Chapter One of FORT WAYNE: A NOVEL

 

CHAPTER 1

SAMARA

You know how at funerals, they only say good things about the deceased? This is how I'm going to talk about my childhood, which is thankfully over. I met Avery Baker when we were in special ed together. He had wild, dark brown curly hair and sharp angled eyebrows. Whenever I noticed him looking at me, it was like he was trying to figure out what to do with me.

 

Rumor had it that he killed another kid and somehow got away with it. Some versions of the rumor had him beating a boy to death in front of the class, other versions had him stabbing a girl. But every version involved multiple eyewitnesses watching him getting arrested. And yet there he was, in class and on the bus with me and other kids.

 

Would the powers that be really let a killer finish high school? How could they be sure that he wouldn't snap again? His very presence made me curious. And if he were to snap again, it would have been better if he came after me instead of someone who wanted to live.

AVERY

Everyone who grew up in Fort Wayne remembers that one little blonde girl who went missing and ended up on national television. Nobody in Fort Wayne remembers Ronnie Barker. Nobody gave a shit about him. Not even me, not at the time and it's too late to give a shit now. But his story deserves to be told. It's not what you wanted to hear about, but it's shorter than my story. And maybe it kind of explains how I turned out.

Ronnie sat next to me in kindergarten, first grade, third grade, and fourth grade. Our names were next to each other in alphabetical order. He was fat and he smelled like smoke all the time. I hung out with him at recess, not because I liked him but because he grossed out all the other kids who wanted to fuck with me.

In middle school, he would buy my Ritalin for $5 a pill. I hate drugs, and I refuse to take them. But it seemed like such a shame to waste them, and $5 is $5. This is why I never considered him to be my friend. Many arcade machines of the era warned us that "WINNERS DON'T DO DRUGS" and "FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS DO DRUGS". Well I took that to heart and decided that Ronnie could not have possibly been a winner or my friend because I was totally letting him do drugs.

He did make people laugh sometimes, although he stole jokes from me. The school bus driver would set the radio to a station that played love songs and country music. The girls liked it and the boys hated it. I told him once, "Boy band music is like sucking dick. Country music is like sucking your dad's dick." He would repeat this over and over again to everyone else. The other kids claimed that he was admitting to giving head to his own father. I'm not sure if he ever knew his father.

In the 7th grade, he developed bad acne that made him repulsive to all the girls he was starting to have feelings for. I didn't date anyone at all before that point in middle school: flat chested tweens were no match for the busty porn stars in the magazines that I swiped from Dad. I let Ronnie borrow the July 1991 issue and he never returned it. All those magazines are gone now, all the same articles and pics are online, but I still remember that. I forgave him, because I was making $70 a week from him.

One day on the bus ride home, he opened up his dirty Detroit Lions backpack that I used to give him shit about.

"Look in here," he said with a smile.

I looked inside. I just saw his Spanish book that he liked to draw graffiti in, some old comic books, and his three ring binder with the ball point pen drawing of Pamela Anderson.

"Ronnie, I don't want your help with homework."

"Look closer." He opened the bag wider. There was a metal grey thing among the papers. If he was this proud and this secretive, it had to be a weapon. Since it didn't look like a knife, either he had a gun or wanted me to think that he did.

"Is it real?" I whispered.

He nodded. The two girls in front of us were chatting about last night's episode of Beverly Hills 90210. Monica and Stacy were just pretty enough to get me to stop thinking about my porn stash, but I didn't really have anything in common with them. They didn't look like the type to have a porn stash.

"Where did you get it?"

"I saw a car drive up and toss it in the dumpster at our apartment. I didn't recognize the car, but it had Illinois plates. I figured it would be something that he didn't want nobody to find if he came that far just to throw something out right before trash pickup. He had it wrapped up in a plastic sack with some other garbage, thinking that nobody would look through it. But I found it."

"Does it work?"

"Dunno. Bout to find out."

He pulled the gun out and I flinched.

