By Guest Ranter
Rev. Windsor G. Rage
Okay, so it's 2000 and I don't have any of it!! Where's the flying car that can go underwater? I need it to visit the oceanic and aerial cities that don't exist either. Where's my death ray? If the Y2K thing had made the lights go out I would have had to defend my home with an ordinary gun! Fuck that!! If the lights go out because the badly programmed computers are revolting, I'll need a phaser rifle!! And after I blow the mutant looters to smithereens, I'll want my robot maid to sweep up the little piles of ash and put them in the matter converter!! Oh yeah, I don't have a robot maid. She's in hiding with the holovision, my personal Von Neuman machines, my nanobots, and the two way radio implanted in my brain. Did I mention that the money we've spent and will spend on the Star Wars and smart weapons could buy us most of these things?
January 1st, 2000, has come and gone and the future hasn't come yet. The last 50 years have seen hundreds of above ground nuclear tests and I have yet to see a single giant monster. The aliens haven't invaded. In fact, I have yet to meet a real alien or even see one on TV. Why isn't there a crazed computer tormenting poor Dave somewhere out beyond the orbit of Jupiter?
Well, either the government is hiding the aliens or we're too stupid to get their attention - probably because our gene pool is filled with people who believe that the government is hiding aliens. Either way, we're screwed. And why isn't the crazed computer locking Dave out of the ship? Probably because our criminally short-sighted government won't spend the money to make sure our stupid little primitive probe can make orbit around Mars!!
Oh yeah, and why haven't I been able to take my family to the Lunar Hilton or buy my daughter a personal anti-gravity belt?? Of course, there's no wide-spread solar energy to power the damn thing either. Oh yeah, and did I mention what primitive disease my mother died of last year? Where's the goddamn cure for fucking cancer? Oops, forgot! We traded that for the cure for Communism. Cure for AIDS? The Stealth Bomber - or whatever. Of course, before we could get anywhere with that stuff, we need some knowledge pills to turn ten thousand high school graduates into Ph.D.s so they can start researching these problems.
Speaking of the Stealth Bomber, am I the only one who's sick of hearing about these flyovers by useless weapon systems? They're fun to watch, but c'mon... get a life!!
And knowledge pills? No. We probably couldn't have traded the whole defense budget for a single one of the things, but they were supposed to be part of the future and they aren't here and I feel so damn betrayed I want to kill someone!!
Where's the benevolent one world government, the end to poverty and the end to prejudice? Where are all the rational people who live according to high ideals in mile high cities of crystal that rise from clean land into clean air and overlook clean oceans?
I don't know, but there are people in Idaho and Montana who stock buried school buses with automatic weapons and food, who have feared this "one world" stuff for years. The difference between them and their neightbors is only a matter of degree!! Sometimes I weep at the thought of what the human's racial inability to think has wrought!! Glad I'm not one of them!!
But as I walk down the streets I see thousands of hung over, precancerous Jew hating bastards and starving Zombies on the street sucking the air out of ground bound pollution mobiles while believing every lie our dirty, stinking greed masters tell them!!
Which leads me to the hard question? Has the promise of the future been killed by us, the Americans? After all, we're the descendants of criminals, religious fanatics and folks who had a get rich quick scheme that involved heading for The New World and enslaving Africans. Yes, we probably have killed the future, but had we not done it, there would have been plenty of Nazis or Stalinists to do the job. This was not a happy century and I am already not missing it.
But there are people in the world who are not American, Stalinists, or Nazis. Maybe, just maybe, there are people elsewhere who would have done the whole future a little differently. If you watched the ABC on December 31st, what you saw from other countries was remarkable. Significant, historically oriented celebrations worldwide, many with peace prayers or rituals derived from indigenous religions. Think about what you saw; the old Australian man with the digeridoo, the chorus of prayers in Bethlehem, the young boy and the grandfather taking the torch of peace out to sea in the Pacific Islands, the Chinese interpretive dance that showed the process of evolution, and compare it with what we saw at home; Five million people in Times Square watching MTV and are we gonna fucking PAR-DEE!!! And their goddamn mayor is gloating on the tube: We stuck plungers up the assholes of every lowlife third world creep in this goddamn city, now the teenagers of America can get fucking down and watch MTV and PAR-DEE!!!!!
PAR-DEE!! PAR-DEE!!!! Yeah, lets party. Lets party with Elton John and Barry Manilow, Billy Joel and Aerosmith, lets party with the lobotomized guys and gals whom the conspiracy calls to entertain us at these events, the pale and white people who find it artistically impossible to challenge us at all. Does anyone remember the old Billy Joel, the one who sang the song that went:
They sent a carrier out from Norfolk,
To pick the Yankees up for free...
They said the Queens could stay,
They blew the Bronx away,
And sank Manhattan out at SeaNew Years Eve of the new millenium would have been the perfect moment to play that song... but they removed old Billy's balls long ago, and replaced the brain that created darkly witty lyrics with some "healthy, pink, normal gray matter" and sent the resulting limp dicked thing back to song writing school.
But so what, I mean, hey as long as we got Barry Manilow and the fucking glowing ball in Times Square, we don't need Clavius Base, we don't need clean air or death rays or giant monsters or a brilliant song about the end times and hey, we got to see and hear Streisand live for a whole minute and follow it up with the Stealth Bomber over the Rose Parade the next day, so what the fuck do we want with a goddamn cure for cancer?
You call this a future? I'll tell you about my perfect 1999 New Years Eve, the one that would have been possible if we'd had our priorties straight:
We've flown up to the zero gravity hotel the day before. After an evening of low G ballet and nuclear fireworks we go back to our suite. We spend the time between eleven and midnight making love while floating next to the giant picture window. I watch her moaning in ecstacy against the backdrop of the lovely blue green planet below... We have no worries about AIDs or venereal diseases because good vacines are available for all of these treatable illneses. While still in the throes of our bliss filled mutual orgasm we get to watch the Xist warships arrive. They don't blow up the earth, because we've created an excellent place to live. Instead the admiral of the Xist fleet extends the tentacle of Galactic unity to the paradise planet we've created. "Welcome home," she says.
But as things stand now, the Xist fleet will probably blow our paltry, polluted, human infested planet to rubble after harvesting the pinks and selling their souls to the highest bidder. They'll rescue the good stock, put us in another pasture for later consumption and go on to the next farm. Talk about torturing pinks? The worst torture of all will be knowing that the whole damn thing could have been ours. We could have had it all.
At least I can still make art.
At least I've paid my thirty dollars and I can get away from you damn bozos.
Beam me up, "Bob."
Send Comments to Boddhisatva Troutwaxer (tungtung@pacbell.net)