THE HISTORY OF THE GROWTH OF HISTORY
from the novel
VIRTUALLY REALITY
(on the coast of Nebraska)
by Mike Golden
from the novel
VIRTUALLY REALITY
(on the coast of Nebraska)
by Mike Golden
“In the dynamic web of inseparable energy, the intersection of a cross may be the gate through which the gaze rides the breath into
the silence of the too high to be actually heard frequencies of intuitions; the song of perpetually vibrating virtual particles.”
- WHITE SCIENCE AT THE GATES OF SILENCE / Judy Nylon –
LISTEN TO: Tout Passe, Tout Lasse, Tout Casse by Judy Nylon
No big thing, but it wasn’t a secret to anyone who was paying attention that the end of the world was a process not an event, yet when the inevitable finally kicked in, 99.4 percent of the population, including the religious zealots who were praying for it to happen, still didn’t realize it. According to Eureka, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise either. All the various Prophecies had always been somewhat vague in pinpointing the process of cognition, especially on a mundane level, and 99 percent of the world, according to Eureka, operated on a mundane level and were waiting for “The End” to entertain them as much as the original Star Wars had years earlier.
Even to this very day there are still arguments among historians as to the exact date of the demise of civilization on this planet as we knew it, so it’s safe to say that any figure I might give you will be in dispute no matter what it is. One thing is certain, however; “The End” did not come in a BANG, as expected by the Bible quoting swooners of doom, but in a series of whimpers considered so ordinary for the last days of the Old Calendar, that the populace ho-hummed their way through The Apocalypse without even adding a new twitch to the collective repertory. You couldn’t have sold the story to Hollywood, or Pay for View, not a single one of the 23 Networks would have touched it, much less the Religious Wrong’s electronic pulpit, good old unreliable Fox News. The End of the World, Apocalypse, Armageddon, all had too many vivid images for too many people to tell them NO, that wasn’t the way it was going to be. That wasn’t the way it was. Of course, it was almost impossible in those last days to buck a trillion dollar growth industry, and make no mistake, “The End”, even though it had already ended, was the biggest industry next to economic bailouts of corrupt banks and Wall Street grifters ever recorded in the History of the Growth of History.
For as long as anyone could remember, nation after nation had made their principal industry defense of that nation, so even after the revolutions in Eastern Europe, after the triumph of the Corporation State over Nationalism as a ruling entity almost went in the toilet but never quite brought down corporate tax exemptions, after Osama bin Laden took credit for orchestrating 9/11, and supposedly got tracked down and whacked 10 years later while blissfully munching on popcorn as he watched Debbie Does Dallas, after the seemingly never ending crescendo of terrorist bloodletting fiascoes in the name of one bogus God or another turned the Mid East genocide into an eternal burning nuclear ocean geyser of black greasy kid stuff, hardly anyone, including that 0.6 percent of the hardcore Futilitarians who realized it was over before it even leaked out that the Internet and mobile phones caused brain decay, could believe that vested interest had choked in the clutch, and despite the overnight 500% DROP in the hightech-protech biz, what was left of cyberspace was not filled with multiple computer viruses emanating from the fiery dung-stenched daily dose of false information piped outside by insider media sluts.
My sweet, but long brain-dead, ex, called the Mid East crisis, “The final war against the Jews,” but she never did understand the basic elements of Marketing-101. Once you have a concept that everyone embraces and loves – and everyone in the world, including the Jews, who were selling it every chance they got, loved to hate the Jews – it wasn’t that easy to give up a Loss Leader that strong without finding another group to fill that void. The blacks, whose names and reputations had been derogatorized by different hate groups since they first got off the boats from their homeland, were the logical target until it became apparent the n-word had become such a term of universal endearment and respect, the “brothas & sistas” were without doubt the lifeblood of the sports & entertainment cabal’s marketplace. All any kid with a dime in their pockets wanted to do was emulate a Koby or LeBron clone. In fact, even though the rapid right wingers who wanted to throw “the cool Doolittle Prez” out of office were racists by-any-other-name, they swore they wanted him gone and buried not because of his skin, but because they considered him an anti-Cappie Commie who was responsible for other anti-Cappie-Commies stealing the money which they believed was their birthright to steal. So once the marketplace finally became a free steal zone for real, hate was so far-crxxing-out of the Afro-American equation that even in his old age, the once manacled and incarcerated grinning badass “I’m gonna eat your baby, baby” poster mug of the two-time Academy Award winning Best Supporting Actor Mike Tyson had become a beloved corporate spokesfigure for the Age of Duh Reason.
The Muslims seemed like the obvious choice. No one could deny they had earned their hate the old fashioned way more than any other group on the planet, but in the mood regulated minds of the citizens of the over-therapeutic Old Calendar it was hard to hate dumb haters back, much less label crazy as evil unless you wanted to prove you were as dumb as the dumbest tea-brains too; anyone who blew up their own children and then honored them as martyrs couldn’t be sane, according to the so-called logic of the so-called sane sob sister New York Times. The Muslims obviously needed help more than hate. In what was to be considered the end of the bad bookends of political extremism, what was left of the left and the conservative Religious Wrong united for the first time in the history of the growth of history and stuck out their olive branch forked tongues of love and understanding in order to bring peace to the Holy Land, so poor bloody Jesus could finally be lured back to Gate 23 of the Old City to get nailed up one final time by his so-called followers.
