Dave's Fiction Warehouse

With citizens like these... H ard times need good songs. The Great War had “Over There.” The Great Depression had “Brother Can You Spare a Dime.” World War II had “We’ll Meet Again.” And now, with Covid-19 roaring back, it feels like we need an anthem too. I nominate “Wise Up,” by Aimee Mann. The song came back to me yesterday, just after I canceled the family vacation rental I’d booked for a week in September in Seaside, Ore. I know; the song was written in the ‘90s. But like everything sad these days, it seems pretty apt in 2020: It’s not going to stop / ‘Til you wise up I think she was talking about substance abuse, but it sounds kind of like the Einstein quote:  “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”  Which aptly summarizes the National Strategy since April: Ignore it. Transitioning in July to National Strategy 2.0: Ignore it some more. Let it burn. Let it consume the old and the weak and the merely unluck...

'W ell, that was some weird shit." President George W. Bush's unscripted reaction to Trump's 2017 inauguration speech may well be his most memorable words. They may also be the truest he ever spoke. They certainly describe everything Trump has done since then. Weird shit indeed! It never ends, does it? Take last night (July 3) at Mount Rushmore: Trump again reveling in dystopian fantasies of culture war and forced-perspective photographs suggesting his own smirking visage would look pretty good chiseled alongside the other four.    Now there is the stuff of nightmares: if Washington had been Trump, we'd have abandoned  the Revolution after the first month. If Jefferson had been Trump, the Declaration of Independence would be eight incoherent  tweets with more exclamation points than actual words. If Roosevelt had been Trump, we'd have no national parks. If Lincoln had been Trump, we'd be ... well, Confederates at the very least. Somehow I imagine the Trumps...