"You're scared," he teased. He put the gun up to the right side of his head. He closed his eyes. His face was blank, neither smiling nor frowning, in a way that I only saw when he was taking a test and I was trying to copy off of him.

"I feel like I'm about to step through a door." Stacy and Monica giggled, blissfully unaware of what was happening right behind them. Part of me wanted to tell them to duck just in case. Part of me wanted to invite them to watch.

"Ronnie, we go through doors every day. The school has doors, the bus has doors, my house and your apartment have doors-"

BANG! It was so loud that at first I thought it was a bomb disguised as a gun. Bright red blood and goo covered the shards of the bus window. Ronnie groaned, then sank out of his seat to the floor. The girls in the seat in front of me saw this and started screaming.

"Stop setting off firecrackers!" yelled the driver. "I will stop this bus if this happens again!"

Poor Marty the Bus Driver. I never learned his last name, but word got around that he was a Vietnam vet with PTSD. So of course, kids had been lighting off firecrackers on the bus since August. Maybe it was divine intervention that kept the bus from burning or crashing, but I don't know why a kind and loving God would allow middle school kids to have free will.

Stacy got up and ran down the center aisle. "Marty! Marty! Avery just shot Ronnie!"

"Sit down!" Marty yelled.

Monica looked at me and the red smear on the glass. Her eyes got wide and she ducked. "Stop the bus!" she pleaded.

Marty did stop the bus. Some kids scrambled out of the back emergency exit, which set off an alarm. Other kids ran towards the front. One grabbed the door lever and opened the front exit. Marty got up from his seat. I was the only one he saw who wasn't trying to get away. He saw the blood on the shattered glass, then bolted out the front door.

There were abandoned backpacks and books on some of the seats. One black shoe with a bow on the toe sat in the middle walkway. I went out the front exit, looking for a girl with one bare foot so I could tell her she left her shoe behind. But all the kids were gone. A line of cars was waiting behind the bus, obediently waiting for the stop sign on the bus to be retracted. I saw Marty shuffling away as quickly as a man with an artificial hip could be expected to. He walked up to the driver’s side of the blue station wagon immediately behind the bus and banged on the window.

“That kid has a gun!” he yelled while pointing at me. “He shot another kid! We have to get out of here and find a payphone!” The driver allowed Marty to get into the back of the car, and then sped off, with tires squealing. All of the other cars behind the bus followed suit, perhaps realizing that it wasn’t normal for a school bus to have its rear emergency door open.

It didn’t feel right for me to leave Ronnie behind on an empty school bus with its exit alarm going off. But I figured there wasn’t anything I could do for him, so I just walked the rest of the way home.

Thoughts on AI

I'll go ahead and disclose that I've played around with AI image generator to make silly images like my cat fighting in WW2 or the Indianapolis Colts winning the World Series. I've decided to put a freeze on that because I'm at a point in my life where I'd just rather make more friends than enemies.

I'm old enough to remember when most people didn't want computers in their homes. There was even a time when I didn't want my own cellphone. I was 26 when I first signed up for one in 2005. We didn't see a need to be constantly connected with everyone else back then. We still had books, magazines, newspapers, vinyl records, cassettes, CD's, TV's, and radios. We had lots of ways to stay entertained. But computers started creeping into homes. Your nerdy friend might show you how cool America Online was, and maybe you'd snap up his old PC cheap when he wanted to upgrade. Eventually we got to a point where the luxury became a necessity. It's a big crisis now when your computer won't boot up, unless it's backed up to the cloud and you can access your data with your phone. We were afraid of becoming dependent on technology, and yet here we are now, a nation of digital junkies.

We can talk about AI generated entertainment. If you work in entertainment, someone should have told you up front that job security isn't a thing. You will likely have to tend bar or work in a warehouse to make ends meet if you want to be an actor. However, there will always be demand for human generated content. I don't use AI to write my stories for the simple reason that I can do a better job on my own. But I think some people might be worried about the possibility that one day, they might discover a new book, read it from cover to cover, decide it was the best thing ever put to print, recommend it to all their friends, buy all the merch, watch the Netflix miniseries based on it, and then find out years later that the story was AI generated. It would be like taking someone home from the bar and having the night of your life and finding out in the morning that they are married or they only make $40,000 a year. 

