OK: Roland the Roadie, a man whose soul had been pressure-washed by the sonic assault of a hundred death metal concerts, found himself back in the beige stillness of Kansas. Because, of course. For months, his universe had been a rolling thunder-dome of Marshall stacks, sweat-soaked leather, and the high-pitched whine of a tour bus generator. But now, in the quiet, his brain kept replaying the scene from Bethel, New York. Bethel! A name that was supposed to conjure images of peace and love and naked people in the mud. Instead, it conjured for him a single, vibrating image: one deeply patchouli-soaked hippie, a walking potpourri of BO and self-righteousness, lecturing him on vibrational energies.
The whole psychic episode had left Roland feeling untethered. He decided, in a moment of profound spiritual desperation, to reconnect with the simple carpenter from Nazareth he’d learned about in Sunday School. A tune-up for the soul. The first step, apparently, was having a beer in Kanorado with an old classmate, Buster was his name, but might have been Biff or Buddy or something equally percussive.
Buster was now full-on MAGies. That’s what he called it…Make America Great In Every State! He said it with the kind of thermonuclear conviction usually reserved for multi-level marketing pitches. He was a walking, talking embodiment of the movement… a cyclone of star-spangled certainty in a Cabela’s cap. Roland, who hadn’t been inside a church since Y2K, admired the dedication. He truly did. But a few things didn’t quite add up.
“So, help me out here,” Roland began, watching the condensation snake down his bottle of suds. “Jesus was all about welcoming the stranger, the whole ‘Good Samaritan’ bit. Now, how does that square with, you know, the screaming on TV about immigrants being an invading army of… well, Bad Hombres?”
Buster took a mighty pull from his beer, his eyes gleaming with the reflected light of a flatscreen broadcasting the gospel of NewsMax. “Roly, Roly,” he said, shaking his head with a sad, paternal chuckle. “It’s an invasion. The enemy within! You gotta protect your house before you can invite people over. It’s just common sense!” Roland wondered if the biblical Good Samaritan had checked for Roman citizenship papers first.
On they went. Roland brought up humility. The washing of the feet. The first being last and the last being first. A beautiful, revolutionary kind of logic.
Buster countered with a sermon on the Prosperity Gospel. Yessir! It was a whole new, New Testament, one seemingly ghostwritten by a real estate developer from Queens. Buster spoke of the President, a man so obviously blessed that his success… the towers, the gold, the winning… was a sign of divine favor.
“It’s a blessing!” Buster roared, a bit too loudly for a Tuesday. “You model the behavior of the blessed to get blessed yourself (Because God, you see, is a big fan of winners)! Damn the torpedoes!” He finished with a belly laugh that shook the barstool.
The conversation, naturally, turned to money. Out on the prairie, a lone steer bellowed for its evening feed, a primal scream from the feedlot heartland. “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,” Roland quoted, “than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Buster’s face soured. “That’s communist talk, Roly. Wealth redistribution. That’s theft. And there’s a commandment about that one, an old one. A good one.”
And so on.
Roland pivoted to peace. “Love your enemies,” he murmured. “Be peacemakers.”
“You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet,” Buster said with a shrug, finishing his beer. “It’s a simple recipe.” Roland felt a sudden, powerful urge to test the idea on Buster’s nose, but he resisted. He had, after all, sworn off violence after the “damn hippie” pepper-spray incident.
The final frontier was Truth itself. Roland lamented a world gone funhouse-mirror mad, an upside-down where experts were fools and feelings were “alternative facts“. Buster then launched into a magnificent, thirty-minute jazz solo of pure, uncut conspiracy, a verbal firehose of YouTube links and podcast prophets about how the only way to find truth was to “do your own research.” Roland performed a quiet face-palm, a gesture of complete and utter exasperation.
“Jesus challenged worldly power,” Roland said, one last gasp. “He taught that leadership was about service, not control.”
Buster saw his opening. “Exactly! He was against the Deep State, just like us!”
Roland drained his beer. It was over. He and Buster were standing on opposite sides of a canyon, shouting into the void. They lived in two different sectors of the multiverse, occupying the same space. An irreconcilable parallax view. He realized there was no argument to be won here, only a friendship to be cautiously maintained across an ideological event horizon.
He clapped Buster on the shoulder, managed one last drop from his beer, and walked out into the vast, starry Kansas night. Roland the Roadie resolved then and there to just keep living by the simple, baffling example of the Nazarene, hoping his friend might one day meet him somewhere on the spiral of spiritual originalism.
And so… a lot has transpired since our whirlwind swing through the New England and the D.C. swamps. To be more explicit, we’ve wrapped the HSoB tour in a bow visiting all 48 mainland states. Admittedly, some got less attention than fairly warranted. Texas most egregiously. So, after taking care of health, dental, optical, and vehicular care in good ol’ Hays, America, we (Rocinante and i) made our way south when the Late October chill started infiltrating the great state of Kansas.
1st stop… Tejas…
Since the time is neigh for diving head first into the book project, i couldn’t in good conscience leave the current snapshot of Texas stand unfinished … we’re searching for that “fibrillating heart of our divided nation”. And Texas in an important pole in the current energy disturbance. So, we HAD to spend more time here. And so we did. Starting with a stop in Red Rock, a rural berg roughly 30 miles from Austin. We have friends there, including one bass player who i assume wishes to remain nameless. He’s the one from whom i learned the expression, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” He was a literal comrade in arms as we stumbled through a giant swath of the 1980s in the same Rock-n-Roll platoon… we took no prisoners. As well, a brief detour to celebrate Thanksgiving with a Texas comrade from a different war, the 2000s… the Bush years. Another fellow soldier whom i’m assuming wishes to remain anonymous. From him, i learned that there are no problems in Civil Engineering that, “can’t be solved with a bullet.” He has effectively estranged from his home state, but i suspect he still harbors a deep connection to this storied “whole ‘nuther country”. One thing for certain, he has a keen Texas ear for good music.
Anyway… Texas… after escaping the late autumn chill in Kansas, cruising over the vast tabletop of the Texas prairie, listening to Crime and Punishment via audio book, deep in a reverie, my concentration started wafting in and out with disjointed strains of a song i once knew by heart but hadn’t heard in many years. The voice was that “high lonesome” distinctly Texas lilt, and as the miles rolled by, the music grew more intense and i couldn’t ignore it any longer. When the song started drowning out the book, i turned it (the audio book) off, and racked my memory for a door that could lead me into the song properly, but it didn’t appear. Finally, wishing to get my concentration back in order to track the Dostoevsky novel properly, i pulled over in one of those Texas prairie parking areas for a quick Google search. I HAD to get a bead on that song. And here it is… Lilah, by Don Henley. From a record released the year my first marriage was falling apart. The song evidently embedded itself in the hole where my soul had been before the divorce. Anyway… it was the endless Texas prairie that stirred the song from its resting place, and that impression will be with me for the rest of my days.
Now, in Rocinante’s slipstream as we made our way South, an early November arctic blast ravaged the Eastern Midwest, and more, reaching all the way to Georgia, even Northern Florida. And since we have no interest in climates dipping into the 30s, we beat a burning path to Corpus Christi after sharing a few beers, reminiscences, and current doin’s with my old Rock-n-Roll war buddy.
After crossing the prairie, escaping the white knuckle traffic snarls of Austin, and finally spending a few weeks here in South Texas, i have a better impression of the Lone Star State and with that, ready to dive head first into the book project.
For that purpose, back to the River of Grass… back to South Florida and the Miami-Dade Public Library Network. I’ve begun the process of world building and character development, and i know i have a lot to learn before screwing up enough courage to present a manuscript to publishers. I also know the chances of snagging a professional deal are slim to none. But i’ve read Stephen King’s comments “On Writing,” and from that, i know rejections come in bushel baskets. So dear loopers, please understand, i don’t do any of this out of an expectation for something more than, how did Papa Vonnegut put it? Oh yeah, renewing, “feeding, and growing my soul”. And by some lucky coincidence, this has been my retirement plan all along… #winning.
