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Our editorial, "Slouching Toward Bedlam," judges Obama's first year in office.
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The Cassandra Causality looks at a the people who tell us unwelcome truths.
Wars, Famines & Pestilences examines the very idea of what a war is. Or a famine. Or a pestilence.
With Signs & Portents of Armageddon, you can't say you weren't warned.
Preparing for Armageddon can be rough -- but it might save your life!
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Chapter 9: A Patient Darkness Outside, the view of the Del Mar-Pasadena Stratum from thirty stories up: dirty skyscrapers, staggered in alternating shades of gray, a grid-work of concrete walls that pretended at calm order. The surfaces of the buildings crawling with ads. It felt, to Goldstein, not so much like a vantage point outward into the world at large, but rather like being claustrophobed in a small room with no floor or ceiling. Nothing out there but falling small.
He pulled a cig and struck it on his shoulder, sucked a good half inch of it down, and blew smoke at the window. The smoke spread across the glass surface, a vertical pool of gray luminescence in the sunlight. At the end of the city grid on the horizon stood a kilometers-high Chuck Christ, the afternoon sun His halo against a sky flecked with orbital billboards. YOUR OBEDIENCE, He was saying, IS OUR STRENGTH. Hands as big as moons, outstretched, dripping meteors of blood into the cityscape. Goldstein grunted. Just my luck, he thought, the un1verse would let through all the non-intrusive, benign crap. He grimaced. Must be Sunday.
Chapter 8: Backflash The mall was a still, almost meditative place for him; other than the small sounds of people walking in large spaces and the occasional shout, it was quiet. Quieter than outside. Quieter than his apartment. It was a cathedral space, with broad, open angles of glass and metal bigger than a human mind. It was awe-inspiring that such a huge space held nothing. Of course, he knew this was just his lack of perception -- for everyone else the towering spaces and balcony-encircled shafts were filled with holographic video and dancing signage, animated vegetables, animals, babies; no doubt in those great spaces bright hauntings taunted and begged. And noise. Music, admonitions, entreaties, directions, words focused into blasts of pure sound designed to loosen purse-strings.
But not for him.
Chapter 7: Scars & Angel Wings A British expedition found it in 1923, atop a steep and jagged temple, encapsulated in jungle, in the Yucatan. At that time, it was a black stone disk, two meters in diameter. A calendar. Bas reliefs carved around the black mirror of the top edge showed the parade of time in hunched animals and screaming faces, stars and planets and serpents flowing ever forward. It was accurate to 50,000 years. The size of the flawless obsidian, the savage artistry with which it was wrought were more than enough to signal a momentous find -- but this was no ordinary calendar. It was also a sacrificial altar. A shallow, oblong blood-runnel cut across the center. It was there that the autocratic priests of the winged serpent gouged out the hearts of prisoners and princesses alike, tearing loose their souls with daggers of volcanic glass whose edges were only a single molecule thick. God's work, all. They let the blood pool beneath the jittery corpse, to scoop up handfuls and slick back their long braids, let it dribble thick and hot down their sloped foreheads, framing their sidereal eyes in crimson, sticking to their lips and dripping reluctantly off their chins.
Chapter 6: PR1Σ$+ The dumbot opened a window inside his own window, showing the puzzle box. The puzzle box opened, revealing yet another window. Windows within windows within windows. The call was blue. Voice only, no vid.
Chapter 5: Fierce Orbits Shakti lay prone on the pitching deck, her mother-form pleasantly soft, her ankles crossed. Before her she had opened a portal through the bottom of the data barge; she trailed the fingers of one hand in the static of The Middle. The touch brought whole worlds flashing through her. She saw everything. Worship, engineering, flesh and fists.
Chapter 4: Dead Playboys Chazz was on his knees, giving the gretch what it wanted, taking what he needed. He held its hips and rode it, stuffing its noisy face into the pillow with each thrust. The view was unambiguously supreme.
Chapter 3: Tabula Rasa On the TV, nothing but flesh and flesh and rhythm. Wet sounds and curves and open mouths. It was not nearly as narcotic as cartoons, but it would do. Porn filled his empty head, keeping his few memories neatly compressed.
Chapter 2: Blood Sneeze The last truck landed, disgorged four anxious godcops. Goodkind called them over via laser. They huddled, snapping their visors up for face time, smoldering cigs pinched delicately in little servo arms.
Chapter 1: Screams Like Meat Shakti was riding her favorite body. Around her, the glassware and voices of the patio bar compressed into a confusing mush of single-channel, low-kilohertz noise. She always rode with full tactile and kinesthetic feeds; with the spine turned all the way up, sound and vision suffered. Pleasure was a pig for bandwidth.