So yes, I have used AI for memes, but I'm never going to use AI to write. I'm not going to put "No AI Used" on the cover of my book because that's like putting a "No Crack Sold Here" sign in front of my house. Trolls have accused me of being a bot in the past and I'm sure they will again. I'll just roll with it.

A common objection I hear about AI is that data centers consume a lot of water. A data center is being planned in my town, and it would use water from the same source as my house. If there was a drought and push came to shove, I would expect the city would cut off the water to the data center before letting people die from thirst. Because it takes three days to die from dehydration, that would be two days more than it would take a mob of thirsty people to rip open the water main that leads to the data center. I think my own town will have it figured out when it comes to water, so I think we're good on that front and I hope other communities with data centers have it figured out as well. Other countries could build more desalinization plants to increase the world's supply of potable water. So I don't think the water conservation argument is very compelling.

Another objection is that AI uses other people's art to generated prose and images. If you believe your work is being used without your permission, then you are welcome to file a lawsuit for damages. But AI firms could get around this ethical and legal issue by using public domain works to train AI. They could also pay artists for the use of their portfolios. I can see some artists cashing that check if the rent was due and they were low on options. But they are never going to admit that to their friends. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm guessing that fair use might be a defense if you see an AI image that looks way too much like your IP.

But even if the problems of water usage and plagiarism were solved, what it really boils down to is that lots of people just hate AI. Personally, I don't want to talk to a machine like it's a person. I don't want to talk to Alexa or Siri. Machines don't need personalities or moods. They need to function exactly they did when I first started using them and continue to do so until I don't need them anymore. And I'm not a fan of all the uncanny valley images of Jesus walking around in the present day. To be sure there were lots of humorous images that I found funny, but there is so much absolute crap that gets cranked out.

A company might have paid someone to design a new logo in the past, but now they can just enter a prompt and find options that would serve the same purpose. Companies are now using AI to make ads, training videos, and even wall decorations. Some are using AI to make critical financial decisions. Does it make it better or worse if you get laid off by an app instead of a person? A lot of this is just outsourcing responsibility. "I didn't want to lay you off, Bob. The app said we had to!"

So while my own feelings are nuanced, I get why people hate it deeply, and they have a right to try to avoid AI content. Just saying that you hate it is unlikely to result in a ban. If the President is using it openly and corporations are pushing it, then it would appear that generative AI will be around as long as COVID in one form or another. It's a issue that you might be able to mitigate with great effort, but never fully solve.

I do thing there should be a social media platform that does not allow AI content or bots. It would have to be moderated by humans, and those humans would have to be paid. So it would likely have to be a subscription based model. Like if you wanted to sign up for the platform and break its rules, you still have to pay for the privilege of getting permabanned. If you want to create a new account from scratch, you got to pay again. It might be a bare-bones, 90's bulletin board experience, but I think it could work.

Red and Blue (Short fiction)

 

I woke up to find Sheila Nellis, my old high school crush from decades ago, standing in my bedroom in a red sling bikini and six inch Lucite heels.

At first I thought I was dreaming because she still had her braces and her hair was in a Karen bob that nobody under 50 had anymore. And I would never admit even anonymously online that I found Karen bobs and braces to be as sexy as a bikini.

And Sheila was happily married and lived two states away.

She smiled with a mouth full of metal. "Do I have your attention, Seth?"

"Sure."

Suddenly she was wearing a black turtleneck and jeans.

"You already know that I'm not Sheila. But you aren't dreaming either. I'm more real than you are. Say My name."

"You're Satan."

She smiled. "For as long as I've known him, he has never admitted to anyone who he is. Try again."

"You're an angel."