It was so off-the-wall it might have worked if YO TERRORISTOS hadn’t caught on as a chanting-ranting 99 Beers On The Wall type drinking song in the pubs of London, Prague and the new high rent Trusteferian East Village rebuilt low rent dives of yonder yore.
72 virgins in the sky, 72 virgins in the sky
Take one down, pass her around
Not a very smart reason to die.
71 virgins in the sky, 71 virgins in the sky
Take one down, pass her around
A pretty crxxing dumb reason to die. . .
The Trustaferian grifter princes masquerading as delegates to the United Nations labeled the song “taunting and disrespectful”. But in secret, were drunkenly singing all 99 versus until closing time in Karaoke bars from NYC to DC to LA, then bringing it back to their favorite bars in their homelands. When the song started playing regularly on the underground air waves of Radio Free Nepotism 9.72 emanating across Europe out of Amsterdam, the Muslims decided to revive their long dormant contract on Salman Rushdie, even though it was rumored that the aging lit light’s newest girlfriend was 22-year-old 6-foot-6 Saudi superbabe Benita-Benita (you guessed it, secret daughter of) bin Laden.
Strangely enough it was that old rattlesnake of the ring Don King who first suggested nuking France in order to stop the war in the Mid East. No one took him seriously at first. But the more he said, “Only in Fragmerica could I tell you, if somebody gives you a toothache, and the dentist has gone fishing, what better way to get rid of the pain than drop a bowling ball on their toe.”
By the time that what powers-that-be-were-left realized what was happening it was too late to even go back to the threat of nuclear annihilation since everything by that point was already annihilated. Any further action at that point obviously would have created a run on redundant. So much so that it would have underlined and illuminated to even the most vacuous space heads that the whole structure of so-called civilization was nothing more than a shell of impotence inflating itself to give the impression it was rising up, so once again the morons could rape the dead, and pound their blood into the earth as they chanted into the night “WE’RE NUMBER ONE, WE’RE NUMBER ONE!
Oh to be sure, there were more than a few bombs still bursting in air, and more than a few nuclear power plants seeping their gaseous billows over the earth, and layering the atmosphere with the mutant nectar of radiation. A less poisoned people might not have survived to begin again, but by the time the end came even the myth of the alien had been resolved. As prophesized in more than a few underground comix, man himself was the alien he feared. The sweet pseudoscience had proved he was the invader who had come thousands of years before and forgot what he was doing here until Ginko Bilboa (the Norwegian band, not the herb) released their first monster 100 million selling CD Mooning The Man. So by the time all the excuses had worn out, even the backward, The Third World, and less industrialized countries were so filled with poison and death the human forms of the people did not so much crumble as fade into shadowy phantoms of their former selves. If your Third Eye was open you could see the grayness and emptiness of the walking dead, and if you were at the right place at the right time, you might even catch their tentacles dissolving in front of your eyes. If you were a fully mutated being, completely conscious of your powers, you might be able to fight their internal gravity with your levity, if you thought they were worth spending what was left of your laughter to save. If your judgment on their worth was worthless, however, the odds were 100,000 to one that your tentacles would be sucked out of your body, along with theirs.
Despite musical tributes to the contrary, the road was not the place for buoyant Samaritans or innocent do-gooders, even before the obvious became obvious. Bands of Wall Street lowballs, cutthroats, touchhogs, derivative promoting scumbags and blood hungry psychopaths roamed the highways destroying the noble myth of the outlaw, turning the honorable concept of betting on rebellion into a black hole you might never return from.
Even the most fearless, the ones most addicted to adventure, had second thoughts about traveling down unauthorized paths. Travel was restricted. Day and night you had to know where you were going and declare to authorities how you were going to get there before you went. Either that or you might as well have checked into a Government provided Termination Center. That is, if you could get an appointment. Termination was UP, family planning down.
Delicacies that were once taken for granted, were not only generally unavailable, but forbidden. Hypertension set in. Bodily functions once taken for granted became unpredictable. Lawyers everywhere became constipated by the Constitution. Not only was the First Amendment a double edge pipedream, even The Fifth was broken. Lips locked. Deals no longer went down in places where chumps dared to tread. Doctors were challenged to come up with a cure, but not only couldn’t diagnose the cause, but for the first time became too discombobulated to double-bill Medicare for their incompetence. Naturally eating habits changed. If you wanted a steak, a hot dog, a Burger Chump, or even a half a dozen hot wings, you had to get them on the black market, so rather than go underground most people were willing to eat mock. Either way, whatever you got you had to get it from the Fleshhogs. Synthetics were BIG. So-called Health food was BIGGER; even though it guaranteed a new strain of cancer, it was a pure organic cancer. Over 85% of what remained of the sane Green world lived on soybean derivatives and alcohol. Lots of alcohol. Lots of opiated mock to keep things cool in the face of the abyss.
