4th of July Report: Trump’s America and Hitler’s Germany

(We ran two earlier, considerably shorter versions of this post in years past under the title “Nazi Germany and the U.S.A.” As you might have noticed, things have changed a bit lately, hence this update.)

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REFERENCES TO FASCISM abound in American political discourse. Unfortunately, most of those using the term wouldn’t recognize fascism if it bit ’em on the butt, and use it as a catch-all pejorative for anything or anyone they dislike. But the term does have a specific meaning.

Very briefly, as exemplified in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, fascism is an extreme right-wing, phony-populist ideology and political-economic system (which Mussolini dubbed “the corporate state”), the key features of which are strident nationalism, militarism and military worship, a one-party state, a dictatorial leader with a personality cult, a capitalist economic system integrated with state institutions (to the mutual benefit of capitalists and fascist politicians), suppression of independent unions, government use of media as a propaganda instrument, suppression of civil liberties and all forms of political opposition, and an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy.

The racism, racial scapegoating, and racial persecution that permeated German fascism are not part of fascism per se, unless one wants to classify extreme nationalism as racism. There’s a case to be made for that, but for now let’s consider them as separate maladies. But since the topic of this post is the comparison of Nazi Germany to the U.S.A., we will consider racism as well as fascism in the following comparisons.

Getting to the headline topic, just how similar is the present-day U.S. to Nazi Germany? Let’s look at specifics:

 

Nationalism

• Nazi Germany: See Deutschland Uber Alles, Triumph of the Will, Lebensraum, etc., etc.
• US.: “American exceptionalism,” “God Bless America,” “Manifest Destiny,” “Make America Great Again,” etc., etc. From ideological justification for invasions, territorial annexations, and military interventions to everyday trivialities (Nazi armbands in Deutschland, flag worship in “the land of the free”), America gives Nazi Germany a run for its money as regards nationalism.

Corporate Capitalist Domination

• Nazi Germany: The German industrialists (notably the Krup armaments company) were key Hitler backers, and benefited handsomely from his rule.
• U.S.: Trump has filled his cabinet with people from the fossil fuels industry (e.g., Rex Tillerson, former head of ExxonMobil) and big banks, notably Goldman Sachs (Steven Mnuchin, et al.); Obama’s primary 2008 backers were Wall Street firms and the pharmaceutical companies; Bush/Cheney’s were the energy companies.

Of late, Trump’s slavishness to the interests of the big corporations has become blindingly obvious with his dismantling of clean air and water regulations (which safeguard public health while impeding corporate profits), his attempts to open millions of acres of federal lands (including national monuments) to desecration by mining and fossil fuels corporations, his (and other Republicans’) attempts to restrict access to Medicaid, to allow the insurance industry to discriminate against those with pre-existing conditions, and his refusal to do anything about the obscene price of prescription drugs and the obscene profits of the drug companies. (Trump’s “plan” to reduce drug costs was complete bullshit designed only to string along the gullible while providing cover for the continued gouging of the public by big pharma. The fact that pharma stocks spiked immediately after Trump released the details of his “plan” tells you all you need to know about it.)

Militarism

• Nazi Germany: The Nazis constructed the world’s most powerful military in six years (1933-1939).
• U.S.: Last year, U.S. military spending accounted for approximately 43% of the world’s military spending, and the U.S. has hundreds of military bases overseas. With the aid of his accomplices in Congress, Trump just boosted the “defense” budget to approximately $700 billion, not including the tens of billions in the “black budget.” The figures aren’t final yet, but it’s a good bet that current U.S. military spending not only considerably outstrips any other nation’s (China’s is hard to judge because of secrecy, but may be as high as $250 billion), but could quite possibly now account for a full half of the world’s military spending.

Military Worship

• Nazi Germany: Do I really need to cite examples?
• U.S.: “Support our troops!” “Our heroes!” “Thank you for your service!”

Military worship is almost a state religion in the United States. Tune in to almost any baseball broadcast for abundant examples; this worship even extends to those on what passes for the left in the United States: Michael Moore, Stephen Colbert, Rachel Maddow.

