Every Renaissance has its Reformation?

Anyone else out there unnerved by what’s happening in America these days? 

Experts on authoritarianism say that when political violence is being perpetrated by both sides (and make no mistake, there is violence on both sides), society is in the greatest state of peril, particularly in quasi-democracies. 

And Trump is stoking the fires, cynically weaponizing the anger of disgruntled people.

Globalization, like all things, has had positives and negatives. Hundreds of millions prospered, but millions in the USA were left behind, and they aren't happy about it. 

Worse, over the last 50 years, ever since the Powell Memo, big business has steadily pushed back gains made by organized labour, polarizing wealth in America to an increasingly dangerous degree. Worker wages have remained stagnant while 50 trillion has gone to the top 1% and CEO salaries have skyrocketed.

Democratic government, as opposed to authoritarian rule, is all about compromise: FDR and LBJ moderated the social and class divide with The New Deal and The Great Society. This helped America avoid falling into Communism or Fascism, creating the famed diamond shaped class structure, instead of the traditional feudal pyramid. 

Extremists want purity. This can be good, in that we want to be moving forward towards a more equitable, prosperous, healthy society. It can also be bad, with people pushing for purely selfish, impractical or outright self-destructive ends. Extremists push in the direction of their obsession without regard for practicality. That’s their nature. It’s also why societies run by extremists are unstable. 

The more you push in one direction, without regard for the greater body politic, the more resistance you build up. 

Every Renaissance has its Reformation.

Push the pendulum too far, and it’ll snap back with a vengeance. 

Savvy democratic leaders are aware of this, and implement changes incrementally, moving forward, in the direction (hopefully) that's most constructive, as much as politically viable. 

This (hopefully) avoids the Reformation trap. 

Demanding immediate extreme change leads to extreme resistance that can undo all progress. 

It’s not always even logical: change can be frightening. People often accept things as they are without thinking. Sudden change throws their lives and world view into chaos, creating alarm and fear. 

That seems to be where we are now. 

Trump is a con man, but he’s cunning, and he’s picked up on widespread discontent, real grievances, and provided enemies to rail against: a Goldstein for the Two Minute Hate, and he’s using it for his own benefit, to enrich himself (to the tune of $3.4 billion dollars), distract his opponents, and dismantle the institutions that kept the system (relatively) fair and competitive.

United we stand, divided we fall. Trump instinctively knows and exploits this, and social media has been his ally in this from the get go.

Social media elevates the incendiary, and it helped Trump get elected. He’s the social media prez, the Great Divider, the Drama King-in-Chief. Facebook infamously embedded with Trump's election war room. Just as Mussolini and Goebbels used the new social tech of the day (radio) in the thirties, Trump's at the forefront of it today.

The White House is practically a reality TV show. I'm amazed at the restraint Trump's shown, in that he doesn't have a camera crew following him 24/7. We could watch him destroy America in real time.

Opposing Trump with violence plays into his hands and would send America into the abyss, giving him the very excuses he needs to go full authoritarian.

Never go full authoritarian. 

The United States doesn’t need purity—it needs dialogue and, honestly, compromise. Eventually, this storm will pass, and a new generation of leaders will emerge to rebuild democracy. 

United we stand, divided we fall. 

Let’s step back from the abyss.

Gotta love me some Raphael

Like a demented Shadow out of Mordor

A great shadow is falling over the world, from Ukraine and Yemen and Gaza and Sudan to the USA, like something out of Lord of the Rings, that book Peter Thiel admires so much. He names his companies after elements taken from Tolkien, like Palantir, after all.

Anne Althouse details in Autarchy Inc. how authoritarians are coordinating internationally to undermine democracy and support each other. The world is becoming increasingly polarized between haves and have-nots, between exploitative elites and the unwashed masses. 

Does Pete see himself as Aragorn? Aragorn, after all is a king, preordained to rule and unite Gondor, to usher in an era of righteousness and prosperity. 

And yet, Aragorn is still, at root, a king. A chosen one. Ordained to rule by blood, thanks to an ancestor being the biggest, meanest, and most cunning thug in the land.