"That's not a name, and you're way off. I'll give one hint, and one more guess. There is only one of Me."

The way she enunciated that first person pronoun was the final proof.

"You are God,’ I told Her.

She nodded.

“Sorry that I was an atheist since high school.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t need you to believe until now.”

“Why do you allow bad things to happen to good people?”

She wagged a finger, and Her voice reached a deep baritone, deeper than any man I’ve met “I decide what is good and what is bad. I decide what is right and what is wrong. And I decide who is good, who is evil, and all shades of grey in between. And I allow you all to have your own opinions based on the very limited information available to you. But now that I’ve established my identity, I have orders for you.”

“I’m listening.”

“Of course. In one week, all humans with Internet access will be required to vote red or blue. Everyone who votes red will live. Everyone who votes blue will only live if more than 50% of all votes are for blue. You will have from noon to 1pm local time to decide. I’m going to spare indigenous tribes, coma patients, and infants, but anyone with their own email account must participate or die.”

“This has to be an elaborate prank, but it’s pretty dumb too. Nobody cares about that meme anymore.”

“I was inspired by the meme to impose the test. Eight billion people around the world are getting the same message as you, Seth. Good luck.”

She vanished. I assumed it was a dream until my mother called. I answered.

“You saw Him too, right?” she asked.

“I did,” I admitted.

“Good. I thought we were all losing our minds in the hospice. The staff saw Him too, but I thought they were just humoring us. What did He look like to you?”

“He looked like a woman.” I was never going to tell anyone about the bikini.

“Well He looked like that one actor who played Him in that movie. I can’t remember the movie but do you know the one I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Well my friends and I are all voting blue. We’re just about ready to go. God’s calling us all home, so we’re all getting on the bus. But you’re my only son, so promise me you’ll vote red, okay? You have a lot of years ahead of you.”

It was the most sense she made in decades. In a way, that was more miraculous than the divine revelation in my bedroom.

My phone made an irritating beep even though I always kept it set to vibrate.

IMPORTANT PRESIDENTIAL ANNOUNCEMENT, said the notification. Then a video started playing even though I didn’t click anything. The President was standing behind a podium. He was in his suit, but his hair was a mess and he was ghostly pale.

He sighed, then just started talking.

“Look, I saw Him, my Wife saw Him, so we need to talk about this. I’ve agreed to issue an executive order for the development of an official, divinely ordained voting app. All Americans and visiting foreign nationals will be strongly urged to use it to make their selection next Saturday.”

He swallowed hard, then went on “As your commander in chief, I fully support every American’s right to make their own choices…but I’m choosing blue. It’s pretty clear that I have a lot to answer for, so I’m just not going to make it worse for myself. “

I wrote my own post to my 655 followers. “The President is voting blue. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? Let’s vote red and save ourselves.”

I scrolled down to find a video from a verified legacy media account. A pastor of a Texas megachurch declared that he and his followers would all voted blue in order to leave this wicked world behind.

My original post got flamed and ratioed. Three likes and 6K comments. I was declared to be a selfish baby killer, even though God had already said infants were exempt.

So I made a video.

“Folks, it comes down to this. You are NOT going to tell your kids to vote blue. And you shouldn’t want them to be orphans, so you’re going to vote red too. But you want to look like self-important martyrs. Like you’re so special because you want to die and the rest of us want to live.”

My video got taken down and my account got suspended. I shrugged. Soon either all those #VoteBlue clowns would either be dead or exposed as hypocrites.

The Pope issued a statement insisting that he personally would vote blue, but his designated successor would vote red. He also urged all pregnant women to vote red.

Nobody was talking about anything else beside Saturday’s vote. The weekly episode of World War Woke had a darker tone as Toxic Teddy interviewed B-list popstar Daisy Short. The interviewed was held remotely; both sat wearing headphones in their own personal studios  with YouTube plaques in the background.

