A Shot Across the Bow

The great warmup to the much-ballyhooed "End of Democracy" is on

As I’ve no doubt reminded you earlier, I’m a 71-year-old man, sitting at his impossibly messy desk in a comfy chair in a globally warm and excessively humid cul-de-sac in Pleasant Valley, New York, pontificating uselessly into the gathering ether. And at this moment, I vaguely resemble a befuddled Eric Weinstein suffering through his midlife crisis, which involves reluctantly obsessing over confusing UFO narratives, bemoaning the frustrating decades-long stasis of theoretical progress in physics, and suspecting it all to be the fault of a shadowy cadre of “deep state” puppet masters having created and maintained a set of fictions and subterfuges over the past 70 years since the fusion bomb was first detonated. I’m experiencing a similar late-innings crisis, homing in reluctantly but nonetheless obsessively on similar … and possibly related … narrative territory, and trying unsuccessfully to avoid suspecting a similar shadowy cadre of puppet masters manifesting lies and subterfuges in the service of maintaining dominance over the world’s resources and economies.

Because what has been happening, around the globe and here in the United States of America, is, to this grizzled literary veteran, following a scripted narrative, replete with graph-able, can’t-put-it-down story arcs seemingly lifted from Kurt Vonnegut’s legendary lecture at Case Western Reserve University in 2004. These ongoing narratives, I have (again, reluctantly) observed, are designed to keep America’s and the world’s restive population of wage slaves and financial/resource renters eternally preoccupied with a layer of dramatic nonsense divorced from the reality of the global kleptocratic cabal’s exercise of economic and military power, as well as to render us all unwilling or unable to curtail or alter this extra-national regime’s myriad political, economic and military plots and projects.

I’m not going to bore readers with the many, many instances over the past two centuries of wool being pulled over the eyes of the electorate, just here in the United States and Great Britain, the twin crucibles and power centers of this rapacious enterprise. Feel free to choose your own list of war-engendering false flags, coups, assassinations, political take-downs, CIA, MI6 and Mossad-sponsored regime-changes, trumped-up invasions, sabotage operations, kangaroo court imprisonments, reputation-smearing dossiers, blackmail operations, “suicides” and so on. On hand in support of the cabal for every indignity of the modern era, you have the clandestine operative-infested mainstream media of The New York Times/Washington Post/CNN/FOX/MSNBC/Fleet Street news organizations and their equally infested North American, European, Israeli, Asian, African, Australian and South American cousins, regurgitating and spreading the spoon-fed plot twists and fake analyses provided by the puppet masters. The same goes for the large social media platforms that have stolen much of mainstream media’s former clout and reach, including Facebook/Meta, YouTube, and yes, even Elon Musk’s star-crossed Twitter/X experiment, which are all being led by the nose into the latest iterations of the ongoing narrative.

Which brings us to the events of the past month, which have been building, in a series of increasingly bold and jarring anticlimaxes, toward … one way or another … the replacement of the tattered and increasingly hard-to-control electoral process in the United States with a modified coronation process more amenable to the continuation of a multi-generational organized criminal empire. The current narrative has been built into a towering, unwieldy castle of bullshit worthy of Dostoyevsky. In short, with these Siamese twin Trump/Biden dramas, we’re all falling for a two-pronged attack on a somewhat threatening third-party threat (in this case from RFK Jr.). It doesn’t matter to the puppet masters if Biden craps out and gets replaced by the winner of a Hollywood panel-hosted speed-dating contest or doesn’t, just as it didn’t matter to them whether Trump got killed or miraculously survived a crappy assassination attempt, pumping his fist for the cameras. Any which way it turns out, they win.

The resulting narrative blizzard from any resolution of both of these crowd-riveting story lines ensures that no one will be paying any attention to anything else through at least November, including any actual issues worth discussing or the fact that neither the Republicans under Trump nor the Democrats under the speed-dating contest winner will upset the puppet masters’ long-term plans. This unified cabal could care less about race relations, women’s rights, abortion, religion in schools, voting rights, immigration, gun rights/control, or whether your kid wants to be a boy or a girl or something in between. It cares a lot about its bottom line, including where energy and other resources come from, and how to control and profit from them, worldwide, far into the future. Those resources happen to include drugs, both legal and illegal. And water. And oil and gas. And lithium and other rare metals. The cabal cares mightily about dominating the balance of military power in the world, and keeping potential threats fighting amongst each other. It sometimes seems as if it might be amenable to taking seriously a number of possible existential threats, such as climate change, nuclear proliferation and highly contagious fatal diseases, as long as none of the proposed solutions threaten its hegemony ... but I wouldn’t make a bet on that.

