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Friday, December 27, 2024

Prologue to Chapter 18, "The SwiftPad Extinction"

 ERICK DUKE, MERCENARY, MEETS HIS TROOPS
Early October
Erick Duke’s father, Parnell, had made a fortune in direct marketing. When Erick was born, his family lived in a single-story, three-bedroom red brick house in St. Louis. Parnell was an Army helicopter mechanic, but he left the service under a cloud after the failed Iranian hostage rescue during the Carter years. Erick was only an infant then.
    Parnell joined the first Pentecostal Fellowship Council and started a multi-tiered direct marketing company called NewLife with a partner who later died under mysterious circumstances. NewLife sold ammunition, handgun components, and various other combat paraphernalia. It also sold women’s make-up and “survivalist feminine hygiene” products plus self-help books (How to NOT be a Homosexual, Clean and Sexy Makeovers, The Psychiatry Cult, Jesus in 30 Days, etc.).
    It took almost eight months for Parnell to cull through all of his potential business partners, who were promoted as an exclusive group, and he was very public in his sermons at his growing church about the need to be very selective (as well as the sacredness of the number 12).
    He sold the lifestyle to the associates. He made them feel special and exclusive. It was the lifestyle of the committed evangelical. Lots of meetings, deep regret about nothing, deep amnesia about the really bad shit. But that was just theatrics, the “small talk” before the short strokes. Parnell
instinctively knew he needed to convince them to be “slaves” (to the spirit of Jesus), and make them believe their business served a higher cause. For the first six months  they war-gamed their plans. They were to burn through family, grade school buddies, buddies’ parents, plus anyone else they could guilt into paying 5–10 times more than they would pay at Target, or Cabela’s or even online for stuff they didn’t need.
    Maybe 1 out of 20 people had the willpower to go outside their own “circle” and find strangers to buy the shit. They had to be determined not to end up with boxes of the shit in their garage. That’s the trick. Find those people, the 1 out of 20. Parnell taught them to be their own cult leader. They had to be as careful in finding their first “12” as Parnell had been. Once they learn the trick of lying, the rest is easy; there are an unlimited number of suckers out there.
    Those people who shamelessly promote the shit are your “bottom bitches.” You just need to find some good bottom bitches. Everyone has those people in their lives. They depend on you for their self-worth. So do them a favor, and put them to work. It’s what they want anyway. They understand what’s going on, but what they get out of it – self-worth, a reason for getting up every day – THAT is all the payment they need or expect. Just teach your bottom bitches to feel like royalty, better than royalty, and for them to do the same to their bottom bitches. There is an endless supply of BBs. And once you show them how you did it for (to) them, they will know how to do it themselves, and they will all believe that they are going to get rich too. Erick watched his father carefully through his youth and early teenage years as he grew his business.
    In actual fact, 98% of all “associates” in all multi-level marketing schemes (pyramid selling), regardless of the products, lose money. The math proving it is simple. And his always ends up the same. You need the maniacal qualities of a psychotic narcissist to be a leader in multi-level marketing. It is Cult Leading 101.
    Erick, or ED (not Ed as in Edward), understood his dad’s business and knew he could do it better. He thought his dad was lame and declared loudly that he didn’t need his fucking money or his bullshit company (or his evangelical religion for that matter!). He left home after finishing his homeschooling and getting an approved Missouri GED, joined the Navy, then quit that and with the secret help of his dad’s money got into Virginia Military Institute (VMI). Graduated with a degree in Geopolitics. 
    Joined the Navy (again) via Officer Candidate School. He got very fit and made it onto SEALs and within a year, on his second deployment, was charged with machine gunning 19 Arab villagers. He spent six months “under house arrest” but was never brought to trial. He was thrown out of the SEALs, but the murder case disappeared. Rumors said a lot of money flowed for a little silence. Congressional investigations circled all around his “honorable discharge” but again, crickets. Nobody would talk.
    Meanwhile his younger sister Martha became a Christian Internet sensation. Little innocent sister – caught in the maelstrom of our perverted culture! She was shrewd, built her image as a cult slut – long bizarre rants about how rap music and vaccines had stolen her sense of right and wrong – called out over fifty celebrities for “psychically” raping her as a child, had actual sex with three rich, local notables, all older men, one after the other, over a single week, videoed it all, and then outed them. She started an S-Plog that morphed into a high-production popular show on RFD network about the Satanic influence in popular culture along with cooking tips. She dressed in white, and wore daisies in her hair.
    On Sundays she delivered screeching video sermons in tight t-shirts and often would spin around when delivering a punchline, to show off her tramp stamp of Jesus on the cross just above her low-slung, cut-off jeans. She claimed prominent Dees were recruiting young girls into a sex cult and she had nearly been caught in it herself! They came for her, but she had fought them off, attacks which she described in graphic detail, attacks that nearly lost her newly restored virginity! No place or person was safe!
    On her show Martha interviewed another young woman who claimed to have been violated in her own bed by demons (“They told me that Black-Prez had sent them and that he was laughing and jizzin’ all over me!”). The woman gave tearful, long detailed descriptions of being raped repeatedly by big men – white men, “Chinamen,” and bringing up the rear, a Black man batting clean-up with a huge dick! How big? asked Martha. How is that possible, she asked, looking at how far her hands were spread apart.
    Martha talked about the power of her visions, and how those visions told more truth than anything – they told her the future, and most importantly, they told her what was in the hearts of people. Millions of views.
    She soon was preaching at her father’s mega-church, and quickly became the star attraction, driving attendance and collections too of course, higher and higher. And then – ED’s little sister was asked to be the Official Chaplain of the White House.
    Erick, a civilian again, hiding from his SEAL fuckup, had taken over his father’s business. His father had died on the pulpit while preaching. Some say he was trying too hard, competing with his daughter, who watched in what appeared to be fascinated horror as he flopped around on the stage like a walrus trying to get off the beach into the water. For the first 30 seconds of his death throes, the congregation clapped in unison to the strange rhythm of his convulsions. But when the true nature of his moribund condition was finally evident, they all burst into “Nearer My God to Thee.” When he died, Parnell was worth nearly a billion dollars.
    The autopsy found strychnine. The church had had recent infestations of rats, and the theory was he had accidentally eaten some of the poison left out. An investigation failed to find any evidence of foul play.
    ED sold his shares of his dad’s pyramid marketing company, NewLife, to Amway for $16 billion. He immediately kick-started a domestic protection force, based on the SEAL model. It was all white men (except for Echo Devious) and came to a certain kind of fame during the rise of Hassan Coleman. There were kidnappings of squatters, shootings, and social media campaigns against Hassan. Some of his guys got caught and begged for forgiveness. But there was no extrajudicial action; trials were judged fair by all accounts. After the (V)ICE debacle in Portland, when it was slowly revealed how Coleman had been closely involved in the defeat of the (V)ICE forces, the battle for Memphis’s soul was over and a warrant was issued for Erick Duke in Memphis.

