My short story, “The Boy Who Didn’t Know How to Recognize a King” has been published by Aliterate, and you can read it free online at this link.
Love’s Labors Lost
They Both Die at the End
by Adam Silvera.
2017.
“Maybe it’s better to have gotten it right and been happy for one day instead of living a lifetime of wrongs.”
If a book keeps me up past my bedtime, gets me teary, and even after I finish it I still can’t sleep because I need several hours to process how I feel about what I just read, that’s an automatic “highly recommended.” Thanks, Adam. (I think.)
They Both Die at the End is a young adult science fiction novel is set in a world just like ours, with one huge difference. In this world, there exists a service called Death-Cast. Every midnight, Death-Cast phones every person who is going to die on the coming day, to give them a heads-up. To give them one last chance to live to the fullest. To say goodbye. To have a fling. To do whatever they need to do on their Last Day.
Mateo Torrez is eighteen. He is bright and talented and kind. He is also agoraphobic and hardly ever leaves his apartment in New York City. He’s about to begin college (an online university, of course). On September 5, 2017 (the release date of the book!) Mateo gets the call. It’s a shock. How could a healthy young man who is too timid even to leave home possibly die so young?
Rufus Emeterio is seventeen and also a New Yorker. He gets the call in the middle of beating up his ex’s new boyfriend. Rufus is angry and hard edged. But cut him some slack. He lost his parents and his sister in a car accident just four months ago. Now he lives in a foster home and wonders what kind of future awaits him. None at all, it seems.
Mateo and Rufus don’t know each other. Neither of these young men has anyone to spend his Last Day with. Fortunately, there’s an app for that. It’s called Last Friend, and before dawn breaks, Rufus and Mateo are Last Friends. They spend a magical day in New York together, doing their damnedest to live to the utmost. They make their goodbyes. They try new things. They party. They fall in love. Rufus teaches Mateo to be brave. Mateo helps Rufus rediscover his gentle spirit.
Spoiler: They both die at the end.
They Both Die at the End is a tour de force. A novel in which Death is so near it is practically one of the characters will instantly trigger deep feelings, but this is a two-edged sword. Once you’ve got your readers by the feels, you’d better use the opportunity to show us something worth the pain of the journey, or else your book will feel like cheap manipulation. I am happy to say that Adam Silvera not only passed the test, he aced the extra-credit section.
Silvera’s “Death-Cast” is more than just a gimmick to get the plot moving. He devotes some of his novel to examining the impact Death-Cast has on society, on hospitals and emergency services, on celebrity culture, on the internet. Even “Deckers,” as they are called—I couldn’t suss out why—have to put up with creepy people on the internet. Silvera also devotes some chapters to introducing a cast of minor characters. Some are Deckers wrestling with their own fates, some are not, some are already known to Mateo or Rufus, others are not, but all of them cross paths with our two young protagonists on their fateful day.
For this story belongs to Mateo and Rufus. It isn’t easy spending your Last Day with another Decker. You can’t help wondering whether you have inadvertently sealed your own doom. Maybe the piano destined to land on his head is going to get you too, since you chose to tag along. Hilariously, tragically, the two young men avoid taking elevators. “Two Deckers riding an elevator on their Last Day is either a death wish or the start to a bad joke,” says Rufus.
Over the course of their remarkable day and this amazing book, Mateo and Rufus overcome their initial discomfort, get to know one another, say their goodbyes, have adventures, and narrowly escape several incidents that might have been The End for one or both of them right there. They also open up to one another and heal each other’s hurts until at last their budding friendship blossoms into an honest-to-God love. And Silvera strikes not a single false note along the way.
But as the day passes—noon, 5:00 PM, 7:00 PM—the time allotted to them grows short. The tension mounts as they know, and we know, that it must happen before midnight, yet they and we hope beyond any hope that somehow, some way, they will escape their shared fate. One of the most touching moments in a book chock full of touching moments is when the two young men each try to make the other promise not to die first, because neither wants to be the one left behind, even for a moment. It is a promise neither has the power to make of course, and logically they can’t both make it, but the heart has a logic of its own. At last, death comes for them, deaths that were perfectly predictable, in hindsight.
