Dave's Fiction Warehouse

L ike a few million others, we’ll be back on the street tomorrow. Singin’ songs and carryin’ signs. Still trying to come up with original slogans. Can’t use the ones from two weeks ago. We thought things were bad then but they’ve only gotten worse.  Now Trump and his minions are openly defying the Supreme Court and laughing about it. They’re still getting rid of people solely on the strength of the boss’s whim. Which, when you think about it, is pretty much the last stop on the train to Treblinka. I wonder if these nationwide protests are too little, too late. But this is no time to sit at home. Here in Missoula, the April 5 event didn’t feel like a protest so much as a party or a wake:  A gathering of a few thousand like-minded people aggrieved, bothered and bewildered by what appears to be the rapid disassembly of America.  It was kind of uplifting to see that our months-long sense of anger and dread was widely shared. But the protests didn’t generate enough headlines a...

The original cast of MAGA W hat happens when a rapacious, hateful and thoroughly corrupt gasbag gains complete control of a government?  Well, we’re finding out, aren’t we? But this is not specifically about Trump. It’s more about this book I just finished: “ A Fever in the Heartland .”  In it, Timothy Egan relates the sordid saga  of a Trump-like figure who managed to take over the state of Indiana in the early 1920s.  At the height of his power as Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, David C. Stephenson controlled much of the Midwest and believed he had a shot at the White House. If his depravity hadn’t escalated to an actual sex slaying, he might have. Even then it was touch and go. “Fever” is a great example of what Egan does so well: Take well-trod episodes of American history and structure them almost as novels, with villains and heroes and quite a bit of  dramatic tension.  In a lot of fiction, it’s the villain who keeps you turning the pages. You can’t...

I used to live near the Canadian border. The northern boundary of the folks’ ranch was a stone’s throw from the 49th parallel. There was a switchback road you could drive up to see the border itself – a 20-foot swath in the timber that stretched out to the horizon (that’s my son and brother-in-law in the photo). Even back in the ’70s I remember thinking it was pretty incredible to have such a long, totally undefended border between two sovereign nations. Not even a fence, then. Sometimes, hiking or hunting, we’d stroll across the border just to say we had. Other days we’d drive through the border station at Roosville to pick apples or buy Labatt’s. Each way, the guards would make small talk and wave us through. Then 9/11 happened. Then, 15 years later, so did Trump. Then Covid. And now, an older, meaner and more disordered Trump, who no longer seems to be kidding when he raves about annexing our more civilized neighbor to the north. Plus the tariffs. Don’t get me started about the stup...

Regrets, she has a few I t’s tempting to chortle when a Trump voter reaps the whirlwind. But Ryleigh Cooper, 24, was just a kid during Trump’s first time around, so I can sympathize. According to this Washington Post story, she lost her Forest Service job earlier this month, as part of the ongoing Musk/Trump vandalism of the federal government. There goes a $40,000 annual salary. There goes health insurance. There goes 12 weeks of paid maternity leave. Oops.  Ryleigh said she voted for Trump mostly because of his glib campaign pledge to make IVF treatment free. She didn’t realize Leon Musk was on the ticket. Oops again. Trump doesn't talk about IVF now. At all. He and Musk have bigger fish to fry: parasites to purge, hotels to build in Gaza.  It gets worse: Republicans just approved a budget plan that will raise her taxes, gut Medicaid and shrink all sorts of programs meant to help folks in the middle and lower tax brackets.  If there’s an upside, maybe the IVF thing see...

I applaud the Philadelphia Eagles for apparently declining to sit with Trump at the White House. Hey, it kind of stinks in there! Also, anything that gets Megyn Kelly’s panties in a wad should bring joy to all our hearts. Kelly, noted MAGA apologist and all-around mean girl, has big feelings about the rumored snub. Replying to a fan’s post expressing disgust with the team, she had this to say: “SAME. GO F YOURSELVES EAGLES… F THIS BS!” Harsh words! Which pretty much tells you that the Eagles are on the right side of history here. Like the Eagles, we should all work to erode the autocratic aspirations of the Orange One. Naturally he’ll claim he didn't want them there in the first place. But we know better, don’t we?   I really didn’t care who won the Super Bowl, and in fact didn’t watch one second of it. But if the Eagles have the stones to stick to their guns on this, I’m a fan for life. As they say in Philly: Go Birds!  (EDIT 3/11/25: To hell with the Birds. I see they...