From The Fall of It All – A History of the Big Dump

Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Reviews from READER VIEWS

 I occasionally write reviews for the book review site Reader Views.  

Reader Views 

It is a great site that helps new and mostly self-published authors (such as myself) to be reviewed.  The philosophy of the site (and of Sheri Hoyte, who is the main curator of the site) is to be firm, honest, but gentle if possible.  Because these are new and often unedited authors, their prose isn't always the most scintillating.  And  - those who live in glass houses etc.  - Reader Views has also reviewed my stuff - which I include at the end of the list below. 

I sometimes verged on being a bit mean - especially if the content was unartfully titillating or was too blatantly riding the coattails of current events - you know - "ripped from the headlines" stuff.  But I take the job seriously  - I am paid an honorarium for each review. I am currently taking a break from reviewing for the site,  as I am working on a new project and recovering from the election, but I hope Sheri will let me return to join her cadre of reviewers down the road. 

I have learned a great deal doing this - about spotting mistakes and weaknesses in my own work by seeing them appear in others - but also I find some really innovative narrative techniques that push the boundaries, yet often do work very well. And the ideas presented or the characters portrayed are often very unstereotypical, and can be boldly crafted.   One other reason I am taking a break is that it is hard work. Because I get paid, I take it very seriously. I read the novels closely, taking notes, and writing and revising the reviews to provide some value to the authors as well as their potential readers. Anyway - if you are looking for new fiction (and non-fiction too) to read and support authors who deserve a chance to be read - check out Reader Views to look for some interesting titles. 

 Here are my reviews.

 

Mutually Beneficial - a blackmailer has sexually provocative pictures of the Vice President 


The Encounters of Quintas Livius - A young, orphaned Roman living in Israel arrives late to Jesus’s miracles


Splendors of Quanzhou, Past and Present -a history, as well as an archaeological and architectural tour of the Chinese city

 

The Serpent Underneath - Describes a “Near Term Dystopia”—what can happen to our society and country if, in the next twenty years or so, things go off the rails. 

