The Populist Moment

 What IS authentic populism?

Authentic populism is not on the right or the left. It involves downsizing our institutions, our culture, and our minds-- moving away from top down Big Box monopolistic thinking. Instead, returning to our roots as a people and a society. Back to our humanity. Right now we live in a fake world, experienced via electronic devices and their artificial digital worlds, created by gigantic trillion-dollar tech companies owned by a handful of hyper-rich individuals. That is today's unfortunate reality, and holds true whatever party of bought-and-paid for politicians is officially in power.

We as a people, a nation, can do way better. But it will involve recapturing the original populist American vision, which existed at least since Lincoln, and can again.

Fiction 2025

 

THE QUESTION is whether fiction-- our literature-- will ever change, or stay stuck in a rut like a car in a ditch, in the mud, tires no longer even spinning-- our literary mandarins press the accelerator but nothing happens, maybe it's broken. Or their foot presses too gently.

Literature isn't moving. It's marginalized. Trapped behind walls. The elite still attend parties-- in Brooklyn, mostly-- while going through the motions of being important, but they all sound tired. It's all been done. Their book education in a stuffy house, too large, with stuffy, usually absent parents. Big armchairs to hide in, resting on plush burgundy carpeting, with heavy green drapes covering windows to keep the world outside. So they can hide. They've been hiding their entire lives-- still are, frankly-- with books full of long corridors they can hide within. Intellectual-- the facade of intellectualism anyway-- not exciting. Don't give them anything exciting, or emotional, or political-- they've been conditioned to ignore anything of relevance in this chaotic society-- that which SHOULD be addressed by these writers and their acolytes.

Instead they're lost on a Virginia Woolf island searching for an elusive lighthouse. They're not moving, and they're not leaving.

Which leaves us: what? 

It leaves opportunity for change.

A tumultuous new year requires all-new ideas.

(Among my new is a new novella, The Loud Boys, available at Kindle, Kobo and Nook Books.

"The Loud Boys" Is Here!

 State of the art "hyper-pop" writing has arrived. The Loud Boys novella is now available at Amazon's Kindle, at Kobo-- soon, at Barnes & Noble's Nook, with a print version to follow.

Fast-paced multidimensional writing that's topical and relevant? Check it out!