And now, another desperate yawp from my perch atop a high rise bar-stool in the Texas A&M “Tejas Lounge”. Not really a bar… more like a living room in a co-ed dorm… people saunter to and fro. Holiday lights are hung by student workers piloting mobile telescoping scaffolds that make that garbage truck reverse warning BEEP BEEP BEEP whenever moved. Now, that sound is somewhat annoying, but nothing bothers me… i’ve raised boys… and if you know… you know. After that, NOTHING in the way of annoying sounds can break my concentration.
Anyway… i’ve been meaning to compose a piece aimed at one of the many things that keeps my beloved loopers at each other’s metaphorical throats. And yeah, some of them are prone to discuss the possibility of moving from bellicose words in the social chat threads to destructive action in the real world. My hunch is much of that talk is just that, empty posturing… just words. But i also believe there are loopers out there that would spring into action if they thought the “boogaloo” was actually on. This is a bothersome thought, but i was raised in an era where, at any moment, we could be coping with the chaos of city-obliterating nuclear exchanges. After surviving the Cold War, a few deluded psychopaths with guns and terminal bloodlust isn’t really that scary. In fact, these poor creatures desperate for validation are kind of pathetic, and i can’t help feeling sorry for them. Now, this is not a political statement. I know loopers on both sides of the artificial divide who take pride in their gun handling skills and unabashed hostility regarding political “enemies”.
So… today, i’d like to take a stab at defanging the ideological “boogeymen” cited in weak justifications for contemplating the murder of neighbors, acquaintances, or participants in distant social unrest (looking at you, Mr. Rittenhouse). Now, to be clear, distrust, and ill-will is clearly coming from the very top of our political hierarchy. From the right, the smoldering embers of racist fear and loathing leveraged to the maximus surpacity, with some success as politicians take steps to rid the nation of anyone not in possession of certified proof of citizenship. On the left, we have protesters warning of some sort of impending fascist coup, aimed at eliminating the democratic ship of state, among other issues. For one, the documented fact that law enforcement officials are far more likely to perceive bodily threat to the point of deploying lethal force when the threat is a person of color. This all came to a head with the death of George Floyd, and it led to a “summer of racial reckoning” leaving quite a bit of property damage in its wake.
Then came the #metoo and #blacklivesmatter movements infuriating those wishing to preserve what’s left of a patriarchal power structure favoring white dudes over people of color, but especially women, let alone women of color. So, imagine the seething fury of one of these “rugged individualist” alpha male types trying to cope with the likes of a Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, Jasmine Crocket. Right? So many social media keyboards are coated with spittle flecks coming from the rabid foaming mouth of an alt-right edge lord, putting those uppity folk who have clearly forgotten their place in their rightful cages.
All must be “made great again”.
And so… both sides get on their favorite hobby horses with their metaphorical spears and magic helmets to slay the forces of their chosen ideological boogeymen. For those on the left, the boogeyman is turning the U.S.A. toward an ethnonationalist “fascism” similar to the one that infected Western Europe in the wake of the great depression. For the right the boogeyman is the Marxist camel trying to get its nose into their sacred Constitutional Republic’s tent. Because, you know socialism ALWAYS leads to injustice and mass atrocities… everybody knows, right? Besides, the camel stinks and makes funny noises.
So, shall we now pour some cold water on this dichotomy? Let’s open a few historical cautionary tales starting to look familiar as current events unfold. Starting from the left… the most egregious examples of regimes widely described as authoritarian socialist ruling as single-party states include the Soviet Union (especially under Stalin), the People’s Republic of China (especially under Mao), North Korea, and the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.
In Stalinist U.S.S.R., there was a rapid, forced buildup of industrial capacity and collectivized agriculture. These efforts to strengthen the nation, unfortunately, contributed to mass starvation, most notably some areas of Ukraine. It also featured extensive political repression, including the Great Purge, a campaign of surveillance, mass arrests, and executions of perceived enemies of the state, with many sent to Gulag concentration camps.
In China, Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, extreme social and economic upheaval featuring a similar push for societal change, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution led to widespread famine, social chaos, persecution of the educated classes, and millions of deaths. The Chinese Communist Party has maintained a single-party, authoritarian system since taking power, which is considered highly repressive of dissent and civil liberties (see Tiananmen Square massacre).
Today, countries like China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam are considered by many observers to be authoritarian states with ruling communist parties that exercise significant control over the economy and suppress political opposition. Loopers conflating U.S. socialist public policy (Social Security, Medicare, ACA, etc. ) with the abovementioned authoritarian communist examples, unfairly brand Democratic politicians with a scarlet “S”. But this is understandable considering the “conservative” mindset of eternal vigilance against the constant threat of “barbarians” outside their doors… they truly fear their Boogeymen.
Now, from the right, the most egregious examples of authoritarian fascism in history are considered to be Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini, and the Empire of Japan during the 1930s and 40s.
Nazi Germany is widely regarded as the most extreme and devastating example due to its systematic use of genocide and state terror. And though there’s really no need to belabor decades of History Channel cautionary tales, it’s important to note Nazism was based on a pseudo-scientific theory of racial hierarchy, promoting the idea of an “Aryan master race” and identifying Jews and other minorities as scapegoats for Germany’s problems. Their Atrocities include the well documented systematic, state-sponsored genocide of millions, including Romas, people with disabilities, political opponents, and roughly six million Jews in concentration and extermination camps.
And then there’s Il Duce. Mussolini’s fascism emphasized extreme nationalism, the glorification of war, and a corporatist economic model designed to suppress labor movements and consolidate state power. The regime utilized black-shirted paramilitary forces to dismantle free speech, intimidate and murder political opponents. It later passed antisemitic racial laws and cooperated with Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.
And rounding out the WWII Axis Alliance was Imperial Japan who’s military committed widespread atrocities, including mass murder and human rights violations considered on the same level as the European genocides. The ideology centered on emperor-worship, extreme nationalism, and the concept of a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” to justify military conquest and imperial rule across Asia.
And let’s not overlook the Balkans and Spain. The Independent State of Croatia under Ante Pavelić‘s Ustaše regime committed some of history’s worst atrocities and advocated for a “Greater Croatia” at the expense of Serbs. And Francisco Franco‘s long-lasting Spanish military dictatorship, while not a pure fascist regime, absorbed many elements of the Falange fascist movement and implemented mass arrests and human rights violations.
Sam Clemons put it best. History may not repeat by rote, but very often rhymes with current events (see above… astonishing deja vous bars). And we’ve already mentioned how, with just about every attempt to build and maintain government run enterprise under the heading of “serving the people” in matters too big for private enterprise to manage without coordinated planning, the political left is branded with the Scarlet “S”. But now, with the right, loopers who have determined government run enterprise inferior to the invisible hand of market forces, have been hoping for a chance to “drown the U.S. federal government in the tub” after shrinking it down to a drownable size. These loopers are now in power, and the tactics they have employed look a lot like authoritarian fascism.
Sam ClemonsBoogaloo BoysThe Stupid ShitElmer Fudd puts on his “war face”Vigilante Justice
But, here’s the deal. Democratic leadership has yet to employ the authoritarian communist policies conservatives fear (Jade Helm, gun confiscation, etc.), and, so far, the right has not begun rounding up undesirables for mass extermination (that we know of). And they haven’t yet succeeded in overturning U.S. democracy in favor of an all powerful executive with a lifetime appointment (yet). They do make these kind of noises in the form of online trolling (Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy), but getting their political opponents riled up is most of the point. Worst-case scenarios are most likely not part of the plan (call me overoptimistic, i’ve heard worse).