There were UPS and there were downs. All kinds of levelers (known in the underground as zombies) that made you feel like nothing is all right and there’s not a thing to worry about, so why bother? Most people didn’t.
If you couldn’t get off the planet, if you hadn’t been sentenced to one of the numerous CAMPS (for your kind), if you didn’t spend all your waking hours hustling for POINTS to buy your ticket OUT, there was always The Box. A combination 2,000 twenty-four hour a day channels, 30 percent tied into satellite hook-ups from The Colonies, and vice versa. And if that wasn’t good enough, there were always movies. Old movies, new movies, studio movies, independent movies, co-dependent movies, movies that hadn’t even been made yet, interactive movies that you created for yourself to star in on your own set in the comfort of your own debauched little Virtual Reality studio. And if movies weren’t your thing, there was always theatre, there were concerts, music-dance-whatever you thought passed for culture, news and sports. Sports of course were the biggest of the BIG diversions. Though in terms of sheer numbers involved in the process they were not as BIG as movies, even when nobody was going; there were more people making movies than there were people playing sports, and you didn’t need to pay an audience to make a movie. There was always an audience for Sports. In fact, you had to turn them away at the gate. For theatre it wasn’t that big a problem, but just like sports, you had to have a live audience to have a live event, although it was becoming increasingly apparent the term live event was a contradiction in terms. (*According to The History Of The Growth Of History, at this moment of cognition, The Amalgamated Theatrical Appreciators, were the first Audience Union, and also the first Audience Union to ever go on strike for a unified pay scale in accordance to whether The Performance Scale was 4-Stars, 3-Stars, 2-Stars, 1-or-lower.) Audiences were harder to find than performers. The world was full of performers, full of quarterbacks, ingénues, funky piano players and jerkwater kids studying to be SuperHeroes. There was an over-abundance of would-be Primo ballerinas and get-down stand-up comedians. There were more so-called artists than there were appreciators for any specific form you could think of. (*The disastrous 0011 Super Bowl held in the Coliseum in Rome was a point in case. *The caravans of actors, dancers, poets, magicians, musicians and performers crisscrossing the pot-holed topography in search of audiences, at this very moment, is another point in case.) A good audience was hard to find.
Witnesses were easier. Believers came in bushel baskets. The Holy Men & Women in the SuperSavior Sweepstakes didn’t have to sweat not drawing an Audience, though for every so-called incarnation of Jesus there were at least 3 incarnations of Elvis. On the other hand, for every 10 Anti-Christs on the horizon there were only two Anti-Elvises that made it as far as Prime Time.
Salvation was UP, but there was a waiting line to get into Hell. And out on the bardo plane, even the dead who were waiting to be reborn, were said to be filled with fear of coming back for another shot at so-called “life”..
Outside of a few cynical exceptions who refused to profiteer, the only mass group to resist were the teenagers: It’s all existential bullshit! The Malls are closed. Why the CRXX are CRXXING Malls closed? Break down the doors! Kick in the windows! Liberate the CRXXING Malls! Grunge. . .
Grunge!
Yes, our children were g r u n g i n g. . .in the Malls.
And what was left of the conscience minority was c r i n g i n g at how far down all the g r u n g i n g had taken things. There was even a rumor that when the National Archives were finally officially due to be opened, Eureka was going to come out with a full length government sanctioned animated musical called The Three Assassinations, that would depict the three major popular inspirational political leaders of the 19blah-blahs as traitors who had to be eliminated in order to save Fragmerica. The assassins of course would be portrayed as the good guys; brave faceless FBI and CIA agents aided by wily mob warriors looking to redeem their heinous lifestyles in order to protect truth, beauty and the Fragmerican way of life from something. . . Maybe substance (avoidance abuse)? Maybe false images? Maybe that old devil moon? Or the fabled red menace of yonder yore, if they could get that lame McGuffin to come back from the dead and fly into the face of the two trillion pound snowball from hell of capitalism rolling unhindered down the mountain over the out-of-control planet? Or maybe it was something we’d never heard of before, because like the millions of aliens from different planets who were living among us on Earth at the end of the century, it, like them, didn’t really want anyone to know they existed as anything but a myth in the collective refried unconscious, until the time came when mythology would take its place in history as reality. And as any politician worth his hypocrisy might say when evoking the hot button of selling the cliché of saving our children’s future, it was in our children’s National Interest that Eureka define the reality. After all, the business of business was business, and though business was the engine that built up and then broke down society, it hadn’t come close to being replaced yet, though cultural planners knew the only way it could coexist with society in the long run was as its transmission, instead of its engine.
Blame the fiasco on the Supreme Court’s sanction of the first stolen Presidential election of 20blah-blah if you like, but History, as it so often repeats itself, made no exceptions for the end of the world. Money as we knew it, might have been over, but exchange and the rate of exchange were just going through a new cycle. Death was only a concept that History continued to record in the name of Evolution. Vested Interest continued to prove, if nothing else, it was flexible. The marketplace was anywhere you created it. At the beginning of the last recorded century, movements to save humanity and preserve civilization almost overnight became the biggest and most pre-imminent danger to the rights of the individual and the concept of Free-Will since the Corporation State rescued humanity from the Commie-Cappie McGuffin. Repression, just like homogenization, became not only a byword, but a bylaw of the new Powers-That-Be, despite pledges they made to the contrary, during THE PURGE.
