Pat Fish's Blog: Clarion Call

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Tuesday

Chapter 11-The Common Sense Implemented Based On, eh, Our Common Sense

Chapter 11-The Common Sense Implemented Based On, eh, Our Common Sense

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It was on the fourth day of the national blackout that American lives, so recently gone through a major upheaval, began to fall back into place.

No, it wasn’t that the electricity was restored on that day. Total electrical restoration came on the seventh day and we also, on that day and per the scriptures, rested.

It was more that sane voices could be heard across the EBS, that there was a sense of purpose, a determination, a collective intuit that at least now, no matter how disorganized we are, we are slowly putting it all back together will begin.

First thing early that Thursday morning a Clarion Call employee could be heard via the EBS system. The broadcast began by warning us that there would be something called a “national discussion” within the hour, to recruit all the CB’ers and media tents to prepare, that we citizens should be ready for some talk and a plan to get things working again.

The voice we heard over the EBS was, to our collective surprise across the fruited plains, the voice of Joe Dabney.

If yon readers have even ever heard of Joe Dabney, at the very least he is known as the CEO of Clarion Call. What he had to say over the EBS that fateful day shocked the nation to its core.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, citizens of the United States, NON-citizens of the United States should you not be registered but are hearing this….let me tell you who I am and how this is going to work.

‘I am the CEO of Clarion Call, the organization that is speaking to you now. When the electric went down Clarion Call, as is our design and as was the intent, Clarion Call’s backup generators kicked in immediately. While this is pretty much the same situation as most big corporations, one of the bigger differences between Clarion Call and, say, an Amazon site, is that we kept doing what we do at Clarion Call, even with the power out, and well hey, we got to this point, now didn’t we?”

It turned out, as Dabney went on to explain, that the employees at Clarion Call were all called in to work. The next two days Clarion Call used their database to find Americans who could fix that godawful EBS and shut up Mickey Majors. They also spent many hours calling and contacting people registered in the CC database as experts on electricity or power generators. CC employees were also used to contact the military and as best as possible, to locate the country’s leadership and find out where the hell they all scattered.

It wasn’t easy, as Dabney summarized for the CB’s and media tents and over the EBS. America was suffering a nationwide power outage and it wasn’t as if a phone call or quick email would notify all power plant experts to quick, contact Clarion Call. For almost a full day cell phone service worked pretty much nationwide. Cell service deteriorated as the blackout went on for reasons having something to do with cell towers and signals generated by electricity and there was always that lack of gasoline to fuel the generators.

At any rate, via a pony express CB system , enough folks with electrical and engineering experience were contacted and put to work and as Dabney went on to explain, the work of restoring electricity was underway and goodness we all could hear that the EBS was now working.

Then Dabney made a most unusual announcement, a proclamation that probably changed the course of our future history.

The CEO of Clarion Call informed a listening nation that the company had absolutely no intention of taking over the government or engaging in any bureaucratic activities. Dabney announced that Clarion Call will advance the money to pay the people recruited to restore electricity and fix the EBS. He said he would bill the government for Clarion Call’s services, whatever government might be in power after all this was done, he expanded. For now Clarion Call was committed to restoring not only the electricity, but a new order in the country. The pieces, so Dabney explained, would fall into place however they fell into place.

With the EBS then restored, Clarion Call found many political pundits to lead the discussions about where the country should go. Mark Levin ranted that an entire new government should be formed, that the desertion of the political leaders should be considered an abandonment of law and order by the political class. Rush Limbaugh, a little less bombastic than Levin but still very Conservative politically, too urged the establishment of a new order for America.

Clarion Call found some liberal commentators to air their arguments and goodness, Chris Matthews said that no one even knows if President Obama is alive and we shouldn’t be talking about a new world order when our very President is missing.

All of the rants and speeches are documented and linked to for consumer review. I can speak to the mood of the country as I deduced because, frankly, pretty much nobody cared where Obama was or any of the Senators and Representatives for that matter. They weren’t there when needed and Americans of all colors and nationalities wanted to get on with our lives, not go searching for a Political Class that didn’t do the job for which they were elected then left us all high and dry when needed.