Bottom line, neither of these political boogeymen are anything more than red herrings, mirages meant to keep their respective bases outraged enough to make sure to vote when the time comes. So, if we can take a couple steps back from the outrage machines, acknowledge both sides have good and bad ideas. And since neither side will be free to put members of the other in ovens, it behooves us to get back to reasoned debate. Stop demonizing the “other” and look for ways for all of us to work together, identify common concerns, and draft policies that can accomplish agreed upon goals.
And with all of that said… seriously, the left is not going to “Cultural Revolution” the right out of existence, and the right is not going to march undesirables into ovens. OK? Ok! So, let’s now address the elephant in the room… let’s talk about religion. As much as i’d love to avoid the topic altogether, it’s unavoidable. We have at least two, maybe three supreme court jurists identifying with a sect of Christianity that is actively working toward a power structure placing apocalyptic Christians in total governmental primacy. They are literally working on ways to delete secular, pluralistic governance in favor of an ethno-nationalist monarchy. Do i believe they will succeed?? Hell… to the no! But the fact that this is in the works, and they’ve managed to capture the White House, the Speaker of the House and at least two SCOTUS justices is beyond anything i would have imagined in all of my adult life.
And the founders were unambiguous about the prohibition of religion capturing the levers of power. There will be no “official religion”. The sooner we can get the wall of Church/State separation rebuilt, the better. This has to be job #1! After that, time to drop the wedge issues and rancorous, bad faith rhetoric. Seriously, i don’t know ANYONE who wants to eliminate local police departments. Maybe divert some of the “socialist” resources to “community policing” and counseling, but only a delusional crazy person would take us back to the libertarian “wild west” days of vigilante justice. Full stop… there will be no defunding of the police. At the same time, no one i know wants their neighbors to stop going to their chosen church, or stop celebrating Christmas. It’s all just rage bait…. grow up people! Please let’s cut the stupid shit all the way out.
If you were to put a gun to my head for an answer to our current state of divisiveness, i would say forcing mainstream news organizations and health care practitioners into capitalist imperatives comes closer to the core of our cultural and economic strife than the spittle-flecked pseudo-debates over extreme abstractions such as “communism” or “fascism”. I know… it’s an opinion, and my opinion is about as good as anyone else’s. I’m just another slob … like Werner Herzog, or David Letterman, or Jesus… you know, one of us. But i do have skin in this game. I want to see a tenable future for my kids… that some day they too can thrive in a world they would be glad to welcome new souls into.
Right now, it’s not…! So let’s do this thing, what do you say? Let’s 86 these boogeymen together… OK? Ok!
So, you’re not free to determine the path your life takes? Why? Is it like the song? Because your love is, “too much, Baby?” Is your autonomy actually restricted by the attachment to which you’ve surrendered? Or, have you, like another song, “the kind of debts no honest man can pay?” Or maybe, you just want to “fit in” or be “normal,” but that normality severely restricts the frontiers of your authentic self? Well… what to do? Will you roll with the imprisonment, or will you take action and do like a whole ‘nuther song, and choose one of the fifty ways?
First, i guess we need to define terms starting with, “freedom”. What does it mean to be “free”? For the narrow purpose of this mental snapshot, let’s go with a less than conventional definition (from A. Bierce’s sarcastic dictionary)… “FREEDOM (noun): Exemption from the stress of authority in a scant half dozen of restraint’s infinite multitude of methods. A political condition that every nation supposes itself to enjoy in virtual monopoly. Liberty. The distinction between freedom and liberty is not accurately known; naturalists have never been able to find a living specimen of either.” Could it be the effort is futile? We’ll save that questin for later. For now, let’s just agree the condition of “freedom” is slippery at best.
And what does it mean to be “caught in a trap”? Is this a good or bad, pleasant or painful condition? Again, an elusive concept to pin down. Do restrictions imposed by the trap cause pain, or are they more like liberators, freeing our minds to explore expanses of thought without the burdens of engineering and executing an escape plan? The question might take you back to those wild and wooly “salad days” when you KNEW you had to generate enough income to feed yourself and secure a warm place to sleep in those bone-chattering winter weeks or a cool oasis in the “dawg days.” This might have required a duel life, one that makes room for the tasks for acquiring necessaries, and another that feeds your restless soul. You didn’t want either to interfere with the other, so you found a normie gig that wouldn’t sap what creative bandwidth you had, and you avoided creative gigs that might jeopardize your meal ticket.
And finally, what exactly is “normal?” After all, science finds itself baffled by some serious inexplicabilities. For one, if gravity is an attractive force, what explains the dramatic “red-shift” observed by light from distant galaxies? According to what we know about the Doppler Effect, those pups are speeding away from each other at roughly the speed of light… WTF? Shouldn’t gravity be pulling them together? And what about that spooky “quantum entanglement” nonsense? If nothing travels faster than light, how can anyone explain the “instant” response of entangled particles across vast distance? How can those particles possibly move in synchrony with no delay? These and other paradoxes have to be reckoned with before we can stand on a box and declare what should and should not determine the boundaries of knowledge. After all, have you seen Escher’s art? How long can you stare at those images before giving up and just accepting the notion that sometimes you just have to be satisfied with a non-resolution resolution.
So… are you really not “free”? Are you really caught in a trap? Can someone or something actually force your soul into a restrictive box?
Seriously… have you ever tried to put yourself into the slippers of those unlucky bitches and bastards locked in cages? Sing-Sing, CSP Canyon City, Club Fed, the Hanoi Hilton, Auschwitz, Dachau, Siberia, and Gaza? What sort of redemptive discipline does it take to survive those literal “traps”? And can that sort of resilience be applied to the regular routines most of us endure on the daily? I imagine that sort of superpower would come in mighty handy for those elderly neighbors waiting out delays in medical procedures or the brief and scarce visits payed by over extended loved ones? Folks who were once strong and vital, free to move around with supple limbs and grand ambitions. But now they’re grounded by failing health and limited monetary resources? When they finally realize no one is coming to save them, what sort of mental expanse can they exercise to endure the quiet hours that comes with chronic sedentary existence?
Could it be efforts to reach gold-plated states of “liberty” or “freedom” are futile? Einstein was right about time… it’s relative to local conditions such as pleasure and pain. If we could find a way to fill our days with service and purpose, even if that means dealing with… ugh… people or worse, our own nagging regrets or admonitions, maybe then time would be a friendlier companion. And so, if those literally confined in cages can do it, so can we. Even if we think we’re “trapped” by conditions beyond our control. Don’t wait for a savior, no one is coming. Get up, stand up, find a purpose and fill your days working for it. Give it your all… and don’t let disappointing results stop you. It’s like the lessons of geology and the Shawshank Redemption. Time… time and pressure. Time and pressure create diamonds and the possibility of genuine freedom.
What will time and pressure do for you? How will you reconcile the non-resolution resolution?
Seems we’re coming up on some hard scrabble times for citizens down on their luck. And hard scrabble times call for hard scrabble responses. We’re going to have to grapple with how to handle the consequences of gutting the social safety nets. Nothing new, we’ve seen this play before. In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s novel uses the theft of a loaf of bread by Jean Valjean to illustrate the harsh and unjust nature of the justice system in his time. In more recent times, Willie Smith Ward, a Texan, received a 50-year sentence in 2013 for stealing a $35 rack of ribs. Now granted, this was the logical conclusion of this man’s incorrigible behavior in the light of Texas’ habitual offender laws, allowing for lengthy prison sentences to repeat offenders. Yes, he was a pervasive violator of civic good faith, but the final straw was the theft of food.
