Hello, folks. This is the first bit of a recent post by Chuck Wendig, an author and a screenwriter whose blog I follow (and you should, too). I’m reposting a chunk of one of his posts here because it’s both funny and true and because you should read it. You can read the post in its entirety here. There’s also a link back to the original at the end of the snippet below.
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Dearest Electors, And Also My Fellow Americans:
I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but things have gone slippery here in the ol’ States-That-Are-United. I feel like I’m watching one of those videos where a car hits a patch of ice in slow-motion and then drifts ineluctably down a hill toward an intersection, and we see it’s happening but we can’t do shit about it, just as the driver of that car couldn’t really do shit about it. Except this video is worse than any video I’ve seen, because the car is now sliding toward a school bus, and a church, and a zoo full of adorable animals, also a hospital, and at the end of it all is a nuclear munitions factory sitting on a fault line.
The news from President-Elect Trump’s side of the chasm comes fast and furious every day, and it’s never really good news. It veers somewhere between head-scratchingly odd and gut-churningly apocalyptic. It’s like watching TV in Bizarro-World. If I wrote this stuff in a novel, people would tell me it was too far-fetched for fiction. If I wrote it as satire, it’d be too on-the-nose, too crass, too clumsy. It’s all very confusing. We’re all very confused. We have a phrase amongst me and my fellow bewilderbeasts: this is not normal. But lately, that phrase has almost started to feel a bit toothless to me. We’ve set a benchmark for normal that includes George W. Bush’s run, because at this point I think we’d all gladly agree to another four years of him, instead. But normal is so small a signpost, and so far in our rearview. Abnormal isn’t even visible anymore from where we are. We’re in Fucking Cuckootown, Population All Of Us. We all live here now, it seems. The news is like being covered in fire ants. Each headline seems weirder and worse than the last. TRUMP ANNOUNCES MUMM-RA THE EVER-LIVING AS PICK TO HEAD SECRETARY OF STATE. MUMM-RA SAYS, “I’LL GET THOSE THUNDERCATS. ALSO I PLAN ON DISMANTLING CLIMATE CHANGE LAWS, WORKER PROTECTIONS, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND EACH YEAR INSTEAD OF PARDONING A TURKEY FOR THANKSGIVING WE WILL CATAPULT A BAG OF KITTENS INTO THE SUN. MOSTLY, THOUGH, IT’S THE THUNDERCATS THING. ANCIENT SPIRITS OF EVIL, TRANSFORM THIS DECAYING FORM!”
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