Spare Idea: Alternate-history parody in which Kelsey Grammer becomes President.

Hey, sorry I haven't updated this blog in so long; like most others, the election this fall had me utterly and exclusively obsessed, which I guess is good considering how it turned out, and that all of us needed to be that exclusively obsessed with it precisely in order for it to have turned out that way. Anyway, I'm going to start getting my random thoughts and cellphone pics up here more often this winter; and I thought I'd start by announcing a new semi-regular feature here, something I've contemplated doing for a long time, which I'm calling "Spare Ideas." Essentially, even though I gave up creative writing in 2004, ideas for creative projects still keep popping into my head, several a day almost every single day; and instead of mentally junking all of these ideas, I thought I would share some of the ones that are particularly funny or unique or that I think would make for a really successful project. And then I'm basically giving open permission to anyone who comes across these ideas online to steal them and work them up on their own if they want; better to do that, I think, than to just have all these ideas lay fallow in my head.

So anyway, here was one I had yesterday -- write a parody of all these dire doom-and-gloom "alternate histories" that have become so popular in the 2000s, an idea which frankly came to me because of recently reading Philip Roth's The Plot Against America (and is actually a very specific parody of that specific alternate-history novel). In the parody story, recently "outed" real-life far-right Evangelical nutjob and former Frasier star Kelsey Grammer secures the 2008 Republican nomination instead of John McCain, and eventually wins the entire general election, by running a glib and slick campaign combining his Hollywood connections with the "aw shucks I'm just a common guy" veneer we just saw the GOP try (unsuccessfully) to run with Sarah Palin; and in the alternate-history parody, such a campaign ends up vying against an inefficient and conflict-riddled Hillary Clinton campaign on the Democratic side, one being torn apart by inner-party strife concerning the semi-racist dirty tricks they used to "steal" the nomination from Barack Obama (or so the Obama supporters claim, leading many to defect to the GOP during the general election), a campaign the GOP can easily argue is a "Beltway insider" one, easily linked in the public mind to the impotent Congress who screwed the pooch on the first economic-bailout bill last September.

After the election, a series of shady background far-right power brokers essentially take over the White House (Karl Rove, Steve Schmidt, etc), secretly setting the agenda for a series of high-profile paleocon cabinet appointees (Sarah Palin, Ben Stein, "Joe the Plumber") to act along with Grammer as a remarkably obedient puppet administration for the people behind the scenes actually calling the shots. And then the usual alternate-history tropes to round things out -- a fascist takeover of the government, noble rebellion by the liberal heroes, valiant deeds from people who in real history were merely entertainment figures and the like (turns out that Paris Hilton saves us all), etc.

There. Want to go write that story? Go right ahead; you have my full permission to steal that idea.