I’m no conspiracist but I do indulge occasionally in reading highly educated pundits make sense of the world through suspcious facts that come together nicely.
I thought I’d take a stab at it myself, since it’s the kind of scary fun that we all love during this Halloween and Election Season and the fact is — with the current administration, anything truly is possible. Note these are only fictional hyper-thoughts about the short-term future of the world and are not gleaned from science, pseudo-science, news headlines or overly caffeinated beverages. Here goes:
- If Kerry is elected, the administration will allow a nuclear device or series of very large, indefinable explosions to go off in a small city in the United States. This will cause the Government to suspend the transfer of power and martial law will go into effect. Bush will stay in office for a long period of time while the country decides what to do.
- If Bush is elected, the Government will find that Iran has built up to ten nuclear warheads, all of which could be readied against Western allies. With a large number of troops already in and around Iraq, a memo will be publicly leaked that calls for plans to invade Iran in early 2005. A draft will soon become necessary and Congress will authorize it. Bush, though he stated there will be no draft, will have his politically dry hands tied and young men and women will be called upon to fight in the hundreds of thousands in the Middle East.
- After Bush is elected, the stock market will take a precipitous fall in February, sending the economy into a deep recession. The twin causes are the European, Asian, and Saudi pull-out of investments in the United States and the decline in profits being taken by American companies who no longer sense their privilege in world markets. It will make the crash of 2000 look like a cough. The new Bush administration will need to lay out a massive plan for saving the U.S. which will include reforming four-year presidential limits, collapsing domestic and foreign intelligence agencies, and expanding Federal work programs while deporting illegal foreigners to save American jobs.
- If Kerry is elected, a huge cyber-attack will be set off in early 2005, propagated by Texan Republicans through back-channel Russian computer systems. The attack, which could be either a trojan horse, virus, or something entirely new, would cripple U.S. government and business connections, supply chains, and communications and send the economy into a spiral. The Internet could no longer at all be relied upon, emails would be confiscated by the government, and online privacy will no longer be a right. Telephony and information technology generally will become artifacts of the past and the U.S.P.S. will need to govern (paper) communications. After four disastrous economic years, in 2008 Arnold Schwarzenegger will be elected to the highest office to tame the electronic wolves.
No “t” in Schwarzenegger; that’s the only error I noticed.
Thanks, Hank.
Ackkk!! Where’d you come up with those ideas – have you been visiting suburban Waczjob, N.Y. recently?
In actuality, your theories are so terrifying that I can’t help but think you researched them — ‘Nucular’ warheads? Oy. ‘Suspension of Democratic processes’? Oy. Cyber-attack? Oy. Not even Democrats.com, Buzzflash.com or OctoberSurprise.org have managed to come up with any of the paranoias you’ve listed.
Uhhh… lay off the crack, or talk to your physician about upping your dose of mood-altering drugs (Xanax,Prozac, Valium, Restoril, etc.). Your concerns may be well-founded, but YOU *don’t* have to live with them or disseminate them into the internet.
Then again, you and the family could probably get some easy jobs teaching English in China, if you want. The pay’s not high, but the U.S. won’t continue to exist in any recognizable form, if Dubya is re-elected.
‘Brain Drain’ won’t even begin to describe the results. How many people – besides Jim Jones – are willing to live beneath State-sponsored Evangelical Christianity? … Besides Rev. Moon …?
Conspiracy theories are inherently unfair and ugly. I realize that, in creating these ridiculous fictions, no one is really served politically or socially. But I do believe in fiction and the possibility that the imagination can control our destiny. To that effect, conspiracy theories allow us to imagine more greatly (and perhap more expansively) just so long as we don’t apply them to our daily behaviors.
Finally, I think the present administration, with its hand on secrecy and information containment, as led to conspiracy getting out of control and they really have no one to blame but themselves for asinine posts, like this one, on weblogs and in the media.
Oh yeah – you just finished reading ‘Checkpoint’, so I guess I can see where you’re coming from on this one.
I just finished talking with a friend in W. Massachusetts who’s convinced that we’re going to see the sequel to the litigation frenzy that was November-January 2000. Very sad indeed.
I’m still vibrating from the prardigm-shift that was China. The Great American ‘Lifestyle Bubble’ is but so much floss – we really need too get over our petty partisan harping, because this Manifest Destiny sh*t is going to be the end of us. The Bushies don’t believe in a ‘Reality-Based’ thinking – guess what? The Chinese nad much of the rest of the world don’t believe in the Bushes, the two-car garage, the 2.5 kids or private property as we understand it.
I tried to watch ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’ the other night, and I just had to turn it off, because it was just sooo wrong – I found it impossible to suspend my disbelief in that American-ified fantasy of a future civilization – a future unmarked by root ideological conflicts and a seamless extrapolation of a Western, liberal mindset.
I think that that particular American ‘future’ has already been eclipsed. Next month’s election will only determine how fast and how we far we fall after the setbacks of the past four years.
Maybe I just need to self-publish my travelogue on my own site – NOT that that would be any guarantee of anybody else acually *reading* it…
Someday they are going to put a dog in outer space.