A particular work of fiction opens with an attempted assassination of a prominent politician, which is thwarted by his security team. Over the course of the book, more assassination attempts occur, and a number of high-level elected politicians are killed. Some fifteen security buildings are bombed and destroyed, and two government ministries are gutted by terrorists. The engineer supervising the building of a government research facility vanishes after he discovers a plot to sabotage the construction. Despite all this mayhem, and more besides, a handful of reader reviews found the book “boring.”

Some of you may even recognize the book, but those “boring” reviews got me to thinking. What does it take to keep reader interest? How many people today have become so addicted to violence on so many levels that if there’s not something overtly violent in every chapter – or at least every other chapter – they lose interest?

Then there’s the complaint that politics are boring. Yet, in not only the fictional world, but in the real world, politics are only boring to those who don’t understand them. Failure to obtain a workable political solution to slavery led to the bloodiest war in U.S. history, and the incomplete nature of the Constitutional amendments and post-Reconstruction state laws led to more than a century of subsequent violence. The political decisions by Great Britain and France to exact maximum “reparations” from Germany after WWI likely led to worsening the Great Depression in Germany and to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.

In 1832, President Andrew Jackson not only refused to enforce the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that federal law prevented Georgia from disenfranchising the Cherokee Nation, but also sent troops to evict the Cherokees, a course of action that resulted in the death of roughly 4,000 Cherokees on the Trail of Tears and set a horrible example for dealing with other tribes. “Jacksonian democracy,” while high-sounding, enshrined universal white male suffrage, masculine privilege, and blatant racism and effectively supported the growth of southern slavery, all of which stemmed, at least in part, from a political decision to flout the law as defined by the Supreme Court.

So… as I see it, those who find politics boring are the ones who fail to learn the lessons of history (and politics) and so often doom the rest of us to live through the same mistakes all over again.

Donald Trump has not only reiterated – and reiterated – the big lie about the 2020 election being stolen, but has now declared that there was such massive fraud that any laws, including the Constitution, that keep him from being elected should be terminated. While a bare handful of elected Republicans have said that terminating the Constitution was uncalled for, so far no Republican in a leadership position has publicly disagreed with Trump or rebuked him on his rejection of the Constitution.

Just how has the United States gotten to a point where patent falsehoods are held as truths by roughly a third of the country, and nearly half the country votes for officials who endorse those falsehoods?

Living where I do, immersed in “deep red” southwestern Utah, I can understand why a third of the population believes those falsehoods. The culture here is unabashedly patriarchal, with the greatest economic disparity between the earnings of men and women of any state in the union. When we moved here, a senior professor told my wife that if she didn’t follow the male party line dealing with female professors, she’d never get tenure, and it really didn’t matter because she had a husband to take care of her. My wife fought back and got him removed from the committee [but not from the university], and she built an opera program from nothing and got tenure but was paid less than male professors in the department for years. Over those years, the more overt aspects of patriarchal domination have softened, and the university now has its first female president, possibly because her two previous male predecessors (forced on the school by the male dominated state legislature) were so totally incompetent that even the male-dominated faculty and administration backed her, quite possibly out of fear that another patriarchal clone would destroy the university.

There is no effective Democratic party, and the only competition Republican candidates face is in the Republican primary so that they generally run unopposed in the general election, except occasionally by minority party candidates. Guns are sacred, and environmentalists are generally either despised or considered misguided souls. The Bureau of Land Management belongs to the devil because it wants to destroy ranchers by restricting the number of cattle they can graze on federal lands.

In this culture, it’s effectively social and often economic suicide to suggest loudly anything to the contrary of the local mindset, and that’s one reason why almost no faculty with liberal or moderate views remain long at the university.

The result is that there’s really no way to effectively point out misconceptions and falsehoods, and everyone believes that everyone everywhere, except for a minority of liberals on the coasts, thinks the way they do – and I’m just a fantasy and SF author who’s never lived in the real world, despite the fact that I’ve lived and worked in ten different states and served as a naval officer and Navy pilot during the Vietnam War. But then, anything not in Utah isn’t the real world… and I’ve seen that same attitude in other “red” states.

This self-isolation isn’t limited to the far right, unhappily, because it also occurs on the left, but it’s more dangerous on the right because the far-right is losing economic position, is generally less well-educated, is getting angrier and angrier, and has far more guns and large trucks.

The other day I got a couple of spam-type political emails, claiming that “The Left Hates Thanksgiving.” And before long, it will doubtless be “The Left Hates Christmas,” because that also occurs every year.