Prologue: God's Dogs I will kill everything that eats children.
Animals, people, ideas.
Things from the stars.
I ask but one thing of you, cosmos: let me be their suffering.
Stephen W. Potts / Zone of Silence Allison was in the middle of a message to Ryan when her phone stopped working. She had just thumbed in "b/c don't u just h8 it" when the tiny screen went completely black.
She tried to remember if she had heard the beeping that meant the battery was low on charge. Maybe she had been so engrossed in her texting that she had missed it. It was the reason she had missed her bus as she messaged Courtney from the girls' room about getting together that evening for homework and Beverly Hills 90210. You would think that Courtney, who had been on the bus in front of their high school, would have texted something about its leaving.
Allison looked up from her phone and discovered a suburban street in a neighborhood that was much like hers but not hers. She recalled dreams like this in which she turned a corner near home, only to find herself somewhere she had never seen before. She had not wanted to phone her mother for a ride and get chewed out for missing the bus; she had figured the walk home would take less than an hour. Now, however, calling her mother seemed like the next best thing to do. She held her phone up and pressed the power button once, twice, then more firmly a third time. Nothing happened.
Harold Jaffe / Warr Games Night after night throughout the wrecked city contingents of US troops in cartoon new-age uniforms hunt for hidden roadside bombs.
On a recent night, a unit from Company B of the Fifth Engineering Battalion, out of Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., met in a darkened tent to prepare for their road-clearing mission in a 27-foot armored vehicle called the Cowpoke.
At the end of their meeting, Staff Sgt. Jessie McGah, 31, of Greenville Arkansas, led his team in prayer . . .
Out on what passes for a road, crawling along at five miles per hour, the unit peer through blast-resistant glass windows, using giant floodlights and a remotely operated steel arm to help detect any telltale disturbance in the pavement or median below that would reveal a buried bomb.
To accomplish their mission, the engineers, or sappers, try to get into the enemy's mind.
William Terry / Affection Interchange Program Just the strange blue gray color of the affection interchange building is enough to make you feel alone.... The outline of the building is so unfriendly that sometimes I'm amazed that I don't get cut into organic ribbons just walking through the doorway. It's like a blender with a doorknob. This is my third time to apply for the love stamps program. If by some miracle they accept me I will be able to receive a federally funded amount of government approved affection from a person matching my demographic profile. Fluorescent shadow boxes hug every corner of a linoleum hallway as I escape a near death entrance though the slice of the revolving door.
Two bright red signs illuminate from opposite ends of the hallway. The hallway splits into two long lines. The longest line belongs invariably to the sex interchange program applicants. Mostly males, 25-35, middle class, blue collar, lonely, distraught, and divorced perhaps. Alimony blues and child payment stories of the single life beat. On the other end are the applicants for the affection interchange. Scanning the line I see that it is mostly women. Shy, tragic looking, occasionally Goth, clutching band-labeled purses, with rectangular outlines of iPods in the back pockets of the tight fitting designer jeans. A few guys too. Mostly emo types. The occasional obviously married white picket SUV-driving man trying to find a pathway out of his marriage that won't look too bad on divorce forms.
Juventino Manzano / Vestige to Visage The first time I saw Her I was 15 and it was at a deal my papa took me to in southern Nuevo Leon in order to introduce me officially to the mechanics of the family business. This wasn't just some "deal," this was a big deal; my papa was buying tons of marijuana and we were going to inspect and approve the transaction which his regional patron had set up. My papa always carried a nickel plated Colt Combat Commander in .38 super, shiny as the moon seen through a hand lens. It had, until before this deal, silver cachas or grips, but now was decked out in ivory grips with Her carved in bas relief, wielding scythe and wearing Her cassock get up -- a gift from a connection in Michoacán. Everything was normal -- just another day hanging with my papa even if it seemed unusual to be taken to a major deal. It was life. The sun was high, the mountain woods closed in around us, and the air smelled of dried cannabis.
Suddenly I could see us, the men with us, and the men from the other cartel all appearing as Her, but in different vestments -- cowboy boots and hats, Levi's and shirts with fancy embroidery. My handsome papa, neatly trimmed black goatee, his brown eyes hiding layers he'd saved only for himself, his shirt with the marijuana leaves embroidered around the buttons open throated, anchor Christ necklace on his curly haired chest; Colt tucked into his belt -- only the grips with Her visible. As we toured the tonnage, I felt Her gaze on me from all the eyes around me -- all the macho narcos fingering AK-47s and Colts, their gold marijuana leaf necklaces, customized trucks parked idling, dual exhaust grumbling behind the shipment. It was a moment of revelation being able to see through Her eyes -- understanding we were all as able as Her to wield the scythe without a second thought, reduced to reflex-ruthless. I remember it stronger than my first orgasm given to me by Angel in his pick-up truck -- him on the floor between my legs, tongue tapping a door I had not known existed -- crying out "Epiphany" and "Angel" -- a pleasant, perfect, continuous memory.