W e all know by now that Donald Trump will do whatever Vladimir Putin tells him to do. And most of us have long suspected that his eagerness to bend over for the Russian president is not based on, say, mutual respect or the shared love of golf. So this claim from former KGB official Alnur Mussayev, reported in the Irish Star , kind of rings true. Mussayev says the KGB recruited Trump while he was visiting Moscow in 1987, on one of his many failed real estate ventures. At the time, Mussayev says, he was running a directorate charged with “recruiting businessmen from capitalist countries.” A man like Trump – clueless, vainglorious, infinitely susceptible to flattery – would have fit the bill nicely. The KGB even bestowed a code name: “Krasnov.” I’ve often pondered those pictures from Trump’s first meeting with Putin in Helsinki, in 2018. In each of them, Trump looks a little sore in the backside, while Putin wears the satisfied smirk of a man whose long game is paying off bigtime. I thou...

'W ell, that was some weird shit." President George W. Bush's unscripted reaction to Trump's 2017 inauguration speech may well be his most memorable words. They may also be the truest he ever spoke. They certainly describe everything Trump has done since then. Weird shit indeed! It never ends, does it? Take last night (July 3) at Mount Rushmore: Trump again reveling in dystopian fantasies of culture war and forced-perspective photographs suggesting his own smirking visage would look pretty good chiseled alongside the other four.    Now there is the stuff of nightmares: if Washington had been Trump, we'd have abandoned  the Revolution after the first month. If Jefferson had been Trump, the Declaration of Independence would be eight incoherent  tweets with more exclamation points than actual words. If Roosevelt had been Trump, we'd have no national parks. If Lincoln had been Trump, we'd be ... well, Confederates at the very least. Somehow I imagine the Trumps...

I used to not mind grocery shopping. But now every trip to the store involves a certain amount of resentment and homicidal rage. That’s one more effect of the pandemic: It makes me uncomfortable with my thoughts.  Here in Jacksonville, the Republican mayor has finally decided that maybe masks aren’t so bad after all, and recently announced a citywide requirement that masks must be worn in any enclosed public space. Well, he didn’t announce it, preferring to decamp while aides got the word out. I assume he wanted no video evidence of him saying such a thing. Trump worship is a cruel mistress.  Still,  praise be. Tremendous breakthrough. If such a rule had been in place two months ago, maybe Florida wouldn’t have hit 10,000 cases a day last week. Maybe we’d be looking at the end of this, instead of the beginning. But better late than never, right?  The problem is, the extreme Trump wing of the Trump party remains determined that mask-wearing is an affront to God. The m...

  T here’s no need to read any of this. We’re all going through the same thing, all reading the same stuff on the internet. I can’t offer any fresh insights on American life in the time of Covid-19. I’m just writing here because I’ve finished the new season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and the last murder mystery I had on the Kindle ( The Perfect Couple , three stars). So. Pandemic, huh? As it happens, I also recently finished a book about a pandemic ( Severance ) and I really didn’t expect to see the book’s premise played out in real life — or for another few years at least. But now it’s happening everywhere and we must all deal with it as best we can. Here in Jacksonville, we’ve spent the last 10 days hunkered down, washing our hands like the Macbeths (stole that line from a New Yorker piece) and exploring the wonders of grocery delivery. The last time I went to a store in person was to pick up a prescription at WalMart. I didn’t really have a cold, but I did cough into my elbow a f...