Military Aggression

• Nazi Germany: “Lebensraum” — you know the rest.
• U.S.: To cite only examples from the last half-century where there were significant numbers of “boots on the ground,” Vietnam (1959-1973), the Dominican Republic (1965), Cambodia (1970), Grenada (1983), Panama (1988-1990), Kuwait/Iraq (1991), Afghanistan (2001-present), Iraq (2003-2011). And this doesn’t even include bombing campaigns and drone warfare. Then there’s the matter of proxy aggression enabled via logistical and intelligence support by the U.S. The most horrific current example is the brutal Saudi intervention in the Yemeni civil war.

Misuse and Misrepresentation of Science

• The Nazis suppressed “Jewish science,” financially supported and sponsored fringe pseudoscience (into the supposed superiority of Aryans, among other things), and based government policy (including the Holocaust)  on that fringe pseudoscience. They mutilated science to force it to fit into the procrustean bed of their ideology, and millions died as a result.
• U.S.: Here, the misleading “science” is supplied by the major corporations and their bought-and-paid-for “scientists,” who denigrate real science while promoting corporate-sponsored studies that promote corporate interests. Prominent examples include the efforts of the tobacco, pesticide, and sugar industries to present their deadly products as safe while vilifying scientists whose research demonstrated the actual effects of their products. Tens of millions have almost certainly died as a result.

Currently, the most serious such assault on science is corporate-funded climate change denial. It’s been obvious for decades that climate change is real and a deadly threat, and over 95% of climate scientists agree — and have agreed for decades — that it is. Yet the fossil fuels corporations have funded and promoted the work of a very few contrarians (whose work doesn’t, upon examination, hold up) to cast doubt on climate change science so that they can wring every last dollar from coal, oil, and natural gas.

Now, official U.S. policy is based on climate change denial pseudoscience. Trump has filled his administration with science deniers, especially climate change deniers, notably Scott Pruitt at the EPA, who are busy undoing clean air and water regulations, are doing their best to promote use of dirty fossil fuels, and are discouraging the use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Trump has even proposed public subsidies for money-losing coal-fired power plants that utilities are planning to close.

As in Nazi Germany, government policy is based on willful ignorance of science. Millions upon millions will almost certainly die as a result, unless the government drastically reverses its course and implements evidence-based policies based on the work of climate scientists.

(For more on all this, see Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology, and Politics in Science [revised & expanded], by John Grant. Full disclosure: See Sharp Press published Corrupted Science.)

Incarceration and Slave Labor

• Nazi Germany: The Nazis built concentration camps holding (and exterminating) millions, and employing slave labor.
• U.S.: In comparison, the U.S. has by far the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world, far outstripping China, with only Russia’s incarceration rate being anywhere near that of the U.S. Slave labor is routine in America’s prisons.

Justice System

• Nazi Germany: The Nazis had a three-tiered “justice” system: one for the rich and powerful (who could get away with virtually anything); a second for the average citizen; a third for despised minorities and political foes.
• U.S.: There’s also three-tiered “justice” system here: one for the rich and powerful (who can get away with virtually anything); a second for middle-class white people; and a third for almost everyone else.

Obama’s “Justice” Department never even investigated the largest financial fraud in world history that led to the 2008 crash, let alone charged those responsible. Prosecutors routinely pile on charges against average citizens to blackmail them into plea bargaining and pleading guilty to charges of which they’re not guilty; it’s no accident that America’s prisons are filled with poor people, especially blacks and hispanics who can’t afford bail and good legal representation; at the same time cops routinely get away with murder of blacks, hispanics, and poor whites.

Suppression of Unions

• Nazi Germany: In Nazi Germany, the government tightly controlled the unions, and used them as arms of the state.
• U.S.: In the U.S., the government merely suppresses strikes when “in the national interest” and allows corporations to crush union organizing drives through intimidation and by firing anyone who dares to attempt to organize.  Of late, the Supremes have further crippled the unions by outlawing the collection of fees from nonmembers who the unions represent in collective bargaining. (Admittedly, the sell-out, hierarchical, visionless AFL-CIO unions bear considerable responsibility for this sad state of affairs.)

Free Speech

• Nazi Germany: Total suppression of free speech; direct government control of the media.
• U.S.: There’s near total corporate control of the media, and suppression of free speech when it shows the faintest sign of threatening, or even embarrassing, the government or the corporations that control the government. The Obama and Trump administrations have viciously gone after whistleblowers and reporters who have exposed their wrongdoing — Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, James Risen, Reality Winner, et al.