It’s probably no coincidence original sin is connected to behavior inspired by hunger. According to the Judeo Christian holy book, we’re guilty as soon as we hit the ground. And guilty of what? And why? Because the first XY chromosomes in our hereditary line fell for a cock-n-bull story about an apple being verboten per maximum overlord’s command? And why the prohibition? Because consuming the apple would drop the scales from our minds regarding the existence of good and evil? And the consequences of gaining this knowledge is… death? But not until one experiences a veritable parade of humiliation, pain, sorrow, and general suffering? Again… we get to ride this roller coaster of woe because some dipshit, 10,000 years ago chose to enjoy a spot of fruit with his girlfriend? Yeah… i don’t know if i can get behind this allegory. It seems a bit unfair to the XX natives. It paints them in a devious light. Like, both of them were instructed to avoid the fruit, but the devil’s serpent chose XX as an ideal target for corruption. And XY was just too gullible or dumb to mount an effective argument. Bottom line, XX is an hedonistic schemer, and XY is a goofy simpleton that just wants to eat. Naw, we’re not gonna fall for that misogynistic bullshit. XX and XY are born equally innocent, if they go bad as they grow, it’s the result of non-optimal environmental conditions or physical chemistry, but mostly… bad behavior is taught by irresponsible caretakers.
The whole “bad behavior inspired by hunger” issue might grow into a nagging problem in this age of prioritizing gilded ballrooms, machine automated labor, and antiquated energy policies over the well being of the XX and XYs who happen to lack connections in society’s power structures. And how might that play out? We could look to historical record for cues. Has hunger ever been an issue for working and doomed classes through the ages as economic and technology conditions change? Indeed it has, is, and will continue to vex policy makers… Victor Hugo’s novel is a vivid example.
And outcomes have varied widely. The most recent encounter with abject mass deprivation in this country got defeated by what was known at the time as a New Deal for the nation’s people. This, many would acknowledge was a best case scenario. Things didn’t go so smoothly in Russia or France as they transitioned away from monarchical rule. You could say, for the ruling classes, these are a couple worst case scenarios. Given that, what’s driving the U.S.A. away from democracy, careening toward authoritarian ethno-nationalist governance? Time will tell, but for now, it might behoove the ruling classes to recognize working people and the doomed are talking to each other. They’re not as hampered by ignorance as has been a hallmark of previous socio-economic upheavals. Consolidating power may not be the golden ticket they think it is.
Now… how will all of this shake out? I wouldn’t venture a guess, but i do see chatter crisscrossing the social networks, and i can confidently predict how some will approach the oncoming hunger dilemma. As we advance into this age of machines automating repetitive rote tasks, and jobs continue to evaporate, people will ask for opportunities to earn the means of feeding their families. When no useful work is available, they will ask for food assistance, and when no food assistance is available, they will take the food from whatever source is handy. And there will be plenty of XX and XYs with the resourcefulness and discipline to create their own redemption. Regarding original sin i, for one, am grateful for the flood of knowledge passed down by the original XX and XYs. I’m GLAD they ate the apple. And if supporting tax dollars for food security to people i’ve never met makes me a communist, well, pepper-spray my ass and call me “Comrade!”
I gotta black bomb… It’s tickin’ away… Gonna take it out… On the Blue Highway.
People love stories! Coherent frameworks for making sense of the often-unintelligible chaos of existence. If a truly good story is unavailable, a vapid stinker will do. And this desperate embrace of the easily digestible is what we might call the Deification by Default… the human brain settling for any compelling fiction, no matter how empty.
And the believers… they congregate in concrete echo-chambers, modern-day amphitheaters for a new kind of spectacle. Their gaze is fixed on an angry face projected onto a giant, 16k screen, a digital idol spitting vitriol like a croaking raven or territorial baboon.
They see our guy up there. And what a Guy. He is not merely human… he is a creature of pure, unadulterated id, a walking monument to the most cherished American religion… Getting Away With It. He is a living testament of the belief that consequences are for them. That rules are for suckers, despite the fact that he’s been tried and convicted of transgressions that would usher lesser mortals into country club prisons. And so on. The universe, in its indifference, allows such animals to prosper. This particular specimen has been fined millions for frauds so brazen, so loud and brassy, they transcend mere criminality and achieve a perverse kind of art. He’s the zero-sum game personified, a playa whose existence dictates that for him to win, others must lose. He is a babbling font of perpetual-grievance, forever the victim, endlessly fueling his sad tale of victimhood and defiance. He can’t even stand up straight, a physical manifestation of his moral scoliosis. He is covered in a fine orange paste, a desperate veneer masking the gray, clammy, countenance of a moldering corpse.
And the people… the God-fearing, the church-going, the hands-praying people, look at this babbling, orange vessel, and astonishingly proclaim: “Yes. Him. He is our champion.” Not so much admiration as an act of religious conviction… a leap of, what Mr. Bierce’s sarcastic dictionary might define as: “FAITH, n. The acceptance without evidence in the words of one who speaks without knowledge of things inexplicable.” It is the suspension of critical thought in favor of comforting delusion, the embrace of narrative that fills a void, regardless of its factual basis or internal consistency.
The human brain is funny about credulity. It needs reasons, rationalizations, even if they’re entirely bogus. The brain conjures prestige labels to slap onto zircon-encrusted baubles in order to justify worship. So, in this desperate search for legitimacy, the people dug up a relic from the annals of biblical history. They found Cyrus the Great. Cyrus! The Persian! And they told themselves, with remarkably straight faces, that this tangerine-hued Nero… was the new Cyrus. They called him a “flawed vessel,” which is precisely what you call a boat that has already sunk to the bottom of the sea.
Very well: “VIRTUE, n. In a king, that quality which keeps his subjects from sharpening their knives.” It is not necessarily about moral uprightness or inherent goodness, but about the practical efficacy of governance, the ability to maintain order and loyalty through action, not just rhetoric.
Cyrus II was a profoundly practical man, a shrewd statesman and a brilliant conqueror. His actions were dictated by strategic advantage and pragmatic necessity. Tolerance? It was not a deeply held philosophical conviction but a calculated policy. He observed the Jews moping by the river, exiled and dispossessed. Click-click-click went the imperial abacus, weighing the costs and benefits. He permitted them to return home. He didn’t smash idols or persecute local religions. Why? Because it was simply cheaper than cleaning up the inevitable riots and rebellions that religious intolerance would provoke. Mercy? A merciful conqueror, in Cyrus’s view, was one who spent less on garrisoning ruins, who avoided the costly and protracted business of subjugating a rebellious populace. Generosity? A king who hoards all the gold for himself, who starves his populace and his armies, soon finds his head in a basket, a grim lesson in the economics of power. Cyrus understood math, the cold, hard logic of imperial administration.
And now, our guy. The Cyrus of the Golden Commode, a man whose reign is marked by ostentation and vulgarity rather than strategic brilliance.
On Tolerance: Cyrus the Great managed a vast, multi-ethnic empire, understanding that stability required a degree of accommodation. Our modern Cyrus, however, manages a cable-news cycle, a perpetual loop of manufactured outrage. His entire machine runs on intolerance, a relentless jihad against phantom gremlins labeled “wokeness,” creating divisions rather than bridging them.
On Inclusivity: Cyrus the Great let diverse peoples in on the grift of empire, integrating them into its functional framework. Our Cyrus, conversely, wages a cultural war on letters… specifically D, E, and I (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)… and openly dreams of an America built solely of pale, northern European peoples. He welcomes an imagined homogeneity while demonizing actual diversity.
On Compassion: Where Cyrus the Great understood the practical value of a measured mercy, our guy’s philosophy can be succinctly summarized as: “Fuck the doomed.” There is no pretense of empathy, no concern for the less fortunate, only a brutal, unvarnished disdain.
On Wisdom: Cyrus the Great was a strategic genius, a master of statecraft. Our guy’s intellectual prowess, by his own proud admission, extends to being able to identify the difference between a camel and an elephant.
On Fortitude: Cyrus the Great was a formidable warrior and empire-builder. Our guy’s most celebrated display of “fortitude” was his aggressive and ultimately successful war against the Vietnam draft.