At some point we did find the President and all the loser-burgers of the Political Class but by then we didn’t want them.

Which is how I ended up a person of some influence because Americans who could manipulate words prettily enough to convince an aimless public to embrace a methodology were in great demand.

It was only because of my bird watching hobby that impelled me to present my argument. That and my disgust at how low the country had fallen due to the Political Class pushed me to the fore. I modestly assert that I had some influence over the subsequent turn of events that now has the so-called Country Class ruling themselves.

It’s called government by Common Sense but truth is it’s much like the notion of common law, another concept that the Ruling Class expelled from their oppressive rule over us all.

Yes I love the birds and watch them avidly. When Clarion Call advertised for Bloggers to present arguments as to how the country should go forward, I applied. This was all after the electricity was restored, of course, and life began to once again rumble like it should.

A living organism’s main goal in life is to live. It’s not rocket science. Given the chance and/or choice, endangered organisms struggle to live, even under the most overwhelming of odds. It’s an instinct shared in common with every protozoa, every worm, every bird, every mammal and every human.

We all share the goal in life of trying to live.

This concept is the basis of common law and wow, isn’t it about time someone sat down and wrote it down? The follow-up is, of course, that all humankind legislation would first strive to the result of maintaining life, at the worst, legislation should never endanger life.

Again, it’s not rocket science.

Then things begin to get a bit nuanced and this is where Bloggers, ordinary Americans with many opinions and nothing else to do but post them, became a big part of the new order of things. For we no longer needed pretty words or nice slogans, we didn’t need bad laws termed “affordable” or experiments in Communism cutesied up by assuring us we were leaving no child behind. When the debates began to rage the country was sporadically regaining its power grid, most Americans having gone at the least seven days with no power and for no discernible reason. And let’s not forget that the Ruling Class was kaput…gone! Poof, nowhere to be found. We were, as a country, not in any mood for games or lies. We knew that America once had a working power grid and every year life got better for most of us.

Once we were tethered to a bulky desk phone and most Americans born by the time of the national blackout had cell phones and the thought of not having such devices was infathominable. Remotes controlled our TV’s, the Internet was well established. Life got better for America through the years. Having it suddenly yanked away was a wake-up call, boy is that an understatement.

You don’t really need to believe in a God to believe that after that bit about staying alive, one of our most impulsive instincts is, but of course, to reproduce and raise the young.

Because the Ruling Class and the Political Class and the Stupid Class in America got to arguing so much about God and when He could be mentioned that I figured, the hell with it.

Robins don’t believe in God, way I figure. Yet a robin is as dedicated a parent bird as any living thing on the planet and the robins themselves, opportunists as are most birds, didn’t get one physiological benefit by suffering and sacrificing to raise the young. Often they died their own selves in the attempt to raise those young ones to maturity, that they too may live and go on to reproduce and raise the species.

Yeah I know it’s only a backyard but go with my experience as a former Backyard Wildlife Steward, trained by the former National Wildlife Federation, backyards are dangerous to birds as the most remote of jungles are to humans. A snake will devour a nest of baby birds in seconds, baby birds incubated by a patient mother, baby birds fed worm-by-worm by busy bird parents, baby birds that have their fecal sacks removed by those same busy birds parents, just like that, a black snake can deduct all that often heroic effort of a bird pair to raise the next avian generation.

Cats are a mortal enemies to incubating birds, yes dogs too, even humans. Birds must incubate, feed and clean their nests and broods in the hottest and most unbearable of weather. They must sacrifice their own meals to feed the babies with endless-open beaks. The young must be raised as quickly as possible, they must fledge, they must learn the song of the species, they must spread their wings and fly.

Suppose the robins just said….the hell with it? We’re not raising any babies, go on, all that work in 98degree heat? What if we didn’t build a nest, incubate the eggs, feed the ever-open baby bird beaks, cleanse the nest, protect from predators, what would we suffer if we decided not to do any of this?

