Lead on.”

Shut down

The sunny Republic sets; always. Yet,
surprise and frustration?
To those upset when better-but-not-good-enough fails, ask:
"Why mourn the loss of the old boss?"

Capitalism looked good
because winners look good;
so long as you don't look too close.
But I'm fairly certain
one man cannot be worth 30,000 times more
than any another.

Shut down, fine.
Stay down, please.

Murderous Practice

I'm currently reading Stephen King's enjoyable and instructive nonfiction work "On Writing." In one chapter, he assigns some "homework," which involves writing a short narrative outline of a story starting with a simple premise: an estranged wife beats-up or murders her husband. Here's my assignment, turned in on time.

Gabriela and Mark met at the Halloween party with the best reputation on campus, which was thrown by the nerdiest frat on campus. She dressed up as a sexy angel. He was Batman. Her remarkable cleavage and well defined hips lead him to pursue her relentlessly after that, and she only relented when she learned of his father’a status as a wealthy movie producer.

They go on a few dates, and he is awkward but charming, and certainly generous. He takes her to the finest restaurants in Los Angeles, gets them backstage passes to pop music concerts, and they go to Hollywood parties. One memorable evening, she gets to meet Robert Pattinson and Anderson Cooper at the same party. All the while she plays along, cautiously avoiding a serious physical relationship while enjoying the rarefied air, despite having little or no feelings for Mark.

Bleeding Heart

Lyrics by Elmore James, as performed by Jimi Hendrix. A new music video of this song can be viewed here on YouTube.


The bar, by Queens standards anyways, hardly stood out. Estimable attempts at sleek post-modern décor filled the space to the limit, thrashing any sense of minimalism originally intended by the designers of the individual lucite-and-vinyl barstools or bleach-white booths. But none of the guests seemed to care; eight dollar Heinekens taste the same here as in the hippest hipster stop in Brooklyn.

James - as he now fancied himself - gazed through his preposterously new horn-rimmed glasses clear past all the other patrons. He scratched at his nascent beard and squinted to read the teeny score box on the screen across the room. It was bad news:

NYK 108

SAC 112 F

Knicks loose again, surprise surprise. And to the Kings no less. Bleh. He took a hard swig and finished the first of several whiskey and rocks of the evening. He swiveled around and neatly released the tumbler onto the bar, which would have made a pleasing clinkthud sound if some miserable wretch hadn’t been belting out karaoke at the top of her lungs at that particular moment. She held his attention for a moment, amusingly drunk for this early in the evening but lacking any other sort of appeal. In particular her choice of music ruffled his sensibilities; even if chosen out of irony, Journey is inexcusable at this point.

“Hey buddy, you having some fun?” Matt slapped his back harder than he meant to and yelled directly into his friend’s cochlea. James raised his eyebrows and pulled his cheeks up, screwing his scrabbled features into a very poor poker face. “Aw man, don’t be like that! Look at these chicks! If Christina weren’t around I’d totally hit like half of them!”

“How very Chris Brown of you Matt,” he deadpanned back, then turned to gesticulate wildly in the direction of the overworked and under-clothed bartender for another round.

“Ha, ha, smartass,” he droned, adding a jovial punch at the shoulder. James managed to procure a refill before turning back to his pal.

“You know wha- -eans -eft -lone?” James’ depressive voice didn’t carry enough punch to outmatch the dreadful karaoke, now a heartfelt love ballad to ganja perpetuated by a dreadlocked Caucasian (via Bob Marley).

“What?!” Matt screamed for his friend to repeat.

“Do know what it means to be left alone?!” he screamed, his reddening cheeks hidden behind a wall of chestnut bristles. “My little girl left me,” he muttered to himself, eyes watering.

Recovering the Satellites

As this is a little longer than some of my previous shorts (and because now I know how to do this kind of thing!), you can download a PDF of this story for easier reading instead. Click here to download the PDF.

“Recovering the Satellites” by Counting Crows

For Joshua, mornings were certainly the worst. Some days he just lay in bed, often for hours on end if necessary, waiting until light finally crept its way through the slits between his yellowed bedroom curtains. During one of those dark pre-dawns, he half-dreamt he was caught in an endless cycling freefall from the ceiling to the bed. Other times he saw people’s faces in the blinking smoke alarm above, people from his past arcing across the room as his vision crossed and rolled uncontrollably. And always, he struggled bravely against his bladder’s false sense of need. It was a fantastic exercise in willpower, the theme for seemingly all of his endeavors these days.

On rare mornings - like today for example - he forced himself upright to get the blood moving a little, so as to initiate the skipping of the nasty tedium altogether. It took a few moments for the cobwebs to part, moments he wanly endured. His breath blurted out in wheezy bursts, mercifully clear of the cursed rattling for now. Thought it had been an impressively stifling evening in the valley following the yesterdays’ triple-digit August afternoon, he left the A.C. quiescent overnight. The searing dry air drew buckets of sweat out of him, but also performed miracles on his wretched lungs.

He slid his legs off the bed, testing his limp feet on the cold hardwood. He found a little stiffness in the knees and some pain at the mounds of his outer toes when he applied pressure, but no more. Better than usual. With a grunt he lurched to his full height before bending forward to spare his protesting back. A flash of pain spiked near his right kidney, earning another grunt. He felt for the source with a knuckle, but thankfully it dissipated quickly. What I need right now is a drink.

He cursed the thought and reached for his notebook and pencil on the nightstand. Six AM today, not exactly a new record. He stared longingly at the entry for July 16th, the outlier. Somehow he had made it past lunch without so much as an inkling of the stuff. He winced a smile through the pain to remember that day, one of the very few successes of late. Bill had actually called back for seconds, the first one do to so. That day he actually felt like he was on the right track.

After replacing the pad and pencil to their usual positions, Joshua shuffled over to the cramped bathroom and tried his best to avoid looking at his wrinkled old face in the mirror while he performed his morning rituals. Piss. Fist-full of pills. Gulp of water. Shower. Shave. Another fist-full of pills. Gulp of water. Etc.

Copper and Stone

I started this story out intending it to be another "song" short, but it morphed into something else. I have some ideas for extending it to a novella or something, but for now here's a "prologue" style passage:

Harrick gazed down over the valley, seeing only thick haze where he knew his wife and home rested below. The fog usually burned off by midday this time of year, but Harrick didn’t know that yet. He muttered a curse to the gods for his poor luck and retreated into his recently acquired hovel. He cursed again to look at the place, a ramshackle hut with naught but three mudbrick walls and a thatched roof. The hardpack dirt floor didn’t inspire much confidence either.

Seeing little in the valley but fog, Harrick’s eyes turned to trace the rectangular outline of the low stone fence surrounding his new domain. With minor repairs it would serve nicely as a pasture for his town’s herd of scraggly goats. The more daunting challenge would be to provide an acceptable domicile for Lysara and the little ones. For now, the only structure on the large grassy expanse - heretofore to be called Harrickstead, he decided  - would have to do for him and the wiry dusty-blonde boy sleeping in the corner.