An abbreviated update based on studies made by Dr. Herbert J. Rodgers and staff at the Stanford Research Institute, of the late Palo Alto, California, is now presented from THE RECORD.
THE OLD CALENDAR
The date of the demise and the fall of ALL THAT WAS KNOWN BEFORE is not only immaterial here, but NOT ALLOWED, and presently subject to TRIAL & ERROR in the Court of Dreams, under Article III, Section 36: PUNISHABLE OFFENSES FOR REBELLION AGAINST THE NEW CALENDAR (in the year 0007 NC). Let it stand RECORDED, and indelibly etched into each citizen’s MEMORY BANK, in the vent of CHANGE.
Go ahead and blame the failure to rescind lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court after that beginning of the century political decision to steal the Presidential election, if it makes you feel better, but anybody who knows the way to San Jose knows that “The Great Blackmail of 20blah-blah” was the first consensus recognizable signal of the beginning of THE END. The Pulitzer Prize winning Headline of the Morally Correct New York Post summed it up best, when it said:
THEY’VE GOT US!
The President admitted today that America got caught with “our shorts down and our minds empty,” when Fourth World terrorists devastated major U.S. centers of commerce, education and religion yesterday, strategically setting off a series of computer spellcheck viruses which they claimed caused partial destruction of the vocabulary.
The State Department issued a statement conceding that they had received an e-mail from an organization calling itself SCAMCO, years after Y2K, announcing they had “subliminally changed the most popular word in the vocabulary to CRXX” in order to show that they could change the entire communication system of the (un)United States (without anyone consciously realizing it), since the government refused to accept their plan to clean up the planet by disposing of useless information. Infomania, they claimed, was the major cause of the cultural pollution which viruses thrived on.
Topographic scanners were overlaid across the map at the Eureka Foundation, on the coast of Nebraska, but there was no evidence that the language had been changed.
Burger Chump was the first Multi-National Corporation to come forward during the crisis. Chairman of the board D. D. D. D. Chump, made an immediate pledge of opening 500 franchises in Third World countries during the next two years. Three days later, Chump was the first head of a major corporation iced, de-programmed, re-programmed and put on display in the Museum of Corporate Chicanery. Others dinosaurs from the so-called old “New World Order” would systematically follow.
One week after the US capitulated to the terrorists’ demands, the bottom fell out, according to the Morally Correct patriots at the New York Post.
| “NO RESERVE IN THE FEDERAL RESERVE!” | |
|---|---|
| Radical Justice Dept. lawyers Irving Fishman, Jo-Jo Kennedy and Rocky Shriver, charged today that the Federal Reserve System was a sham.
“There’s nothing behind the paper,” Fishman said, except more paper. We’re operating out of a void. We’ve never been in control, and now less than ever.” |
Subpoenas were issued to members of The Federal Reserve Board, and to a number of independent Wall Street lawyers, who Fishman said “belong to an organization called LAWCAP” According to Shriver, “LAWCAP is an organization that establishes policy for multi-national infotainment corps. |
The ensuing trials were the beginning of a nationwide “energy crash” that led America into another economic panic – though there was nothing left to squeeze out of the dollar. All that was left was more uber-ultra-extreme social turbulence and continued polarization of political views. Thus, the beginning of The Purge.
Before the three young Justice Department lawyers were called before The House UnFragmerican Activities Committee, it became apparent to not only the USA, but to the rest of the world as well, that outside of taking care of their friends, the President and the Congress of the United States had had virtually zero power, since just after the last War. Essentially they filled the function of “a front”, and could only try to adjust to decisions that were made by Eureka, that actually determined world events.
Though there were strong denials on all fronts. (The late New York Times even refused to print the word “LAWCAP” editorially explaining that “innuendo could not be considered part of all the news that’s fit to print.“) but it became increasingly apparent that whoever had been determining policy had only two guidelines: (1) to maximize profits, and (2) to avoid getting caught at anything they could actually do time for.
Blame it on the suspicion of people who couldn’t believe Osama bin Laden’s death was real if they never saw his dead body, if you like, but saying that the United States secretly gradually went bankrupt after the terrorists attacks would have been not just a gross understatement, but an even a grosser overstatement than the political division of the country. Fragmerica had been morally bankrupt long before the last Presidential election, long before the computers went kaput. From 20blah-blah to 20blah-blah The National Debt went from $330 trillion to $333,000 zillion, making it impossible to even make a dent on the interest on the interest on the interest. Which was one reason the Chinese withdrew all their wanton soup and egg foo young from Fragmerican-Chinese restaurants, but suspended all debt rather than busting their almost empty humps trying to collect the uncollectible collateral on their loans. It was the reason the peso became worth more than the dollar, and unskilled laborers such as ticket-takers, night watchmen, sack boys in grocery stores, and counter people at fast-food restaurants were all earning in excess of $100,000 a year, and enjoying it less. By the time THE FINAL CRASH came, you could get two dollars on a penny, $10 on a nickel, 20 on a dime, 60 on a quarter, and so on.