Absolutely nothing at all would happen to that robin pair, nothing at all. They’d live happy robin lives, they’d likely eat plenty of fat worms, they’d nap in the hottest times of that day…it would be a fine life.

And yet they do it. Every bird seeks a mate, reproduces however the methodology, builds a nest, establishes a territory, incubates the eggs, feeds the newly hatched, cleans the nest, teaches them the species’ song and finally cajoles them out of the nest to the real life of a bird.

Birds have no guile. Cats have no guile and yet there’s always stories of mother cats rescuing their kittens from burning buildings despite singing themselves. Dogs have no guile but they raise their puppies with devotion.

Human beings have guile. It could be argued that human beings reproduce for selfish reasons, that they do not love their young, that they want other rewards beyond the joy of parenthood. Humans are capable of such calculation, so goes the theory, they have a conscience to guide them. Humans beings can be evil. Dogs cannot be evil. Though some feline lovers would disagree, cats cannot be evil.

It’s common law, as I argue, in that it is unique to all living things. We all want to live, we all want to reproduce and raise the young. “All” being used as a broad generic in this instance, please indulge.

Common law is that we all want to live and all involved with that. Which includes our food supply, our personal territories, raising and protecting the young. The entirety of all living creatures strive for these things and the recognition of this consensus as the basis for legislated law is the concept of common law.

Which brings us to common sense, the basis of common law and the despised enemy of the Ruling Class. Cause folks too often let their common sense take over those life activities even if not desired by the Ruling Class.

Gun control is a good example. For many years every time there was a horrific shooting the Ruling Class got all hoo-hah about gun control. It’s not that the Ruling Class cared much about controlling guns. It’s that adding more gun control upon the populace gives them more reasons to make laws as this is what they do. The Ruling Class doesn’t even believe that taking guns away from innocent people won’t stop murders, goodness our common sense had us seeing cities such as Detroit, New York and Baltimore have the most stringent of gun controls and those cities are hotbeds of crime.

The Ruling Class had ways of over-riding our common sense, showing pictures of little children shot by some deranged nut or another, oh, and don’t the Ruling Class love to mock us morons by calling us nasty names, insensitive…that sort of thing?

The country did muddle along with pretty much no laws at all for a couple of weeks but in due course the constitution as amended was totally restored, the Declaration of Independence was found and changed to include America’s Declaration of Independence from the Ruling Class!

Clarion Call managed to get enough software experts to create a dynamic voting system over the Internet, including fingerprint technology to avoid fraud.

Not one member of the Ruling Class dared to call us vote-suppressers. If you were a citizen and registered your thumbprint for verification, you could vote.

Common sense ruled and this was the best way to assure that everyone who SHOULD have a voice, DID have a voice. Didn’t need to leave the house, didn’t need to drive to a voting poll.

Laws got passed and life got back to normal.

Oh, and we found the Ruling Class.

Heh.

Sunday

Chapter 10-Clarion Call-The Clarion Sounds; The Common Sense Is Implemented

Chapter 10-Clarion Call-The Clarion Sounds; The Common Sense Is Implemented

The third day of the national blackout was at dusk and the citizenry across the fruited plains were about to bust out. Maybe you had to be there, as they like to say. Perhaps someday a child born long after the national blackout, perhaps conceived during the national blackout, will read the words of this humble Blogger and consider my true story of the time. In the day of the founding fathers, there were no Bloggers. While any citizen could sit down with a handy quill pen and write anything he or she wanted, there was no Internet, no way for the words and wisdom and stories to reach across the fruited plains.

Well there were a lot of things different at the time of the founding fathers as compared to current times. We discovered that as a nation during the national blackout and we fixed a lot of the problems to coincide with the technology of our time.

I recall myself being antsy and restless as I administered Will his medicines and told him not to get riled enough to raise his blood pressure. “Come on, Pat. We can’t just keep sitting around twiddling our thumbs in the dark, waiting for somebody to save us. We’ve got to get the power back on. You’d think with all the intelligence and technology in this country we could get a damn power plant up and running.”