We would do well, every one of us, to follow the example of Mateo and Rufus. It is not given to most of us to know the day of our own deaths. But we all know that Death will come. We cannot escape it any more than Rufus or Mateo could. Most of us will never live a day as full as theirs, but we can at least strive to live as many of the days that remain to us as fully as we are able.
Because we all die at the end.
In Defense of Escapism
A couple of days ago, Chuck Wendig posted a piece on his blog about being a writer and coping with all the terrible things going on around us. I posted a comment over there, but I want to repeat it here. (Especially since Chuck’s website appears to have eaten my comment. It’s not displaying.) It was this part of his piece that I was reacting to:
Fourth: Words Are A Door
Just the same: embrace the power of escapism.
We all need to escape, man. Every day I’m looking for a portal out of this donkey show and into something more fun, something so distant that I can’t hear the chaos through the walls. Nothing wrong with writing that escape, or seeking it. Use your own stories to provide an out for yourself and your readers; and read books, too, that give you that escape. No shame. Words can be self-care. They can be a doorway out, for a time. A portal to a Narnia where it’s not a circus orgy of sick chimps running around, on fire, throwing flaming shit at one another.
Nothing wrong with that escape. Absolutely. I am currently writing a young adult science fiction novel set 150 years in our future. The world my protagonist inhabits is not perfect by any means, but it is a much happier and safer world than this one. Visiting his world gives me peace.
The recently departed Ursula LeGuin wrote:
Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.
And J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.
I wholeheartedly endorse escapism. It can be the only thing that keeps the prisoner sane, and who could object to that? Besides the jailer or the tormentor, of course. So read stories. Especially read science fiction and fantasy. Write them too, if you can.
I am currently reading They Both Die at the End, and find I am liking it quite a lot. I will post a review here when I finish it, but if you’re looking for something to start with, you could do worse. Don’t be put off by the grim title (even though it is accurate).
The Wearing of the Green
Jade City
by Fonda Lee.
2017.
I regret that I’m late to this party; by the time I get around to writing a review of this book, it’s already snagged a Nebula nomination for Best Novel and a Locus Award nomination for Best Fantasy Novel, so it’s well past the time I can claim to have “discovered” it. I was sold on Fonda Lee’s writing by Exo, so when Jade City came out, I read it right away, but I had to think about it for a while before I felt ready to write about it. This is a book that invites thought.
Jade City brings to mind classic Bruce Lee martial arts films, but with jade magic substituted for conventional martial arts. It’s set in an imagined world drawn from our East Asia. The island of Kekon won its independence a generation earlier with the help of Green Bones, Kekonese warriors who have mastered the art of magical combat using power drawn from the jade they wear. Today, the same clans that secured Kekon’s freedom act as underworld crime families. They battle for control of the districts of Janloon, the capital (and titular “Jade City”), policing the streets, expanding their own interests, claiming stakes in local businesses, and helping friends of the clan while fighting off attempts by other clans to expand their own influence in the same way. Kekon might be Taiwan. Or Japan. Or the Philippines. Janloon might be Tokyo. Or Hong Kong. Or Singapore. The technology of this world seems to be 1970-ish. There are cars and air conditioning and television, but no sign of computers or mobile phones. Maybe that’s why my mind keeps going to Bruce Lee films.
I have to say that I’m probably not the ideal person to comment on this book. I was never able to get into martial arts films. (Even though my family is part Asian, and it’s not like no one’s ever tried!) So I approached Jade City with some doubts about whether someone like me could enjoy this book. I’m happy to report that those doubts were groundless. Fonda Lee has built a living, breathing world populated with a cast of varied characters struggling to maintain their positions as the ultimate conflict—between Janloon’s two most powerful clans—threatens to tear their world apart. There are young people learning to become adults, adults learning how to lead, and elders struggling to let go. Here you will find warriors wielding jade magic to defend their way of life, lovers finding, or rediscovering, their passions, and secrets everywhere, waiting to be unraveled. There is Lan, the leader of the clan, an able administrator, but perhaps not the right person to lead his clan into war. There is his brother Hilo, skilled in jade combat but hot-headed and too easily provoked. And their sister Shae, who walked away from the clan but now finds herself returning in her family’s time of need.
