Larry Hodges Science Fiction & Fantasy

Many would say that the two and a half century American experiment in democracy has been pretty successful. Are you okay with replacing it with a Trump dictatorship?

Let’s look at what we could be facing.

If Trump wins the 2024 presidential election, this means lower Democratic turnout and higher Republican turnout. Result – Republicans will likely have majority control of both the House (where they currently have a majority) and Senate (where Democrats currently have a one-seat majority but have to defend 23 seats to the Republican’s 10). 

So, Trump will have the presidency; Republicans will control both houses of congress; and five of the nine Supreme Court Justices are essentially Trump supporters (three that he appointed, plus Alito and Thomas).

In the Senate, there’s the filibuster rule, where you need sixty votes to pass anything. Except … that can change with a simple majority vote. Both parties, to date, have toyed with but refrained from pulling the so-called “Nuclear Option” and ending the filibuster rule. They know that if they do this, it’s just a matter of time before the other side gets a majority.

On July 29, 2017, Trump tweeted, “The very outdated filibuster rule must go. Budget reconciliation is killing R’s in Senate. Mitch M, go to 51 Votes NOW and WIN. IT’S TIME!” Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused the Nuclear Option, but Senate Republicans who are willing to stand up to Trump – and face likely defeat in Republican Primaries – are long gone. Say goodbye to the filibuster rule. (Yes, Kamala Harris has said she’d support ending the filibuster rule for one issue – Roe v. Wade protections. If so, she would not be using it for the reasons Trump would likely use it, i.e., personal power, and she’s unlikely to have a majority in the Senate anyway.)

So, Trump would have control of both houses, with only a simple majority needed to pass anything. (Yes, Republicans held both houses while Trump was president in 2017-2018, but Trump didn’t yet have the hold on the party that he does now, a Justice Department that would do his bidding, or a near rubber-stamp Supreme Court.) Even worse, with Republicans doing whatever he asks, he’ll be able to coerce congress into putting even more power in the hands of the president.

Does the German Enabling Act of 1933 sound familiar? 

Learning from his first term, Trump would almost certainly appoint absolute loyalists as head of the Justice Department and FBI, and a Republican congress would rubber-stamp them. (Even if they didn’t, he’d just appoint “acting” directors, as he did in his first term.) The Supreme Court has ruled that a president can’t be prosecuted for “official acts” – again, Germany’s 1933 Enabling Act comes to mind. With control of the House, Trump won’t be impeached again. (Even if he were, they’d need two-thirds majority to indict in the Senate. No chance of getting enough Republicans willing to end their political careers by voting to indict. Dead on arrival.)

Trump could have his Justice Department arrest Biden, Obama, Clinton, and round up anyone else he considers an enemy on “trumped-up” charges. Or order fraudulent tax audits. Or any of the myriad ways a president, without checks and balances, might seek revenge. What would stop him from harassing, even arresting members of the so-called “lamestream media” that often opposes him and keeps the public updated on the facts? Do you think his supporters would object to that? Trump hates the people they hate, and so do you think they’ll complain if Trump falsely punishes those people? What possible mechanism could stop it? Impeachment and Indictment are off the table. He’d have a free hand to enact the very revenge he has so often promised on so many.

“But he won’t go after us!” his supporters would say. This is how dictator wannabes get their supporters to accept them as dictators, by going after their joint “enemies.” It never ends well.

Trump’s followers have long believed or gone along with his many lies. Remember what Voltaire wrote: “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Remember what happened after the Germany’s Enabling Act.

How do we know Trump would seek such revenge? Because he has promised it over and over in rallies and texts. He’s even said he’d appoint a special prosecutor to go after Biden and his family, and that prosecutor would be selected by his Justice Department, i.e., by Trump himself. He has called for Hillary Clinton and others to be locked up. But don’t expect him to stop there – he has a long list of supposed grievances, which he’s very vocal about, and recently said revenge can be justified. Suffice to quote from a speech in 2011: “Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back ten times as hard. I really believe it.” He reiterated this in 2023, saying, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” He’s made dozens of similar statements. If reelected, he’d be in position to do so.

Worst of all, he’d control future presidential elections. Guess who’d preside over the results in the Republican-controlled Senate in the 2028 presidential election? Yes, Vice President Vance, who’s already said he wouldn’t have sanctioned the 2020 election results. (He wouldn’t be on the ticket otherwise.) All he and Trump have to do is once again allege fraud (so Senate Republicans can rationalize rejecting the results), again bring in their own electors (with Trump supporters already taking over many state election boards), and they “win,” no matter the real result. Their Republican base, now essentially a Trump cult, already believes the 2020 election was rigged (because Trump and his sycophants told them so), despite the lack of evidence and losing all 60+ court cases on this, most with Republican judges, many with Trump-appointed judges – about half of them thrown out by judges because of lack of evidence. Why would they doubt it this time?

