Hey! I’m that guy trying to sell my latest screenplay, publish it as a novel or die trying.

In DIE TRYING, you will get an unvarnished look at a bitterly honest writer struggling to make it. No name-dropping or Hollywood phoniness. Just the facts ma’am on what the media landscape really is like behind the curtain.

In TODAY’S ISSUE, we watch the hit movie Weapons and wonder why Americans are so fixated on childhood abuse.

Why are Americans so bizarrely fixated on child abuse?

I was thinking about this after reading the screenplay of this year’s horror hit, Weapons, where a group of 17 third-graders go missing in the middle of the night.

From the Epstein scandal to QAnon conspiracy theories, Americans are obsessed with our children being preyed upon and corrupted.

If you’re a bankable Hollywood actor, you will endure taunts of being a bloodsucking Satanic pedophile from right-wingers who are no longer the lunatic fringe but mainstream.

If you’re on the left, you look past Democratic leadership whoring themselves out to AIPAC money with the excuse that whatever grotesquery Trump is provoking is just another Epstein cover-up.

Our kids are just grenades tossed between partisans streetfighting in the fractured divide that is America, land of the dumb and home of the corrupt.

What is the root of this national psychosis of paradise lost where Milton gets rewritten by a hack screenwriter who can’t afford alimony?

In Weapons, Aunt Gladys is a parasitic puppet master who begins the story as a sickly cancer victim. Through witchcraft, she siphons the life force of her sister’s family and is the malevolent energy behind the missing children.

Our nation’s geriatric leadership, right or left, is a collective Aunt Gladys.

We elect them to raise money to get reelected, not fix potholes, pass laws or do anything remotely useful. More than half the members of Congress are millionaires. Jimmy Stewart is a Swamp Creature, angling to dickride Jared Kushner so he can score Saudi oil money. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is cute in how dead it is.

I get it. Everyone bitches about politicians. I’m not breaking new ground here. But what else do we have to do?

You can’t afford the price of eggs, beef or healthcare. Your job with meager pay? A robot will replace you. The nation is ruled by a kleptocratic elite while we peasants brawl for crumbs tossed down to us.

Bludgeoned, we look back to our youth. Our innocence stolen, trampled upon. We bury our rage by spinning a collective narrative of children missing, abducted and abused.

At the end of Weapons, a father rescues his son. The boy is alive, but his eyes are hollow and expressionless.

Those are our eyes. A void. The eyes of the nation.

Ready for a fun fact?

Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost.

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