I particularly liked Lee’s use of linked points of view to introduce the large cast of characters she’s created. We meet a teenage criminal in the first chapter, he meets the character who becomes the POV character in the second chapter, who meets another POV character, and so on. It’s an effective way to ease the reader into this world without overwhelming. Jade City tells a sprawling story with many engaging characters, each trying to make her or his way through a world suddenly off balance and changing in unpredictable and dangerous ways. That’s a circumstance we call all identify with.
Jade City isn’t like anything you’ve read before, and even if you’re like me, and martial arts films aren’t your thing, its characters and world will keep you reading and will stay with you a long time after you’ve finished.
How I Came to Be Adopted by a Cambodian Family (Part II)
Vantha in 1981. This is how I want to remember him.
At the end of my previous post about the Cambodian family I had grown so attached to, they had moved to Seattle, and I figured I would never see them again. Three months later, I found myself embracing Vanthy in the Seattle bus station. A sudden death in the family, coupled with some unlikely transportation mix-ups, had left me alone in the Pacific Northwest. Sometimes in life you end up in the place you need to be, not because you were brave and dedicated, not because you persevered against the odds, but because you were dragged there, kicking and screaming, through the most improbable set of circumstances.
The Ouks felt lonely in Seattle, and they were as excited about seeing me as I was about seeing them. Vanna and Vantha laughed as they told me about how they’d eaten hamburgers at every meal stop on their bus trip from Philadelphia, because, although they hated hamburgers, it was the only food they knew how to order in English.
The evening of my arrival at the Ouk home in Seattle, I was sitting on their couch amid a family gathering, when a boy I’d never seen before—he was fifteen years old, but from his size you would have guessed about twelve—plopped himself onto the couch beside me, dropped an open algebra book in my lap, and said, “Can you hop me?”
The Ouks I knew laughed at him for his presumption and his inelegant English. “Can you hop me?” they mocked. I helped him work through the algebra problem. His name was Sovatha, and he was a cousin of the Ouks, relocated to Seattle along with his mother. His father had died in the Holocaust.
How I Came to Be Adopted by a Cambodian Family (Part I)
Vantha (l.) and Vanthy in 1981.
I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania when the Cambodian Holocaust took place, from 1975 to 1979, and the nightmare in that country filled me with an impotent outrage. I can’t explain why, even now. I’m not Cambodian myself; I’m Pennsylvania Dutch, and two more distant cultures are difficult to imagine. I didn’t know any Cambodians. I scarcely knew what a Cambodian was. All I knew was what I had read: that the Khmer Rouge insurgents who had seized control of that country in April of 1975 had turned the entire nation into a huge concentration camp. They allowed no foreigner to enter the country, no Cambodian to leave. They’d emptied the cities, forcing everyone into subsistence agriculture in the countryside. Cambodia had no motor vehicles, no post office, no television or radio, no schools, no doctors or hospitals. Just endless days of backbreaking labor in the fields under the burning sun and the watchful eye of the Khmer Rouge soldiers with their AK-47 rifles.
If you were too weak to work, they killed you. If you complained, they killed you. If you tried to eat anything more than the starvation rations they allotted, they killed you. If you had worked for the former government, they killed you. If you had an education, they killed you. If you knew how to read and write, or wore glasses, or knew how to drive a car, they killed you. And many more who weren’t killed starved to death.
Estimates of the number of victims were in the millions. All this information was available in the U.S. in the 1970s, if you knew where to look for it. I felt outrage at what was surely the worst crime since the Allies had shut down the Nazi death camps. And I felt impotence because no one around me seemed to care. In the late 1970s, the last thing Americans wanted to think about was Indochina. We spent far more time and attention debating whether disco was the best thing that had ever happened to popular music or the worst. Whether Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind had overshadowed George Lucas’s Star Wars, or vice versa.
Meanwhile, then Senator George McGovern, noted for his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, called for a United Nations force to invade Cambodia and oust the Khmer Rouge. Everyone laughed. “Now George McGovern wants to go to war in Indochina.” I thought he had a good idea.
In 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia. I remember trying to explain to one of my friends at Penn that this was a good thing. “But now the communists will be running the country,” she said.
Continue reading
Boy Meets World
My Side of the Mountain
by Jean Craighead George.
