Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 11/8/24

Rage Against the Machine edition

My prediction for the coming four years will be a marked uptick in cyberpunk books and games and other media. Less as a distraction from reality and more like a training simulation.

It’s been an epochal week here at the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker and everyone here in administration would like to remind you that we still have responsibilities here to perform, and those roles are critical to the long-term success of our mission: to wait out the apocalypse. Our mission statement is located in the front of everyone’s handbook, but we wanted to re-iterate it here, in the interests of full transparency and accountability:

The North Texas Apocalypse Bunker and its staff are committed to the act of writing, analyzing and navigating the swirls and eddies of popular culture with grace, intelligence, and elan, as we wait out the entropic breakdown of our beloved institutions. We will continue broadcasting our pirate signal as we weigh in on matters both sacred and silly in the interest of bolstering flagging morale for the scattered remnants of a once-great civilization. 

We have no intention of pivoting away from that obligation. However, we would be remiss if we did not also offer up more meaningful critique from time to time. Some of these critiques will be aimed at the tools being used to dismantle the security systems which would allow the mutants access into the walled city. Other comments will concern the elaborate tactical planning that took place over several decades and what resulted from the sowing of those seeds.

You may just be here for the movie reviews and the dick jokes. Not a problem. We’ll still have those, in regular, measured quantities (we’re rationing). No matter. The bunker was built so that we can wait out the inevitable in comfort and safety. All are welcome, and you can leave anytime you like. Whatever you decide to do, we are glad to have met you, regardless.

Roanoke Writer’s Conference Is Here

Attendance has swollen with the announcement that I’ll be in Roanoke this weekend, being all writerly and stuff. My workshop was going to be on how to write a heist, but there’s an awfully good chance that it will turn into a practicum, given our current state of affairs. Hey, I’m just the messenger. What you do with the heist you plan is your business. Unless it involves Ted Cruz. Then I’m all in.

On a More Personal, Less Cheeky Note

I’m not doing this again.

Ever since 2016, and if we’re being honest about it, ever since 2010 (when the Tea Party first bullied their way into Congress with the singular goal of shutting the government down), I’ve been in a twist. I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican, and I’m damn sure not a Libertarian.  There isn’t a name, nor a party, for the issues that concern me. Up until the name Ted Cruz was floated into the zeitgeist, I’d considered myself a Texan insofar as politics were concerned. Give every man his due. Be kind to your neighbors, as they have been kind to you. Don’t overtax me. Spend the money I give you wisely. Invest in our future.

Of course, I was wrong. Naïve to the point of stupefaction, entombed in a bubble of my own making. In 2006 I moved from Austin, the liberal crème-filled center of the Conservative Texas Twinkie, to a small town in North Texas that wasn’t so much “red” as it was “crimson.” You don’t really get to examine your beliefs and convictions until you move to a place were no one feels the same way that you do.

Granted, it didn’t change me overmuch, at least, not insofar as my beliefs were challenged. What it did was shut me up. I didn’t say anything aloud to anyone because I was a stranger here. I didn’t know anyone, and I was restarting a business that relied on the goodwill of others. In hindsight, this wasn’t a bad call. I got quiet long before bakers refused to bake cakes, taco trucks were forced to close, and public figures were harangued in restaurants. I did note these public displays of cancel culture, and never regretted my decision to keep quiet.

The last twelve years of holding that shit in have done a number on me. It wasn’t the sole reason for my depression, but it sure as hell didn’t help mitigate it, either, now, did it? I was already in the midst of a nervous breakdown when Trump grabbed the political scene by the hoo-ha and declared that some Mexicans were rapists, drug dealers, and killers and that they could be stopped by the simple building of a wall. I’m on the record as saying I’ve never, not ever, been a fan of his and I remain baffled by his popularity. Given what his political career has wrought, I don’t think the juice was worth the squeeze. Hah! An orange metaphor! Get it!?

Trump’s existence on the political stage has been a lightning rod. It’s cost me some friends, it’s strained my relationship with family, and it’s forced me to keep more alcohol in the house than I’m comfortable with. It’s stilled my voice, even as I was diligently unpacking and examining every angle of How He Got There to try and understand the why of it all.

That’s an answer that only time will give us. We will all have to move further away from these events to see from a top down perspective how it all shook out. And make no mistake, there is a record being written for posterity that will allow people who are not us to examine all of the disparate moving parts in this needlessly complicated machinery and see where the bad cogs were, where the inputs were corrupt, and maybe, just maybe backtrack further to see where and how it all started.