I’m not making this up, for at this point in Will’s exasperated rant we heard, loud and clear and appearing to come from heaven itself, the sound of a ….it was the sound of a horn!

At first I cocked my head, much like a dog, to tilt ear toward the sound, to move brain around a bit to dislodge the cobwebs. Because I knew that sound!

It was the sound of the horn of the Clarion Call web site.

Of course I had to be losing my mind.

Just in case I opened the door a nudge and put my ear outside the door frame. To my surprise all of the neighborhood was out on porches, on decks, all tilting ears and clearing cob webs from tired worried brains.

“I think that’s the sound of the horn on Clarion Call,” I shouted to my neighbor then felt a bit silly. Sarah Winslow was in her 80’s and probably never heard of Clarion Call.

“It sure is,” Sarah called back, “I thought I’d never hear that sound again.”

And so it began, the Clarion Call blaring out across the fruited plains, oftentimes muffled by the efforts of trying to shut Mickey Majors the hell up.

For the sound of the Clarion Call horn was coming to us from the same nationwide emergency broadcasting system that so dreadfully brought us three miserable days of a nasty man’s nasty promises.

Media tents along the highways and byways began to fill as the Clarion Call horn sounded in Idaho, across the Hoover Dam, above the silent and drab electric-less Las Vegas strip, down the Shenandoah River, up the Mississippi, through New Orleans, across the deserts of Texas.

CB radios, ran by batteries and by then with some sort of Pony Express method of transmission, powered up and began messaging across the fruited plains. All parts of the country reported in via whatever Rube Goldberg method rigged up to pass news and the country gasped by the realization that somebody, somewhere, got control of that crazy national EBS and finally there would be sanity restored.

Clarion Call was, as I described earlier, a very popular web site. I don’t know how many people of the then estimated 285 million people living in the United States had heard of it. It was considered on a par with Amazon and Google so that famous horn sound that greets visitors to its web site on the home page was fairly well known.

It was the next words blaring across the EBS that caused my jaw to hit the ground in surprise.

“This is Clarion Call,” I heard quite plainly as I stood outside on my very front porch and heard something very different than that endless Mickey Majors’ rant. “We have a request for a fake funeral and are looking for volunteers willing to help a Clarion Call client attend her own funeral. Sign onto our site for details on locale and talents needed.”

I was stopped still. Will looked at me, his eyebrows almost to his scalp. It was but a week prior that I’d been part of the fake funeral of Betty Miller. The job was for, as my mind whirled and jaw remained on ground, Clarion Call.

What the he….?

The sound of laughter could then be heard from the EBS, and then the sound of serious.

“Ladies and Gentlemen of the United States of America, I am General Martin Williams. I am currently in charge of protecting the United States so first thing the folks at Clarion Call wanted to do once they got this system up and running was to have me come on the EBS and assure you all that the coastline and air space of this country are protected. I’ll leave it at that for now and let the good people at Clarion Call handle the communication from here on in.”

My jaw remained on the ground as the realization dawned on me that here I was, standing on my front porch, listening to some General in the military assure me that we are safe. The mind does strange things when the world turns upside down but after some whirling I realized that somehow somebody got that EBS thing to work and also somehow, Clarion Call was now in charge.

“That request for a fake funeral was a joke, folks,” the voice on the EBS then said what I hoped was the case. At that point I had to smile.

It wasn’t the President, or any elected member of the political class for that matter, but it sounded like the voice of a nice American that took the time to a)get the EBS working and b)first thing, find a way to calm a restless country after three days of no electricity by assuring our collective safety.

I felt better from that moment than I ever did at the utterance of any President from Eisenhower through to Obama.

It got better after that.

It was all about The Common Sense and I capitalize those words intentionally.

Which is not to be confused with the more…eh, “common” term: “common sense”.

The forefathers of our forefathers called it common law, at least those who came here from England. Common law, common sense….it’s defined in so many ways, with so many examples.