I owe Mitt Romney an apology. Of course he’s never heard of me and never will, but I’ve long been one of those snide, cynical voices on Facebook and Twitter, quick to ridicule the man as an out-of-touch plutocrat (running against Obama in 2012), a soulless opportunist (dining at Trump Tower in 2016), and just another generic kisser of Trump’s ample ass (2018 up to about three months ago). Most recently, I’ve mocked Romney as the Susan Collins of Utah: given to faux concern and soulful hand-wringing, but unable to actually DO anything but furrow a brow as Trump trashes and torches his way through every check and balance the Founding Fathers imagined. I take it all back. Today was Mitt’s finest hour. He identified Trump as what Trump is, and he didn’t mince words: “…a flagrant assault on our electoral rights,national security and fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive destructive violation of one’s oath that I can imagine.” Preach...

I just finished John Le Carre’s latest: “ Agent Running in the Field .” It’s a pretty good book for those who like literate spy stories, but to me it’s noteworthy for at least one other reason: It’s the first time I’ve explicitly encountered the dark and dimwitted presence of Donald J. Trump in popular fiction. Probably won’t be the last. Trump is not a character, thank God. But he does provide the dark milieu in which he, and his totally excellent compadre Vladimir Putin, continue to amplify the disastrous consequences of Brexit and the 2016 American election.  This is not any kind of political diatribe (although at least one Trumpist reviewer on Goodreads called it that. Because of course). The stoic and deliberate Le Carre has never been a  polemicist. In simpler times he might have been a proud Tory, or a Republican. But he knows quite a bit about the clandestine services. And here he deftly illustrates what happens when chaotic bumblers like Trump (and Boris Johnson) are ...

W hat if you discovered that a friend or relative had been donating to Trump’s reelection? Not just shrugging off the malignant stupidity and breathtaking corruption of the last three years, but actually sending money to prop up the world’s largest sack of shit. Would it matter? It would matter to me. A lot. It might even be a deal breaker. In the Washington Post today, there’s a story about efforts to compile and publicize lists of Trump’s political donors. The tone of the story — “donor information is being weaponized” — makes it sound like outing Trump’s financial backers is a bad thing. I say it’s just the opposite. I understand that with friends or family, sometimes it’s best not to know. It’s one thing to harbor vague suspicions that someone might actually think Trump is not the worst thing to happen to America since 9/11. But you don’t bring it up. Because the second you know for certain, that relationship can never be the same. It happens. The relationship doesn’t end with a ba...

I would like to personally thank President Trump for steering Hurricane Dorian well clear of Alabama (and parts of Florida) through the sheer force of his will. That was a close one. If the president had not been closely monitoring the situation between rounds at his golf club in Virginia, this thing could have gotten rough. It’s still pretty bad: We have a couple of small branches in the yard and some puddles in the driveway. We will rebuild! Where do I go to collect my FEMA money? The other downside is that it’s kind of an emotional letdown. After five days of worry about flooding and the impermanence of certain trees nearby (and at least five unnecessary supply runs to Publix), we’re ending up with little more than a tropical storm — basically, a couple of regular Florida thunderstorms placed end to end. Very wet and very windy, sure, but fortunately we won’t be needing Trump to golf us through the aftermath. Just think: He could have gone to Poland after all!   One thing ...

D orian. Never met anyone named Dorian, unless you count “ The Picture of Dorian Gray. ” I finally got around to reading that a few years ago. Oscar Wilde. The book was sort of controversial in 1890. It’s about a guy who makes a deal with, if not the devil, then at least a Jeffrey Epstein-like character -- if Jeffrey Epstein had been a gifted painter instead of a gifted sex predator. The deal is this: Dorian may pursue a completely debauched and solipsistic life, with no consequence save one: the sum of his depravities will be reflected in the portrait.  So, given that, maybe it’s not something he’ll want to hang in the family room. Dorian will look OK in public, but that portrait: whoa. Every sin, it gets worse. Best keep it under a beach towel behind the StairMaster. And again, we’re back to Donald J. Trump, who notably (some would say exclusively) prefers paintings of himself. If there’s an attic in Mar-a-Lago, I’ll bet it’s home to one ugly-ass picture of the Orange One. We’re ...

