Chapter 6-Discussing the Tape Across the Fruited Plains

“Clarion Call” is an American business dedicated to nothing more than making money. Through marvelous use of technology, mass communication and an interconnected society , “CC”, as it became known, unwittingly stepped up to podium when the government of the United States totally collapsed, all under its own bureaucratic weight.

Solidly set and running smoothly with an economic and intellectual infrastructure that included millions of American citizens, talents ready, workers inside of the government institutions, an ant hill existed below the fruited plains that arose to save the most powerful country in the world.
All this without a single bureaucrat lifting a finger, without a solitary politician casting a vote.
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Chapter 6-Discussing the Tape Across the Fruited Plains
 
 
 
America, as a general rule, does not know much about the President’s Chief of Staff. Oh we hear his name bandied about. There was Rahm Emmanuel, John Podesta, Andy Card. Mickey Major was President Obama’s then White House Chief of Staff and he had a story that somewhat raised the public scrutiny.
 
Major was involved with an adolescent male who was, at the beginning of their affair, just barely 17. The boy revealed the story of his relationship with Mickey and it became, as these things do, a bit of a scandal.
 
Again, I was busy with a sick husband, running a household and taking care of all the pets. Some DC homosexual guy having an affair with another homosexual guy was hardly worth my listen.
 
Mickey Major’s assertion that America would soon allow “young” men to have older mentors to love and share lives with really gave the country pause.
 
 
 
Actually the entire country was a bit nonplussed over this statement, plus the rest of Major’s rant. It was, after all, the only thing most of us had to talk about over a few day period before Clarion Call got moving.
 
It’s documented somewhere just how this rant of the White House Chief of Staff got on the country’s Emergency Broadcasting System (EBS). It was due to some combination of the electrical outage and a blip in the EBS.
 
 
 
It had been planned for the Obama administration to announce the existence of this new and shiny nationwide emergency broadcasting system sometime during the President’s second term, right before the 2014 mid-term elections so went the rumor. Seems that words somehow can be broadcast right into the public air, the logic being that should folks be running amok from danger or for fear, as in “War of the Worlds” for example, that a calming voice can be broadcast via air waves from some remote location or another. Said calming voice, ostensibly and in a real life situation, would be the American President in the event of a national emergency, a Governor in a statewide emergency, local authorities in the event of a local emergency event.
 
There had been talk about such a system, of course, though you can believe that most Americans, like me, really didn’t pay attention to such “talk”. We were too busy running our own hectic and dramatic lives to keep up with these sorts of things until they were thrust upon us.
 
The “public air” EBS, in theory, is a good thing, in that everyone can gain access to information and/or instructions in the event of an emergency. Strategic stations had been set up throughout the U.S. “Public Air” broadcasts could encompass a few square miles or engulf the entire country. This system negates the need for televisions, cable stations, the need for people to sit in front of a television instead of fleeing if the situation requires. Americans just need to go outside in the event of an emergency and await the magic voice that will tell them what to do next.
 
 
 
Well sure, we did suppose this, didn’t we? For while so many of us grumbled about too much “gubmint” in our lives, it was more a complaint of the country class, a mumble with no action behind it. Over that period of no power our country lived through, with this awful conversation broadcast over the public air waves constantly, one cohesive national debate ensued: Did the “gubmint” really think we needed them for everything, everywhere? Did they really think we don’t know how to save ourselves without their annoying Ruling Class voices filling the very air we breathe with their wisdom?
 
Like I said, the country was engaging in national debates, only not on CNN, not on ABCCBSNBC, not even over the radio air waves save in small pockets of the country. No. The debates raged in neighborhoods across the fruited plains. Blackened taverns and malls held citizens who formed coalitions and groups based on common interest and, frankly, to pass the time.
 
Busy lives like mine became a little less busy without the need to watch Big Brother or play in online poker tournaments or engage in Angry Birds or go to movies or do anything much that required electricity. We had a lot of time to debate and digest the words of Mickey Major broadcast over and over across the public air of the country until Clarion Call finally got someone to shut it off.
 