Trump routinely attacks journalists who report anything even slightly embarrassing to him, or who point out any of his almost innumerable lies. Of late, he’s upped the ante by attacking the press as the “enemy of the American people” in a transparent attempt to intimidate the press and provoke the anger of his worshippers.

As well, Trump routinely lies about damn near everything, great and small — Politifact clasifies 69% of his statements as being “mostly false” or worse — counting on the fact that the press (e.g., New York Times) is reluctant to label his lies as lies, allowing Trump to muddy the waters and mislead the public.

Fortunately, Trump doesn’t have complete control of the media. But he does have the sycophantic tools at Fox “News,” Breitbart, InfoWars, and the rest of the right-wing echo chamber. Almost worse, 67% of Americans get at least some of their news from social media sites such as Facebook, with an unknown percentage getting all of their news from these platforms (predominantly Facebook). What makes this dangerous is that Facebook feeds them news reports that, based on their previous “likes” and other use, reinforces their existing beliefs and prejudices.

Add that to Trump’s denigration of the free press and you end up with a significant part of the population that’s woefully misinformed.

Other Civil Liberties

• Nazi Germany: Total suppression.
• U.S.: Suppression when individuals exercising those liberties show the faintest sign of threatening the government or the corporations that control the government. The coordinated suppression (by the FBI, local governments, and corporate security agencies) of the Occupy Wall Street Movement nationwide in 2011/2012 is the latest large-scale example.

Spying Upon Citizens

• Nazi Germany: The government had a massive eavesdropping operation. No citizen was safe from government scrutiny.
• U.S.: The FBI, DHS, and NSA — and let’s not forget Facebook — make the Nazis look like amateurs.

Free Elections

• Nazi Germany: Total suppression
• U.S.: U.S. citizens have the opportunity to vote for the millionaire and billionaire representatives (over half of Congress at last count, plus the president) of the two wings of the property party: one wing being authoritarian, corporate-servant, science-denying theofascists, the other wing being merely authoritarian corporate servants who routinely betray those who elect them. As well, the Republicans are doing their best to destroy what passes for American electoral democracy through egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression on an industrial scale.

Racism

• Nazi Germany: Do I even need to cite details?
• U.S.: (We’ll restrict ourselves here to the present.) The “justice” system imprisons blacks at a rate over five times that of whites, and hispanics at a rate about 30% higher than whites. Cops routinely get away with murdering poor people, a disproportionate number of them blacks and hispanics. Median household wealth for whites is 13 times that of blacks. And median household income for whites is 60% higher than that of blacks and hispanics.

As well, the Republican Party’s longtime “southern strategy” — and its largely successful attempts to disenfranchise black voters — was and still is designed to appeal to racists.

Donald Trump’s hateful rhetoric and racial scapegoating of Mexicans and other hispanics is merely the cherry atop this merde sundae.

Victimhood

• Nazi Germany: Hitler and the Nazis whined constantly about the German people being victims of the Jews (under 1% of the population at the time) and the supposedly vast Jewish conspiracy permeating all facets of social and economic life, even depicting Jewish people in propaganda films as vermin: rats. In short, Hitler stirred up hatred of a powerless minority by presenting them as victimizers rather than victims.
• U.S.: Trump whines constantly about an “invasion” of Latin American immigrants — fleeing horrific violence and political and social repression — who he portrays as rapists, murderers, drug dealers, and gang members endangering the nation through a supposed crime wave. (In reality, per capita criminal activity by Latin American immigrants is lower than that of Americans as a whole.)  In short, Trump stirs up hatred of a powerless minority by presenting them as victimizers rather than victims.

Personality Cult

• Nazi Germany: Again, do I even need to cite details?
• U.S.A.: Trump worship is rampant on the evangelical right, who see this steaming pile of viciousness, hypocrisy, and narcissism as the means to their theofascist ends. And Trump encourages such sycophancy. The cringe-inducing filmed cabinet meeting last year in which cabinet secretaries heaped fulsome (in both senses of the word) praise and thanks on the dear leader is but one example. Another example: Last July presidential aide and Trump toady Steven Miller said on Fox “News” that Trump — who would likely flunk a fourth-grade English test — was the “best orator to hold that office [president] in generations.” All hail the Glorious Leader.

