Trump's Presence to be Felt Beyond the Election and Biden's Inauguration

The rumor going around is that President Trump will be staging more mass public rallies in the next few weeks as he legally contests Joe Biden's close victory over him in the 2020 presidential election.  To me, not a Trump supporter...although I do support his stances on certain specific issues...this makes eminently good sense as he has always built up a great deal of popular support with these gatherings and obviously loves getting all the adoring, unquestioning attention in front of his many idolizers. And don't be mistaken, Donald J. Trump is indeed an IDOL to tens of millions of Americans, while I firmly acknowledge that many, many who voted for him do not share in their exaltation of this ordinary human being with his own peculiar, individual mix of faults and virtues. Of course these rallies, should they happen, would all be super-spreader events compounding the worst spike in COVID-19 we've yet experienced, but our current president seems unconcerned. I have a prediction: after he leaves office, Donald Trump will continue to hold these types of rallies, constantly insulting President Biden and his administration and running down his efforts as president while continuing his Tweetstorms full of conspiracy theories and false accusations.  Add to that continuing trips to the golf course and you have much of what he already was doing as president...albeit with his finger no longer on the nuclear button and no more authority to issue executive decrees, nominate officials and judges, sign or veto legislation...or hold up military aid to a besieged ally until it produces damaging material on his main political opponent.  But just because Trump will be out of the White House, don't expect any letup in the divisive rhetoric among our politicians: I'm confident that he wants to maintain tight control over the Republican Party and its elected officials in Washington, including the Senate...after all, a thumbs-down by him on anyone he perceives as personally disloyal can just as easily spell doom for their reelection chances as if he were still in office.  And looking at 2024, who knows, he may just want to jump back into it again...or even play the easier role of "kingmaker" by sitting in the background and picking his chosen GOP candidate.  Another possibility is that large segments of the population will simply deny that Trump is no longer president, just as they now deny climate change and the COVID pandemic...talk about alternate realities! Of course, all this is speculation...but if you think that voting Trump out of office equates to getting rid of him or that his conservative supporters for the past five years will now return in floods to their ideological principles and forsake this creepy, blind hero-worship, I don't think you're being very realistic.  I'm not writing this because I've returned to following politics closely but because I don't want anyone out there to be terribly surprised when what I've laid out becomes the new reality.  If you want to allow the media to manipulate you into feeling offense against the "bad guys" in the political world as they fight your "good guys", no matter which side you think "bad" or "good", then it's all on you...you don't have to listen to that crap and it just might behoove you to make an effort to see things for a change from the other guy's perspective.  For myself, I tune in to the half-hour CBS or ABC evening news and sometimes the local late-night news show at 11:  I'm letting the rest of it all ride, recognizing that much of the media...both social and broadcasting...has a vested interest in heightening division and passions among users, viewers and listeners: if you're into all that, then good luck with your outrage, now and in the future.  As was the case with this particular article, I'll state my political opinions from time to time while trying to space them apart more...

Weekly Short Story: Let's Be Frank by Brian Aldiss

"It is an impossible story scientifically speaking, but it makes a weird kind of sense with a socko last paragraph".  This was how science fiction legend Isaac Asimov described the brief but brilliant 1957 tale Let's Be Frank, written by Brian Aldiss and appearing in Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stores 19 (1957), (DAW Books).  Frank Gladwebb, a young English nobleman living in the sixteenth century, fathers a son...who remains in a deep sleep for his first nineteen years of life.  Upon awakening, son and father discover that they are one and the same...a shared consciousness between two different bodies.  Eventually Frank II has his own offspring, some of whom are "normal", but also...and it becomes obvious that this is a genetic mutation (although genes and mutations had yet to be discovered)...there are more "Franks".  Go down the line a few generations and we are seeing a hidden, embedded society of people, outwardly looking distinctly different, but inwardly (and simultaneously) the same conscious entity.  Where does this all eventually lead? Read it and find out!

Aldiss provided the explanation of genetic mutation for the Frank "syndrome", and Asimov posited that it was all scientifically impossible, but I have a slightly different proposition about this.  If one accepts the notion of a consciousness inhabiting a body, then certain possibilities open up.  Suppose it is like the case with the Franks in this story...but pretend that there is no simultaneous awareness of the others.  After all, each person has his or her own internal nervous system, brain, and memory, and has to process information and experiences within the limits of physical laws.  Suppose a consiousness...like Frank...permeates many, many different bodies.  In Aldiss's story, they all are experiencing all of themselves with complete mutual awareness...but suppose it's all just like the author presented it except that each body...despite sharing the same consciousness...was cut off from each other due to physical restraints.  In such a case each person would think that he or she is the entire conscious entity instead of realizing their commonality with one another. You don't need to go much further with this line of reasoning before you're plunging deeply into metaphysics and religion...

I like stories like Let's Be Frank that present an intriguing angle on the nature of reality...and our role as living beings in it.  But still, it is probably scientifically impossible, especially as that "socko last paragraph" reveals...

Weekly Short Story: Imposter by Philip K. Dick

I first read Imposter, which is the first story by the great, late science fiction writer Philip K. Dick that I had ever read, many years ago.  It's the fourth short story I'm reviewing from the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 15 (1953).  Maybe you know of it from the 2002 feature-length film starring Gary Sinise, but Dick's original tale only was only 17 paperback pages long...the movie obviously added a lot of extraneous material, something I don't dig at all...

The premise of Imposter is simple enough: Earth in a not-to-distant future time is at war with unseen beings called Outspacers, from Alpha Centauri.  The enemy's technology is developed to the point where they can create duplicate android robots that are indistinguishable from real people...and they can tailor them to copy specific persons, even their own memories.  Spence Olham is employed on a crucial project to develop a super weapon and gets up one morning with his wife Mary to get ready for another grueling day of work.  When the "bug" comes by to pick him up, he sees his friend and colleague Nelson...accompanied by a stranger, whom he learns is Major Peters.  After a little conversation, Peters explains his mission: the arrest of Olham, accused of being a robotic Outlander spy! Nelson and Peters grab and restrain Olham and then transport him to the moon for safe disposal, for they have been informed that the robot has a very destructive u-bomb within him and that it is activated by an unknown, specific phrase spoken aloud.  Olham loudly proclaims that he is himself, not an imposter...but Peters and Nelson always have an answer to each protestation...and Nelson seethes with hatred as he believes that the imposter killed his best friend in order to replace him...

The rest of this short story deals with Olham's struggle for survival and determination to clear himself by finding the real robot, which he believes is in a crashed ship in the woods nearby his home.  You can read it all for yourself (here's a link to it: [link]), but I'll just say that the ending was pretty surprising and abrupt...with a memorable final line.  I rather doubt that a drawn-out movie with its distracting subplots could have come anywhere close to capturing this compact tale's feel and effect...

If our memories are based within the complex neurological framework of our physical brains...and these can be duplicated...then it raises the question as to what constitutes one's sense of selfness, that is of having an identity, of being "me".  Have I been "me" my whole life and how could I prove it: no matter what calendar moment the "now" is resting on, at that moment I have access to my physically-based memories...but that in itself just means that I am "here" at this moment with access to them and not that I have been here in the past forming them.  This can get a bit overly metaphysical and speculative, but that's a trademark of Philip K. Dick, who was always trying to get his readers to stretch themselves...