Dave's Fiction Warehouse

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

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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 […]

There will be blood

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No matter what happens with Trump’s dumb travel ban, we’re nearly certain to see another ISIS-inspired attack sometime this year. But that’s not the scary thing. The scary thing is that Trump and Bannon will be absolutely delighted when it happens. It’s been nearly eight months since the last big incident, in which an American citizen killed 49 people in Orlando. Now, the media ignored the Orlando […]

It’s a buyer’s market

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In the tragic wake of the Bowling Green Massacre, you’d think people would be lining up at gun stores. That’s the normal response when guns are used to kill large numbers of Americans at a single sitting: People immediately think to themselves, “hey, how better to honor the memory of the victims than by buying a bunch of the same weapons used to kill them?” But gun […]