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© Andrew Wade 2006 and for all eternity or till someone pays me enough Note: This document reached Benzedrine Towers in a plain brown envelope on heavily annotated paper, along with a cover sheet filled out in green ink. There was no return address, but it was apparently sent from central Washington DC, USA. The annotations and cover letter reveal a byzantine, intelligent mind, obsessed with X-Files like conspiracy theories - contact with aliens, cover-ups of same, and so forth. I release it with all of this nonsense stripped out except the letter, as it is obviously a hoax, albeit an amusing and perceptive one. Enjoy!
Report on the factions of Endtopia
The Righters believe in the sovereign right of the individual to do whtever he wants. If you are lucky and exceptionlly good, they'll let you go to the capital and see this individual for yourself. The President demands supreme authority to do what he damn well likes and no god damn pussy assed liberal's gonna stop him. Why? Because he's got the guns, the gold, and the unqualified support of an army of reactionary goons eager to do his bidding.
Of course the main plank of his power is the fact that Endtopian citizens live in a democracy- a world where the will of the people, in the form of election results, are decided by large and wealthy corporations which any citizen with a few thousand bucks to spare can buy shares in. Commie rats, such as, say, the Venezuelans, or the Opposition Party, are always implying that there's something corrupt about this. Nothing could be further than the truth; the existance of real participatory democracy, in which every billionaire can buy equal access to the President, is proof positive that this is one of the most advanced societies in history.
The Righters do of course believe in their Divine Right to rule as such, unlike the Godless Communist Hordes, and of the need to have the tools to keep the population fairly safe and relatively warm- hence the existance of a further two planks of Government, although like the Righters themselves these are of course only servants of (some of) the People.
The Righters, then, are the nobility of Endtopia.
The Christers are believers in the immenent arrival on earth of their fundamentalist God. They honestly believe this in true medieval style, and they'll doanything to make sure it comes true. They are also similar to the old Flat-Earthers in that they hold some rather eccentric beliefs which even the Catholic Church has given up; that the Earth is only six days old and has been made (along with the rest of the Universe) in only a few thousand years, complete with Man and the Animals, and that the dinosaur bones and distant galazies a gazillion light years away are either a Divine hoax or a result of scientific incompetence - of the scientific method that they themselves don't believe in.
Their function, like that of previous clergies, is apparently to provide an opiate and outlet for the population (although it has been noted that in more advanced countries this is done by the mass media itsself, the function of outlet is more often taken by extreme Right-wing political parties, which the Government cannot control).
This system allows for more input into the political system, as it were. The Christers regularly consult with the Righters, who run the government, and even with the Nukers, although their anti-science bias makes for more strained relations, this is made up for with the knowledge that certain Christers can personally meet the bright young men responsible for, and able to, bring God's own Hellfire to earth on their behalf.
The Christers are of course the Clergy to the Righter's Nobility.
Other elements within the power structure:
The Nukers are of the opinion that there's no problem so great that it can't be solved by the judicious application of nuclear radiation. Believing the link between radiation exposure and cancer to be "a myth", they lobby for more and more weapons and power stations to be built, and even for the former to be used in defense of the latter. Additionally, they support the campaign to release what they call "low-level" radioactive waste into the environment by recycling it into tin cans, baby pacifiers, and cheap pens for schoolchildren, as well as the introduction of compulsory barium enemas for all citizens as part of their regular medical check-up, as well as also, of course, copious X-rays, z-rays and gamma-ray treatments in the now highly likely event that something is found to be wrong with the patient...
As scientists and engineers, the Nukers don't really fit in to the power structure in any traditional sense,although similarities have been noted to the Mayan priesthood and the worshippers of Moloch in ancient times, particularly the adherence to the rites of mass human sacrifice and infanticide. Athough this is not, as commonly believed, only theoretical, the vast majority of actual deaths have been exported to warzones where the practice of dropping radioactive waste on the enemy is commonplace, seeing as they're all going to die anyway.
The Oilers, adherents to the One True Petrochemical religion, are a powerful lobby within the voting bloc of the very rich. It is their marklar that oil, not nukes, is the wellspring of the country's wealth and power, and not a drain on both. Oilers frequently lobby for more foreign military involvement, which does please the nukers, and also fewer controls on pollution, which makes them so popular with industry that they effectively lead industry and, as of 2000 AD, have in fact formed a government. Slogan: The Future Is Oil!