America fought a war to escape the fickle rule of such inbred aristocrats, yet Thiel and his broligarch gang (and their Wormtongue, Yarvin) openly yearn for a stunted world of moh monarchs.

Which makes one wonder: If Thiel sees himself as the hero of LOTR, who does he see as the villain, in the role of Sauron? 

Nancy Pelosi? Socialized medicine? Unions? Welfare? Public education? Vaccines? Rule of law? The modified free enterprise system?

It’s shocking how quickly corporate America has knuckled under to Trump’s regime, with Jimmy Kimmel being the latest casualty. Trump is taking tips from the likes of Victor Orban, Erdogan, Putin, and Modi as he silences media critics and shoves American democracy into an early grave. 

As Jon Stewart said, comedians are the banana peels in the coal mine. 

The USA has always been a collection of contradictions. But despite all its flaws, it has always aspired towards noble ideals, and been the greatest, brightest hope for democracy.

Perhaps the worst thing of all, and the most alarming for Western democracy, is that political assassination is making a comeback. Assassination is completely antithetical to democratic society, where peaceful power transition through debate and voting sidesteps the internecine violence that afflicts authoritarian societies. 

Democracy isn't perfect, extremists are always trying to destabilize it, shift it towards the extremes. Arguably it's not a spectrum but a loop (as many have argued), with freedom on one side, and authoritarianism on the other, and you can get to either by turning left or right and going far enough.

And while it's true that Tolkien himself yearned for a quieter, feudal age, sans factories and industrialized warfare, would he really be on the side of the broligarchs, were he with us today?

Criticisms of monarchy aside, bottomless greed and an endless appetite for power and domination sounds a lot less like Aragorn, and much more like the eponymous Lord of the Rings. 

Democracy is not incompatible with freedom, Mr. Thiel: autocracy is.

11.22.63 review

The TV miniseries adaptation of 11.22.63 starring James Franco is surprisingly good. Best of all, despite being a cable show, it’s not drawn out (I’m looking at you, House of Cards); it’s 10 episodes and done. That’s it, the entire book. King has also said he has zero intention of ever revisiting the characters. 

The show takes an outlandish premise (a closet that is a gateway to 1960 USA… maybe it’s the closet they shot Doctor Who in during the 1960’s… and a mission to prevent the assassination of JFK) and treats it in an extremely grounded fashion. Apparently this book involved the most research Stephen King has ever done. All the details feel right, right down to the price of a piece of pie. The show dives deep into all kinds of JFK assassination conspiracy theories, and has a blast doing it.

King adheres to the time travel rules (The past does not take kindly to people trying to mess with it) he sets up all the way to the end, when he doesn’t just drop the ball, he spikes it, doing the rules, the characters and the audience dirty. He wants to make a particular point, and he’s not about to let his own rules stand in his way. 

That said, the ending has emotional impact, it lingers, and the whole trip was enthralling. I can object to the ending while still highly recommended the miniseries.

The characters, for me, really shone, particularly because they were so obviously flawed, including the hero, who sets up some of his own problems because he’s oblivious, insensitive, and an entitled member of the culture class. We do see some of the same, almost stock, Stephen King character types, but they’re all well realized, and there are some excellent character beats. 

It would probably be more accurate to say King often includes people with certain personality disorders, like psychopathy; psychopaths, in a sense, are all the same, and share a lot of the same exploitative, cold-blooded behaviour patterns.

The hero is an earnest high school teacher, and while he’s investigating the background of the assassins, gets caught up in life in the 1960s, taking a job as a teacher, and getting involved in period drama.

There is a twist, naturally, and while you can see it coming (if you’ve read your history), it works, it makes sense, and it serves the points he’s trying to make. 

Which leads to…

SPOILER WARNING!

Come back after you’ve watched it, if at all!

In the end, our hero Jake and Sadie (his love interest) foil the assassination of JFK, although poor Sadie is killed by a stray bullet. Jake then goes back to the future, only to find it a nuclear wasteland. Saving JFK has led to conflict with the Russians getting out of hand, and a nuclear war broke out. So Jake pops back in the closet to reset the future, to wipe away his changes, and seeks out Sadie again. 

Then… he lets her go.

