Dark Shadows Herald the New Year

And as the holidays are upon us and another year draws to a close, let us review the evolving darkness of our nation's leadership.  If leadership it can be called.

A journalist is butchered and dismembered by a royal despot.  Our own intelligence services swear the royal prince of Saudi Arabia gave the order, but our president brushes it aside, acting as if it doesn't mater.  (Sure, why not?  It's just a journalist.)  And, the accused represents a royal family that has helped Trump make scads of money.  He can make more by selling them guns so they can kill more innocent people.  Priorities.  Money over morality.  Our leader.  Our role model for our youth.

The world's leading scientists (including Trump's own science team) unanimously confirm that pollution-induced climate change is destroying our way of life and that it may already be too late to change course.  Trump's response?  He puts Andrew Wheeler, a lobbyist for the coal industry in charge of the EPA.  (Par for the course, after Scott Pruitt.)  Trump seems determined to destroy this planet one way or another.  Why?  His pals in the fossil fuel industry want to make scads of money.  So what if their grand kids inherit a dying planet?  Priorities.  Money over morality.  Our leader.  Our role model for our youth.

The innocent are slaughtered in Syria.  By ISIS.  By Assad.  By Turkey.  By Russia.  Our president's response?  Pack up and go home.  Not our problem.  America first.  Last, and always.  But, not America the protector of freedom.  That America is dead, apparently.  Trump's America is the America of amoral self interest.  The America that withdraws from the world and hunkers down behind a wall and an arsenal, denying food and water to the poor at our gates.  (Isn't God supposed to have destroyed Sodom and Gomorah for that kind of selfishness?)  Money over morality.  Our leader.  Our role model for our youth.

Refugees flee war and crime and poverty, making a long and sometimes fatal trek towards America.  America; that shining beacon of light that beckons the tired and the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  Their welcome?  Barbed wire.  Not enough? Hell no!  We need a wall, our President says.  Can't have one?  Shut down the government.  Keep it shut down until the opposing party coughs up five billion dollars for a border wall.  (Wait, wasn't Mexico supposed to pick up the check on that one?)  Five billion dollars couldn't be better spent trying to solve the problems that caused the exodus in the first place?  Or, to somehow pave a path to eventual citizenship for some of those refugees?  Nah.  Our president appeals only to fear and hate.  He claims to feel compassion for the American victims of crimes committed by the army of criminal evil-doers supposedly streaming across our border.  But, no compassion does he feel for children ripped from their parents and put in cages.  Or, buried in American soil.  Such blessed ground.  Money over morality.  Our leader.  Our role model for our youth.

Mass shootings continue.  No end in sight.  Children are slaughtered, and Trump and his NRA buddies say their thoughts and prayers go out to the victims.  Then, the victims speak out and demand gun control, and they're accused of being "soulless" or "mush-brained."  He does nothing.  We need more armed guards, he tells us.  In the schools.  In the temples of worship.  More armed guards.  The NRA is too powerful.  Too much money to be made from gun sales.  Money over morality. Our leader.  Our role model for our youth.

Resignations.  Terminations.  A revolving door on the White House.  Trump wants only fawning supplicants, apparently.  (Caligula's palace offered more stability.)  He chastises an Attorney General for not protecting him from prosecutors.  He accuses judges of being political agents and the law enforcement agencies of being out to get him.  He considers justice his enemy.  He believes the law should be his personal weapon.  That's how he sees the world and his place in it.  Money over morality.  Our leader.  Our role model for our youth.

Yet, our God-fearing heartland still loves him.  Why, only they know.  He makes them feel strong, perhaps.  He shows them the easy path, the self-serving one, and tells them it's okay to be selfish.  It's okay to do what comes easiest for human beings:  fear and hate each other.  Kill each other.  It's fine.  God loves us anyway, because we're Christian.

Happy Holidays, America.

NewMyths Magazine

Science Fiction and Fantasy Lovers, attention: 

       NewMyths Magazine Issue #45 is now live:



https://sites.google.com/a/newmyths.com/nmwebsite/past-issues/2018/issue-45



Visit strange new worlds, and share in startling adventures:

"Gentleman's Agreement" by Tom Olbert --  Excerpt:

The entire sand ship trembled on its massive treads as the sand crawler’s forward limbs, like the gigantic legs of some nightmarish arachnid crushed the upper framework.  Nicholas’s blood boiled.  Men plummeted to their deaths from the radar mounts and gun turrets, screaming as they were smashed like insects against the buckling metal hull or swallowed up into the churning desert sands.

 The writhing hydra-like organism swallowed several of the native workers even as they fired laser turrets from the overhanging gantries.  Nicholas lunged for one of the upper turrets as the gunner’s scream was muffled, the man’s legs kicking in mid-air as he was seized by one of the lashing triple-pronged tongues of the great beast and sucked into one of its three-sided mouths. Nicholas roared in impotent rage as he fired and fired, hoping desperately for a lucky shot at one of the damnable titan’s neural nodes.