“The nation,” according to young Rocky Shriver, was “completely bankrupt, with its world leadership, its financial credit, and its reputation for courage, vision and humane leadership, fragmented beyond repair.” Shriver was censored, but not held in contempt of Congress for his statements. Nor was young Jo-Jo Kennedy, who shortly thereafter resigned his position with the Justice Department to “enter the private sector.” Only one member of “The Eureka Three,” as the three idealistic young lawyers came to be known, was held in contempt, and later brought up on “conduct unbecoming an officer of the courts.” That was Fishman, and he was ultimately disbarred for “his lack of judgment in a critical situation., i.e., defending Quirk and I against the charges that we consorted with viruses.
Whether my lawyer was “a sacrificial lamb,” as our supporters claimed, or “power hungry legal scum without any sense of decency,” as our detractors insist, is not only inconsequential, but diversionary.
Polarization had divided The United States into essentially two camps after the dissolution of the cancerous two party system: Those who played what was left of the power game were either Technoidical Materialists or Transformationalists. The Techies, as we all know, were supported by a vast majority of citizens no matter what label (Democrat-Republican, Liberal-Conservative, Relativist-Reactionary) they had worn on their sleeve back in the day. America was ready, according to The President, “to kick ass!” But there was no ass to kick. Third World Countries unanimously stood up and declared they wanted nothing from Fragmerica, except (1) their own free channel Remote Control, and (2) to be left alone by the rest of the world. Which was exactly what Fragmerica wanted from them.
Well who did it then? It certainly wasn’t the “swimming in vodka” Russians. The Chinese, though hardly innocent of not putting MSG in anything, were totally clean on this one. In fact all nations were clean! The nation against nation McGuffin had ended after first France chocked on their own precious smoke, and then the Mid East, burned and blew. So who did it? It was SCAMCO! A band of ideological-guerrillas from another dimension, who were dedicated to cleaning up the planet.
Obviously controlled channel hypnosis made the Transies look bad. It made them look like a front organization for SCAMCO. Techies immediately made strong unfocused attacks on Transies of all races, religions, creeds and economic status. In 20blah-blah it was a sign of Terminal Dumb Ass to wear your philosophy on your sleeve, and Transies not only wore it on their sleeves, but their cuffs and tongues as well: “The world’s Resources are not limited, only restricted. Peace is not restricted, only limited. In order for there to be World Peace the World must have unlimited access to Resources. The Earth can provide unlimited Resources, if we provide unlimited Peace. And the only way to provide unlimited Peace is to recognize the irreversible state of material restrictions, simplify our needs and share what wealth we have with the rest of the world.”
Thus, The Purge.
Transformationalists were much too stoned on romanticism and idealism for me, so despite accusations to the contrary, I was not a Transie as charged. I was a Futilitarian. Long before The Purge became a reality I had answered the nodded-out whine from the great gray Brotherhood of the Inept. As those who knew well knew there was no point long before the asses masquerading as the masses realized nothing quite worked the way it used to. In fact, nothing had ever worked the way they claimed it used to. Though it’s hard to prove to the true believers of the Free Market system without careful statistical evaluation by the ventriloquist manipulating the polls of popular opinion, the burden of the 12-trillion pound snowball from hell rolling over us down the mountain of CULTURE FOR SALE was too much to overcome. Though looking back, it does seem like the illusion of that gestalt used to work. The delusion probably worked even better. And the allusion of Free Markets always worked in those bad old good old days we’d probably never go back to again, even if we had the chance. After all, being sentient beings, progress was our byword, not our bypass.
Now I’m no Luddite, and never have been, so I’m not suggesting there’s just one solution to our present malaise that we missed in the past, but more than likely our failure to be able to modulate the flow of obsolescence in the marketplace turned progress into our major curse. Which also happened to be the curse of our fabled forerunner, the long lost metaphor of Hotlantis. As a Futilitarian, I always realized it was too late to turn the tide. That realization was not only my congenital philosophy, not only my all-purpose user-friendly religious-discipline, for those of you committed to living in the crxxing world instead of heading for the hills, it was also my political party. As Professor I. E. Mandolini said, “We will, of course, fail: Our vote is worthless, but for the first time we can take false pride acknowledging just how worthless our vote is by voting against voting.”
And I did. But by always keeping the contradiction between action and thought in mind I was able to achieve zen emptiness, and understood without guilt that we couldn’t save the world! Not for our children. Or their children. Or their children’s children. We could only do what we did until somebody in a better position to change things came along and fucked them up even worse than we had. That was progress. It was our byword. Maybe even our bypass? But what did I know? I was a scientist, a disenchanted citizen, an Independent Contractor hired by Eureka to do a job of work the best way I could. I neither confirm nor deny I conspired with viruses, as charged. I was merely looking for a cure for Mutation, by whatever means were available to me at the time. I state these facts not as a defense, but as a record of fact. Let it so be stated for THE RECORD.