 

The Evolution of China’s Anti-Poverty Strategies - A collection of 20 stories about Chinese people who have risen from poverty to have successful careers. 

 

 The New Empire - set in Northern California in the mid-1700s, alt-history of how the Chinese beat Europe to the punch during the 15th century’s Age of Discovery.

 

 Casadora Island - A burnout retreats to a Caribbean Island - a story of rediscovered love, and a dreamscape of escape, an idealized vision of the perfect life with wonderful friends

 

Vietnam was a Just War - An unabashed rejection of any viewpoints sympathetic to North Vietnam or the Vietcong or anything critical of the US.  

 

The Intrepid Brotherhood - A memoir of a long running bureaucratic knife fight between the author, an IT systems manager, and his organization’s CEO 

 

No Peace with Hitler - is a 700 page survey of Churchill’s life and why refused to parley with Hitler in the spring of 1940 

 

The Plot to Save America - Springtime, 2024 – the January 6, 2021 insurrection succeeded – the rioters broke through, captured and killed Vice President Pence, set the Capitol on fire, where half of congress died, and the other half were put in detention.  

 

Dancer of Death - is based on the life of the Spanish bullfighter, Manolete, who was the most famous matador of the 1940s 

 

 Full Circle Freedom's Firewall - An android cop intercepts an intergalactic cargo ship, beginning a civil war between the corrupt humans and the androids (and their human allies).

 

The Hidden Game - A thriller about modern American pro football, and it brings together the mechanics of how and why games might be fixed for the benefit of “the product.”  

 

Trump Dog – Wild Tales of Lies, Hair Dye and Dog Poop - A funny, light satire that is very prescient, about a world divided over politics, where people can quickly find their allegiances in all sorts of cultural markers.  

 

The Truth Effect - a story of a fearless woman journalist who’s trying to warn England of the government’s plan to impose an artificially intelligent-powered thought control regime in 2030. 

 

 Here are some notes about my novels by other Reader Views reviewers


Farewell the Dragon - With twists and turns and surprises unraveling, this book depicts China’s cities and sounds extremely well...This makes the book not just entertaining to readers but also eye-opening.

 

Digging Up New Business: The SwiftPad Takeover - Satire that is brutally honest, hysterical, and unforgettable. Not a dystopian world; this is a very real, bare bones, trash-talking world that all of us are still living through to this day.  

 

Digging the Golden Fungus: The SwiftPad Insurgency - SwiftPad, Inc, becomes the number one social media site in the world. Based in Portland, Oregon, the company is also the prime ‘enemy’ of the President of the United States.  

 

Digging Around the Pandemic: The SwiftPad Extinction - - Kip “Chubby” Rehain (who is SwiftPad’s co-founder) is journeying though Alt-world, meeting up with the fear, terror, and panic that’s all around. A trail takes him across Asia, Siberia, and eventually to the very source of it all. 

 

And an interview with yours truly..

 

Interview with S. Lee Barckmann – Author of “The SwiftPad Trilogy”










Thursday, October 31, 2024

Has Anyone Seen My Toes? by Christopher Buckley



   Has Anyone Seen My Toes?, (HASMT?)  is an acerbic, comic novel about an overweight, aging screenwriter in the throes of writer’s block. He fears and shows the apparent signs of approaching dementia.  He lives “two hours” outside Charleston South Carolina, and is a fast-food and social media addict.  He is struggling with a screenplay about the Nazis kidnapping Roosevelt from Bernard Baruch's South Carolina estate of Hobcaw Barony, which was Roosevelt’s trysting hideaway (with Lucy Mercer).   

I read HASMT? because my friend Carl sent it to me. I had sent Carl a copy of a screenplay that I had recently written, (based on my first novel “Farewell the Dragon”).  Carl is a great letter writer, but his reply seemed to skirt around anything critical of my screenplay.  But still his letter had a sly understated tone that I read as,

“Lee are you OK?”  

And he told me he was mailing me a copy of Buckley’s book, HASMT?, (which almost sounds like the acronym for “hazardous  materials” – humm…).  When the book arrived two days later, I tore the brown wrapping paper off the hardcover novel, thinking OK, maybe Carl is sending me a message...