The narrative is now in full swing. On both sides of the ersatz, cleverly manipulated national “divide,” pundits and political hacks are falling all over each other to blather and bolster preordained party lines:

• This was terrible, we must all “unite.”

• This was terrible, and all the Democrats’ fault, for demonizing Trump. We must strengthen our speech censoring.

• This was a message from God, that Trump is invincible, and we must vote for the fist-pumping hero.

• Trump is a man’s man. Can you imagine Biden or Kamala reacting that way? I was leaning against voting for him, but now … he’s my dude. Rock on, America!

• We’re sorry this happened to Trump, but he’s still evil and plotting to end democracy, so we have to use any means possible to defeat him, even if it means ending democracy.

• Biden is too old, and it’s too late to trust the democratic process. Kamala can’t beat Trump, especially now that he’s a death-defying superhero. We must replace Biden, quickly, throwing caution to the wind, with the most electable person in America. We cannot leave this process up to the people, although we’ll let them watch the thrilling popularity contest, which will wrestle the spotlight back off Trump.

And so on. Whatever happens, you can also be certain that, despite what didn’t end up happening to Donald Trump, every candidate who ever runs from now on will be reminded once again that there is a big, fat target on your head, and whatever independent-minded ideas you may have about becoming the allegedly most powerful individual on the planet can easily get some lame-brained patsy aiming at your hubris-soaked noggin from the top of a nearby building as your slow-witted, undersized Secret Service detail is busy looking the other way.

By the way, along with the great Walter Kirn, I predict that the Hollywood speed-dating coronation scenario will, following its debut later this summer, become the de facto method for anointing presidential candidates in the future, finishing the job started so long ago of excising the ungainly mob from the process. When you can sit and watch a list of expertly selected “leading contenders” being grilled on a gilded stage with softballs from world-famous celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Taylor Swift, George Clooney and Stephen Colbert, why would you want to go out on a cold, wet early spring day and vote after having to watch a bunch of losers argue about dumb shit for three hours in front of the likes of Megyn Kelly?

Have a wonderful rest of your summer, and get ready for the Celebrity Battle of the Super Candidates, coming to you this fall on FOX/CNN/MSNBC. My money’s on Michelle Obama, but I’ve been wrong before.

https://www.amazon.com/Wasted-Story-Love-Gone-Toxic/dp/1948796309

Z. Shaw

5.0 out of 5 stars Living the nightmare like a dream

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2021

I don't read much fiction. It's often like listening to someone explaining their dream to you. Cringe.

Maybe I'm living in the same nightmare as Biff. I found this book extremely relatable.

There's so much to praise here. The book operates on many different layers all at once. it's got the dirty Times Square porn shop gallows humor. Twists and tension abound. Narratives weave. It's compelling, relatively fast-paced, and contains within it a simmering plot that explodes into blockbuster Hollywood action drama... yet it remains smart and witty throughout with an unpretentious, drug-addled-but-I-can-handle-my-drugs delivery.

The characters are real, relatable and always seem to say exactly what's on their minds. The characters felt fully grounded, present, alive. The author juggled a sizable cast with aplomb, painting evocative pictures of even the bit players.

To be honest, I didn't read this as fiction. For the most part, it feels 100% real and grounded in the same New York State I live in, in the same toxic corporate-captured society... regardless of the changed location names. Who knows, maybe it's all true and the author just claims it's fiction to avoid scrutiny, lawsuits and beheading. That would be the ultimate rebel genius move.

What do you do when you discover the depths of this world's nightmare, and you're too smart and passionate to ignore it? Cut the whole toxic machine off at the head, or failing that, at the tentacle.... and don't get caught. Or write a masterful, can't-put-it-down novel about it. Existentially, same difference.

Dom

5.0 out of 5 stars Didn't expect to lose this much sleep...

Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2021

Verified Purchase

Biff Thuringer is dropping hard truths in this novel. It's like reading the terrifying expose of some top-notch investigative journalist, only it's couched, blessedly, in a wry and oftentimes hilarious work of fiction. From page one it was clear I was in the hands of a life-long professional. The writing is faultless, riddled with brilliant turns of phrase, and dripping with that all too precious commodity: STYLE. Raw, unflinching, pissed. If there's any justice in this world (which I'm now more convinced than ever there isn't), Wasted will get its due one of these days and be the talk of the American literary circuit. Though set in immediate aftermath of 9/11, the corruption, graft, and systemic defilement of Mother Nature highlighted in these blistering pages are all too permanently relevant. Do yourself a service, pick up a copy, and be part of the Biff movement, which if I had my druthers would be rampaging in full force.