The Slavers are businessmen who require that the price of human labour be kept particularly low in order to turn a profit, ie all of them. Spend their time demanding cuts in unemployment compensation and the minimum wage and more hand-outs for themselves, as well as in-work benefits as these allow them to lower wages. Slavers also lobby for more immigration, which pits them against the Righters, who traditionally use the issue as a sop to distract the proles from who is really doing the screwing around here. But apart from this, the Slavers are good friends to the Righters, for example with their constant requests for more petty offenders to be sent to jail (one of the Slaver's newest enterprises is a burgeoning prison-industrial complex), demands for the government to pay welfare claimants starvation wages to work for them for free, and coming soon, return of legal ability to issue company scrip and machine gun strikers.
The Militaro-Industrial Complex is a clique of government officials, high-level military personell, and industrialists. They effectively form an important over-faction within government itssself, opposed to the diplomatic corps (whose function is to prevent war, and whose star has been permanently occluded) and allied with anyone or anything that makes war more likely: Notably the Oilers, but other allies include or have included Terrorists, foreign dictators and Christers; ultimately, their goal is to make people dead and who they use to accomplish this is all the same to them. Like the Nukers, there is something primal and unpleasant about their function.
A comparison may be vaguely draw between their ruling classes and those of the Aztec culture around five hundred years ago. Like Mesoamerican human sacrifices their wars consume more and more human lives, and for little logical purpose. They are skirting the edges of ecological disaster and at any time may do something even they might live to regret.
The writer of this document can only hope that for our part, we can successfully emulate the Spanish of the same time period, who with a limited initial invasion force utterly subjugated the vast, powerful and evil empire with only culture shock and a marginally more advanced technology than the natives on their side. They civilised these barbarians just as we must civilise
(EDITOR'S NOTE: The manuscript appears to have been deliberately defaced here. The words have actually been cut out of the pages with scissors. It goes on for another couple of paragraphs, and then signs off.)
Your humble servant,
[UNDECRYPTABLE]
Dear Mr. Wade
Please find enclosed this translation of a report made by one of them on us, for inclusion in your online magazine. I have sent this physically to avoid being traced- hopefully this will get the word out.
It is quite a good translation, although they seem to keep calling the United States of America "Endtopia" and we have broken several of the NSA's supercomputers trying to understand their names, which in the original trasmission are several million bytes long. They're probably image files, but we can't process those without any idea of the encoding technology, although it appears to be similar to our .JPG format it is far more compressed, so much so that it is almost indistinguishable from random noise.
That isn't the point. The point is that they are here. As you will see, they compare us to the Aztecs of old Mesoamerica- obsessed with human sacrifice, corrupt, polluted; spiritually, morally and physically dirty. They want to improve our lives and trade with us. We're going to get pasted unless we get ready for this- as they themselves admit, they aren't that much more advanced than us. We have to get people to wake up, or these people will seem to appear out thin air like the horsemen of Cortez and Pizzaro. They will kill our civilisation with culture shock.
I know you, Mr. Wade. You are not a salubrious person. Neither are you special - I have mailed this report out at random to a number of individuals and organisations around the world. The reason you are holding this paper in your hands is that, although we might not agree on everything if we met, I can tell from your writing that you criticize us because you want our civilisation to survive. Most people are so apathetic they couldn't care less either way, to be honest, and a lot of people would laugh like drains - at first.
In short, there aren't many people like you in the world- people who write, who are read, who would actually mind if we were - taken down by these people. Maybe together, we can at least get people used to the idea that they are coming. This might even have happened before - although you're too young to remember the 1950s, of course. I'm asking you to write about this, Mr. Wade- make it your obsession. As of now, your job is to rewrite my communiques and help me to leak information before these bastards walk in to your Houses of Parliament and strangle your Queen and Prime Minister to death with their bare hands, then piss in the font at your quaint Westminster Abbey.
Forgive me for speaking so bluntly, but I'm sure you understand, we all of us face an equally grave threat.
Now, our enemies are looking for electronic communications, and will not notice things sent through the mail. I will be in touch with more concrete evidence and further financial help as soon as this manuscript is published.
Yours
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