And, of course, Trump needs to be president to stay out of prison. Once out of office he faces a lot of criminal cases. How far would he go to avoid this?

Even the Supreme Court can’t stop him. Putting aside that five are essentially Trump loyalists, remember that the Supreme Court in 1832 ruled that President Andrew Jackson couldn’t relocate Cherokee Indians (Worcester vs. Georgia). He simply ignored it and went ahead and did so – see “Trail of Tears” – correctly realizing the Supreme Court couldn’t enforce it, and that congress wouldn’t impeach him.

Guess who Trump has called his favorite president?

How would this not be a Trump dictatorship? Remember that laws and even Supreme Court rulings are meaningless if there’s no way of enforcing them. (Ask the Cherokees about this.) If Trump is elected president again, perhaps the only thing stopping a Trump dictatorship would be if Trump magnanimously chooses to give up such power. Do you believe he would do that?

On July 26, 2024, Trump said, “You won’t have to (vote) anymore” and “In four years, you don’t have to vote again.” Yes, he said this. And who are the leaders around the world that Trump regularly admires? Autocrats such as Putin, Xi, Kim, Erdoğan, and Orban.

He’s even said he’d be a dictator on his first day back as president. How many dictators willingly give up power?

Am I assuming the worst of Trump? Yes – but that doesn’t matter. What matters is whether we really want to put Trump or any other potential megalomanic president in a position where they could, if they choose, become a dictator and end our democracy.

The Founding Fathers understood the value of checks and balances, and so should we.

Some might argue that our democracy has survived this long, and expect that it will survive Trump, despite the unique situation we face. That’s the famous last words of every democracy that turned into a dictatorship and didn’t see it coming. Russia says hello.

Trump is a unique danger in that his cult followers support him no matter what he does, potentially putting incredible power in the hands of the most narcissistic and dishonest president this country has ever had. As Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” (And he didn’t lose any voters by saying that or any of the huge number of other controversial statements, insults, and tens of thousands of documented lies.) This makes it clear what we are up against. It’s an existential threat.

Many of his followers likely want a Trump dictatorship – though they wouldn’t call it that. They believe he’d remake America in that vague “Make America Great Again” image in their heads that he’s sold them on. Many would love to see Trump take revenge on his enemies, who they see as their own enemies – liberals, Democrats, the mainstream media, and the long list of others that Trump demonizes, i.e., anyone that opposes him. Trump’s followers may be surprised and dismayed at the actual result. How many dictatorships have worked out for the good of that country? Perhaps they should google the famous “First they came for…” quote from pastor Martin Niemöller.

So … are you okay with a Trump dictatorship?

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It was an excellent 80-minute movie. The problem was that it was 138 minutes long. They tried to make it half drama, half musical, but the musical aspect mostly didn’t work, and seemed forced. That’s the  primary reason I think it’s getting such bad reviews. I watched in a nearly empty theater, and halfway through, during another pointless song and dance routine, two different groups walked out, leaving just two of us in the theater to watch the rest.

How did I survive? By pretending the musical sequences were just commercials, and so wait them out until we get back to the good stuff. During one of the musical numbers I actually scribbled some notes on a notepad for a story I’m writing.

I see what they tried to do with this movie, and it was a worthy attempt. If you look at great movies that had great sequels – The Godfather, Terminator, Alien, original Star Wars, and so on – the one thing all had in common is they brought in the best of the first movie plus something new. In this sequel, a primary “something new” they brought in were all the musical sequences – way too many of them. Some were real, while others took place only in the fantasy mind of Joker, i.e., Arthur Fleck, played by Joaquin Phoenix.

The sequel already had two new things. In the first movie, which I really liked, we got to know the sad-sack Arthur and his horrible life, and his descent into insanity. The movie had eleven Academy Award Nominations, and won two – Phoenix for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and, ironically, Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score). The sequel almost entirely takes place in a prison asylum and in court, which was new, and Arthur’s terrible life continues there – those scenes I found interesting as he adjusted to his new life, along with the breakout courtroom scenes, where many of the surviving characters from the first movie were brought back to testify.

The other big addition is Lady Gaga as Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, i.e., Harley Quinn. She was basically a Joker and musical groupie, and love interest. As a character, she was pretty good – the “Folie à Deux” from the title is French for “madness for two,” and she was quite mad with her obsession with and devotion to Joker. But she wasn’t as big a standout as the hyper-energized, bubbly Margot Robbie was in the role. However, overall, the strange prison romance between the two worked for the movie except when they went to the musical numbers – which was essentially every time. That’s why they hired Lady Gaga for the part! Imagine all the best scenes in your favorite movie, and in the middle of each one someone pulls out a blackboard and for three minutes scratches their fingernails across it. That’s what much of it was like.