On Generosity: Cyrus the Great understood the strategic importance of a king’s generosity. Our guy’s much-vaunted “generosity” extended to giving billions to Argentina… a country, not coincidentally, where many unhappy Germans went for a long vacation in 1945 and conveniently forgot to go home. Astonishing Coincidence?
So, what is this comparison, this desperate attempt to link a modern figure with an ancient legend? It is not history… it is a pet-rock fad, a shabby attempt to pass off an empty metaphor as genuine good, to assign a false provenance to something entirely unworthy. It is a magical story for magic junkies, a comforting fable for those who have abandoned the pesky demands of reality for the soothing embrace of fantasy. It gives us a new definition, a diagnosis of a collective delusion… sound familiar?
Now, back to our Bierce-esque sarcastic dictionary: “CYRUS-COMPLEX, n. The political hallucination wherein one mistakes a bankrupt casino boss for a Persian philosopher-king.” It is the fond, almost childlike belief that a man who cannot manage a golf score without cheating can, in fact, be trusted with an empire… a testament to a complete divorce from logical reasoning. It is a bedtime story for those who, having consciously abandoned reason and critical thought, must now shop for their saviors not in the marketplace of ideas, but in the remainder bin of historical analogies, grasping at any discarded narrative, no matter how ill-fitting or absurd.
It is all very, very silly. And so on. The endless, circular dance of self-deception continues, with profound and often tragic consequences for the bewildered animals who crave a story, any story, to light their way.
And… there it is… warts and all.
I got a black bomb… It’s tickin’ away… Gonna take it out… …on the Blue Highway!
(A single spotlight hits an avatar, RONNIE HAYS, mid-60s, holding a worn acoustic guitar. He doesn’t play it. He just holds it like a shield or a piece of driftwood. He stares out, not at the audience, but through them.)
My pinkie toes. That’s what i remember about New Mexico. Not the Flagstaff sky, which was a shade of blue so deep i could’ve drifted upward into it forever. Not the train… a glorious old steam-belching dragon chuffing its way toward the biggest ditch on planet Earth. Nope… i remember my pinkie toes, both of them, singing soprano arias of pure, unadulterated pain inside a pair of waffle stompers that were just a whisper too narrow in the front. A purchasing error. A metaphor. I was trying to rise above the heat and the soul-choking smog of Albuquerque, to summit the Embudito Canyon Loop, but i was grounded by a millimeter of poor planning. C’est la. I turned back halfway up, defeated by footwear, then pointed Rocinante toward Georgia O’Keeffe’s ghost in Taos.
And like all of those “best laid plans”… a perfect day, ruined, setting me off on another journey altogether. You get those, sometimes. A gift. A trick. I was at Lake Wilson, back in Kansas. A limestone bowl of water so almost clear, like a dusty mirror on a rocky prairie. Not a breath of wind. The kind of day that makes you think the whole grand, chaotic carnival might just work out. And then the phone rang… a branch of the family tree just… fell to the grass… just like that… gone. The universe had provided a perfect day, and then, the bill. The HSoB tour was born right there, in the silence between the ringing and the news… an extended Bardo in motion.
Lake WilsonDusty MirrorRocky Prairie
And then, as if waking to a disjointed lucid dream, Cannery Row. Walking through the ghosts of Steinbeck’s worlds, smelling the salt and the history… beautiful. Then from the hand-held dream portal, i saw some new AI-generated video… something someone made with a sentence prompt. And soulless cartoon pop-stars with autotune larynxes, hitting all the right pitches on demand. Was this a dream, or were we building a world without flaws, without the shaky notes, without the happy accidents? A world of deus ex machina? A perfect, yet unrealized machine partnership? A place where my screaming pinkie toes would seem out of place.
What can we do? Here in the real(?) world… after the 2024 election, when the tectonic plates groaned and shifted rightward… a slow-motion drift that picked up steam with Bubba’s saxophone… and then poor Uncle Joe took to the debate stage like he was trying to remember where he’d left his tennis ball tipped walker… what do we do? I decided. I would be an anonymous troubadour… like Kwai-Chang Kane with a song list instead of Kung Fu. At worst, i’d languish in utter obscurity, singing to light posts and fire hydrants. At best, i’d become a gadfly on the rear end of a naked emperor’s pony. A tiny, buzzing annoyance for the forces of indecency.
Then came winter. The bomb cyclones and blizzards hammering the interior, but where was the Anonymous Troubadour? South Florida. All of January, February, half of March. I became a connoisseur of the Everglades, that “River of Grass.” Alligators sunning themselves like lazy, armored gods. The quiet hum of a billion insects. It was a primordial peace. Meanwhile, the forces of chaos were perfecting the art of “flooding the media zone.” A new outrage every hour, a new tweet to send half the country into a fit of cheering and the other half into a spiral of despair. The gasping death of democracy, playing out on a 6-inch screen with real life, ancient and unbothered, oozing by in a Florida swamp.
EvergladesSleepy GatorRiver of Grass
Then, Springtime in Foley, Alabama. A land of asphalt and every consumer convenience this roving malcontent could desire. Wide parking spaces. Good Wi-Fi. I almost stayed. But Mother Nature was cooking up her own brand of chaos. Springtime tornadoes, spinning up like God’s own potter’s wheel. I grew up believing this was a Kansas/Oklahoma thing. Now they were chasing me through the coastal South, as if to say, “You can’t escape the whirlwind, son. Not even here.”
On the way, i met a guy in a Louisiana dive bar who told me about Amos Moses, a local swamp-dweller who could allegedly dance with gators and heal the sick. A regular Cajun Jesus Christ. The New Apostolic Reformation had nothing on this guy. And while we were swapping local myths, the big, global myths were playing out in blood. The Holy Land, a place that’s anything but. Civilian casualties, famine, talk of ethnic cleansing and genocide. No easy answers, just the hard, cold reality of bellicose leaders discarding compassion like a soiled napkin. Even Israeli Jews were in the streets, screaming against their own government’s handling of the tragedy.
Amos MosesWhite Knuckle NightsLouisiana Bayou
We find our bliss where we can. A perfect song, a mineral bath. Oh, Sweet Golly Miss Molly, the mineral baths. Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Hot Springs, South Dakota. Sinking into that sulfur-scented heat, you understand that this isn’t indulgence; it’s healthcare. It’s sanity. Ancient Romans knew it. I was just catching up. And while i was soaking, trying to dissolve the knots in my soul, the ticker tape of modern U.S.A. life scrolled on. In the year of our lord, 2025, there would be over 300 mass shootings. Over 300 little holes punched in the fabric of the country, one for every day, it was getting harder to feel whole. A perfect day… then the bill. Maybe i should avoid consuming news for a while.
Turn the page, and the Appalachians… the rolling hills of the Virginias and Carolinas were beautiful and suffocating. But towns like Boone and Morgantown were so peak-and-holler infested, driving through them was like being on a roller coaster you can’t disembark. It gave me a strange kind of claustrophobia. And then perspective… the morning news from Ukraine. Atrocities that make the U.S.A.’s 300+ mass shootings look like kindergarten playground scuffles. It’s all a matter of scale.
Then Pennsylvania… Amish country. A different kind of rolling beauty, pastoral and profound. The horse-drawn buggies, the men’s beards, the ladies’ bonnets. It was like driving through a photograph from a hundred years ago. Strange and wonderful. And then, as if Stephen King had personally designed our itinerary, we landed in Horseheads, New York. A town named for the mountain of bleached horse skulls discovered by early settlers. They put the weird right there on the welcome mat. From Horseheads’ digital nomad-friendly library we planned several day trips. From the macabre to the hallowed… Woodstock and the Big Pink. We meandered through the forest and landed outside the house where The Band forged their sound. I just listened to the whispering pines. After that, to Hartford, to see Sam Clemens and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s next-door visitor’s centers, wrestling with the soul of America a century and a half ago. Some fights never end.
