I’m on some trifling writer’s BS this morning.
It’s 300am. I’m not fully awake. Being fully awake would defeat the whole purpose of being awake at 300am. I need to access apart of myself that is not myself. This needs to happen before moonlight disappears and before the sunrise. Leave the daylight writing hours to those who hide behind slick smooth sounding brochure phrases which scream “see look I can write better than you can ever dream! Subscribe to me!”
lol
Deference To Inspiration (The Subconscious)
I can’t make those claims because I didn’t write this. If I were writing this it would have been strict adherence to premise and then from there an outline and then from there a conventional by the numbers series of arguments and precepts which build toward a conclusion and tie it up in a nice bow tie with a call to action at the end. Boring.
I’ve been doing this long enough to develop this skill of spontaneous inspiration such that I have to intentionally turn it off sometimes. What you are witnessing is me publicly practicing for my immersion week where I finish this manuscript by binge writing 7 days back to back 20 hours a day. I haven’t picked a date yet but I’m thinking sometime before the end of June. Aside from the Blackout Briefs, it will be just morning and evening Author Room updates with not too many excerpts to give away the whole book but just enough to build anticipation. There will however be plenty of process displays such as pics of me looking COOL as all hell writing this thang in various locations and in different positions with sunglasses on.
Payback Politics
I’ve decided that Payback Politics will be a major theme of my novel War after War so much so that it will become the subtitle. Therefore as of right now the full title is War after War:The Big Payback. Payback Politics is a phrase I coined up to describe the arrogance of an empowered political class whose entire motivation isn’t a legacy of policies that reshape society for the benefit of society as a whole as in the case of the New Deal proponents, The Civil Rights Activists, and the Reagan Revolution adherents, but rather its primary purpose is to use federal power in the settling of scores and as a demonstration that someone is finally going to make “them” feel it.
There is a type of arrogance that accompanies The Payback gangsters in power that blinds them to their own unforced errors. I can’t help using Superbowl LI as the prime example of how Payback Politics ends in the ruin of its adherents and the near ruin of the country. This is from my January 9th essay PAYBACK ALWAYS LEAVES A CRIME SCENE
SUPER BOWL LI
If you don’t watch football, you still understand a choke. You’re winning. You can taste the victory. And then, for reasons that make sense only to the part of the brain that panics when it’s almost safe, you start doing things you don’t need to do. You stop taking the simple points. You stop protecting what you have. You start trying to win “beautifully” instead of winning clean. That’s Super Bowl LI in a sentence.
Atlanta was up 28-3. That’s not “we’re doing okay.” That’s “the game is basically over.” And yet the Patriots didn’t win because they discovered magic. They won because Atlanta made a series of unforced errors, decisions that weren’t forced by the opponent so much as seduced by their own confidence and speed. A sack that knocks them out of field goal range. A holding penalty at the worst possible time. A choice to keep throwing the ball when all they had to do was bleed the clock. The Falcons didn’t get beaten by genius. They got beaten by panic disguised as aggression.
That’s the political analogy, plain as day. Republicans have been ahead, not just electorally, but structurally. They’ve got possession of courts, statehouses, media ecosystems, and are lucky enough to have an opposition party addicted to “norms” even when norms are being used like a weapon against them. And when you’re ahead like that, your biggest threat is not the other team.
Your biggest threat is your own unforced error.
Because when you’re already winning, every unnecessary escalation becomes a gift. Every lie told too loudly becomes a receipt. Every act of cruelty performed for applause becomes a clip that builds the coalition you were trying to prevent. And that is where Payback Policy is dangerous, not only because it harms people, but because it makes the leadership intoxicated. They stop playing to win the long game and start playing to satisfy the crowd in the stands. That’s how you turn a lead into a rout.
Football is a game of deception. Every play begins with a lie. You line up to run and you pass. You line up to pass and you run. You fake left to go right. And the best teams don’t just deceive the opponent. They deceive the opponent into helping them.
Politics is the same. War is the same. And the first casualty in war is always the truth.
But deception has a limit. Eventually the film catches up. Eventually the clock becomes your enemy. Eventually your own lie forces you into one more unnecessary move, and that move is the unforced error that turns a comfortable lead into a fourth-quarter collapse.