 Or maybe I am just reading too much into it. Carl is a very private person, so I will only say we have known each other since high school, where we trained together and competed against each other for three years.  We were both decent high school distance runners and I beat him more than he beat me, but – alas -  he beat me the last time.  

All that was more than fifty years ago, so we are old now. Carl is much the opposite of me. Where I am a vainly boastful, loud, class clown type, Carl is very soft-spoken, shadowy, (his nickname was “The Assassin” for his ability to suddenly “appear” where he had been lurking all along). He’s a man of few (but always meaningful) words.  I promptly read HASMT? cover to cover. (As a opposed to starting in the middle and reading it backwards.)

Mr. Christopher Buckley is perhaps most  famous for the comic novel and subsequent movie “Thank you for Smoking”. He is the son of the Godfather of the Pre-Trump Conservative movement, William F. Buckley.  He is about my age.  Both Christopher  and HASMT?’s unnamed screenwriter, (who I will call "Chris") have many biographical points in common.  

Mr. Buckley also intrudes into my biography because Christopher Buckley went to sea after college, working on a merchant ship and wrote a book about it. It was the last book my father read before he died. Dad gave me the book but I never finished it. It struck a sore point with me because  I was supposed to go to sea with Dad after college. Dad was a Chief Engineer in the Merchant Marines.  But I punked out of the gig because of my fear of losing my college girl friend (another story I will probably never write). Dad had gone to some length to arrange a very rare “Cadetship” for me with his company, so I could train to be an merchant marine deck officer down the road, but I never took that road.  I know it was a disappointment for Dad, and Buckley’s sea story brought that disappointment back up for me during Dad’s last days.
 

 I was a fan of his father’s show “Firing Line”,  and later briefly chatted with William F. Buckley, which you can read about here. (Review of Saving the Queen ).

 
Well, anyway, all that aside, "Chris" the unnamed screenwriter,  is married to a woman who slowly becomes concerned about Chris’ forgetfulness and growing confusion between real life and his slowly evolving (or rather devolving)  screenplay.   From Chris’s point of view it all makes sense, and we ride along on his bizarre AD-HD-like inability to focus. He has a huge trove of historical and literary knowledge stored up in his fragmented mind, and he is constantly Googling offshoots and tangents of his untethered thought process. What makes it so powerful though is how this Googling and tangent chasing mirrors what it is like for many of us in the Post-COVID and possible Trump Interregnum period. (I write this five (5) days before the 2024 election, so I don’t know NOW how this is all going to turn out. ) “Chris”  is sly in his slightly hidden disdain of Trump. (“If you can have “alternative facts” why can’t you have “Alternative history?”). But the possibility of  a 2nd Trump term lurks behind much of Chris’ fearfully scattered imaginative romps, which is all in search of the “finishing touches” on his Roosevelt kidnapping screenplay, called “Heimlich’s Maneuver” (Heimlich is the Nazi U-boat commander in charge of the kidnapping).

“Chris” is an etymologist, (like Buckley’s father) who constantly searches for the original meaning of words.  The running joke through out HASMT? is that "mayonnaise is one of the few words in English of Carthaginian origin". (We finally learn in the post script that Mayonnaise was “invented” in the Minorcan city of Mahon which was named for Hannibal’s brother.  A cheap kind of Carthaginian origin.)

While showing disdain for Henry James and Proust, he reveals he is in fact the product of those upper class prep schools that teach “The Western Canon” of the literature of Dead White Men. Much of the story is of “Chris” threading the needle between the enforced political correctness of our age with the eternal truths of those great books that are being read less and less.

He covers much of what we have been living through since 2020 – George Floyd’s murder, Confederate statues coming down, fierce partisan-fueled local elections (in his case the weird South Carolina tradition of electing the local coroner. )  He riffs on suicide, especially about writers who killed themselves.  He of course Googles it and we read a long list of self-slaughtered writers.   He searches for an appropriate quote to leave behind as his own suicide note. He writes about a 20th century artist (who paints Victorians in Togas) who kills himself and leaves a note that the world isn’t big enough for him and Picasso, but then notes that Picasso never heard of him before or after his suicide.  

The novel is filled with hilarious, pathetic self-referential jokes that rotate around  and connect with other jokes that appeared earlier, as if they are interior concentric circles of humorous asides that constantly, (and almost randomly) recur.  It is the kind of satire that has the reader looking off from the pages in embarrassment at his own reaction of laughter combined with a feeling of deep loss. We (me and “Chris”) are almost at the end of it all, whether we pull the trigger ourselves or let nature do it for us.