 
 
As for living without electricity, sure there were plenty of places that had electricity. Dealing with a power outage is a fact of life for many businesses and as soon as the power switched off generators over mountains and valleys automatically switched on. Hospitals and retirement homes and quite a few private residences are equipped with generators that come on in the event of an electrical outage so for almost a day or so there were lots of places with electricity, all smug and running smooth waiting until the power came back on.
 
Generators, however, require gasoline to generate their electricity. Gasoline is plentiful, even today, but getting gasoline out of underground tanks as required when the sudden demand for the fuel swelled to such demand that after 36 hours or so many of the smaller places being run by gasoline-fueled generators began to shut down. Hospitals had to go begging for gasoline, this without any kind of telephone service. Volunteers all over the country carried gasoline and donated gasoline and delivered gasoline to the thousands of hospitals in the 50 states.
 
Gasoline began to get scarce, or, more accurately, getting the gasoline from storage was dwindling due to the need for pumps to get the fuel out of the underground tanks.
 
It was a mess and millions have written their stories, how they survived with no electricity, how they became better people for it. I was pretty much like most Americans. I stayed close to my family, with them I worked out the details of life. Kerosene lanterns heated many a home, including ours. I learned the joy of books once again. Children formed new play groups and in the day spent time playing dodge ball or kicking soccer balls or just….playing. People talked and walked and mingled. Most people were civil and helpful. I am told that crimes were few, even in the most crime-ridden of cities.
 
 
 
 
 
For three days of the blackout the country debated what Major meant when he said that 85 year old criminals shouldn’t be getting heart bypasses. Did he mean that all 85 year olds expecting expensive heart bypasses for a limited life span left are automatically criminals? Was there an 85 year old criminal in some jail somewhere needing a heart bypass that wasn’t worth the money?
 
For sure Major mentioned that people should just die come their time and this caused many of the powerless country class much consternation. When would be their time, we debated? Who would decide when was the time, we shouted?
 
I’d heard much about so-called “death panels”, at least during the 2008 election. I pooh-poohed such a notion. On a cold day in January I heard my country’s White House Chief of Staff, loose-tongued due to alcohol and spouting truths the politicians never dare do, pledge that this country would soon get some “common sense” as regards health care.
 
The word bureaucrat never meant much to me before that nationwide blackout. Oh I knew what it meant. A bureaucrat was a person who worked at some bureau or another.
 
The term came to be something much more sinister. For people who work at bureaus enforce the details of whatever bureau is their employer. Employees working at the Bureau of Social Security-yes it’s called the SS Administration but an Administration is a Bureau, do not be fooled, are bureaucrats. Their job is to adhere to the rules of the social security law.
 
So far, nothing wrong with this. Somebody’s got to administer driver’s license tests. Somebody’s got to shuffle submitted paperwork. Somebody’s got to generate the checks.
 
The country engaged in a national debate over the growing problem of bureaucrats. We all had a story, it seemed, about a government agent of some kind giving us a hard time, nitpicking at details, failing to use common sense. After the death of my husband the funeral home told me I couldn’t sell his legally purchased and paid for car for 30 days, that I had to go to something called the Department of Wills and Probate. I waited the required 30 days though I had no idea why I had to wait even that long. When I showed up to the Dept. of Wills they told me….NO, you need to wait THIRTY ONE days to get this paper that will allow you to sell your husband’s effects. I had to return home to make the same long trip to this Bureau of Will and Probate for want of an extra day. I had no idea why this was so and nobody bothered to explain. Those were the rules and rules are rules and common sense or logic reasoning never enter the picture.
 
Millions of us had stories like this, multiplied by ten almost. For every aspect of our lives of late it seems like we had to report to some unelected bureaucrat who could, with a snap of the fingers, send us away while providing no logic or reasoning.
 