I took my inspiration for the subtitle from James Brown’s song The Payback. Once I get over this hump I will immediately begin writing a screenplay adaptation which will make full use of this song in select scenes.
There is Few if Any Like It
This work of historical fiction I’m working on will do what no other work save Birth of A Nation and Gone With The Wind has attempted to do which is to create a narrative that ties the antebellum period to Reconstruction well into Jim crow and connect it to Nazi Germany. I know what you’re thinking. You can’t possibly connect completely different eras using the same characters. I thought the same thing for years before I came up with this narrative.
There are documented cases of civil war veterans that survived into the 1930’s. One of my central characters, Alex, is a black civil war veteran and former slave who has seen slavery up close and personal, has worked as a federal agent as part of a posse of federal troops to confront violent militant white supremacists groups which were terrorizing black voters and Republican officials throughout the South, and lived long enough to witness first hand the white washing of history by watching the Birth of A Nation from a segregated movie theater.
He is interviewed by Works Progress Administration agents looking to preserve a historical record and from these memories spring forth a revelation of events that are so extraordinary they cause a rift between the two agents as they both see this nations violent and checkered moral history through 2 different lenses.
It’s no different than today where we cannot any longer agree that Martin Luther King was an American hero and icon. It’s no different then today when we cannot any longer no longer agree that slavery was an evil worth the lives of millions of soldiers to wipe it off the land that holds all these truths to be self evident…
We Gone Be Alright
Take solace in the fact that it doesn’t matter whether it’s Progressive wielding Payback Politics as during Reconstruction or right wing reactionaries today wielding they all will eventually collapse on themselves as they fumble the ball dancing on there way to the end zone. My novel will demonstrate this as it makes you laugh and cry a few tears.
I’m increasing the spots for a dedicated page for early Author Room supporters from 20 to 38 spots to symbolize the number of states in the Union at the end of Reconstruction in 1876. Currently there are 22 spots taken. Get your star and name in my upcoming novel before it’s too late. You will receive a free signed copy. Sign up for the Author Room.
Can’t swing the subscription fee but still want to contribute?
I’m so looking forward to your book. Michener also wrote some sweeping, historical multigenerational epics.
The battle between autocracy and democracy continues to shape our world.
"This work of historical fiction I’m working on will do what no other work save Birth of A Nation and Gone With The Wind has attempted to do which is to create a narrative that ties the antebellum period to Reconstruction well into Jim crow and connect it to Nazi Germany. I know what you’re thinking. You can’t possibly connect completely different eras using the same characters." Respectfully, nope...you don't (and can't) know what I'm thinking. I have long believed in that connection and in fact am burdened (more cursed than blessed) with seeing connectivity that others just don't get. But my life, now close to over, grew out of different soil than your life, so I invariably might view things differently, not that the connection described does not exist -- you and I believe it certainly does, but that I first run all human actions through the lens of evolutionary psychology - did what seems irrational have survival value no longer needed, and possibly counter-productive. I am aware that my answer to that question may be filtered through my own unconscious confirmation bias -- which becomes conscious by virtue of my recognizing it may exist. But I have never (at least since maturity and growing awareness of our species overall collective nuttiness has led me into research and thoughtfulness about such things) denied the other factor, the nurturing part. Not every white descendant of slave owners who lives in rural Mississippi is a de facto white supremacist (or so I think, never having knowingly met such a person). What I'm trying to say in my excessive verbosity (sorry) is that I think the connectedness goes far, far, beyond the U.S. and Germany, or between the Holocaust and the present. If I were religious I'd think that it was a case of the devil vs God, with the former sometimes able to take the disguise of the latter, in a continual struggle for ultimate control. But I'm agnostic, and first look for a Newtonian cause-and-effect relationship with what we have inherited from who we were tens of thousands of years ago. I just read about scientists finding two groups of Chimpanzees engaging in "civil war". Exactly. Did not protohumans do the same? Impossible to say. On the other hand, there seems to be no such behavior in Bonobos, who are more closely related to Chimps than we are, BUT, are also more closely related to us than are Chimpanzees, according to DNA analysis. So enter the nurture part, I guess, whereby evil flourishes where evil is. Evil, thus defined, serves a purpose that no longer exists. We are not who we were when heritable traits were being selected for, and the distrust of "the other", even based on the most minimal of trivialities, is now counter-productive....um...in my opinion.