Two of the musical sequences really worked, and if they’d dropped all the rest and went with these two standouts, it could have been a really nice movie. The first took place when Arthur and a group of prisoners and guards are watching the news on TV and District Attorney Harvey Dent says he’s going for the death penalty for Arthur. The prisoners and guards begin making fun of him. How does Arthur react? Out of the blue, he breaks into song, and in that situation, it was creepy and worked, reminiscent of the out-of-the-blue dancing scene in the first movie. The other took place in court, when Arthur has just had his whole imaginary world burst open and he’s at his lowest point, and a witness is saying he lives in an imaginary world. Arthur’s response? You guessed it, a great song and dance sequence in the courtroom that takes place entirely in Arthur’s imaginary world, showing what he wants to do. That might have been the best scene in the movie. Then the scene closes, and we’re back to poor Arthur drearily sitting in court, forced to hear more statements from witnesses.

If the movie had only stuck to drama, with those two sequences, it could have been a near-classic. However, there were two other problems.

First, if you take out the musical sequences, the movie would be rather short. But that’s easily fixed. There’s only one prisoner that Arthur really interacts with. Why not have him and Arthur concoct an escape plan (along with Harley Quinn) that almost works? Or something like that. Or, better still, they could use the extra time to resolve the courtroom letdown scene, which is the second problem.

That second problem is that there’s a big letdown in one of the last courtroom scenes that I can’t go into without spoiling the movie. The letdown only works if they either resolve it in the final third of the movie (which they didn’t), or by having a third Joker movie that resolves this letdown. That probably won’t happen now due to the lower ratings and ticket sales for this one.

This one ended with a rather downbeat resolution for Joker that could be the end . . . but it left it open for a possible third movie. From a cinematic point of view, imagine if they had done the original two Star Wars movies (now #4 and #5), and stopped. Then Luke’s final confrontation with Darth Vader would be in #5, “The Empire Strikes Back,” where he loses his hand, and at the end of the movie the bad guys are on top. All this is resolved in the sequel, “Return of the Jedi.” That type of resolution was needed in this movie, either in the final third, or in a third movie.

Overall, I don’t regret seeing this movie, but there’s nearly an hour of my life I’ll never get back. But now I can replay those musical numbers in my mind whenever I need to get to sleep.

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It’s been a busy year so far, between writing, rewriting, submitting stories, and the nine-day “The Never-Ending Odyssey” science fiction writing workshop (TNEO, July 21-29).

I have this strange routine where I go to Panera’s almost every day for lunch and spend the afternoon there writing and sipping Dr Pepper. Sometimes I stay for dinner. But the routine works – I get a lot of writing done, both science fiction & fantasy, and my other writing topic, the Olympic sport of table tennis. (I’m currently alternating between writing SF and writing, “Table Tennis Doubles for Champions.” I’m in the US Table Tennis Hall of Fame as a coach and writer.)

I’ve had an even ten stories sold or published so far this year. (I have five others that are currently “finalists” – in fact, I’d have written this blog a while ago except I’ve been anxiously awaiting the final word on some of them – but decided I couldn’t wait any longer. But two of them are big markets!!!) The ones sold or published this year are:

• “First Galactic Table Tennis Championships” (10,000 words!) to New Myths
• “War Around the Clock” to Bullet Points, published in August
• “Spiders Under My Skin” to October Screams anthology, published in September
• “Drip” to Ahoy Comics, published in August
• “Consecutive Terms” to Martian Magazine, published in September
• “The Whaler and the Whale” to Shacklebound Short Horror Stories
• “Battle in the Ballot Box” to Sci-Phi Journal
• “A God of One and Zeroes” to Storia
• “Super Rex” to Storia
• “You Are President, Madam President” to Madam President anthology, coming in October

Since January I’ve written over twenty stories. Three of my favorites were critiqued at TNEO, and are all now making the rounds:

• Two Dreams: Dr. King and the Alien. An upbeat alien makes first contact during the 1963 March on Washington, during King’s “I have a dream” speech.
• Bullet Time. You’re a bank teller, there’s a robbery, and the robber shoots you – but time slows down, and it takes five days for the bullet to reach you. Except you are trapped in your body, which is also slowed down, and so you can’t get out of the way! And then something shows up…
• Connoisseur of Cambrian Cooking. A woman travels 500 million years into the past to the Cambrian – but her time machine’s battery is dead and she’s stuck there. There’s no edible food, and yet she survives – how?

I often work on multiple stories at the same time, going from one to another. I currently have five in various stages. My favorite is probably “Mathball,” a satirical future where mathematicians on the field have completely taken over baseball!