 

Yes, there still are significant differences between Nazi Germany and the U.S.A.  But they grow smaller with every passing day.

Interview with two-time Hugo winner John Grant

 

John Grant is a two-time Hugo Award and one-time World Fantasy Award winner, and is the author of over 70 books, both fiction and nonfiction. He has been a science writer since the 1970s, and has written several well-reviewed books on science, including Denying Science, Discarded Science, and Eureka! The original edition of Corrupted Science appeared in 2008. This greatly expanded new edition is nearly twice the size of the original, and will be available by mid-May.

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Your new book, Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology, and Politics in Science (revised & expanded) deals at length with corporate and Trump administration misuse of science. What sets it apart from being just another anti-Trump book?

I confess it was the election of Trump and in particular his appointment of Scott Pruitt to head the EPA that made me decide it was time for a new edition of the book. I reckoned it would need to be quite a lot bigger than the original edition, although I didn’t realize it was going to approach double the size!

What I realized, even before I started writing, was that Trump and Pruitt, and the genuinely horrific corruption and denigration of science in US politics, were just the end-products of a process that was much bigger: the abuse of science by major corporations or spheres of industry in the quest for profits.

For example, to any sane person, inaction on climate change is beyond the bounds of comprehendible stupidity – even if there were some doubt about the science, the only intelligent thing to do is to err on the side of caution. (By way of analogy, if someone tells you the brakes on your car are dodgy, you get them checked: you don’t just carry on belting down the freeway on the basis that they might be okay.) But the fossil-fuels industries aren’t really concerned about the longer-term dangers: they see it as their duty to their shareholders to maximize short-term profits. So they’ve lied to the public about the science.

Trump and Pruitt – and James Inhofe and Lamar Smith and Smoky Joe Barton and all the rest of them – are just the public face of this problem, not the root of it. The lies they regurgitate about climate science have been put into their mouths by their paymasters.

Climate science is just the most obvious example of this process. Remember when sugar was supposed to be harmless? Remember when it was surely nothing to do with aerosol sprays that the hole in the ozone layer was expanding? Remember when we were told there was no reason to believe smoking was harmful to the health? Remember when tetraethyl lead in gasoline was harmless? Asbestos?

All of these lies – and there are plenty more where they came from – were put out by industry, by the corporations. Yes, they were being spread by those industries’ shills in the House, the Senate and even the White House (and let’s not forget George W. Bush’s completely bogus claim that “the science is still out” on climate change), but the shills were the symptoms rather than the sickness.

So I realized almost at the outset that the balance of the new book (which is how I think of it, rather than as a new edition) would need to be shifted such that it focused far more than its predecessor on this corporate corruption of both science and the public understanding of science. That involved the introduction of a near-book-length new chapter on the topic, not to mention a considerable expansion of my coverage of the parallel, industry-funded abuse of science in 21st-century US politics, of which the Trump administration is just the latest excrescence.

Trump-bashing would have been easy (and, to be honest, fun), for the very simple reason that Trump and his minions are so obviously corrupt, so obviously vile and so obviously moronic. But I wanted to look at the root of the problem we collectively confront, and that meant looking beyond its public faces.

Of course, there’s an even bigger context – the economic system in which corporate corruption flourishes – but that would have been a very different book, and one that I don’t have the expertise to write.

 

You worked as an editor before you began writing books. Where did you work, what were your jobs, and has that background been of help to you as a working writer?

I had a number of senior editor/editorial director jobs in the UK before finally being made redundant from one of them in Exeter – a couple hundred miles from London, which is where at the time all the good publishing jobs were. So I decided to become a freelance editor and do a bit of writing on the side. That didn’t quite work out how I’d anticipated, because after about a year both of my departments, so to speak, suddenly took off simultaneously. Since I didn’t have the guts to forsake one in favor of the other, I had a very tiring twenty years or so, during which I had in effect two full-time jobs.

When I came to the US in 1999 it was in fact as an editor – I was running the Paper Tiger imprint of fantasy art books on a freelance basis. Since then my focus has shifted almost exclusively to writing. Which is why I’m broke.