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky / A Beetle in an Anthill By ten o'clock, the marching order settles completely. We're walking the middle of the street, Schekn is ahead on the axis of the route, I am behind and off to the left. The initial idea - keeping close to walls - had to be abandoned, since the sidewalks are filled with peeled-off pieces of drywall, broken bricks, shards of glass, rusty metal roofing, not to mention that twice already, crumbling ledges fell down almost on our heads without any discernible reason.
The weather is not changing; the sky is still cloudy, damp warm wind is blowing in gusts, flinging around assorted garbage, rippling stinking water standing still in black puddles. The hordes of mosquitoes assail, dissipate, and assail again. Waves of mosquitoes. Tornadoes of mosquitoes.
Lots of rats around. I have no idea what they eat in this stone desert. Snakes, maybe? Lots of snakes around, too, especially close to manholes, where they bunch together into tangled wriggling lumps. I have no idea what snakes eat here, either. Rats, maybe?
The city, clearly, has been abandoned a long time ago. The man we saw at the outskirts was obviously mentally unsound and wandered in by chance.
Editorial / Slouching Toward Bedlam In short, what has come to be called "conservatism" has de-coupled itself almost completely from the reality-based world. The magical thinking that dictates you can make something true just by believing it and repeating it -- e.g., "We not only know Hussein has weapons of mass destruction; we know where they are," or "We can slash taxes and balance the budget," or "There is no global warming," or "Obama is a Kenyan communist" -- has saturated the mind of the Right like syphilis.
Editorial / The Guns of August This August we watched angry gangs invade town hall meetings with torches and pitchforks -- actually, worse, surround them with assault weapons and pictures of Obama as Hitler. Democratic congressmen were hanged in effigy. The President was accused of planning to impose a Nazi-Communist-Satanist death program aimed at killing off seniors, veterans, unborn children, Republicans, and Trig Palin. He was accused of being foreign-born and thus not actually president, suggesting his plot against America was an alien plot.
Republican leaders of states like Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina threatened to secede -- creating the deliciously ironic prospect of Lincoln's party starting another Civil War -- while many in their constituencies howled for insurrection, threatening to water the tree of liberty with the blood of democratically elected public servants. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.
And the focus of this madness on the Right? The initiative to improve the nation's health care.
Editorial / The New Minority We are now six months into the Obama presidency, and the honeymoon is over. Fortunately, we are still a long ways from marriage counseling.
Many of the President's supporters are less than happy that more change hasn't happened faster, or that this administration refuses to investigate the crimes of the last one, or that it has accepted compromises. If Democratic voters and their ideological allies haven't gotten everything they want so far, the Republicans and their fellows on the Right have gotten much that they don't want. Still, my answer to both sides is -- and shall remain -- no matter what happens, no one could suck as badly as that last guy. The good news is that we really hit bottom in the first eight years of this century. Every time the Republican Party appears to have scraped bottom, however, they manage to find a new bottom.
Editorial / The Last Christmas Carol It was the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring except W. The single frosty window in the relatively modest room showed only darkness, though outside Camp David was covered in snow. Inside, settled on the sofa before the television and fireplace, W. felt cozy in his presidential pajamas and robe. He cradled a bowl of pretzels in his lap, desultorily munching one even though the taste of the turkey dinner he had eaten hours ago lingered on in the occasional belch. Habitually he would have been long in bed by this time, but after lying on his presidential pillow for half an hour, he had found himself oddly restless and had risen again. Perhaps he had eaten too much. Perhaps the awareness that this was his last Christmas in office -- his last month, in fact -- had taken roost in his mind, which was normally undisturbed by thought. In any case, now he stared at a repeat of some Christmas special with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the sound turned down, while fragments of pretzel crunched in his head.
Editorial / Obamarama Ever since the Supreme Court elected George W. Bush as 43rd president in the last year of the last millenium, a host of true believers have proclaimed the Coming of the End Times. Bush the Burning would bring on the Final Battle and the Final Judgment, and the faithful were gaga with the certainty that they would experience Rapture and Christ's return in their lifetimes. The Bush League did not discourage such speculations, and indeed Karl Rove figured the faith of the "nuts," as he called them, into his electioneering strategies.
Well, they got their Armageddon on 4 November 2008, only the rest of us got the Rapture.
Having laid waste the land and its budget, having fucked things so badly that the Lord Himself would have to descend -- deus ex machina -- with a divine rape kit, the Bush League got busted. And a miracle happened . . .
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