Sure, most of these people were just employees, employees with lives and kids and sick husbands like us. I worked for a property management firm once and we took action to evict people who wouldn’t pay their rent. That’s a form of power one might argue although paying the rent would take all of my power away.
 
With the national debate raging over the throw-away truths of Mickey Major dawn began to break over our marble heads. All these bureaucracies and administrations and office dynasties were a more sinister way of government controlling our lives than those in the Ruling Class that we actually elected. At least we could UN-ELECT these people.
 
Now we hear Mickey Major saying soon we’d be getting some “common sense” as regards our health care and we could all, collectively, gather our memories of this bureaucratic common sense and it was small matter for us to see ourselves begging yet another unelected bureaucrat for our child’s life, like the parents of Sherry Morton. We realized, as a group us American citizens, then in the dark, cold and dreary, that we’d already been given a peek at things to come in the person of that precious child.
 
Most of the country was against admitting homosexuals in the Boy Scouts. I don’t have the percentages but Major’s sound byte about the ability of young men to love and share love with men older than them got many of us discussing what he meant by that.
 
We’d been hearing most of our lives about rogue priests who’d molested young altar boys and enabling bishops who transferred these molesters from parish to parish rather than deal with the problem. The concept of grown homosexual men molesting little boys had been a part of our lives, if only as a sound byte. When the national debate arose over Boy Scouts and homosexual leaders, most Americans were against it. At the very least, most Americans thought that if homosexuals were to become leaders of young boys, that they keep their homosexuality a personal matter, same as a heterosexual.
 
But most citizens had been politically corrected into silence on this matter as for sure we are mostly nice people across the fruited plains. People who are not inherently mean, which would be most Americans I’d assert, didn’t want to deny homosexuals a normal, unstressed life. There was some trepidation over homosexuals and young boys but we were told that there are no more juvenile molesters in the homosexual community than in the heterosexual community. Most of us accepted this but enter Mickey Major’s assertion that soon, SOON, homosexuals would be able to openly love underage young men. Would anyone with any power dare utter that soon heterosexuals could enjoy the love and share the life of older men with fear of arrest?
 
We got stuck on the notion of “young” men with Mickey’s speech. While many of us kind of shrugged over Major’s scandal with the 17 year old boy, none of us were too pleased with the vagueness of love between the “young” and older homosexual men.
 
In the powerless world and after three solid days of hearing Mickey Major rant about a majority of Hispanics in America, how the only white people left would be living on the government dole, Americans discussed this rant and it only took a day for most citizens, black, white and Hispanic alike, to get damn mad.
 
No the black citizenry, or the Hispanic citizenry, especially the white citizenry, didn’t much like the concept of any wide swath of Americans being eliminated or forced out of the work force. Of course we had a whole lot of time to discuss the matter, we had plenty of folks willing to translate for the Hispanics amongst us. Before the nationwide power outage had such a tape been aired over the cable and TV air waves we’d mostly have shrugged and figured this was some kind of nutty talk, if we even heard it at all.
 
After all, we had families, sick husbands and personal lives to attend to. With most of us then struggling to keep warm and fed and without those same air waves beyond that absurd emergency broadcast endless rant, no one probably would have paid much attention to Mickey Major’s drunken rant.
 
The perfect storm included this very public rant, children denied new lungs, homosexual Chiefs of Staff declaring that young boys will soon be fodder for older men. Yes we knew that heterosexuals too molest young children but let’s get honest here, the words shouted over cities and hills and valleys were from the lips of a known homosexual. Had a heterosexual been declaring that young girls would soon be able to love and share love with older men, we’d have been just as concerned and angry.
 
The perfect storm brewed and stirred and rumbled. The gasoline supplies diminished, more generators shut down with each passing hour. We waited to hear from someone, somewhere, just what happened to our power and when on earth would it be turned back on.
 
After three days of a leaderless America, Clarion Call arose in power to save the country.