As the country went forward with putting the country back together, we began by agreeing that the new system would be based on common sense and just to make sure of that, we called our new national voting system “The Common Sense”.

It’s not about religion though it certainly fits into all known organized religions on the planet. It’s not about science, at least science alone. It’s not about any one academic endeavor or school subject. We all agreed, loosely, that common sense was that which guides us when the manuals and instructions don’t quite fill the task.

We know, for example, that to climb a staircase we need to lift one foot to the next step then heft up the other foot, and so on and so forth. We don’t really need a manual to tell us how to climb the steps; we know how to do so from our experience with life.

Indeed we live and with life we seek food, water, safety….typical Maslow’s hierarchy of needs stuff, then we move on to fun, joy and happiness. We instinctively protect the young that the next generation carry forth the genes to keep the human race alive. We fight to remain alive as long as we can as that is part of our instinct and part of our common sense.

We don’t need to write it down or make it all a law. We get it.

The Ruling Class, however, spends its life, indeed EXISTS just to destroy our common sense. For it is our common sense that will quell their power and can’t have that. That stupid Zimmerman/Trayvon case is an example of a government over-reach to try to frighten us into not even defending ourselves. Loosely put, the government, via President Obama who sighed that the thug Trayvon Martin looked just like his phantom son. George Zimmerman should have allowed Trayvon to methodically pound his head onto the concrete rather than pull out his lawful weapon and stop the attack. At least that was the logic of the Ruling Class as us ordinary Plebes interpreted it.

The Muslim political correctness mania also was an attempt by the Ruling Class to stop our common sense. Goodness knows that 100% of all terror attacks were committed by radical Muslims, damn we should not be “profiling” them alone on the airplanes because it makes us look mean, trying to protect ourselves and everything. Thus we put hands up the drawers of wheel-chaired Grannies and torment young children with strange wands while our common sense screamed that WE ARE NOT THE ENEMY!

We don’t drill oil on our own public lands because some political party or another gets big campaign donations from the oil-producing sheikdoms of the world so throw common sense out the window as it’s not what benefits the common people but what benefits the Ruling Class.

Of course I quickly give a synopsis of US versus THEM as concerns the Ruling Class versus the Country Class. We knew all this was going on before the blackout, of course, but I say that softly.

I didn’t know what “fracking” was as I lived a busy life. I only vaguely knew that Obama wouldn’t sign off on the Pennsylvania pipeline to bring oil easily down from Canada, although common sense would dictate that using Canadian oil was more effective in terms of price and availability than shipping oil across the planet from some horror in the desert where their Ruling Class of Sheiks and Emperors enslave the people via a bullying religion.

The Ruling Class fights common sense every step of the way for they obtain their power only by keeping us from following our own God-given common sense. Or nature-given, for the Atheists among us.

It wasn’t until the morning of the fourth day of the blackout that The Common Sense was implemented and it’s still with us today.

Things buzzed mightily across the fruited plains after the horn of Clarion Call sounded across the country’s Emergency Broadcasting System. Will and I took an evening walk down to the local media tent and we were astounded, but pleasantly.

People were gathered all around the media tent and more kept streaming up and down the most major highway of our region. All around small groups of people gathered as the sounds of laughter, joy and tinkling glass could be heard. As I learned before finally turning in that fateful night, it was the same situation across the fruited plains.

The guy speaking on the EBS was NOT an employee of Clarion Call, we were to learn. He was recruited by employees of Clarion Call, much the way they recruit people to …well to do fake funerals for example.

Seems about a dozen employees were present at the main office of Clarion Call when the power went down. Clarion Call, as is no surprise, had a mega-cool electric backup system so while Americans across the fruited plains coped with the dark and cold, the employees at Clarion Call went into their database and looked up some information, recruited some help to deal with this situation.

Clarion Call employees managed to contact the military. They found a public speaker to handle that important task. They found an expert in this crazy EBS and while it took a couple of days, they did manage to get Mickey Majors off of that thing and use the EBS for what it was meant for.