He has a  “Concierge” doctor, (who he pays a healthy retainer to be on his speed-dial) a beautiful woman recommended by the hound-dog husband of his wife’s best friend.  She puts him on some meds to deal with his self-reported, very unspecific ailments. This leads to a pretty good ending which makes it all the more worth getting to that end.

It certainly didn’t read like a “great book”, when I was in the midst of it, but later, after thinking of how it affected me, I think it just might be – a very serious and worthwhile read, maybe even  - a great one.

Thursday, October 10, 2024

The Apprentice

 The Apprentice

Written by Gabe Sherman, Starring Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong and Maria Bakalova

 

 “The Apprentice” is a biopic of the early days of the rise of Donald Trump. It is a brilliant work, especially considering the hurried, momentous timing of its release. It is an artistic triumph, especially for Jeremy Strong. but also Sebastian Stan, an actor who I had never heard of before.

It is a hard film to watch in many ways. It is gritty and its low budget shirttails hangout (like Donald’s white dress shirt in several scenes as he is pulling on his pants getting ready to hit the Manhattan night.) The camera doesn’t flinch from glimpses of raw gay and public sex, marital rape, or Donald’s liposuction and scalp reduction surgery. It captures the trashy streets of 1970s NY. 

It begins with Donald in a cheap suit, driving a big (but dirty) Cadillac sedan through one of the outer Boroughs to a low-end high-rise apartment building where he proceeds to knock on doors collecting and shaking down rent from very poor, old, but mostly white tenement dwellers. The hallway smells, and the barking dogs and crying children and the profanity-laced complaints about his demands for back rent disgusts him, and shows his self-righteous anger and self-pity. But compassion? Zero.  The actor Sebastian Stan realistically portrays the empty callousness of a small time loser dreaming of something he knows is out there, but is out of reach.

But then Trump meets Roy Cohn at a restaurant and things begin to happen for him. Jeremy Strong exudes evil from the moment you see him. He brags about how he conned the Judge (illegally, "ex parte") in the Rosenberg case to sentence both Ethel and Julius to death, in-spite of the weak case against Ethel. Roy Cohn is a gay Jew who explodes with hatred against homosexuals and is a virulent anti-Semite. He teaches Donald three rules – attack, deny, and declare victory no matter the outcome.

The film portrays Donald growing from an very average NYC schmo, not too bright or socially perceptive, into the monster he became under Cohn’s tutelage. His early attempts to impress bankers and developers is grossly transparent, revealing a total lack of interpersonal adroitness. But gradually, as he follows Cohn around the Manhattan Party scene we see him pick cues better, and become something of a real estate player. Then he meets Ivana, who marries him in spite of the insulting prenup Cohn writes for Donald, and she begins to smooth out some of his edges.

In the end roles reverse – Cohn becomes almost sympathetic, as he is betrayed by Donald, who evicts Cohn’s AIDS-stricken, long time boy friend from his hotel. Stan the actor shows Donald as he becomes even more desensitized, and begins to repeat himself as he ages, even in the early days. Donald, masters Cohn’s three rules (see above) and pushes his way into Atlantic City and beyond. He is no longer the "Apprentice", but the over-confident blowhard we all know, even as Cohn warns him that he is becoming over-leveraged. But nothing can tame Trump’s greed. A light suddenly comes on in Cohn’s eyes as he sees what he has created. Donald’s older brother Fred, addicted, sick and dying comes knocking on the door, desperate for help, but Donald pushes him out, in a scene where Ivana sees her own future.

Trump’s relationship with his father is shown but not deeply explored. I suppose some might see it as a weak point. But this to-the-point film has a clear warning message that FOX News will undoubtedly call “a hit-job” and - and – so what? (As Trump said when told the Jan 6 rioters wanted to kill Mike Pence.)

I had a professor in college who said that Shakespeare's Richard III was not appreciated as a great play until the 20th century. It was considered by early critics as too over the top, and a caricature, because surely no one could be such a baldfaced liar, so unconditionally evil. But then we had the 20th century dictators who showed exactly how it was done. Yes - it is possible to be that empty of humanity and still finds a way to climb to the top. Now our generation knows that as well.

Politics had nothing to do with the way the film moved me. I was shaken as we left the theater.

It is a travesty that HBO or Apple didn’t pick the film up to stream 24 hours every day until the election. Mary and I went today, opening day, and there were only two (2) other people in the theater.