“I’m still processing this whole existence of God thing,” said Toxic Teddy. “I think it says a lot about the way our culture is headed by His appearance. I think that He has had it with all these virtue signaling hypothetical questions. So what if you would take a bullet for the President or the Pope or Bernie Sanders. That isn’t your job. So what if you would give up your seat in a lifeboat for you wife. You never take her on a cruise anyway.”

“I think God wants us all to vote blue as a show of unity,” said Daisy Short.

“Toxic Teddy held up a hand. “Consider this. God gave us free will. He gave us the power to choose. If He just wanted us to die, He’d just kill us. But now He is giving us a choice. We can choose to live by voting red or choose to die by voting blue. People who are suffering will choose blue. If all these healthy do-gooders get what they say they want and most people choose blue, then they are denying a merciful end to thousands of terminally ill patients. On the hand, the results could be even more disastrous and billions of healthy people will die in one weekend.”

“Is that really a bad thing though?” asked Daisy.

“Excuse me?”

“Consider that our planet is dying. We won’t do the right thing and cut back on carbon emissions. It’s not even a matter of limited resources; we are choking to death on our own waste. So God is stepping in, and putting the solution in front of our faces. Everyone in the Global North should choose blue, and everyone in the Global South should choose red.”

Toxic Teddy snorted. “No! Look, the way the original red-blue question was framed, you had to make the choice instantly, without communicating with anyone else. But here, we’ve been given a whole week to talk it out and make the right choice. And the right choice is red! Folks, I apologize. I agreed to interview Daisy a month ago, before all this God thing happened.”

“Seriously, Teddy, people like YOU are what’s wrong with this world!”

“Okay, you’re all going to be dead after Saturday, so I don’t need to care about what you think. Goodbye.”

The next day, a #ChooseBlue activist posted a video of himself beheading Toxic Teddy with a machete. I couldn’t tell if it was AI or not, but the safety algorithms were allowing all sorts of content like that.

Finally, Saturday came along. I voted red. I went online and saw dozens videos of people filming themselves voting. There were way more people advertising their choice to vote blue, but there were still a few reassuring me that red was the right choice.

After the voting was done, my phone started playing a video.

It showed a glowing orb  hovering behind the president’s podium.

“Yeah, he died. You need to know that he lied about voting blue, and he actually voted red. And then he had a heart attack. I didn’t kill him. In fact, I’m not killing anyone, even thought the tally was 48% blue. This was just a test, like that time I told Abraham to kill Isaac. Yes, that really happened, but I just wanted to see what people would do. Please just be good to each other. See you in a few thousand years or so.”

 

We had a new President and we all moved on with our lives. After a couple days, the entire Internet had been scrubbed of content related to the red/blue vote. Nobody I’ve talked to seemed to acknowledge that it happened. There were numerous conspiracy theories about the old  President being poisoned, but people rarely about the glowing orb or the voting. When it is brought up, people will dismiss it at an elaborate prank.

But I KNOW it happened. Because it changed me. Because I now believe in God, and I know He hates hypothetical scenarios. And I am making this my entire personality from now on.

The TMI War

 

This war in Iran will be a way different experience for those watching at home. This would be the first major American conflict where the other country’s civilian population has smartphones. We are going to see things that Trump doesn’t want us to see, the Ayatollah doesn’t want us to see, and that we don’t want to see. If you are already opposed to this war, it’s okay to take a mental health break from the Internet. There will be violent images that will trickle past any filters that Zuck and Musk can put up.

A lot of people aren’t going to be ready for what they are about to see. I’m used to seeing gory pictures from EMT classes, and I still might not be ready. We might get HD quality images of atrocities in our timelines. You might want an image blocker extension for your browser if you have to use the Internet after the next ground invasion.

Still, many people will look at their phones and see pictures and videos of dead and dying soldiers and civilians. Trump will not be able to hide how hideous war is, and he never had any idea of the hideousness that he himself hid from. (He was right to hide from the Vietnam War, his participation would have served no purpose.)