1959.
My Side of the Mountain was a very special book for me. I read it when I was eleven years old, and I suppose that was the perfect age. A few months afterward, Paramount Pictures released a film adaptation, and I begged my dad to take me to see it. I have thoughts about the film version, but I will save them for a separate post. Here I want to talk about the book. I recently re-read it, 49 years later, to see how it held up. I’m pleased to report that I think it holds up very well.
From what I can tell, noodling around on the internet, the book is still well regarded in many quarters. It has won many awards. It’s the sort of book that teachers and librarians are apt to recommend to young people. It’s the story of Sam Gribley, an adolescent boy, perhaps fourteen years old, give or take a year, and the novel opens with Sam living on his own in the Catskill Mountains in December, hunkered down against a big snowstorm as he tells his story. He lived in what must have been a very crowded New York City apartment with his parents and eight (!) brothers and sisters. You won’t be surprised that Sam finds it stifling. He dreams of the outdoors, a dream shared by no one else in his family. When he hears from his father that his Gribley forefathers once owned a farm somewhere near Delhi, New York, Sam resolves to run off and live on his own at the old Gribley farm. His father indulges his fantasy, expecting Sam to return home chastened after a day or two on his own.
Surprise! Sam not only survives in the Catskills wilderness, he thrives, after a rocky start. December blizzard Sam recounts (with some embarrassment) how May tenderfoot Sam struggled to survive his first night in the wild. He whittled a fishhook out of twigs and cried after a trout broke it. He finally succeeded in catching a few fish, but utterly failed to start a fire and spent the night hungry, cold, frightened, and miserable.
But Sam learns and from this inauspicious beginning builds a life for himself alone in the forest. Most of the story is Sam solving the problems of keeping himself fed, clothed, and sheltered and storing up food for the coming winter and his occasional interactions with other people who stumble across him. Among his accomplishments, two stand out. First, he burns out the inside of a huge hemlock tree to build himself a shelter, complete with storage niches for his provender and a clay fireplace so he can keep himself warm. (He is inspired by stories of Native Americans using this technique to make dugout canoes.) Second, he steals a falcon chick, which he names Frightful after the experience of capturing her, and raises her as a hunting bird, with guidance from the local library.
It’s a charming story of a smart, kindly, persistent boy taking on the challenge of living in the wilderness and not only surviving, but doing it in style. Some of this may seem implausible, and that’s the biggest rap the book’s detractors have against it. Sam not only copes in the wilderness, he begins to make it look easy. Do not mistake this story for a gritty, realistic portrayal of what it would mean to be alone in the forest, surviving on your own wits. Still, Sam does dispense good advice, even if it is doubtful he could have learned all this reading in the New York Public Library, as he claims.
Even harder to swallow is the idea that Sam’s parents would let him run away, then not search for him frantically. Not when he doesn’t return home in a day or two; not even after he’s gone for months and winter sets into the Catskills. This was only marginally plausible in 1959; today, these parents should expect a visit from a social worker with some hard and awkward questions.
I could understand if these difficulties are too much for some modern readers, though I found the book as delightful at the age of sixty as I did at eleven, and would counsel 21st century readers to overlook the plausibility issues—think of My Side of the Mountain as an historical novel, or a fantasy, if you must—and focus instead on the deeper emotional truth at the heart of the book.
Adolescent kids—especially boys—feel the call to separate from their parents and make their own way in the world. It’s a scary moment, torn as they are between the child’s yearning for familial security and the budding adult desire to stand on one’s own two feet and find a place in the world. The message of My Side of the Mountain is this: the world may sometimes be cold, or lonely, or frightening, but you are capable of more than you realize. You have it in you not only to survive, but to thrive.
That is reason enough to love this book, and to recommend it to today’s crop of young readers, who need its message as much as kids ever did.
Do We Really Need an Amazing Stories TV Reboot?
Amazing Stories was a science fiction magazine that began publication in 1926. No, strike that. It was not a science fiction magazine, it was the science fiction magazine, as in, the first of its kind. It was founded by Hugo Gernsback, who coined the term “science fiction.” (Originally, “scientific fiction” and then the unhappy portmanteau “scientifiction,” before settling on the solid, if somewhat limiting, term “science fiction.”) Gernsback’s name was imortalized in the “Hugo Awards,” given annually to the best science fiction of the year.