THE NEW GOVERNMENT
When the economy totally crumbled in the year 20blah-blah, it was only a matter of time before the Government as we knew it followed. The revelations that there was no true power in the office of President, Senator, Congressmen, Governor, Mayor, Councilman and so on, outside of patronage, hardly made it worthwhile holding elections. Money was worthless, payoffs were obsolete until the coin of the realm changed. Politics, in other words, was not only a bad joke, but a joke without a punch line.
For a few hectic months there were rumors of a Military tribunal, and now it can be RECORDED that the rumors were indeed fact. An army, however runs on its stomach, and no one with Sustainable Cuisine at their disposal was willing to part with their assets for promissory notes from a bankrupt government for a bankrupt army, scattered all over the world waiting for wars to break out.
It was not so much that one President of the United States had resigned and another was impeached by Congress for not being able to keep his dick in his pants that was startling; there was nothing new in that. It was a relatively simple (“why didn’t we think of that before?”) solution which was shocking. On the eve of California’s descent into the Pacific Ocean, all seven Networks simultaneously announced the end of The Old Calendar, retroactive three weeks to the first day of January, of the beginning of year they all agreed would be called 00.
The Seven Major Networks were named transmitters for The New Government. There was no such thing as The Democratic Party anymore, if indeed there had ever been such a party since right after Vietnam. And the petty-greedhead stooges of the Republican Party as we know had done in their credibility so completely during “Little Nero’s” terms of embarrassment that after the special election 10-years later transferred all the congressmen back to serve out their terms in their hometown Motor Vehicle Bureaus, the party was hardly even a party in name anymore.
We were “all NONE now,” according to the network anchor clones. Five hundred on-the-tit Corporations, members of the Fortunate 500, were working day and night to revamp the structure and system of the Fragnited States. These proposals on restructuring would be presented nightly for six months, at which point the citizens would be allowed to vote for or against voting for the system that worked. The elections would or would not commence immediately and continue or not continue indefinitely until the system of choice was finally implemented.
In the beginning, Transies demanded, and not only got time on The Seven Major Networks but on the 323 other legitimate Independent and Cable stations. Their views were somewhat different. The Transies claimed the Techies were stalling for time. They maintained the whole restructuring was nothing more than a ploy to continue the status quo. Like the graffiti in the streets said: THE RICH GET RICHER, AS SOON AS THE PIG CRXXERS CAN FIGURE OUT HOW!
Coins — pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, halves and silver dollars would be considered temporary legal tender. This, of course, was before SCAMCO cleaned out Fort Knox, before the Island of Martha’s Vineyard seceded from The Union, declaring itself to be The Independent Republic of New Atlantis.
The army, navy and marines all waited for THE WORD to come down from The Commander and Chief, but there was no Commander and Chief. New Atlantis was not invaded. In fact, all the Networks urged “CALM!” The elections were less than two months off. Fragmerica, the UnUnited States of Fragmerica, was in dire need of allies since Israel, Germany and Japan entered into the B.E.A.T.O. pact, destroying the vitality of The Common Market, and turning the term Euro-Trash into an economic reality.
Which of course was when Miami declared itself Castro-free Cuba and Las Vegas went in the drink, declaring itself Atlantic City West.
War-Time joined Eureka after their Disney takeover, as the second multi-national Infotainment Satellite to buy into a state, moving corporate headquarters along with the techno dynasties from the defunct Silicone Valley to Breaks, on the newly formed gold coast of the Jersey-Nebraska triangle that was created by the meltdown of that infamous San Andreas enchilada, as the boys up at Eureka liked to call it. After Mandolini proclaimed on Meet The Press, “They may be able to pull it off, but they can’t put it back on,” he became the first Futilitarian barred from the Airwaves.
And, oh yeah, sports fans out there, we’ve forgotten a lot, but the demographics say there are still too many of you gung-ho apeshits tuned into ESPN’s top 100 channels for us to blow you off. So here’s the nightly weekend year-round season-ending wrapup and prognosis for next year in a nutshell: The Yankees finished last again. The Designated Junior Boss claimed the sale of the team to Yiutzobigi was only in the interest of making the National Pastime a true International diversion from the pain of Mutation, but those in the know say The Tokyo Yankees was a move to spite not only the new Commissioner, and the old Commissioner for that ancient suspension, but to reek revenge on Cuba for years of Fidel, after Bennie Beanball turned his back on becoming the first Billion Dollar A Year Man and led the newly formed expansion Havana Rice&Beanheads to their first World Championship. In hoops, The Lakers moved from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to Atlantic City to the French Rivera all in the same season, not long after Kobe retired and moved back to Italy to build his own legacy of meatballs. And of course The Memphis Blues brand won the first of their five straight NFL crowns inside the once abandoned Great Pyramid studio recording I-PAD center that had officially been moved to Shreveport, Louisiana in 0000. (As an aside, neighboring Nashville, immediately one-upped their arch rival Delta dog cousins by encasing the entire city in a huge Plexiglas bubble, making it the first city to turn itself into the ultimate shopping mall.) It was indeed a glorious $ALE!
Though he was only a cartoon caricature in a holographic museum, the grinning figure of Ronald Reagan was appointed Chief Executive. Naturally there was dissent. Protest after protest was phoned and written into what was left of all the major communications networks. But they weren’t marching in the streets over the figurehead Old Ranger of Death Valley Days in the year 00. In fact, most protest, outside of terrorist action was totally clandestine. Transies had been forced to retreat from the public arena. Nine out of ten Techies were absolutely convinced that Transies were responsible for the sorry state of the world.
