by Warren Longwell

Created on: January 25, 2010

Looking back, it seems that nobody saw the end coming in the way that it actually happened. Armageddon was supposed to be the final apocalyptic battle between good and evil, playing out like World War Two with Satan in the role of Hitler and Jesus in the role of Ike Eisenhower. The problem was that good and evil were concepts that had become increasingly hard to recognize and define, so that when Armageddon finally played itself out, the evil wasn’t to be found in any kind of Satanic icon, and Jesus was certainly no Ike Eisenhower.

When December 12, 2012 finally arrived (yes, the Mayans had called it correctly), life in America was so complex that people couldn’t even do the basics without institutional support. It started at birth. Babies (half of whom were born out of wedlock) were torn from their mothers and stashed in soulless Munchkin warehouses euphemistically called, “day care centers.” Even those babies with fathers were subjected to the fate of “day care” lest their inconvenient little daytime lives might interfere with total feminine fulfillment. American’s basic nutrition came to them like rat feed funneled into a maze— cascading down imperfectly-regulated, convoluted agra-production chains to be piled high on their ample plates by competing fat-glutting smorgasbords. American’s very procreation was now scrutinized and dramatized and publicized and manipulated and pharmaceutically enhanced against a backdrop of debate about whether two sexes might be one too many. Daily individual health was maintained with miraculous tiny tablets supplied by pharmaceutical researchers, castigated for their unmitigated gall and audacity to charge money for these live saving miracles. Half of Americans were too fat to trek, so they moved from place to place in SUV’s and airplanes, and then they screamed to the high heavens when their conveyances occasionally rolled over or fell from the sky. Americans wanted to be safe. They needed to be safe. They demanded to be safe. Just as long as it was someone else’s job to make them safe. And those fifty-odd-percent of the people in the government who weren’t totally incompetent were expected to baby-sit all this mess. A sixth of the planet wanted America to just disappear from the face of the earth, and Americans wondered if that was gonna cut into their shopping.

Backing up this complex dysfunctional madness was the U.S. Military, with more armament than

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>