Sam ClemonsStowe Visiter CenterHorseheads Public Library, New York
Which leads us, of course, straight into the belly of the ailing beast: Washington D.C. The 250th birthday of the U.S. armed forces. The President wanted a parade, a big, gaudy show of military hardware down the Mall for his own birthday. In response, a “No Kings” protest was called. I went, expecting a worst case scenario, like Kent State, like Tiananmen Square. What did i find? Maybe a hundred people. Mostly old hippies, the very same tie-dyed specters Stephen Miller claims to be a clear and present danger to the republic. Lots of smoke. No fire. An insurrection of gray ponytails and Birkenstocks.
And the road goes on forever… stay tuned… much more to come.
(Ronnie Hays looks down at the guitar in his hands, as if noticing it for the first time. He strums a single, unresolved chord that hangs in the air, then begins to sing…)
I got a black bomb… It’s tickin’ away… I’m gonna take it out… On the Blue Highway.
So a wise man, or a man who was at least passing for wise, started talking about truth. And the first thing he did, the clever bastard, was admit that nobody has the first clue what it is. We’re all just monkeys with car keys, little fizzing bundles of electricity piloting meat-suits around the planet, and we haven’t even figured out what the fizz is. Consciousness? Human thought? We don’t know what’s running the projector, but good lord, the movie is colorful, brief, and loud.
And yet…
Out there in the great electronic shrieking festival… pow! slap! kick! BOOM! you’ve got no shortage of bloviators, of sidewalk saviors and cable news prophets with shellacked hair, their faces glowing in the 4k pixel bath, absolutely convinced they’ve got the universe on a leash. They are selling Truth like it’s a used car, a timeless, irrefutable, low-mileage beauty that can be yours for the low, low price of your own brain. And the loudest dealership on the whole cosmic car lot is, of course, religion. These fanatics, these apostolic holy rollers with their eyes spun back in their skulls, insist their particular brand of Truth is the only one that gets you to the bliss of heaven. Just have a little faith, they say. Which is a five-dollar word for blind credulity.
And so on…
Sometimes, you see, you have to do more than just believe. Sometimes you have to get up from the couch and move your feet. Take Vlad Dracul III. There was a man who put his convictions on a stick. A very long, sharp stick. He wasn’t playing around with faith and hope. He was a man of action, a walking thunderhead of revenge. Why? Was it because the Ottoman Turks read the wrong magic book? Nope. It was because his own father traded him and his brother like hockey cards to the Sultan, who was not a nice man. It was because while Vlad III was learning to hate in a Turkish dungeon, his father and brother were being tortured and murdered by his own people.
This sort of thing can change a boy’s outlook…
Vlad’s truth wasn’t a holy whisper in his ear; it was the hot, screaming fact of betrayal, and his answer was a field outside Târgoviște decorated with two thousand screaming, writhing, shish-kabobbed exclamation points aimed at a merciless sky.
That was his dark sermon… that was his truth…
Now, let’s rewind history to Simon the Zealot, a different cat altogether. For him, the truth was a revolutionary tinderbox just waiting for a match. He saw this Jesus fellow, this Nazarene miracle man, and his synapses started to crackle with visions of Roman eagles falling out of the sky. He saw the critical mass, the juice, and he wanted to turn the power of popularity into a revolutionary battle-cry. He was trying to shove a prophet shaped like a question mark into a political hole shaped like a sword. This, you might imagine, made the local authorities a little jumpy. While Simon was trying to crown a savior king, the Romans were sharpening their nails. Was Judas the real betrayer? Or was it the man who tried to turn a movement about turning the other cheek into a bar fight with an empire? As a wise old Chinaman is supposed to have said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” Simon may have changed his tactics, but his all too mortal king wound up in the same place as Vlad’s unfortunate enemies: pinned to a piece of wood, proving a point about the interaction of truth and power.
Undeniable truth? Not so fast. It’s a road, not a motel. Anyone who tells you they’ve checked in and unpacked is either running a con or they’re so lost they think the lobby is the entire universe. The best we can do is what that magnificent, gloomy German filmmaker suggests: you can actually stare into the void until misty clouds of undifferentiated nothingness take shape and stare back. Who knows? You might find something interesting in there. Mostly, you’ll just see yourself, your own egocentric story reflected in a million broken pieces. But if you can lose yourself, as the poet from Detroit once said, you might stumble over a shard of something real. Something inspiring. Just be wary the winds of power can short circuit your heartfelt illusions.
For now, until we actually begin to understand the wellspring of consciousness, could we please interrupt the merry-go-round of inherited cruelty, this endless cycle of pain passed down by people who were taught to be main characters in a story written by a mysterious, all-powerful Sky-CEO who actually cares to keep a running tab on every thought, every misdemeanor, every everything. The horror show starts when these people realize… and they usually do… that the Sky-CEO, in fact, isn’t watching and doesn’t care.
Anyway… what if we tried something else? A little compassion… a little kindness… a pinch of skepticism and doubt. After all, the points of light seen in the dark night are mostly distant clusters of billions of stars and their satellites. That the universe allows for individual micro-particles such as you, me, astrophysicists, theologians, filmmakers, schizophrenics, etc. a glimpse of itself is nothing short of miraculous. What we know (we’ve learned quite a lot over the last couple centuries) amounts to no more than a quark, on a barnacle, attached to a massive seagoing cargo barge. We’re as good as bats experiencing hearing loss, we’re constantly bumping into reality in the barely audible darkness.
But so what?
Don’t be afraid… Keep stumbling… We’ll see you there… Fishing for ecstatic truth… …in the gallery of the void.
So… here we are… in the Hays Public Library with a mission to tie the Oz parody in a bow in order to make room for the book project planned as a capstone to the Hot Springs or Busk tour. The relevant characters have been sketched… the basic outline drawn. So… i guess… without further adieu…
Audiovision: The Folly of Oz
We begin with a narrator. Picture the Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, smoking a characteristic cigarette. Behind him, a projection screen shows stylized, harsh-lined images of a yellow brick road winding through lush green fields. He addresses his audiovision audience thusly:
“The Yellow Brick Road, they called it. A path to salvation. Hah! In Oz, all roads lead to a single, glittering lie: Riviera City, where the Wizard, a paper-tiger wrapped in loud noise, holds court.”
The narrator continues, “And so, our pilgrims gather, driven by the oldest, most pathetic of human hungers: the desire for an easy fix. There’s J.R. Murgatroyd, the Scarecrow, a poor fool who’d traded his common sense for a bowl of good-time gravy. He clutched his straw-stuffed ears between which a brain should be. He yearns for an education, for the power to understand the rigged game of Oz.”
The audiovision director signals a switch to angle #2, The narrator flicks his cigarette’s ash, exhales a billowing cloud of blue smoke, looks directly into angle #2’s vision and says, “Beside J.R.,Milo Woodsman, the Tin Man, stood stiffly, a polished monument to unfeeling ambition. No heart, but a singular, cybernetic goal: to be more than flesh, to be a god in the cloud. A heart? Sentimentality! He wanted to be a cyborg, a machine of pure, cold efficiency.”
A glint in the distance as the sun rises behind shimmering Riviera City. The narrator continues, “Then, Delicate Donny Goldencalf, the Cowardly Lion. A beast of magnificent self-promotion, selling a magnificent lie. He desired a crown, a throne, a kingdom built on his own vapid image. He was the Emperor with no clothes, surrounded by sycophants who whispered, ‘Surely, this lack of character is a profound statement!’”
Presently, we hear a small dog’s bark in the distance as the narrator describes the final leg of this pilgrim’s stool, “And finally, Amelia Wolfe, the interloper from Kansas, a nurse, whose flying machine had done the world the small favor of flattening a minor Oz bureaucrat, the Wicked Witch of the West (WWW), they called her. Amelia was the unwilling participant, dragging her terrier on a frayed rope, utterly bewildered by the local legends.”