I n another life, I would like to have been a detective. Not a regular detective who has to play by the rules and follow “the law” and kiss the asses of all the powers-that-be. No, thank you! I’m thinking of something more like a movie detective, the kind of guy whose boss gives him 48 hours to solve a sordid high-profile murder case and he solves it in like 47:59:59. Suck on it, boss! In such a scenario, I would carry a very distinctive firearm. Not a long-barreled Smith & Wesson .44 caliber Model 29 — that’s already been done . No, I would be even more old-school: maybe a Wogdon dueling pistol, recently popularized by the musical “Hamilton.” One shot, and if you throw away that shot, you are well and truly screwed. Much like Hamilton himself. If there were no Wogdon dueling pistols available, I would have to go with the Model 1892 Winchester Chuck Connors made so famous in “The Rifleman.”  Mark McCain: “Pa, you just killed eleven men! In like two seconds! Is that a Model 92 o...

L ast night we headed for bed just before midnight. The New Year’s Eve gunfire was like the opening battle scene in “Saving Private Ryan,” to the point that the dog followed us upstairs to cower by the bed. My wife asked me what my hopes for 2018 might be. She asks things like that. I hadn’t thought much about it, but the answer came pretty quickly: “To see Donald Trump driven from office in disgrace.” I don’t know if that says more about me, or more about Trump. Is my life so barren that I should for the first time in my life care that much who occupies the White House? Or is this president so loathsome in every respect that his ouster should be my fondest wish? Obviously, I’m going with the latter. Trump cast a pall over pretty much every day last year, a thickening miasma of dread and disgust that all the late-night comics in the world couldn’t quite dispel. I woke up in the morning with minor hopes and dreams, and every day there was some new outrage concerning Trump and his terrib...

These needy seniors are making me thirsty I used to be a Meals on Wheels driver, and let me tell you, those were the days: Pulling down a generous stipend while delivering gourmet cuisine to indolent oldsters. The only downside was that they were lousy tippers, and tended to complain if the foie gras was grainy or the filets were overdone. Ha ha. Very funny, right? Actually, I found Meals on Wheels to be about as economical and efficient as any government-assisted program could be. Almost austere, really. Nearly all of us were volunteers. We’d donate our time and cars and gas money to haul mediocre cafeteria chow to lonely folks who might otherwise go hungry. In the process we’d see how they were doing. We had one job and we did it pretty well. On my route, I never got the feeling that the food was being wasted. I don’t know that everyone was 100 percent delighted to see me personally at the door — I’m not the sort of man who lights up a room — but I always imagined that, worst-case sc...

Same body type, better manners Y ou 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 when you’re in the middle of it, it’s hard to know what the hell’s going on. To make sense of things, you must turn to classic ’60s television. There’s a Star Trek episode called “ And the Children Shall Lead .” In it, a man who resembles the Trumpster gets children to indulge in homicide. The metaphor works because the Friendly Angel, who controls the children, is also overweight, cheesily transparent, and can’t speak without lying. The kids, like many of Trump’s supporters, are kind of creepy and easily persuaded to commit horrific acts in service to a none-too-bright svengali. ...

I magine 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 immigrants doesn’t mean they’ll leave everyone else alone. What Trump wants is for people to be detained merely on the basis of accusation. And, no doubt, collaboration. He wants 10,000 new agents devoted to the task, and he wants every local law enforcement agency in the country to help out. He also wants to loosen or bypass due process for those who object to being rounded up. Nobody wants violent criminals in this country, particularly if they’re here illegally. That’s why these people were already being arrested and deported long before the current president afflicted us. What Trump wants now...

Y ou get used to President Trump blowing bullshit, but this has to rank as the most inelegant non sequitur in the history of presidential remarks. Here’s Trump on Wednesday, fielding a question about the “sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents across the United States: "Well, I just want to say that we are, you know, very honored by the victory that we had — 316 electoral college votes. We were not supposed to crack 220. You know that, right? There was no way to 221, but then they said there’s no way to 270. And there’s tremendous enthusiasm out there." Thanks for clearing up your feelings about hateful behavior, Mr. President. Your words are a comfort in these troubled times.