Amazing Stories was the first magazine dedicated to science fiction, but others soon followed, and the sad truth is, once Astounding and later Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction appeared on the scene, Amazing Stories got left behind. It ceased to be the premier SF magazine as soon as it ceased to be the only SF magazine. There were occasional periods when it reached a respectable level of quality; sadly, there were other times when it was regarded in the field as a joke or embarrassment. Nevertheless, over eighty years, most of the biggest names in science fiction appeared in the pages of Amazing: H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Doc Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Fritz Leiber, Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Randall Garrett, I could go on and on.
For two years in the 1980s, Steven Spielberg produced an Amazing Stories TV series, an anthology show in the vein of Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. It was…not very good. It got mediocre ratings and was quickly cancelled. Now comes the news that Apple is paying big bucks to reboot Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. I can only conclude that Apple has more unused cash lying around than it has brains.
The original series was highly anticipated when it was first announced because Spielberg was, if anything, hotter then than now, having just come off Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. The ABC TV network made a highly unusual 2-year commitment to the show, sight unseen, mostly on the strength of Spielberg’s reputation. And brother, did he let them down. They ran the two years they had already committed themselves to, then unceremoniously dropped the project as soon as they could. I don’t recall many tears shed when Amazing Stories went off the air.
The production values of the show were quite good—you expect nothing less from Steven Spielberg—but the stories were disappointing. Which seems strange. You would think, with (at the time) sixty years’ worth of story inventory from the magazine, hundreds and hundreds of stories from some of the greatest SF writers of all time (admittedly, not their best work, but still), Spielberg could have pulled out 48 good stories for a two-year TV run.
But in fact, he didn’t even try. Amazing Stories, the TV series, purchased the name from Amazing Stories, the magazine, but that was all they took. In a colossal act of arrogance that staggered me in 1985 and still staggers me today, almost every story the show produced came from Spielberg himself. The man literally sat down at a typewriter one afternoon and cranked out 48 one-page story treatments. These were handed out to other writers to develop into scripts, and that was how Amazing Stories was born.
This was presented to the news media at the time as evidence of Spielberg’s genius, but really. One guy sitting in front of a typewriters and brainstorming can’t possibly come up with 40 story ideas, every one of which was better than anything that ever appeared in the magazine. But Spielberg somehow convinced himself that he could. I suppose he believed too much of his own hype.
I can’t help noticing that even the news article I linked to above dances around the topic of whether the original Amazing Stories was actually worth watching. It wasn’t. A good story can still shine through, even in a mediocre production, but a mediocre story is never going to be compelling, not even if Steven Spielberg produces it.
Other than as a case study in the creative dangers of an inflated ego, Amazing Stories has nothing left to offer. Better to create something original, and let this unhappy experiment rest in peace.
Remembering The Book Mart
I’ve been thinking about The Book Mart lately. It was a bookstore on the corner of Sixth and Court Streets in Reading, PA from 1935 to 1998. When I was a kid, I practically haunted the place. It was the biggest and best bookstore in the area and during my adolescence was my private nirvana. I searched around recently and came up with the above picture, which was taken in the store on Boxing Day 1972, which was exactly the time I was hanging out there. (But I’m not in the picture.) It was in an old building, with linoleum floors that weren’t always level, funny lighting, and cluttered with old book racks stuffed to the ceilings with books. I loved the place.
And it had a science fiction section! And I was there so often the clerks knew me and knew my tastes and often had some newly published book ready to show me when I walked in. I discovered J.R.R. Tolkien at this store. Tolkien’s works were shelved with the science fiction in those days, because there was no such thing as a “fantasy” section in a bookstore in the 1970s. They bagged your books in heavy plastic bags with a cotton drawstring. The bags were printed with the slogan “Our bag is books.”
(For the benefit of you young people, that was because in the early 1970s, when you said something was your “bag,” that meant you were like, way into it, man. So they printed “Our bag is books” on the bags they put your books in. Get it?)
