Not from a Marvelous Universe
It’s a rather weird horror movie that we are in.
The tech bros and the bankers have funded a dystopian horror film that has a leading cast of Three Monsters from a universe which is decidedly not marvelous. We are only bit players in this film. You know, members of the horrified crowd fleeing as the Orange Monster stomps down the street, smashes through the brick wall of a school, sending kids screaming, bricks falling all around them.
The Muskrat slinks in behind the Orange Monster and grabs one of the female teachers. “You will bear my child!” The Muskrat then proceeds to rape her under the gaze of the Orange Monster, who laughs and says: “Elongate your member and pierce her pride. Women have no rights!”
Meanwhile, the Czar looks on from atop a tall building across the way. In a close-up we see his half open mouth, saliva dripping from sharpened teeth, his burning red eyes focused on an escaping child. He swoops down and in one fluid movement scoops up the terrified kid and bites off his head.
Too gory for you? It’s a horror movie. They are gory. The really gory part hasn’t started yet, but it’s coming. The French revolution had its Terror, Stalin had his Terror, Hitler had his night of the long knives. The Orange Monster and the Muskrat are just getting started. Their blood lust will begin shortly. Their rabid minions are out there waiting, guns loaded. Hundreds of them were recently released from prison. They are standing back and standing by. First the federal government must be taken apart and its workers purged, then come the politicians who are in opposition to these policies, and then any ordinary citizens who dare to resist.
When the command comes, the new storm troopers will be more than happy to begin the great purge.
Oh, I’m sorry. Does this sound like there is no hope and we are doomed to live and die under the tyranny of Three Monsters who will rule the world?
I haven’t mentioned the Emperor of China, have I?
Should he be regarded as Monster Number Four? Maybe. Probably. Somehow, though, it seems to me that the Emperor is following the precepts set down by Sun Tzu in The Art of War.
In the chapter on Stratagem, Sun Tzu says:
- Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.
- With his forces intact he will dispute the mastery of the Empire, and thus, without losing a man, his triumph will be complete. This is the method of attacking by stratagem.
The commentary on this section says: (4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.
The Emperor is waiting, letting the Three Monsters run amok among their own people, destroy the fabric of civil society, eliminate all coherent production capability, crash the economies of their realms and allow them space to render themselves incapable of a coherent response when the Emperor finally decides it’s time to absorb all the dysfunctional territories into the Greater Empire.
So the Emperor is a Monster, but he is a quiet and patient Monster who waits, waits, waits, like the kid in the jazz poem by Kenneth Patchen: The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon-colored Gloves
Excuse me? You would like me to provide some solutions?
I’ve watched enough of the old 50s horror sci-fi flicks to know that the solution is always one that comes from outside the box. Some clever kid, or scientist finds the one thing the monster craves and dangles it there like bait on a hook and the monster tries to grab it and boom, the monster is dead and the world is saved.
Who is going to bait the hook and poison the monster?
What do these monsters really want? Money, of course. Power. But what they really want is to write their names in the history books as The GOATs — Greatest Of All Time.
Nothing is more pleasing to the Orange Monster than seeing his name on things, on buildings, on the news, splashed across newspaper headlines. So, you want to defeat him? You want to wound him deeply and cause his poisonous rage to turn against himself? Eliminate his name from your information space. Refer to him as the Orange Monster, or The Dictator, or The Smelly One, or whatever other moniker you desire, but never, ever use his name. That will drive him crazy. Guaranteed.
What about the Muskrat? Obviously what he really, really wants is to father 100 children and become the first trillionaire in the history of the world.
Oh, don’t worry too much about him, there are already lots of people on the inside who hate him, especially Comrade Bannon. And Comrade Bannon is vengeful and violent. He will find a way to take his enemy down. It will be painful and it will be public and the unwashed minions of the MAGA movement will delight in the spectacle. So will we. However, the Muskrat monster himself is not the real problem, it’s all the data he is gathering that will, after his elimination, be under the control of — as I referred to them in my previous article — the New Management.
The Muskrat is useful right now. He likes to refer to himself as “tech support.” Once the data transfer is complete, his support will no longer be needed. The data is being packed into servers that belong to the New Management so that once the new algorithms are up and running, people can be sorted into groups of white or non-white, for us or against us, rich or poor, dangerous or passive.
AI is being developed by the big tech bros in order to facilitate analysis. When it is used to analyze medical information or information in physics or astronomy, it is a brilliantly helpful aide. When it is used to discover whether or not you belong to the resistance and should be liquidated, it’s not such a good and helpful aide — at least not for you and me.
The solution to that?
Among all the young hackers in the world is one (perhaps two, perhaps a collective) who will devise a data-eating virus that will cannibalize every bit in the system. It’s bound to happen. Since the digital world started to take shape during WW2, the enemy of the electron used to store data has been there all the time: other electrons and magnetic fields. Physics has expanded the game now with quantum computers that can carry out calculations at speeds never before imagined. But they are cumbersome and vulnerable to outside forces. Don’t keep them cold enough — they stop working. So all it takes is a massive power outage and sabotage of the backup systems and the super brain is dead.
There are plenty of external enemies already plotting how to do this. And there are probably a few graduate students working on the machines who could throw a spanner in the works as well if it became a moral choice.
Now what about the Czar.
The only way the Czar will ever quit is if he is forced to quit. He has already installed his family in various key positions of power. Whoever eliminates him will need to eliminate them as well. That’s not a wild assumption, it’s part of the traditional bratva mafia way of doing things. You don’t want some grandchild to grow up and come seeking revenge on you and your family 20 years later. Therefore you get rid of them all.
Right now he is fighting a war he knows he cannot actually win unless he gets help from the Orange Monster. He’s getting some help from him, but inside the Orange Monster’s fan club there are some who do not like what is going on and may — if we are lucky — be planning a palace coup.
Why?
Because power, as far as they are concerned, must remain in the hands of the United States. Allowing a foreigner — any foreigner — to take that power away is a mortal sin. There is a power elite in the United States, and they will not tolerate the loss of power. If he continues to allow the Czar to dominate, the Orange Monster is putting himself in mortal danger.
Personally? I’m surprised he has not yet been eliminated. It is quite clear that his cognitive functions are melting quickly. The Muskrat is doing most of the talking and the action, and everyone is acutely aware that the Muskrat is a foreigner, even if he is a white-supremacist neo-Nazi. At some point the “good ol’ boys” will get tired of him. I was hoping that the military might show some gumption and just round them all up and put them into the Superdome in New Orleans so that we can gloat while we watch them cower in fear on C-Span.
Relax, this horror movie has barely started. The Monsters are loose, and we know the world is in danger. But the gory part hasn’t arrived yet. There hasn’t been any actual blood and guts. It will come. Sooner rather than later, I bet. But it will come. And when it does, it will be interesting to see what Jane and Joe Public will do. Everyone has at least one gun. Will Jane and Joe rise up and go to war against the New Management and its team of little dictators, or will they support the Terror? You can bank on a large majority of Janes and Joes to just be the consumer sheeple they have been trained to be for the last 100 years by Edward Bernays and the propaganda machine.
I’m in the audience. You are in the audience. But the audience watching a movie in the Blob had to run for their lives.
Let’s hope that we don’t.