I’m wandering, now. Sorry. I said at the beginning that I’m not doing this again and I mean it. I’m a writer, and some of you think I’m pretty good at it. I’ve not been using my "voice” to try and affect a change, largely because the people that would most need to read what I’m writing don’t/can’t/wouldn’t read it to begin with. And no matter how good something I wrote might be, it would need to go viral to have any hope of hitting some of those folks, and even then, it would be dismissed out of hand for whatever Dunning-Kruger-inspired reason they’d care to give.

Going forward, I’m going to write to my audience with an eye towards venting a little steam and maybe, just maybe, doing something that will assuage our shared sense of helplessness. After all, we can’t snap our fingers and get the money out of politics, can we? No, we first have to elect people to local offices like school board, mayor, county comptroller, etc. Then we have to send those people into the state legislature, where they will hopefully make enough friends and do enough things that we can pivot them over to a Congressional or Senate seat. After a few terms there, and maybe a book deal or two, one of them can make a run for the presidency, but frankly, they are better off aiming for a cabinet position in someone else’s administration first. That’s the ticket! Only then will the American public trust them enough to run the country for four years, and that’s when we strike, overturning Citizen’s United and putting legislation in place to limit campaign finance spending, dissolve superpac anonymity, and forbid foreign money from entering our elections. Should only take about 35-40 years, give or take.

That, by the way, is exactly what the Republicans did.

I know the response of a lot of young people who tried to make their voices heard, to no avail, is to throw up their hands and go, “See?! The system is rigged! That’s why I’m never going to vote ever again, nanny nanny boo boo, until my single issue is made a number one campaign platform that will be addressed in the first 100 days. That’ll show ‘em!”

As someone who has yet to see any of his pet issues brought to the fore in over 40 years of watching American politics unfold, let me be the first to say, "Oh, grow up, you bunch of mewling little idiots.” Considering one of my enduring issues is the continued lack of and defunding of education, let me offer up exhibit A as to why things are bad right now—two generations of largely uninformed voters who respond only to direct stimuli. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.

But no matter. Bunker Operations will be spearheading some projects, and these projects will be for public consumption and dissemination. They will be made available to you, the various members of the NTAB, to do with as you see fit. See, I’m a big believer in culture disruption. Most people aren’t thinking politically when they go through their day. They are just moving to the next hierarchical need, be it food, shelter, sex, sleep, safety, food, sex, distraction from all of the tire fires, and shelter. One of those isn’t on the pyramid, but you get what I’m saying.

Anything we can do to disrupt that feedback loop gives us a chance to broadcast a different message. It’s not a one-shot fixit. It’s more of a hearts and minds campaign. Changing one person’s perspective at a time.

Watch this space in the next four years for some stickers, some mini-comics, some t-shirts, and some other things that you can distribute into the conversation. Maybe it’ll help. Maybe not. But I can’t sit on my hands and keep my mouth shut any longer. I think you should know what I’m on about, so here’s my “platform,” for what it’s worth:

I believe the following institutions have garnered exponentially more power than they can responsibly wield, and I am committed to seeing them brought to heel in a more responsible role for society going forward:

1. Christian Nationalist Churches. Not your local church, mind. Not the people who are handing out food and collecting money for blankets. Not Christians. I’m talking about the mega-churches and the organizing bodies that have decided to add politics into their religious doctrine, without once thinking about how Jesus flipped all of those tables over at the temple, nor what that rebellious action ultimately cost him. You’d think they’d know the Bible a little better, wouldn’t you? And yeah, I get that the Westboro Baptist Church doesn’t speak for everyone and shouldn’t be held up as an example of organized religion, but what about the other churches who have instructed their preachers to inform their congregations that the Republican candidate is “appointed by God?” Does anyone think that’s a good idea?

2. Our Corporate Overlords. Any industry with the word “big” in front of it, like media, finance, pharma, tech, oil, and so on. Anyone considered “too big to fail.” Corporations have been running, unchecked, ever since Citizens United and the removal of all the guardrails that kept them from being irresponsible and excessively capricious. “Corporations are people?” Are you fucking kidding me? I’m not a communist. I don’t believe in wealth redistribution. But I firmly believe that there is an upper limit to how much money a person needs and can comfortably use and spend in a lifetime. I think that amount of money is best expressed with an M and not a B or a T. I want guard rails back in place. I want caps on what can be considered a reasonable dividend. And maybe even let’s go ahead and define what a corporation is with a little more nuance so that it’s clear what a corporation can do to earn money for its shareholders and it’s even clearer what it can’t do. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

3. The military/industrial complex. Do I need to spell it out for you? Do me a favor: go look at the pie chart that shows how much of the budget is allocated to the things we spend tax money on. That big wedge? That oblique angle? That outsized splash of cover? That’s defense spending. It’s been that way for my whole life. It’s the single most disproportionate piece of the pie, one that you could literally cut in half, redistributing the rest to the other categories equally, and it would radically reshape what this country values in ten years or so. We don’t need to buy tanks. We haven’t needed to buy tanks since the first Desert Storm, back in the mid-nineties. But there’s a tank budget. We’ve got a tank guy. And that World War II era surplus item gets refreshed every year while Ted Cruz reads “Green Eggs and Ham” to a bunch of bored senators.

