All Of This Strife On The Political

A Hip-looking Teen Watches An Elderly Woman Hobble Across The Street On A Walker. "grammy's Here!" He Shouts. He Puts Some Macattack Mac&cheese In The Microwave And Dons Headphones And Takes Out A Video Game So He Won't Be Bored During The Forty Seconds It Takes His Lunch To Cook. A Truck Comes Around The Corner And Hits Grammy, Sending Her Flying Over The Roof Into The Backyard, Where Luckily She Lands On A Trampoline. Unluckily, She Bounces Back Over The Roof, Into The Front Yard, Landing On A Rosebush.

Even The Written History [of Abraham Lincoln's Times] Is Poorly Understood By Most People.

For Me, The Fiction Writer's Job Is To Take The Small, Stupid Process Of Learning To Use An Iphone - And Suddenly You're The Guy Who's Asking Your Daughter, "when I Go On Facebook, Can It See Me?"

I Might Take From The Current Political Chaos A Desire To Somehow Reflect Its Essential Qualities In A Story - The Blatant Lies That Get Accepted With Repetition; The Way Mass Media Seems To Be Agitating People En Masse; The Way, Particularly, That A Relatively Lucky And Affluent And Privileged Population Can Be Undone By A Certain Spoiled Quality; That Feeling When Two Decent People Violently Disagree, Because They Are Arguing From Two Non-intersecting Data Sets - Well, The List Goes On.

This - Where We Are Now - Is Where A Culture Gets To, When It Has Chosen, For Many Years, Banality Over Intelligence, The Literal Over The Immaterial Or Complex, Materialism Over Spirituality. This Is The Result Of Many Years Of Disrespecting The Intellectual Project - Of A Collective Acceptance Of The Idea That Thinking And Reasoning And Reading Deeply In Difficult Text And Being Respectful Of History Are Somehow "wimpy" Or Secondary.