It’s not that they were heroes, these Clarion Call employees. They’d all be the first to deny any heroism. It was more that they had a chance to do what they do so they got busy doing it. The CC database was filled with millions of Americans with thousands of talents and the CC employees got to it.

Over the next day the country would be treated to the debates of such pundit luminaries as Glen Beck, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh but no, it wasn’t just conservative voices filling America’s air across the fruited plains. Also we had the glory of hearing Chris Matthews and every host of the nation’s PBS…which no longer exists, by the way.

For many hours we heard voices and debates of more ordinary citizens and, indeed, we honed in on one who became the country’s new leader. Since yon reader knows all about this by now, let us tell the story of the implementation of The Common Sense.

Chapter 9-Dissecting the Propaganda of the Ruling Class

Besides adapting to life without power, Americans across the fruited plains began discussing things.

Which is a very underwhelming way to describe the loud words, angry shouts and sometimes, fisticuffs, that ensured over a)the rant of Mickey Majors over the EBS system, b)what politico/political party caused this national outage, and c)what would we, “we” being the American people, were going to do about it once the power came back on.

Yon readers must believe that we didn’t, swoosh, suddenly, as a powerless country, decide that “we” were going to take any action about the blackout or Mickey Majors for that matter.

It took many hours or parlor/roadside/tent media/CB discussions and debates to get to a point that we collectively agreed that we would, indeed, do something about it. It’s not as if we had a whole lot more to do besides rant and rave over the politicians and how they totally mishandled the country. For many hours we had Mickey Majors shouting in our ears, in many cases loudly and with few ways to escape.

It’s important to note just what else was going on in the country at the time and the stage was set for doubt, anger, dismay and action.

First, President Obama told us that the Affordable Care Act would be cheaper for us, that if we liked our doctors we would keep him or her. Also there were the scandals coming out of the Obama administration in the months leading up to the blackout and this factored in to the country’s new determination.

If it wasn’t the IRS spying on us and doing us dirty it was the NSA taping and tracking our phone calls or it was guns going in to Mexico to illegals then able to enter the country by claiming persecution by the Mexican drug lords.

It was like nothing we wanted mattered.

Now I know there were plenty of people who didn’t care about illegal immigration or Obamacare or if the IRS went way out of bounds with its power. There were for sure plenty of Americans who build houses, have barking dogs….or live next to someone who does. Americans make home improvements, plan and execute wills, dispute property boundaries. A vast majority of eligible Americans have driver’s licenses if nothing else. So we all have experiences with government bureaucrats at the local level. And it was small effort to find someone in our surround who had horror stories of the problems with obtaining home inspection, passing automobiles through state inspection, changing a title on a car or getting a license to operate a small business.

The local bureaucrats that we all dealt with on a daily basis were, for the most part, our friends or neighbors, at the least, they shared our town, city or county. At some point we learned to get through the red tape as logistically we could confront our bureaucratic tormenters. A cross the fruited plains, we’d all dealt with local bureaucracies. Mostly we understood why buildings should conform to basic building tenets. We know that dogs barking excessively or grass growing too tall were problems making life not so pleasant.

But we also understood common sense and, indeed, it was during these many discussions and debates that the country wrapped its mind around common sense and the broader, more magnanimous meaning of the phrase.

The political/ruling class, we began to understand as the first hours of the blackout began to sink in as something that would be around for a while, had NO common sense.

Take immigration. All of us, every American born in this country or born without, understands our personal space and the need to defend it. Fences are our friends, so goes the common sense. The common sense, I remind, that the Ruling class does not have.

“The first job of the federal government is to protect our borders,” my neighbor, a friendly and normally mild-mannered soul, shouted at a parlor meeting in our community. Our local EBS mass speaker was located up and down a major highway and by the time we’d arranged our nightly community gatherings we were sick, sick, sick of that man’s rantings. The external EBS was transmitted via some sort of satellite dish that sent the sound waves up and down the state via…well I don’t know how but I do know that it was almost impossible to shut the thing down.