4. Entrenched Political Systems. Gerrymandering. Term limits. Filibusters. Lobbyists. SuperPACs. The electoral college. All of those little changes that multiply into the death of our democracy by a thousand cuts. If the government is jammed up and no one wants to work with anyone, then things don’t change. The Tea Party assholes ran on the idea of shutting the government down. Let’s take away those tools that they are using to do just that.

5. Internet Culture. Social media is a Great Satan, broken and abused by bad actors and the worst examples of culture and humanity. The Internet is a 50-gallon oil drum on fire in the middle of a darkened alley where you can clearly see the red of the rat’s eyes reflecting in the fire’s flickering light. This is where people go to socialize now. They don’t go to parties or weekly bowling leagues. They go to church, then they go home and hop online to read the screeds of people who are writing horrible, offensive shit on purpose so that they can ‘bring the culture down.’ Nice. These are the same people who learned that you could beat up and kill a hooker in Grand Theft Auto because they did it, just to see what would happen, and watch the animated pixeled blood run. Why on EARTH would anyone think they have the inside track to a hidden cabal within the deep state trying to bring it down from within? Yeah, I’m talking about 8Chan and Q-Anon, invented by gamers solely for the “lulz” and who were laughing their asses off when otherwise normal adults said, out loud, “I don’t know why things suck, but damned if this doesn’t make perfect sense! It’s not my political choices. It’s not my political heroes. It’s someone else that did it to me. Imma get ‘em back!”

Those are my problems. Those are things I think are breaking us. And those are the things I intend to address.

Right after the movie reviews and the dick jokes.

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: the office intercom has been taken over with tracks from Rage Against the Machine, played at full volume on a loop, and it’s been difficult to concentrate on movie reviews this week. We managed to agree to an expansion of our edicts, though. Going forward, this space will not only review movies and TV shows, but it will also handle books (including, but not limited to, zines and comics), music and any other pieces of ‘media’ deemed noteworthy and/or significant in some way.

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Nobody Wants This (Netflix)

A podcaster with intimacy issues and a rabbi fresh from a breakup meet at a party.

I know, it sounds like a joke, but the podcaster is Kristen Bell and the rabbi is Adam Brody, and this light, breezy rom-com series is a welcome distraction for whatever you might be going through right now that you need to zone out on.

I suppose I am a fan of romantic comedies, or at least, I was at one time. Not so much these days as the Rom-Com is now where hackery goes to die. Oh, was there a big misunderstanding? One that could have been cleared up with a phone call? No, better than that, we’ll race to the airport, leap out of the taxi without paying our fare, run through the terminal like O.J. Simpson jumping luggage, spend a thousand dollars to gain access to the gate, just so we can tell whoever is leaving for Beijing for six months that we love them. Crom give me strength.

Nobody Wants This seems very aware of its origins and takes great pains to avoid most of the egregious clichés. Sure, there’s misunderstandings and obstacles to young love, but these make perfect sense in the context of the story. Nothing feels forced, not even the copious amounts of snark that everyone seems fit to deliver. I like Adam Brody a lot, even if he has built a career on playing horrible people. This is a pleasant change of pace. And who doesn’t love Kristen Bell? If it's you, I don’t want to hear it. She’s a national treasure and I’ll prove it with math.

The series is awash with chemistry between the actors. Bell and Brody really seem like they are in love, but come on! They are beautiful people and we expect to see them knocking boots. Timothy Simons, last seen in Veep, plays Adam Brody’s doofus brother, and his wife is played by Jackie Tohn and boy, do those two seem mismatched, until you watch a scene in episode four wherein Simons tries to initiate “sexy time” and you can see how her character could have fallen in love with him. The casting is great.

The series got renewed for a second season, which it needs because of the soft cliffhanger. Nobody Wants This is a quick watch, eight 30-minute episodes that you can binge in a couple of sittings. If you ever were a fan of romantic comedies, this is one to check out for its attempts to try and shake up the formula while staying true to the ‘will they/won’t they’ dynamic.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”