Then, from the top of the frame, a stylized puppet of Glinda the Good appears, her motions rigid and deliberate… Our narrator introduces her: “Enter Glinda the Good, Queen of the Quadlings and a master of the Persuasion Paradox. Forget your spells! Her magic was simple observation, a well-placed question, the quiet, surgical dismantling of loud, stupid arguments. She showed the pilgrims a vision in the poppy fields… a glorious battle, a hard road to the Wizard, who, she promised, held all the answers.”
And so, the setup… a real hero’s journey… a quest for truth.
But Glinda, our “Good” Witch, was engineering events and she conveniently omitted a few details. For one, Amelia Wolfe could have flown her sorry ass back to Kansas at any time. The red shoes were the key, a free ticket out of the entire mess. But Glinda needed a blunt instrument to achieve her ultimate aim, the death of the WWW, mid-level bureaucrat whose groveling to the Wizard, Oscar Ambrose, was a political liability. And who better to deliver that blow than an innocent outsider? And when the Scarecrow caught fire in the ensuing battle, Amelia, a nurse, in the process of putting out the fire, gets water on the Witch… an unfortunate coincidence, but a very tidy political assassination masquerading as a rescue mission… all engineered by Glinda.
And here is where we interrupt the narrator for a Morality Play Interjection: We see for want of a brain (Scarecrow) and the desire to help a friend (Amelia) can lead to the death of a clever operator’s inconvenient obstacle (WWW)? In Oz, good intentions are just another whammy-bar to jiggle.
So… then we cut to SCENE 2: The Wizard’s War Room…A dimly lit chamber where Oscar Ambrose, the Wizard, sits on a throne made of oversized, gilded holograph projection equipment, and Dorine of Omaha paces, her face a mask of permanent battle readiness.
Wizard Oscar speaks into a microphone, his voice echoing, distorted, and overloud. “They came for me! My opponents, armed with a morbid curiosity… a fetish, i tell you… for the personal! They paraded my dear friends and co-workers, my ‘victims,’ they said! They tried a high-tech lynching! A political assassination!”
Oscar pauses this Wizardly monolog to wipe his brow, dramatically, as Stan Diller, the Flying Monkey, creeps from behind the throne, whispers into the Wizard’s ear, then ducks away.
Oscar resumes his diatribe, his voice is suddenly flat, adopting Stan Diller’s twisted rhetoric, “The powers of the wizard… will not be questioned,” he declares pompously. “The personal… must never be mixed with the political! I am the victim here!”
Dorine of Omaha slams her fist on a small table. She wears a pin that says’: ‘DESTROY THE ENEMY.’, “The enemy,” she said. “They shamed me. They spoke of my personal vulnerability! But now, i have him! Oscar Ambrose! A fully reformed Orange Oompa Loompa!” Taking a deep breath, she bellows, “Together we will rise! Together, we will destroy them all! We are at war with the woke half of this wretched country, and we will win!”
Presently, Curtis Loki, ranking flying monkey and agent of chaos, enters, bowing low. He simps at the Wizard’s feet. “Exalted Wizard! I have invented a new doctrine! The Inherent Wizardly Prerogative! It states that whatever the Wizard does, by definition, is legal, necessary, and virtuous!”
The wizard nods vigorously, instantly adopting the new phrase.“Inherent Wizardly Prerogative! It has a good, loud ring! Loki, you’re a genius!” And as Loki was reveling in his plan coming together, Stephen K. Moros, the Winkie gatekeeper burst into the antechamber. Breaking Loki’s reverie, Moros began to shout incoherently about “Uniting the Quadlings” and the necessity of “all means necessary.” With this outburst, Oscar waved a dismissive hand.
“Too much! Too extreme, Moros! Out! I want chaos, yes, but controlled chaos. You’re making the quiet part too obnoxiously loud.” With that, Moros is escorted out and “Lindsey” O Boq of the Castleforce Guild enters bowing deeply to Dorine and then to Oscar. With a ghastly, insincere grin, he grovels at the Wizard and Dorine’s shoes. “Esteemed, magnificent leaders! My Guild, the Castleforce, is with you! Unquestionably! We support the current power. Whomever holds the big stick! We are advocates for… for power!” As he is prostrating himself, the Befuddled Witch of the East (BWE) represented by a puppet on strings glides into the room, head bowed so low it scrapes the floor.
“Oh, Great Wizard! Your every pronouncement is a diamond! Your every flick of the wrist, a symphony! I adore you! I worship your power! Your enemies are swine! I am nothing! A mere crawling servant!” And just as fast as this puppet appears, it glides back out of the room.
The narrator fades, full body, into view and briefly addresses the audiovision audience, “The machinery of power. Personal attacks become a shield. A lust for status becomes a political manifesto. And the sycophants… the Boqs and the BWE’s… they merely lubricate the machine.”
As the Wizard’s antechamber fades to black, The Scarecrow, Tin Man, Lion, and Amilia stand under a single, harsh spotlight.
J.R. Murgatroid, The Scarecrow, his voice, a plaintive wail complains, “They said Glinda was Good. She promised answers. But she sent me to a fire. I was meant to burn! And Amelia, she saved me. But to save me, she killed the WWW! I have no brain, but even i can see the algebra of it: my life for the Glinda’s convenience. The supposed good serves itself with my straw-filled body!”
Next, Milo Woodsman, the Tin Man, in a cold, metallic voice added, “Glinda presented a problem, and a solution that benefitted her. Oscar, the Wizard, simply reframes every corruption as a virtue. Amoral, efficient, both of them. One uses observation, the other uses noise. Neither cares for true justice. I seek efficiency, but this is merely a shell game of power. I still have no heart, but i believe i see how useful the idea of one is to those who wield power.”
Not to be forgotten, Delicate Donny Goldencalf, the Cowardly Lion, sobbing theatrically, puffs out his chest. “I want to be King. King of the forest! But every King in Oz, even the ‘Good’ one, must walk through the mud to get there. Glinda used a nurse! A nurse! Oscar used the personal low-blow as a stepping stone! It is all a show, a magnificent, terrifying show. Perhaps my lack of courage is simply the wisdom to see how dirty the crown truly is! But I still want it.”
Finally, Amelia Wolfe, the nurse, practical, exasperated spoke for all,“I am a nurse. I put out a fire. I saved a life. That’s my job. I didn’t intend to kill anyone. I don’t care about ‘Wizardly Prerogatives’ or ‘Persuasion Paradoxes.’ I just wanna go home. All i see is a frightened man on a loud throne, and a woman who uses people as pawns, and a political system built on deceit and noise. This Oz of yours is a sick place, and i can’t treat everyone for collective delusion! Where’s my flying machine?”
The spotlight on our pilgrims fades and the smoking narrator reappears among the surrounding darkness. Snuffing out his cigarette, he launches into an epilogue, “And there you have it… the journey continues; the Scarecrow is no closer to a brain; the Tin Man is no closer to his cybernetic godhood; the Lion is no closer to his crown; and the Nurse? She’s still stuck in the middle of a political disaster, simply because she acted on instinct. The good are not always good. The evil are not always evil. They’re all simply people, or figures, or tin, or straw, pursuing their own ambitions.” And with that, the narrator fades to black, and a panoramic shot of glittering Riviera City fades in.
And the moral of this Audiovision presentation, if you can call it that, is simple: In the end, it doesn’t matter if you are a Munchkin, a Monkey, a Nurse, or a Lion. If you stand in the way of power, or if you serve power too completely, you will be used, you will be discarded, or you will be extinguished. And the Wizard? He sits on his throne, protected by noise, protected by the same Quadlings, Gillikans, Winkies, Munchkins, and naturalized Oompa Loompas he abuses. He’s the master of the turnabout. But is he a symptom of Oz corruption, or the cause?