We might reach a point where too much information about war makes it politically unthinkable. This will bother the kind of man who thinks of war as being good for a society. The kind of man who insists that “hard times create strong men; strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” As to prove their point, they elected the softest man ever to stand behind a podium and went on to create the hardest of times in the post Cold War era. Do they propose to break the cycle by ending prosperity forever to ensure that every generation of men will be hard?

Some of us have spent the past four years watching what Ukrainian drones can do to Russian soldiers and vehicles. No leader will be able to start a war again unless he’s willing to let his voters watch that happen to his soldiers. Maybe that will be what creates a new cycle of peace.

Seriously, the draft is dead.

So people who know me know that I voted for Harris, and I think that Trump and Hegseth should be impeached. They should have been impeached for blowing up Venezuelan boats last year, and they definitely should be impeached for blowing Iranian school girls this year.

 But I need you all to understand that you don't have to worry about a draft. You might WANT to worry about a draft, because that places everything out of your control. It won't be your fault if you end up in the military, it won't be your fault if you get killed, but if you survive this war you didn't want and have some cool scars to show to potential sex partners, well that's still way more fun to think about than how to pay your bills next month, isn't it?

Young people should be worried about things like school, employment, and the upcoming midterm election. You still have control over the small things like your grades, job performance and how clean your room is. I think you should get involved in the upcoming midterm elections, but even if you refuse to get involved, it would still benefit you to understand how politics works.

Trump can be unpredictable. We can't be sure what he'll do next, but he is still constrained by certain realities. He isn't Thanos or anything like that. Legally he needs Congress to reinstate conscription and actually start drafting people. Even if he tried just signing an executive order, he'd still need Congress to fund a draft unless he intended to pay for it out of his own pocket.

Here are all the reasons why you won't be drafted.

1. The Pentagon doesn't want to draft you. Sorry, but you just don't have any skills that they are looking for. Your Call of Duty K/D ratio isn't going to cut it. The military would happily teach you those skills, but how well are you going to learn them if you don't want to be there in the first place? Historically, conscripts just didn't perform as well as volunteers. A draft is only useful if a military wants lots of infantry and doesn't care about how good they'll be in the field. Modern militaries care more about quality than quantity.

2. Congress doesn't want to draft you. This is a midterm election year. All members of the House and one third of the Senate are up for re-election and they know this is an unpopular war. They are funding it anyway, and they hope that their voters will care about things other than the war. A draft will make the war a much more important issue. It will make it harder to ignore the war. That is a big reason why they are making registration automatic, so that you won't have to think about it. As an American civilian, you can potentially lead a prosperous life without thinking about the Iran war at all. You shouldn't do that, but Congress is committed to giving you that option.

3. Trump's base doesn't want a draft. Seriously, who wants to be drafted? If you want to be in the military, you talk to a recruiter. You don't sit around the house and wait for them to make you go. So there are Trump supporters in the military, Trump supporters who would join but can't, and Trump supporters who just would rather finish college and work for Daddy than go serve overseas. And they don't see this as hypocritical. See, you have a fire department in your town. Do you support your fire department? Why don't you sign up to be a firefighter? Or maybe you are a firefighter. Do you support curbside trash pickup? Why don't you become a garbage collector? Because even if you think a war is just, the reality is that most people won't have to fight, and won't even be allowed to go even if that's what they want. And hawks tend to grasp this more than my fellow doves.

I'm a Democrat today, but I was a Libertarian for a long time. I've posted multiple opinion pieces calling for an abolition of Selective Service. When I've done so, I've gotten more kudos from Republicans, and more pushback for other Democrats. Which is fine; I'm an old fart and this isn't a dealbreaker issue for me. For better or for worse, many Republicans don't have any problem supporting a war without participating directly. For them, it's like my point about the fire departments. Also, I think they grasp that a draft would result in lots of left wing young people receiving arms and military training, and I think they could do without that.

4. Trump's billionaire donors don't want a draft. Of course they are too old and rich to worry about themselves getting drafted, but they still don't want you getting drafted either. Of course they don't care about you as a person, but they want to be able to exploit your labor and sell you crap. Which is easier to do if you are in the US and not in the Middle East.