I was way into books. But in time, I moved, and later the store closed. A Vietnamese restaurant that I was fond of moved into the space, and that was great because I could still go there and look around the space. I would reconstruct in my mind how it looked when it was The Book Mart as I was chowing down on my fried frogs’ legs. It was great for me, but not so much for my dining companions, who would have to listen to me reminisce.
The restaurant recently moved to a new location, so as I write this the space is vacant, which makes me sad. It’s too much to hope for a bookstore, I guess, but I’m hoping some business moves in there soon. I want to go hang out there some more.
I Voted, In Spite of Everything
Yes, I know. But I voted anyway!
Last October, two weeks out from the election, I noticed there were horrible racist comments being posted on this site that were coming from Russia. I posted about it here, and laughed it off as a silly attempt to sell junk jewelry.
Stupid me. We now know it was a lot bigger than that. Even in my small corner of the internet, the Russians were busy hacking the election. The Associated Press just published the results of their own investigation of Russian hacking of the Democratic Party.
There’s a lot we still don’t know about the Russian tampering and the degree to which Americans worked with them, but the broad outlines of the attack on our election are no longer controvertible:
- There was a large-scale effort by hackers probably working for the Russian government to hack confidential information from the Democratic Party and from important party figures. Hundreds of them.
- This information was released in a way to maximize the damage to Hillary Clinton’s campaign as well as Democratic candidates for Senate and Congress around the country.
- Russians probably aligned with their government also operated, and continue to operate, thousands of social media accounts designed to look American, for the purpose of surreptitiously sowing misinformation and discord into American political debate, to the benefit of Donald Trump’s campaign.
- Russian money was spent to influence US elections in violation of US law. Facebook, and perhaps other websites, took this money in violation of US law.
- Russian hackers also attempted to gain access to American election systems and electronic voting systems. Whether they had any success with this is not clear, but they definitely attempted it, and when asked about it, American election officials are strangely reticent. There is at least one case of the wiping of server logs for no good reason.
All of this is pretty horrifying, even if you restrict yourself to what we know for certain. It sounds like a science fiction novel. In fact, I was sketching out an outline for a novel that looked something like this, but I’ve had to abandon it now. (Thanks a lot, Vladimir!)
But far more horrifying is this:
- The Republicans who control our government are showing no interest in doing anything about any of this.
Now, I’m so old I remember the Cold War days when you could count on a Republican to blame anything from bad weather to the New York Yankees on Russian meddling. I can remember how conservative Republicans would whip up this huge historical conspiracy argument about how the Russian state has represented authoritarianism and repression for a thousand years, and has been at war with Western values of freedom, enlightenment, and self-government all this time, and that the Cold War was just the latest phase of a Thousand Year Clash of Civilizations.
You know. The kind of stuff they say about Muslims now.
So you’ll forgive me if I have trouble wrapping my head around this. Because the same political movement, and in many cases the very same people, are watching all this happen without saying a word. And if you’re thinking, “Well, yeah, that’s just because they’re benefiting from it and don’t want to spoil a good thing,” well, then allow me to remind you that a) our incumbent President is a corrupt, incompetent stumblebum, b) he got into office even though his opponent got 3,000,000 more votes than he did, and c) Russian meddling in our election is certainly responsible, given how narrowly he squeaked by. This should outrage any American, even the ones who voted for the stumblebum.
A hostile foreign power imposing a President on us against the wishes of the American people is a existential crisis for American democracy. Don’t think just because Thomas Jefferson and James Madison wrote some clever words down on big brown pieces of paper 250 years ago, they’ve got it covered and you have nothing to worry about. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are not going to save American democracy. The people who actually can save American democracy, the Republicans who run our government, aren’t lifting a finger, because they are benefiting from it personally.
It’s hard to see this as anything other than the final collapse of the American experiment.
That being said, I voted today, even though it’s a stupid, off-year election. And you should, too. Because if you don’t care either, then you are also part of the problem. In fact, I feel pretty sure that if Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were part of this discussion, they would say, “Hey, this is your responsibility, not ours.”
If nothing else, imagine yourself forty years from now, telling your grandchildren about the days when we actually had elections that mattered. Then think about how stupid you’re going to feel, when they ask you “Did you vote when you had the chance?” and you have to tell them, “No, I didn’t think it was worth the trouble.”