The Weekly Screed (#760)

“… A new nation, conceived in lunacy…”
by David Benjamin

“There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light.
She went out one day,
In a relative way,
And returned the previous night.”
                                            — Reginald Buller

MADISON, Wis. — Sometime last year, the Day of the Tachyon dawned. There is no twilight in the offing.

Sci-fi enthusiasts know about tachyons through the writings of James Blish and Isaac Asimov, but the concept derives from a German physicist named Arnold Sommerfeld, who first posed the possibility of a parallel universe overlaid on our own visible, tangible reality. Sommerfeld started out with the fact that the limit of human perception is the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. His theory, later refined and given the name “tachyon,” was the postulation of particles whose speed is always greater than the speed of light. A tachyon world moves too fast to see, feel or perceive in any sense. Yet it would exist in the same space as our own slow-motion, light-trapped universe — there but not there, real but unreal. Hyper-real. Surreal.

In American politics, we have attained — well, some of us — tachyonization. We’ve enlisted enough civic tachyons to compose a new nation, conceived in solipsism and dedicated to the proposition that all men were born yesterday. Tachyonites populate a parallel republic — both in our midst and beyond our rational comprehension (or theirs) — that might well be called the United States of Alternate Reality (USAR). Their standard-bearer is the casino mogul from Queens. But their purest apotheosis and patron saint is Mrs. Mary Lou Bruner of Mineola, Texas.

After winning a first-round Republican run-off, Mary Lou is on the brink of joining the powerful Texas State Board of Education — which influences textbook choices for virtually every school in the erstwhile United States. Among her stated positions, Mary Lou has said that the death of President John F. Kennedy was a Democratic Party plot, engineered, of course, by JFK’s successor, Lyndon Johnson.

It would be against the USAR’s anti-regulatory faith to have a constitution. But if it did, Article One would dwell in exhaustive and paranoid detail on the tragedy of JFK — otherwise known as the Original Conspiracy.

Among the self-contradictory truths jammed into Article One would be the long roster of evil plotters who joined together, or worked independently, or operated at cross purposes, to kill JFK. A partial list would include, in no coherent order, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the Mafia, Fidel Castro and the Commies, Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters, UNICEF, the Trilateral Commission, Prescott Bush and the Carlyle Group, the Freemasons, the Elders of Zion, the Vatican, the NAACP, the Democratic Farm Labor Party of Minnesota, Earl Warren, Huntley and Brinkley, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Dr. Spock, the Screen Actors Guild, the PTA and the Rotary Club, and both of JFK’s brothers under the diabolical spell of Ethel Kennedy.

But back to Mary Lou, who believes devoutly that Barack Obama is a drug-addled Kenya-born radical-Muslim ISIS usurper who worked his way through high school as a sodomite prostitute. He “hates all white people.” Mrs. Bruner believes Islam should be eradicated and that the UN has plans— for reasons known only to her and her fellow tachyonites — to depopulate the Earth. She thinks Texas should secede (possibly as the USAR’s forward operating base) and that the Ku Klux Klan started out with a real good idea.

Article Two of the USAR constitution would stress the importance of being white, with honorary exceptions for Ben Carson, Clarence Thomas and real good singers like Aretha Franklin. “African-Americans” would be Negroes again, they wouldn’t use the same toilets as white folks and they’d be content to eat shortnin’ bread and fill in society’s background as supernumerary tapdancers, mammies, pickaninnies, sharecroppers, prize fighters, Pullman porters and strange fruit.

Article 3 would be about Christianity, family values and going to Hell. It would revoke all that pinko drivel on Liberty Island about “huddled masses.” Instead, ideally, the USAR would erect a Statue of Individual Sovereignty, whose “mighty woman” would be clad in combat camo, holding up an AR-15.

Article 4 would evacuate Capitol Hill and turn it into a food court — or it might be a good place for Roller Derby. In place of the “Washington establishment,” the USAR would have a CEO with a handpicked Board of Directors whom citizens — “shareholders,” actually — would trust to re-appoint the CEO over and over again without the expense, annoyance and uncertainty of a popular election.

Article 5 would retain Social Security and Medicare, but the money would be funneled through evangelical megachurches, who would deduct a ten-percent “tithe” before mailing the payments via FedEx (no more Post Office). All the checks would be symbolically signed by Jesus.

The USAR would have a really cool flag, no taxes, and a “beautiful wall” built by Mexicans all around America. It would fight wars with “overwhelming force,” but without putting our sons (no girls in the army!) in harm’s way. We’d win by just scaring the shit out of everyone else in the world, who would love us.

Best of all — no “media” in the USAR. Tachyonites (as they already do) would learn all they need to know from infomercials, from right-wing websites to explain conspiracies and from talk-radio hysterics who would dutifully whip every conspiracy (as they already do) into an imminent Apocalypse. The tachyon world (as it already does) would ping-pong constantly between mind-numbing terror and salvation-bound fatalism. As Country Joe said, “Whoopee, we’re all gonna die.”

The USAR’s unwavering belief in belief was expressed by a Mary Lou Bruner supporter, who explained that it doesn’t matter whether she’s right or wrong about anything on (the non-tachyon portion of) Earth. John E. Tweedell of Hideaway, Texas, said, “If she’s standing alone, she’s standing on her principles… For that, I admire her.”

Don’t we all.