In fact, it was laissez faire economist Milton Friedman who convinced Nixon to end the draft in the 1970's. So any movement to bring back a draft is going to have a lot of right wing money fighting it.

The draft is dead.

 

The draft is dead. This death might be permanent.

By the end of this year, young men turning 18 will no longer have to register with Selective Service. Instead, registration will be automatic. Generation X had to register at the post office. Millenials and Gen Z could register online. Gen Alpha won’t have to do anything special, and many probably won’t know that they are registered.

Getting rid of Selective Service has been a pet issue of mine. On the one hand, I’m glad that young men won’t be penalized for noncompliance. On the other hand, conscription may be even less of a credible possibility for young men, so that’s one less of a reason for them to pay attention to politics.

It might seem like poetic justice for Nick Fuentes and Barron Trump to be drafted into the army and sent straight to the front. But that’s just now how the leopards choose which faces to eat. Fuel prices will go up, the economy will suck, and Iran might retaliate in ways we can’t predict. This war will suck for all of us and not just the people who voted for Trump. It’s not fair and it can’t be made fair, but that is how it is.

Conscription is an institution created by warmongers for the purpose of waging war. Peace activists should oppose the draft as a tool of war. We should refrain from saying “draft Barron Trump” because nobody should ever be drafted. No American should be forced to fight in Iran, because no American should be allowed to fight in Iran.

The draft and the current war have always been interconnected, but distinct issues. During the Iraq War, there were pro-war people who were anti-draft, and anti-war people who were pro-draft. Both sides understood the draft would make the war even more unpopular. But a young man who does not want to be drafted might be more motivated to support an anti-draft hawk candidate over a pro-draft dove. Because the issue of the war itself is more important than the draft in particular, we should resist the temptation to propose bringing back the draft. Yes, the thought of a drill instructor yelling at a squad of alt-right incels crawling through the mud is immensely gratifying. But fantasies often make for bad public policy.

For that matter, I refuse to call Donald Trump a “draft dodger”. He is a demented sexual predator who either belongs in a prison or a memory care ward, but at no point in his life did he belong in the Army. Avoiding military service was one of the best choices that he made.

The draft is dead, because not even warmongers have a use for it anymore. We can carry on the fight against dumb wars without it. We can talk about American military casualties, Iranian civilian casualties, higher gas prices, and higher inflation. We can even finally kill the blood-soaked myth that war is good for the economy. But let’s not get distracted by a draft that has no chance of happening.

History blindness.

 There are people who lack a sense of history. I'm not even talking about a lack of education: somebody who only watches TV can still grasp that there was a time before TV when people had to watch plays instead. I'm talking about people who don't seem to grasp that an era ended before a different era began.

Here are examples that I have observed from just talking to people. These are adults who are at least mentally sound enough to have gainful employment, and did not seem at all sarcastic when they said what they said.

1. I joked to a coworker that a different coworker was so old that she had a Confederate birth certificate. He looked at me and said "Really?" as if I was telling him a weird fact instead of a joke. A high school graduate should know when the Civil War happened and the limits of a human lifespan.

2. I was chatting with a coworker who was a Vietnam veteran. He told that he shook hands with a general and got rifle grease on his hands, and the general just laughed it off. I asked him if it was General Westmoreland. The vet confirmed that it was Westmoreland. Another coworker overhears this, looks at me, and asks "How old are you?" with a confused look on his face.

3. At a party, I was talking about a place that I used to work at. At that location, uranium was rolled into bars for the Manhattan Project, and workers had no idea that these bars were being used to develop the first atomic bombs. A woman asked "But you didn't have anything to do with that, right?"

4. A friend of mine was telling me about a guy in her gaming group. She said that he was in his 50's and had served in World War 2. This is especially egregious because I met her grandfather who raised her and had actually served in the Battle of the Bulge.