By 02 most Transies had retreated to meditative communities, spread primarily throughout what was once known as the southwest United States. Their concentration, other than agriculture, was split almost evenly between the spiritual and psychic realms, and this is where the Techies paranoia started. After the first two Space Shuttles to The Colonies failed because of fires in the electrical circuitry, Government forces attacked Transie communities with a vengeance that hadn’t been seen in America since the white man went after the red man’s casinos. Five communities, one in New Hampshire, one in North Carolina, one in Arkansas, and two in northwest New Mexico were trashed. Over 60,000 Welfare prisoners were taken, and placed in Work Detention Camps. When what was left of the so-called American intellectual community protested this action; the loudest protestors were sentenced to Camps of their own. And were forced to read The Nation outloud to each other 24 hours a day until they denounced their socialist ideology. And thus began the New Government’s official policy of promoting constipation to hold everything together while dealing with the same old dissent that was attempting to open the diaherria of the mind and start all over. If your special interest was not in the special interest of the State, it was OFF TO CAMP for you, Buck-O.
By 03, the CAMPS were specialized. But there was resistance; through the use of psychokinetics, radical Transies had caused mental breakdowns in the vacant President and Vice President of the United States, the entire cabinet, 101 members of Congress, and 32 affiliated zombie anchormen and women.
To put it mildly, the government overreacted, as usual. In two and a half years of the NC there had been five Presidents, 12 Vice Presidents, over 30,000 members of Congress, and 230 Supreme Court Justices.
Techies were rapidly discovering that they had by and large alienated over 90 percent of the world’s mostly overworked psychic population, and though they hadn’t recognized it, they were at War against a hidden enemy with the power to distort and destroy the strength and cohesion of national leaders’ ability to make decisions and carry out policy. For the first time since Special Prosecutor Grundy Van Grundy tried to expel Archie for getting head from Betty, Veronica and Monica too, no one wanted to be President: If there were no more perks for jerks on the job, what was the point in working for The Man, even if you were The Man?
The terrified Powers-That-Be, in their infinite dorkdom, decided “for the good of the country, and the good of the world,” to conceal the identities of leaders, and establish a nameless and symbolic government, that either did or didn’t exist, according to your own designer paranoia, or awareness, as the case for your own personal product placement contract may be.
Right before the first three successful Colonies (A, B and E) were opened, and the Space Shuttles blasted off with The Chosen 12,000, my present then, but now ex-partner, told me that the odds in the street were 9999-to-1 that the next spokesperson we would hear from would be the old obsolete image of Big Brother. I was in The Waste Lands at the time, doing 5-to-10 for not turning over the Virusphere files to Eureka, but just for THE RECORD, I never believed that the Powers-That-Be would allow themselves to play into the hysteria of the mangy masses, even though they had obviously deliberately created the panic. Thus, the image of our symbolic Ophra-clone-leader, Big Sister. The eternal maternal projection of perfect nurturing. A Freudian Third World fantasy. WAM (Woman Are Men) immediately became WAP (Women Are Power), and graffiti bled the walls. By the end of 03, the beginning of 04, Rating Wars were elevated to Prime Time. What started out as a showdown in a schoolyard in South Philly, turned into a brawl at Diddy-Wa-Diddy’s annual 4th of July party in South Hampton, which ABC immediately optioned as an upscale Hip Hop Series. Within a month, NBC had a game show version hosted by George Foreman, and CBS countered with their 73rd new Drew Carey series from the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
Over seven decades of pandering to the lowest common denominator was not that easily reversed. Big Sister, talking to the country out of the warm friendly confines of her kitchen, was obviously supposed to appease women and children in particular, to give what was left of humankind a feeling of womb security. That the image of familiar looking black woman wearing a beret on her head (*Trivia freaks insisted the image had been appropriated from Ophra and mixed with a 19-blah-blah white heiress named Tania), did not have the desired effect the Government was looking for, was no surprise.
Coin of the realm was now double enveloped aluminum, and a quarter pound mock soybean derivative Burger Chump now cost a full pound and a half over the weight of the product itself. Organizations demanding “Red Meat energy” began springing up all over the world. The demand would be met by a seemingly invisible band of gun-toting, cigar chomping pirateers known in the black market as Fleshogs, who promoted a line of new born Mongolian autistic filets, with an advertising campaign that acknowledged the product was IN BAD TASTE, BUT TASTES GOOD!
On a lighter note, the old blue gummed Rolling Stones played their first, and possibly last concert of the Now Calendar together at the sinking Meadowlands in the swamps of northern Jersey. Keith Richards went down with his walker in the glop, and decided he liked it, but like a true Phoenix, came back up just to piss Mick off for the hell of it.
