No news today - Guest Post - Steven Gillis

I read the news today, oh boy. Every fucking country is at war. Internal strife. Egypt, Iran, Libya, Bahrain, hell even Wisconsin. Wild times to be sure and yet what do we know about any of these conflicts really? What the papers tell us? All the news that's fit to print. What the hell does that mean? Isn't that a cute way of saying All that I feel like reporting, that suits a certain paid for agenda. Am I a cynic? No. A realist rather. Having been around the block enough times to wear a groove my naivete has given way to a matured form of wistfulness. I know what I would like to see happen but have no way of pretending it will. There are pirates in Somalia and the FBI is 8,000 miles away from the States getting people on board sailing ships killed. What the hell is the FBI doing in Somalia and what did they think would happen when they locked up the pirate king? I don't know anymore. Have people just gotten more stupid? I doubt it. The truth about war - yes isn't that where I started? - is that these uprisings of late are totally predictable. Say what you will and there is a buttload to say but Saddam Hussein - as freaky crazy and sick and delusional as he was - he knew how to keep the factions from killing one another. In these other countries - and even in America - it's one thing to mess with the poor. The poor have no leverage, it's like kicking the crippled kid in his bad leg, he's going to fall over. But fuck with the lower middle class, or worse the actual middle class and you can damn well expect a riot. It's all so sadly predictable. Jefferson said the best way to insure democracy is to have a bloody revolution once every 30 years. Well, mostly the countries of the world under fascist regimes or political potentates like here in the States have found ways to suppress revolution. Until now. The fan has found the shit. What will the upshot be? Democracy? We can only hope. Damn, there I did it. I said we can hope. Is that naive? I don't know. Last week here in Michigan we got 13 inches of snow in Ann Arbor overnight. The papers did not predict the storm. I went out 4 different times to shovel our walk and drive. I had the flu, was running a fever. The snow as it hit my cheeks melted as, well, as snow hitting something hot. I watched the snow fall. The moon was halfway full and the flakes in the night glistened. It was beautiful. I felt I was on to something. Each time I returned to my driveway there was more snow which I cleared and stacked higher. The snow has stopped now but the residue is there, the accumulation of what I piled so high to the sides during the storm.

Steven Gillis is the author of 5 books of fiction, most recently the novels Temporary People and The Consequence of Skating. He is not the author of some 3,000,000 other books. He is the co-founder of Dzanc Books www.dzancbooks.org