Both of which are follow-ons to a whole slew of far-right initiatives to portray both centrists and liberals as the evilest people in the United States. The right also engages in far greater personal attacks with virtually no regard for the truth. All the vicious right-wing rhetoric about liberals eating babies and running child porn operations from beneath pizza parlors [that don’t even have basements] is fairly indicative of the disregard that the far right has for the truth.

For years, the right has claimed that the left wants to take away the right’s guns, but the left only wants to get rid of military style mass-killing weapons, and they couldn’t outlaw all guns if they wanted to, not without a Constitutional amendment, which isn’t politically possible now and never will be.

The left certainly has no love of the far right, but for the most part, the left tends to attack individuals for their policies and for trying to take away personal freedoms. There’s a huge difference between minorities who’ve been oppressed for centuries wanting fairer treatment under law and right-wing nutjobs who attack the Capitol because they don’t want to accept an election that didn’t turn out the way they wanted.

All across the country, election officials have been threatened, and politicians who have pointed out the illegality of the January 6th insurrection have had their lives and those of their families threatened, hundreds of times.

I’ve been in and around politics for almost fifty years, and I can only recall four instances where possible “leftists” targeted Republican officeholders with armed attacks and/or violent threats. While there are likely a few others as well, the numbers of officeholders threatened by the far-right is in the hundreds, if not the thousands, and includes Republicans whose actions the far-right doesn’t like, all of which strongly suggests that the Republican Party is not only the Party of No, but also the Party of Hate.

And what’s even worse, none of the GOP leaders even seem to care that some of their officeholders and far too many of their supporters are lying hate-mongers.

I have to admit it. I do tend to get my news from CNN. But I’m getting less and less enchanted with CNN, not because of the “slant” of the news, because all news sources have a slant, but because, with the new head of CNN, not only are there layoffs, but there are more and more commercials. That’s likely because CNN’s parent company – Warner Bros-Discovery – wants to squeeze more revenue out of CNN at a time when fewer people are watching CNN. That’s despite the fact that Warner Bros-Discovery’s gross profits for the fiscal year ending in September were $11.4 billion, an increase of 58% over the previous year.

Now, I don’t see that cramming more ads into a profitable news network that’s already losing viewers is going to do anything to increase viewers. If you’re looking for news and only finding more commercials, that’s not going to maintain viewership.

But this trend is everywhere, the latest being Netflix and Amazon Prime cutting commercials into movies that used to be commercial-free. Supposedly, one of the attractions of Netflix and Prime was the lack of commercials.

I’m not a sports fanatic, but on brief breaks from writing on Saturdays and Sundays [yes, I write on Sundays and every other day], I’ll channel-surf the football games or in basketball season, the college games, but I’m doing that less and less as well.

Why?

Because even though my satellite system may have three or four games on at the same time, there are more and more times when all four games have a series of commercials on at the same time, and there are more of them that last longer. How the various networks manage to synchronize this inability to avoid commercials I have no idea, unless it happens that they’re paying the athletic bodies for more commercial slots. And if I’m seeking a brief look at a game in progress, I’d like to see a game in progress, not a series of commercials, especially since the satellite service is already charging me for access (not that I have much choice, living 200 miles and a mountain range from the nearest metro area).

But then, the biggest corporations are locked into a mindset of grubbing for higher and higher profits, even when it’s counterproductive… and possibly likely to precipitate greater government regulation, about which they’ll bitch even when their actions have invited it.

If early statements and promises are any indication, the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives will continue being the Party of No, with meaningless investigations of any Democratic member of the Biden Administration that they feel they can target, as well as quite a few legislative initiatives [which will likely go nowhere] to undo any laws and policies that the Republicans don’t like. So far, I’m not aware of a single constructive suggestion from the Republicans, and I don’t consider tax cuts for corporations and the wealth as positive, not given the state of both deficit and debt.

It’s not as though Kevin McCarthy has much choice, given the size of the “Freedom Caucus” and the number of election deniers within the House Republicans and the fact that Trump, the biggest liar and election denier of all, has announced he’s running for President again.

The Freedom Caucus appears likely to make it somewhere between difficult and impossible for McCarthy to come up with and pass a unified and constructive Republican agenda, even though there are areas, such as immigration reform, that could gain enough Democratic votes to pass. But because there’s so much anger among Republicans, it’s likely that “revenge” actions against the Democrats and President Biden will take up much of the next year, and the year after that will be consumed by pre-election positioning.

All that suggests a singularly unproductive Congressional session, and I could be wrong (I certainly have been before), but the anger and negativity of most elected Republicans will make getting anything done beyond the bare minimums (if even that) extraordinarily difficult.