 The crawler’s roar reminded Nicholas of a star destroyer’s atmosphere venting into space as its bulkheads gave way under a laser barrage.  Feeling the support platform give way under him, Nicholas leapt from the gantry, grabbing a railing along a walkway, and slid down a support strut to the deck.  He struggled to hang onto the guard rail, his boots sliding over the tilting deck. 

*******

This and other exciting stories, by a variety of writers is now available.  Stop on by!

Science Fiction...

      exotic worlds...
                         alien realities...

                              Experience them all:

https://www.amazon.com/Dissent-Book-Nexus-Thomas-Olbert-ebook/dp/B01CRCEMQG  ***

 

s

 

 

https://lillicatpublishers.com/?product=visions-vi-galaxies

 

https://lillicatpublishers.com/?product=visions-vii-universe

 

 

 

https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/175537-science-fiction-microstory-contest

 

 

Passing of an Era, Birth of a Nightmare

Our nation recently mourned the passing of a true statesman and national hero:  John McCain.

Like everything else in our present dark age of anger and hate, the funeral was greatly politicized; charged with anger and resentment.  Understandably.  Our current president had mocked John McCain, a man who put his life at risk in the service of his country.  Who endured excruciating torture in a foreign prison and who chose to remain there in deference to honor and comradeship.  Two concepts our president - a man who escaped military service for minor medical deferment (having more money in the bank than patriotism in his heart) - will never understand.  How did our president acknowledge the service of John McCain?  "He's a hero because he got captured?  I like people that didn't get captured."  (Or, who didn't weasel their way out of service?)  He accused McCain of having failed the veterans.  And, he declared that he loved war and torture.  Never having experienced either, himself.

This is our dark age.  Embodied in the death of a man who personified an age that has passed.  The age of honor and dignity.  Of courage and love of one's fellow man.  On the campaign trail, McCain, unlike Trump, did not fuel the fire of hate when a supporter in his audience stood up and referred to his opponent Barak Obama as an "Arab."  McCain, a gentleman of principle, among the last of a dying breed, referred to his political opponent as a "decent American with whom I happen to have profound political disagreement."  That may have been the last time that phrase will be uttered in American politics.  The look on McCain's face when he said it was one of dismay, like a man of a time past looking into the face of a dark future already festering.

Now, there is no moral foundation of national unity and respect to serve as the dam against the crashing waves of hate, of anger, resentment and bigotry.  Those dark impulses catapulted Donald Trump into the White House.  The ultimate triumph of style over substance.  Of hate over love.  Of self-aggrandizing cruelty over respectability and of tribalism over shared values.  It is the age of insolence.  Of disrespect.  The age of the cyber bully.  The age of self delusion.  Of truth rejected and falsehood embraced.  Represented by a  president who hugs the flag with a false smile while splintering families and putting children in cages, in flagrant denial of what that flag represents.  Who slanderously accuses both the free press and the agents of law enforcement when they oppose him.

The age of kindness, respectability and nobility, it seems, was buried with John McCain. 
Our founding values gathered like angels in the church where a mourning nation said farewell to an age fondly remembered, when America was truly great.  Our current national leader was conspicuously absent from that gathering.  There will be little of kindness or nobility to remember when his time comes.  His mourners will gather in anger, not prayer.  In hate, not humility.  There may be torchlight parades to take him to his final resting place.  But, no gentle songs or kind memories.  Only drumbeats promising more hatred to come.

What follows?  A new age, I hope.  As a new generation emerges...an angry and increasingly focused generation...we may remember with respect the nobility of an age now gone, but we must look to a new future.  A future more diverse.  More female.  And yes, angry.  On the march, and resistant.  No longer silent.  No longer passive.  They will not go gentle into that dark night.  Women may again have to fight for the right to control their own lives, LGBT people for the right to love and marry without shame, and kids in school just for the right to be safe.  The new darkness must one day yield to a stronger, purer new light.

Sundered Identity

 

 



Our nation celebrated its birth last night.  Amid music and revelry and fireworks, we commemorated the birth of a nation.  Did we remember what the defining values of that nation were?

"Send me your tired and your poor...your huddled massed yearning to breathe free."  No more, it seems.  Not for those who cheer on our current leader.  Many others protest his policies towards those fleering poverty, terror, crime, tyranny and death...

Long has it been since we were so divided as a nation.  Division born of identity crisis.  What does it mean to be an American?  Who are we?   Are we the compassionate, giving people we once took pride in claiming to be?  Or, is that now considered the creed of fools?  Those who embrace the pseudo-populist movement of Donald trump embrace cynicism and cruelty.  "We're not gonna take back our country by being nice," Trump has said.

No longer do we embrace the image of Lady Liberty holding her torch aloft, welcoming those in need from distant shores.  Nah, that's for suckers.  Build a wall, with a great big "keep out" sign on it.  That's the new America.