Why? Well, you see there’s this guy with a yellow tab in his hat, who is another time traveler, and he’s gone back repeatedly to save his daughter, but every time he does, she dies anyway, just in different ways. 

Time finds a way to correct itself. 

Living in the past, trying to right the past, all of that… don’t do it. Let it go. That’s King’s message. 

So Jake goes back to the future II, and finds Sadie in old age. She’s alive. She’s lived a happy life. 

It’s all very bittersweet: They only knew each other in an erased reality, and all they have are lingering good cross dimensional feelings.

However, the logic here doesn’t make sense. 

First, Jake DID succeed in saving JFK and changing the future. This caused it to derail, and turn into a catastrophe. But he did succeed in massively altering the future. Billions of people who lived… now died. 

Why wasn’t their future ‘fixed’?

And if people are always doomed to die at a particular time, or within a window, a gamut, then how could Sadie have lived a long life?

If time tries to maintain itself, then she should always live a long life. And if Jake didn’t try to save JFK, why would Sadie always die? She certainly seemed to die as a consequence of Jake saving JFK, along with billions of others eventually. 

But if Jake doesn’t save JFK, those billions would live. Why would only Sadie then be doomed to die if Jake went back? 

And it turns out she’s not doomed, or isn’t doomed so long as Jake doesn’t go back, but wouldn’t the past always be trying to keep her alive, as it doesn’t like changes? 

Either Sadie always dies in 1963, or she always lives to old age. The timeline only allows one option. So why does only she get two? 

She shouldn’t. 

King was used inconsistent rules so he could get deliver on his melancholy don’t-mess-with-the-past theme. 

But he didn’t need to break the rules: he could have just had Jake pull old yearbooks and look wistfully at her photo, or her 1963 obituary. 

King’s point is correct, we should let the past go, but emotionally I’d rather see Jake and Sadie live out a happy and quiet life somewhere. Mind you, King is a hugely successful author, so what do I know? 

What would have happened if Jake had taken Sadie forward into the future? That was his original plan, after all. 

And what if he brought Sadie into the future, found it got all messed up, and then went back into 1960 again, with Sadie, there would be two Sadies, original Sadie and Magic Closet Sadie.

The mind boggles.

Like JFK conspiracy theories, it pays not to think about it too much.

Anthony Aguilar on Gaza

Theo Paxstone and the Dragon of Adyron: Free on Amazon until July 31st!

 

Why, I'd buy that for a dollar... or $3.99! Free? Even better!

Theo Paxstone and the Dragon of Adyron is available for FREE for a limited time only: July 28th to July 31st, 2025. Get your copy from Amazon today!

THEO PAXSTONE AND THE DRAGON OF ADYRON is a fast-paced fantasy adventure that brings together steampunk and medieval myths, pitting noble knights in steam powered battle machines against dragons. Yet the feudal Kingdom of Adyron is mired in injustice, and even the heroes have something to hide.

"Like some sort of steampunk Robotech without the convoluted timeline, the first adventure of Theo Paxstone features an appealing cast of central characters and an intriguing plot that zips along at a delightful pace. The adventure is serious, but Turner lobs some light touches and natural humour into the fray. The book is such an adept balancing act, your "sauce-box" will drop open when you learn it's his first book for younger readers."
Evan Munday, author of the Silver Birch-shortlisted ‘The Dead Kid Detective Agency'

‘This is a charming futurist fantasy that will appeal to young steampunk fans. In a world of ravaged by global conflagration, humankind has reverted to a feudal society powered by steam. An orphan named Theo uses his mechanical genius to find a ticket out of a crowded sweatshop, offering his services to an old knight with a heart of gold. Yes, there is a quest, but no, it doesn't turn out the way you'd expect. It's a fun read enhanced by the author's quirky illustrations.’
Sheree-Lee Olson, author of ‘Sailor Girl’

Theo Paxstone and the Dragon of Adyron FREE for limited time only!Full of dangerous flights, mistaken identities, and kids who show incredulous grown-ups that they are more than able to handle themselves, Theo’s tale should satisfy young readers looking for a bit of speculative escapism.

Kirkus

Because every fantasy adventure worth its salt has a map!