The editing background has been both a help and a hindrance to the writing moi. It’s a help in that, by the time I’m ready to hand in my text, it’s in an edited form with which I’m happy – i.e., it’s in the form it would have if someone else had written it and I’d then edited it. But this very fact is a hindrance in that I then find it extremely annoying when people tinker with my text! Often they’re right, of course, but often they’re unwittingly undermining what I’m trying to do.

 

You’ve written a lot about science. Why? What attracts you to the topic?

I had the misfortune at school of being equally apt at English and the sciences. (Lousy at languages, though, to my enduring regret.) I was therefore jammed into a sciences track, because science university places were a lot easier to get at the time than English Lit ones, and of course the school wanted to boost its university-entrance success rate as much as it could. I went along with this – took the course of least resistance – until I found myself at university reading sciences when what I really wanted to do was study English!

So I left – about three nanoseconds before they booted me out – and started getting the English qualifications I hadn’t gotten at school with a view to finding myself a university place in the different discipline. By the time I actually did so, I had a promising career in publishing and so, after much thought, abandoned my academic aspirations.

Because of my scientific background, meager though it was, people kept wanting me to work on science-based books – most of the other editors of my generation and the generation before it had even less scientific nous than I did! So I fell back in love with science through mixing with scientists – i.e., with “my” authors – and I thereby learned far more about science than I had when I’d been formally studying it. While I’m certainly not a scientist, I tend to think in scientific terms and, knowing at least something about a very wide range of the sciences, rather than a lot about a little, I feel well qualified to write the kinds of books that I do.

 

You’ve written many books in many different areas. Do you prefer writing fiction or nonfiction, and if so why?

Although probably about 80 percent of my output is nonfiction, I actually prefer writing fiction. The trouble is that, of course, just about no one can make a living writing fiction. I thus tend to regard my fiction writing as an indulgence, something to be fitted in when time permits – which is silly of me, because some of my relatively few short stories have been very well received, been shortlisted for awards, made it into “Best of” anthologies, etc. It’s a habit of mind I really should work to change.

I’ve also ghostwritten quite a lot of fiction. There’s nothing more spiritually rewarding than witnessing someone else basking in the rave reviews they’ve received for something that . . . you get the picture.

 

Which is easier for you?

Fiction. No question about it.

 

What do you love most about being a writer?

Terry Pratchett once described writing as “the most fun you can have with your clothes on,” and much of the time I’d go along with that. It can also be extraordinarily hard work, of course. Writing about a scientific subject for lay readers can be very demanding indeed – first I have to understand it well enough to write about it, then I have to shape my own understanding into a form that’s comprehensible to others. I’ve also done quite a lot of work as an encyclopedist (grand-sounding word, eh?) – most recently for my Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir ­– and that sort of work is extremely demanding too. By the end of the day I’m pretty tired – but even that exhaustion is part of the joy of a writer’s life: it’s rewarding in its way.

 

What do you hate most about it?

There’s no security and the pay’s lousy.

 

You’ve collaborated with other writers over the years. What was your best experience doing that?

They’ve all been pretty good, to be honest – I’m sure there was the occasional squabble along the way, but for the most part the collaborations have represented great friendships.

 

What’s the worst experience you’ve had working with a publisher?

I’ve worked with some excellent editors in my time but also, like I’m sure every other writer, I’ve had my share of mediocre and sometimes downright dreadful ones – you know, the Dunning–Kruger combo of incompetence and arrogance. [Another aspect of that syndrome is being too incompetent to know you’re incompetent. — Ed.]

The worst I’ve had recently was with an editor who thought she knew a great deal more about the book’s subject than she actually did, and as a consequence introduced all sorts of factual errors. On the first go-round I just ’umbly corrected these, with a brief explanation as to why. On the second go-round, discovering that she’d ignored quite a lot of my amendments, I became a tad firmer. Next I knew, she was complaining to my agent that I “didn’t seem to respect” her.

Actually, by that stage I for very obvious reasons didn’t, but I thought I’d kept it well concealed . . .

 

What’s the best aspect of being an independent writer?

The fact that a significant part of the job is just thinking.

 

Science fiction often gets a rap as trash, pure escapism, junk not to be taken seriously, by “literary” fiction mavens. What’s your reply to that?

There’s also the corollary whereby, whenever Margaret Atwood or Martin Amis or whoever writes a piece of science fiction, the mavens trot out all sorts of spurious reasons as to why “it’s not really science fiction”!