 

 

 

Maybe that's the whole planet Earth.  Nationalist and populist movements are erupting everywhere in the western world.  Once enlightened nations are following the demagogic example of Trump's America.  Never trust a foreigner.  And, never trust the rule of law.

 

Except when you want to use it to justify tearing immigrant families apart and putting children in cages.  Or, when you want to stack the courts with ideological zealots who simply can't wait to strip away a woman's right to choose or an entire community's right to marry.  Civil rights?  Religious freedom?  They come in second to a president's king-like power to control the borders by arbitrarily deciding who can travel here and who can't.  More broken families, more cruelty to remind ourselves who we are now.

 

We call ourselves a nation of life.  Except when we bomb the sh*t out of countries we don't like.  We call ourselves a nation of law.  Except when we're torturing people in foreign prisons.  We call ourselves a nation under God.  But, only some people's conception of God, not everyone's.  We call ourselves a nation of family values, yet we tear families asunder or at best incarcerate them together, not truly out of respect for law (we have no problem, remember with torture, imprisonment without trial or undeclared war) but out of fear of those who are different.

 

E pluribus Unum?  Not by a longshot.  Happy Birthday, America...Whoever the hell you are.

 

 

The Emperor has no soul

The State of the Union has been assessed.

All style.  No substance.
All gloss.  No heart.

Our president presented the state of the union last night.  The state of the union, apparently, consists of simpering platitudes and teary-eyed human interest stories.  Of tall promises and no specifics.  Promises of infrastructure and great projects.  Lofty promises.  No blueprints.  No money in sight.

The leader demanded national unity, but offered no shared values on which to base it.  Just cheap jabs at people who don't stand during the national anthem.  No offers of healing or understanding or offers to address the root causes of the pain and anger and alienation of those who take a knee during the anthem.  Clearly, he doesn't care.  He just parades weeping parents whose kids were murdered by illegal aliens.  Let's build a wall across our southern border to keep out the rapists and murderers.  He didn't even mention some are good people.  Yeah, that just screams unity.

He did what all wannabe dictators do:  He praised the police and the military.  (Conveniently forgetting he's been trashing the FBI all month.) He praised the 2nd Amendment.  He touted religious freedom.  Yeah, we're gonna be unified, while we're building walls, racially profiling and shooting each other (not necessarily in that order, but probably) and kicking each other out of our respective homes and places of business in the name of Jesus.

He praised beautiful, clean coal.  (Why not beautiful, clean cyanide?) Not a word of support for the victims of flooding and wildfires who are the first of many beneficiaries to come of all that "beautiful, clean coal."  He wants to beef up our nuclear arsenals, reviving the madness of the 1980's with a vengeance.  Smaller nukes, easier and therefore likelier to use.  (Yeah, we're all gonna be unified in smoldering ashes.  Praise be.)

He went on and on about how wonderful we are as a people and how much we have to fear from all those inferior races out there in this terrible, dangerous world.  In between weeping parents and soapy human interest dross, he did add a touch of magnanimity by promising a path to citizenship for "dreamers".  They grew up in this country.  And, he'll graciously allow them a chance to become citizens after 12 years of probation.  Of course, they'll never see their aunts or uncles again.  Gotta keep America white.

The really sad part is that 75% of his audience took the speech favorably.  He told them what they wanted to hear.  We're great.  We're wonderful.  We're God's gift to humanity.  We've done so much for an undeserving, ungrateful world.  Now, it's our turn.  Build a wall.  Build those small, practical nukes.  Hell, let's have one in every home.  America first.  America uber alles.

Changing Planet...Unchanging Folly

Weather seems to have gone wild.  Like a bad science fiction film.

The North American east coast is experiencing an unprecedented cold blast.  Boston Harbor is flooded.  The flood waters will soon freeze in record low temperatures.  Meanwhile, the southern states are experiencing winter conditions alien to them.  Snow on palm trees.  Science fiction?  No more.  Science fact, alas, has caught up with science fiction.

As fossil fuel burning spews more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global climate change has continued to intensify, doing possibly irreparable harm to the planet.  The glaciers melt.  The seas rise.  The gulf stream shifts.  Storms rage.  Warm air rises as Arctic air blasts southward.

Trump's answer:  More oil drilling, of course!  He's opened all America's territorial waters for oil drilling.  'Seems he won't be satisfied until the planet is destroyed.  Science fiction villainy?  No more.  This kind of suicidal madness is now business as usual.  The new sanity.

If true sanity is to reassert itself, it seems it can only come locally, from the ground up.  City by city.  State by state, committing to reduce carbon emissions.  It may already be too late.  But, if we're to save what remains, we must commit now.

https://www.edf.org/climate/how-climate-change-plunders-planet?gclid=Cj0KCQiAvrfSBRC2ARIsAFumcm_NxoisGp3kFsevT5PCecW7aRENPFef850Yt9xP2OIMCgtlCQsFk-IaAmFnEALw_wcB&utm_campaign=ggad_climate-change_upd_dmt&utm_id=1513934888&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google