Three new Colonies were established, and 17 more would be made available by the end of 06. But before that happened, Big Sister, who blew her credibility when her Book Club endorsed Mandolini’s bestselling Transcendental Crucifixion, was replaced by Uncle Bubba. There was no other choice. Her proclamation to “Hold on to your paper money” dropped her credibility lower than the stock market. Paper money bought nothing but chances in the lottery, which if you won, all you won were Play Tickets. Play Tickets were worthless if you didn’t want to migrate to The Colonies, and even if you did, it didn’t necessarily mean you would accumulate enough Points to go to the Colony of your choice. And even if you did, it was hard to tell without playing out the season if your choice was real or you were trapped in a Virtual Reality Game Show version being piped back to the Network to boost their sinking ratings.
At the highest point of Fragmentation, Uncle Bubba took over, and with one statement — “Everyone not in the room is an asshole!” - bonded us for the first time since Big Sister, reacting to her critics reacting to Transie psychokinetic attacks on the Government, told the nation, “Don’t be thinkin’ bad thoughts out there, honey, or the Mind Patrol’s gonna get you.” She wasn’t kidding. And either was Uncle Bubba. Almost 98 percent of the population were hooked into The Interactive Box’s cable-video-network System, which just as immediately plugged the Government into the people. Uncle Bubba felt comfortable embracing Big Sister’s Court of Dreams, since obviously the Techies were now ready to do battle with the Transies on their own terms.
It is difficult from this time and place to estimate just how many people the Mind Patrol charged with subversive activity, but millions of citizens left their homes for The Court of Dreams, and never returned.
Despite increases in violence during Uncle Bubba’s reign, after he declared, “Men are women and women are men!” he was accepted as a popular leader. This popularity allowed him to reopen the casinos in 323 different locations, doubled the number of Play Tickets allotted to each citizen, without increasing the number of Points an individual needed to accumulate to be eligible for the Space Shuttle. He established SPAS for fat people, skinny people, smart people, stupid people, horny people, debtors, and in one fell swoop did more to fight starvation, high cholesterol, sex crimes, poverty and irremovable stains on the planet than all his predecessors combined. True, certain elements of the population charged him with being a “soft core Perv,” while others accused him of being not only a Eureka clone, but a “hipster doofus wimp,” but by-in-large, the friendly talking head of Uncle Bubba practically wiped dissent off the face of the Earth.
Obviously the Techies development of psychotechnolgies, new drugs, human growth hormones, genetic engineering and electronic brain implants to inhibit psychic attacks had more to do with the change in order than anything Uncle Bubba actually did, but you couldn’t tell that to the people in the streets. Nor would you even want to try. Uncle Bubba was a hero. At least until that dreadful time when mankind, womankind, any kind of humankind could no longer look in the mirror and come out with excuses to justify existence.
The year was 0007, and mass suicide was the latest fad. Whole families, neighborhoods, communities, and even two entire towns (in western Pennsylvania) took, what Mandolini “the Mediocre” called, “the leap into Dumb Ass.” Mutation was a painful experience. The loss of ego, programming and self-image was too terrifying for most people to accept. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
The Colonies weren’t cutting it. Chakra imbalance, caused by the restructuring of gravity, had opened the first Cosmic Pilgrims to a brand new virus. A virus worse than any of the 12 major viruses which virtually declared war on humanity down here on lonely Earth. It was all the nightmares of outer space manifest in inner space, then beamed by satellite, back to The Mother Land. (Fortunately, or Unfortunately, as the case for Restrictive Democracy may be, actual transmissions from The Colonies were monitored in Time-lag by NASA computers, which picked up the mutation as a distortion, and corrected the image on screen. When it became apparent, however, that the distortion was not a distortion, but an actualized image, reruns were beamed in until writers were hired to write a new script, and actors hired to perform it.) The New Government had the same old paranoia. After all, what would the man or woman in the street say when he or she learned that the Pilgrims’ heads were turning into the shapes of eggs? Or that their genitals were reversing their genders?
As Quirk testified before The House UnFragmerican Activities Committee ten years earlier, “One of the dangers that the architects of the Information Super Highway should have been careful about was the effect the unencumbered free flow of information had on our thought processes. They provided an open channel for a dangerous intellectual virus to hatch, that once in the polluted lamestream, not only broke down, but actually helped destroy our individual and collective cognitive systems.”
As I write this, it’s apparent that there’s a fly in the ointment, an air bubble in the vaccine, an error in judgment that has to be corrected before anyone else can go to The Colonies. In fact, The Space Shuttle, without any publicity or word of mouth, is running in reverse. Clandestinely bringing the Pilgrims back from The Colonies, and locking them in Detention Camps, so they can be probed, examined, studied, and most of all, kept out of public view, while teams of technicians are dispatched to plug the dikes.
This is history. It’s all a pack of lies, but lies are obviously the only acceptable communication until ideology catches up with the newest new technology and provides a substance to the constant flooding of innovations in our overdrawn memory banks. Lies are obviously what you have to hear if you’re going to take it upon yourself to get out of bed in the morning.
More and more lies will be coming in the future, but as for now I bid you adieu. According to my radar, they’re on their way here to either bust me again or rub me out. Stop me from telling you these lies, which They believe to be the truth, however abstract and outmoded that concept may be. Ah, contradictions. . .What would we do without them?
©2011 Mike Golden
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