Dave's Fiction Warehouse

In which I bloviate about books, TV, movies, politics and other stuff.

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It could be worse.
Just ask Grant

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If you’ve ever thought America is going to hell in a handbasket — and who among us hasn’t? — take a trip back to the mid-19th century and see how you like it then. That’s what I’ve been doing since the first of the year: Reading Ron Chernow’s 960-page biography of Ulysses S. Grant. I’ve learned a lot from “Grant,” but mostly this: Crises and cataclysms come […]

Judgment Day
for American swine

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The wife and I were talking about sexual harassment a couple of weeks ago. I forget which famous man was accused and fired that day; you lose track after awhile. But I do remember saying, “Jeez, who’s next, Garrison Keillor?” It was a joke. I was trying to come up with a famous person, other than Pope Francis, who would seem least likely to play the horndog […]

Downward-facing decade

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I wonder: Has the iPhone made the world a better place, or a worse one? Always a popular subject and more in vogue this month now that the iPhone has turned 10. (Any anniversary that’s a multiple of five is red meat to pundits caught in the dog days of summer.) And so Timothy Egan and David Brooks both have nice columns on the subject in the […]

‘Star Trek’ saw it coming

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You run out of metaphors to explain Trump. In the shit-hits-the-fan scenario, is Trump the fan, or is he the shit? In the Hitler scenario, is Trump really Hitler, or is he Mussolini’s feckless brother Doug? In the comet-destroys-Earth scenario, is Trump the comet, or is he just a guy on his toilet, tweeting out his reactions to “Fox and Friends”? The thing about history is that […]

Papers, please

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Imagine if all those thousands of bored, unfriendly TSA screeners at the airports were turned loose to harass folks on the street. That’s sort of how Trump’s deportation plans are shaping up. Instead of you going to them, they’ll be coming to you. Taking off your shoes will no longer suffice. Now they’ll have the power to seriously screw up your life. Just because they’re hunting undocumented […]

A hobby can help

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Seriously, you have to figure out a way to tune this stuff out once in awhile. In my case, I took up woodworking. I know; that’s a hobby you’d expect of any aging retiree, even without an alarming political climate. But it was a pretty big step for me. Prior to last November, I’d never built a damned thing. Now, three months after Trump’s election, I’ve put […]