All of the genres – crime. sf/fantasy, romance, etc. – tend to get this sort of treatment from the stupider members of the literary establishment. I think the attitude stems from the fact that the genres flourished in the pulp era when, simply because the magazine editors had collectively so many pages to fill every month, a lot of the stuff that appeared was junk . . . er, I mean “rough-hewn.” Also, if we’re honest, not every single genre novel that appears today is a masterpiece.

But the mavens’ position is untenable. J.G. Ballard, who became a literary darling, was part of the spectrum of UK genre fiction; there’s no clear qualitative or intellectual distinction between his sf and his “mainstream” fiction: they have the same preoccupations and concerns. Turning to crime fiction, if you look at someone like Raymond Chandler – now regarded as “literature” – he was part of a continuum that, while it contained plenty of bad writers, also contained some who were arguably better than he was. The list of such examples could go on and on.

 

Other than literary fiction’s being easier to write (no need to create coherent alternate realities), what differences do you see in writing the two types?

I’m not sure that literary fiction actually is easier to write. If I want to put a piece of fiction in a real setting I have to do a lot of research. If I want to set a story on the planet Fablundia, I can just make shit up!

Where I do think literary fiction is easier to write is in terms of storytelling. A crime novel (or an sf/fantasy novel, etc.) stands or falls according to the strength of its storytelling and its plot. Too many of the mainstream novels that I read score very weakly in these two disciplines. They may have other goodnesses to offer, but clearly their publishers and readers have relatively low standards when it comes to those elements that are traditionally regarded as essential to a good novel.

 

What’s the best experience you’ve ever had at a sci-fi con?

That would be telling. The second-best was probably discovering that I was on a panel with Hal Clement. Giving a live presentation with David Langford of Thog’s Masterclass at a World SF Convention in Glasgow was pretty good too.

 

What’s the worst?

Finding myself on a panel with . . .

 

Would you advise aspiring writers, especially sci-fi writers, to submit mss. to publishers or go it alone as self-publishers? Why?

It depends on what the writer wants to achieve. If you simply want your book to exist, then self-publishing can be the way to go.

And there are other instances where it can be the best option. For example, back in the day I had a friend who wrote a book on pirate radio stations, only to be told by publisher after publisher that there was no market for it. So he raised the money to publish it himself (a far more expensive business in those days) and to buy an ad in New Musical Express, and the next thing he knew he was ordering a reprint several times the size of his first run. He ended up founding a publishing house on the basis of that book’s success.

I also recall, back in the days when I worked at one publisher, the author who was himself responsible for at least 90 percent of the sales of his book. It was a book that appealed to horse-racing punters. As he was one himself, he’d simply go to meets with his SUV stuffed with copies of his book, and flog ’em. He sold literally thousands that way. We all thought he was nuts to have gotten a publisher involved – he’d have made far more money if he’d self-published.

But for every case like that – and for every Fifty Shades of Grey or The Martian – you have a zillion self-publishing ventures that go nowhere.

It’s not hard to see why. Although the publishing experience can be infuriating and on occasion dismal for the author, the fact that a book has been published by a known imprint gives the potential purchaser some measure of reassurance as to its quality: the chances are pretty high that the book will be, at the very least, okay. By contrast, if you buy a self-published book, the chances are high that it’ll be lousy. Since most people these days buy their books online, so you can’t browse through the book before buying, the fact that a book’s self-published can be a big disincentive to risking your hard-earned ten bucks or twenty bucks on it.

 

What are your next writing projects?

I’m just about to start writing a book on fake news for a YA publisher – we’re all pretty excited about this. Further down the line there’s a publisher who wants me to write a book on the worlds that science-fiction writers have created – I can’t really say more about that project at this stage – and the same publisher is talking about an expanded edition of the Hugo-nominated book Dragonhenge, which I wrote but, far more importantly, Bob Eggleton illustrated.

I also want to write a book on femmes fatales, but my agent hasn’t placed it yet. And then, still at development stage, there’s the book on beer art, the book on Edgar Wallace movies, the book on SETI, the book that’s provisionally called The Young Scientist’s Bathroom Book, the book on crap movies . . . I’m keeping my Noirish site ticking over,of course, and I have a few short stories that are asking to be written.

I stay busy.