The panoramic shot of glittering Riviera City fades out and a single, large banner drops, bearing the stark motto: “THE POWER OF THE WIZARD… WILL NOT BE QUESTIONED!”
In the grand pantheon of Oz’s legal history, none… not the fabled Tin Man Cyborg nor the Third Goldencalf Lion… had ever ascended with the peculiar, almost manic gravitational pull of Wizard Oscar Ambrose. He was, by acclamation and political fiat, the wisest of Oz’s supreme jurists, a man sworn into office by Glinda the Good herself in a ceremony so drenched in faux-humility it bordered on the obscene. It was a spectacle of political triumph, a testament to the idea that you can, in fact, become the most celebrated arbiter of law in the land despite a childhood that read like the annotated memoirs of a sentient bruise.
Oscar was born into a family so poor it made other Oompa Loompas look like robber barons. His biological father, a man possessed of a profound and fatalistic wanderlust, had one day simply run off with the circus, taking with him a single, beverage thermos and the last shred of his dignity. His mother, a perpetually anxious woman of diminutive stature and profound despair, had subsequently crumbled under the Sisyphean pressure of being an orange woman, a role that was, in itself, a kind of oppressive agony. Young Oscar and his big sister were promptly dispatched to a foster home run by a man whose very name… Jack Ketch… was a synonym for “ragman.” He was, in a cruelty-rich land, a veritable paragon of it, and the children were subjected to a ceaseless, grinding abuse that left them with psychological scars shaped like handprints.
The world outside the foster home was no kinder. As a schoolboy, Oscar was bullied with a relentless, pathological glee for being “a little too orange”… a color-based bigotry so bizarre and yet so utterly common in Oz it was considered a conversational staple. The taunts, the shoves, the sheer, bone-deep loneliness of it all drove him to seek refuge in the Quadling Holy Order. He became an Acolyte Attendant, a kind of spiritual gofer, where the monks and nuns, for reasons entirely unrelated to charity or goodness, pushed him to strive for a kind of purified excellence. He found, in their rigid doctrine and ceaseless demands for perfection, a perfect incubator for a nascent “I’ll show them all” supervillain shoulder chip. He promised to become the very first Oompa Loompa priest.
But it was not to be. Even within the supposedly hallowed walls of the monastery, he was bullied, again for the color of his skin. His faith, a fragile thing held together with the spiritual equivalent of chewing gum and duct-tape, was crushed. He bailed, leaving behind a monastery and a God he no longer believed in, his shoulder chip now growing exponentially. The foster family, upon learning he would in fact not be the very first orange priest, exiled him with the casual cruelty of a bored farmer flicking a bug off his sleeve.
In a bizarre twist of fate… the kind of bureaucratic, affirmative action initiative so beloved by governments with a guilt complex… he was accepted into an all-Quadling private school. The bullying, a constant in his life, continued unabated, a new chorus of taunts about his skin color and his diminutive stature. But he endured. From there, he parlayed his academic prowess into a spot at Oz’s most prestigious academies of law.
Upon graduation, the big-money firms, populated by a parade of perfectly coiffed, perfectly insipid Quadling partners, rejected him. To “show them all,” he found a shorter, albeit less lucrative, path to eminence through the short line of minority hopefuls vying for powerful conservative top government posts. In the process, he came to hate these very initiatives and, more profoundly, to loathe himself for the possibility that regular Quadlings might regard him as a “welfare hire.” The thought, the gnawing, gut-wrenching possibility that they might not see him for the genius he was… that he got where he was merely because he was orange and short… was an insult so deep it became a personal mission.
And so, he set his sights on the Wizard’s office, not for the prescribed two-term maximum, but for a permanent… a lifetime appointment. His path was not without its bumps. Opponents, armed with a morbid curiosity and a penchant for the political low-blow, tried to derail his ascension by bringing some of his more peculiar personal predilections to light. They paraded his victims before the public, a gaggle of witnesses whose damning testimony was meant to destroy him. But he was a master of the turnabout. He painted himself the victim of a “high-tech lynching,” a political assassination attempt of the purest kind. It worked. “The personal,” he argued, “…must never be mixed with the political.”
And this is where his partner and intellectual north star, a woman by the name of Dorine of Omaha, emerges. Dorine, a paragon of Quadling conservative holy-warriordom, was the other half of this premier Oz power couple. On the surface, they appeared to be in lock-step with their political beliefs, but those in the know… outsiders who watched their moves with the meticulous fascination of birdwatchers… knew that she had indoctrinated him. She was the brain… he was, as a lifetime Oz supreme-jurist, the muscle, and this power couple was, in every sense of the word, at war with their political opposition.
ScarecrowGlinda the GoodDorine of OmahaBWETim ManDelicate Donny GoldencalfRiviera City
Dorine was brought up in the plain vanilla provincialism of a small Quadling town, an environment that provided her with the kind of privilege that only the vanilla bourgeoisie could truly understand. She was a “good girl”… no mead, no poppies, just good grades and a deep, abiding sense of superiority. She was, as she liked to say, a “late-life oops,” a child born to aging parents and raised among the “Jerkers,” a group of culture warriors who believed that “politics is war.” She was, in every way, a product of her environment, one who idolized the Wicked Witch of the West and her particular brand of female disempowerment. Dorine waged a quiet but fervent war against the female autonomy movement (FAM), convinced that a woman’s rightful place was in the kitchen, churning butter and producing perfect, obedient Quadlings. At age twelve, she was already writing letters to Oz newspapers, a harbinger of the ambition, hard work, and mission-driven focus that would come to define her.
But Riviera City, a teeming metropolis of chaos and moral ambiguity, was not the best place for “good” girls. The harassments began… petty, pointless cruelties that chipped away at her carefully constructed facade. She became an angry shrinking violet, a woman whose rage was in direct inverse proportion to her confidence and agency. And so, she did what so many lost souls in Oz do… she joined a “self-help” cult. But, as cults will often do, they began the “body shaming” therapy (sans clothing), and Dorine, a woman whose every movement was driven by a deep-seated revulsion of personal over-sharing, bailed.
Like the ram-headed Ronnie Hays, when Dorine was in, she was IN. Her bag, her one and only focus, was to “destroy the enemy,” especially those who shamed her in her time of personal vulnerability. She was, and is, at war with more than half of Oz’s eligible voters. And when she met Oscar, she knew he was the man of her dreams. A fully converted Oompa Loompa! This unique combination promised to raise her social stock in a BIG way.
The pairing was perfect… he was against the universal rights movement (URM), and she was against the female autonomy movement (FAM). They were a perfect team for sticking it to the counter-culture of their formative years. And her family, a group of people whose approval was more fickle than a summer wind, decided the orange guy was okay once his opposition to the URM became apparent.
When Oscar’s bid for lifetime supreme jurist was in jeopardy due to his deep and troubling sexual perversities, her advice was simple. “This is WAR.” Duh. The nominating committee had to pay. The Ambroses made a pact… they would deny, deny, deny, and lie, lie, lie, because the ends always justify the means. And when the gods are on your side, you always double down because your cause is righteous. They played the ultimate race card… a privilege, of course, reserved only for them. “The Judge” used every tool in the book and laughed all the way to the Wizard’s throne.
The power couple’s schtick was now down to a science. Oscar must pose “above” politics, a man of profound wisdom and stoic judgment. Dorine, meanwhile, gets out there and brays their shared politics with a jumbo bullhorn, her manic talking-points designed to discredit anyone who dares oppose Oscar in the realm of Ozland power. And of course, she denies any and all conflict of interest, because a conflict of interest, like a lie, is only a problem when the gods aren’t on your side. And the gods, in their world, were definitely on their side… now and forever.
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