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2020 – It was the worst of times, it was the . . . worst of times. Let’s leave it at that. As to writing, I focused on short stories, and wrote a plethora of stories. Or was that a surfeit or superfluity of stories?

I read 67 books in 2020. By category, Fiction 31, Politics & History 16, Science 9, Writing 5, and Table Tennis 6.

I’m attending the Odyssey Online Workshop, “Emotional Truth: Making Character Emotions Real, Powerful, and Immediate to Readers,” with Scott Andrews. We’ll be doing a lot of reading and analyzing (eight stories or articles as part of the pre-workshop assignment), with two-hour online sessions on Jan. 6, Jan. 20, and Feb. 3. I’m already well into my reading and analysis – I’ve already picked up on some interesting things in one of the assigned readings, “Carnival Nine” by Caroline Yoachim, where she treats emotions like, well, a ping-pong ball. 🙂 I found another fascinating method she uses to re-enforce emotions which I may elaborate on later, and may bring up in the online sessions.

I had 16 stories sold or published in 2020.

• “Releasing Hitler” was published by Galaxy’s Edge, Jan/Feb 2020
• “Blood Wars” was published by Galaxy’s Edge, Mar/Apr 2020
• “Tooth Theology” was published by Galaxy’s Edge, May/June 2020
• “The Untold Christmas Carol” was published by Galaxy’s Edge, Nov/Dec 2020
• “Prototype Solar System with Strings Attached” sold to Galaxy’s Edge
• “Journey to Perfection” sold to and was published by Unidentified Funny Objects #8 Anthology, Sept 2020
• “Philosopher Rex” sold to and was published by Zooscape, Sept. 2020
• “Pinning the Egg” sold to and was published by the Sci-Fi Journal, Dec 2020
• “High Plains Centaur” was published by New Myths, Mar 2020
• “The Vampire on the Tesseract Wall” sold to Amazing Stories
• “Ninety-Nine Sextillion Souls in a Ball” sold to Dark Matter Magazine
• “Nanogod” sold to Dark Matter Magazine
• “Defeating Death” sold to Parliament of Wizards
• “Space Force: First Victory” sold to Alternative Space Forces anthology
• “Space Force: The Poem” sold to Alternative Space Forces anthology
• “The Pushovers of Galactic Baseball Fame” sold to Paper Butterfly Flash Fiction

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I’ve had a good three weeks, with three “pro” sales. Earlier this week I sold “Nanogod,” 4600 words, to Dark Matter Magazine, which pays 8 cents/word. What happens when a microscopic nanobot, designed for brain surgery, is damaged and becomes an egomaniac that travels the galaxy, conquering civilizations and forcing them to build huge monuments in its honor? It forced us to build the Great Pyramids 4600 years ago . . . and now it’s back and wants more! The story (then titled “A Monument for ME”) was critiqued at the 2016 Never-Ending Odyssey by Jeanne Cavelos, Chip Houser, Lauren O’Donnell, Chris Kenworthy, Kat Kohler, Michael Main, and Terry Edge. Special thanks for their help! Side note – the editor asked if I could do a sequel! I’ll get to that soon.

In late May I had two sales. “Journey to Perfection,” 3700 words, went to Unidentified Funny Objects #8, the annual SF and fantasy humor anthology by Alex Shvartsman, at 10 cents/word. A wealthy, snooty “doctor” buys the newest car model, and with a few misunderstandings, they’re off to see and meet some rather strange places and people, including Jimmy Hoffa’s burial site, Jesus on Mars, and the “Perfect” place!!! It’s my second sale to them.

The other was “Philosopher Rex,” 900 words, which sold to Zooscape, which pays 8 cents/word for flash. It’s about a philosophizing T-Rex that meets our earliest ancestors – lemur-like creatures – during the final days of the dinosaurs, and how their attitudes toward each other change after this pivotal meeting. (No talking animals, but we get the T-Rex’s thoughts.)

Now I’m focused on getting ready for “The Never-Ending Odyssey,” the annual nine-day writing workshop set up and run by graduates of the six-week Odyssey writing workshop. (I went in 2006.) This will be my 11th! I’ve done the critiques for all three rounds. I’m debating which story to read in the “Slam Reading” – I could use “Philosopher Rex,” but I’ve got about ten other possibilities, and for this I usually go with something humorous. I’m leaning toward “Prototype Solar System with Strings Attached,” a humorous flash story I sold to Galaxy’s Edge in January – another “pro” sale at 8 cents/word. Alas, it’s a sad and sort of an historic sale – it was the last story bought by Editor Mike Resnick before he died about an hour later. (Lezli Robyn is their new editor – she, Mike, and I co-wrote the novel “When Parallel Lines Meet” three years ago.)

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