Have you ever wanted to be on a longlist with Tobias Wolff, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Stephen King, Amy Tan, Rita Dove, Nick Flynn, and a bunch of other amazing writers? Is the candidacy of Donald Trump, to you, a menacing movement composed entirely of white trash cynicism and hair gel? Well then, have I got a petition for you.

So far, over 500 writers, including a handful of Pulitzer Prize winners, have signed a petition decrying Trump's candidacy. The petition begins with an open letter to Americans:

Because, as writers, we are particularly aware of the many ways that language can be abused in the name of power;

Because we believe that any democracy worthy of the name rests on pluralism, welcomes principled disagreement, and achieves consensus through reasoned debate;

Because American history, despite periods of nativism and bigotry, has from the first been a grand experiment in bringing people of different backgrounds together, not pitting them against one another;

Because the history of dictatorship is the history of manipulation and division, demagoguery and lies

The letter continues in that vein for a while, before ending with a pretty resounding:

For all these reasons, we, the undersigned, as a matter of conscience, oppose, unequivocally, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump for the Presidency of the United States.

I don't have much faith in this petition's ability to stop or slow down Trump's candidacy. Nothing has been able to stop or slow down Trump's candidacy. That is because Trump's candidacy is the rightful sequel to The Blob, a movie about a monster that the Google sidebar describes as "a gelatinous alien life form that engulfs everything it touches."

Whatever you throw into its jellified body only increases its size and its power. NeverTrump hashtags, John McCain's military experience, any appeal to common human decency. None of it works. It only feeds the beast. The only thing that can stop the blob is to temporarily freeze it with fire extinguishers and then to air drop it into the middle of the Arctic. That's what a bunch of high school kids and Steve McQueen did to stop the Blob in the original movie.

The last lines of that ridiculous film for teens now carry a deep and meaningful resonance. Once the Blob is dropped into the Arctic, one character says something like, "at least the Blob has been stopped." Then Steve McQueen says, "Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold." The words "The End" appear on the screen, and they transform into a question mark.

Global warming unfroze Donald Trump, and now he has returned to swallow up everything in his path. We are FUCKED. But, as he eats his way across the country, at least Trump will know that he can't count on the writer's bloc for support.