As was explained to me, what they call the “external EBS” was designed to be the voice of calm and instruction during national emergencies that might destroy tender equipment. There were backups to the original and more backups to the backups. “The stuff has to survive earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and even meteorites is my understanding,” husband Will explained. Understand that the same Mickey Majors’ rant would have been blaring out from our televisions and radios and cable stations, even our MP3 players but I think that’s a joke, had the electricity been working. The “external EBS” was created to do the job of the TV’s and radios should…well should the power go out.

The things were powered by super-strength batteries and the politicos knew all about it, or at least so I’ve been told. The American public, not so much.

The parlor debates began in earnest after about 24 hours of hearing Mickey Majors’ rant. Like I’ve mentioned, many places across the fruited plains managed to stifle the constant sound or escape the torment some way. The country had, for want of nothing much more to do, already went over and over the Majors sound bytes ad nauseam so it was time to move on to some other topic.

We were discussing immigration at this meeting of the parlor debaters, having already gone over the problems with gay marriage and the concept of “man-boy” love.

We have, as a nation and via proper electronic voting, “one-man, one-vote” and we made it happen and we made it fair, forget all that crap with or without picture ID. The political class, they didn’t want to “move forward”, the common sense came to be across the darkened fruited plains.

Well we couldn’t exactly ignore our plight and add Mickey Majors to the formula and there began a national consensus that was, well it was odd how it all happened. More on this later.

The political class, we decided both by some form of weird mental connectivity and verified by locked in, honest votes, a sort of common sense that we, the common people if you will, understood. We came to comprehend that common sense is based, loosely, on nature itself. We don’t have to sit and debate whether to continue sitting on a hot stove was prudent as the pain seared through us. Our very physiology urged us to action in that event but what about those times when we “sensed” danger, or maybe saw it in the form of a deadly snake coiled across the way? Our common sense, a combination of our experiences dictated by our urge to live, thrive and be happy, gives us warnings but there is always evil in the world and in our new world we can identify it instead of being silenced beyond our God-given common sense by the evil of political correctness.

People who wear vests on their person that will blow them up when within a crowd, these are evil people doing that. People who wrest control of our peacefully-flying airplanes and ram them into our own lawfully built buildings on our own soil….these are evil people.

I know I speak the obvious but as time went on the whole nonsense of it went way beyond the common sense.

The political class, as we now understand, does not live by the common sense. For they have none.

The political class are people who rose to a position by our very votes. When seated they built fiefdoms and outright kingdoms, the built silly bureaucracies and staffed them with well-paid unionized minions to bind us up with endless red tape….

….well never mind, I won’t sing the song for you.

So we talked during the darkened hours. Media tents were abuzz with endless topics. CB radios ran channel to channel. This country communicated more effectively and with more serious attention than any national topic discussed since the Revolutionary War, as some historians assert.

Goodness, life gets busy sometimes people. We have children and spouses and errands and full-time jobs and…as one who was derisively targeted as a low-information vote, I argue that oh no, I wasn’t low-informationed, I was information-overwhelmed.

I got my news likes most everyone else, off of CNN or Fox. No Will and I didn’t watch the evening news on the big networks all that much, figuring, as Will put it, “Since we pay for cable, why not get the news from a network devoted to news?” Which was fine with me because I never much paid attention anyway.

Oh sure, I heard the sound bytes, this was the plan. I saw the sight bytes when I signed onto America OnLine, sometimes I clicked in to read the news story. And I watched TV, even if not Walter Cronkite, and flashes of big news story would stream quick across the screen, sometimes as breaking news, most often as the headline for the news show to come on at 11pm.

I knew about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, although at first I knew about it mostly from the Huffington Post on AOL. I was busy ministering to then dying husband, praying he’d get better, trying to make him pain-free. I had to mind the home, tend to pets, visit with daughter and granddaughter. The same old boring stuff Americans do across the fruited plains every day and it’s a busy life. Some of us are political junkees and that’s as fine a pursuit of happiness on the planet but it’s just plain wrong to deride and mock those of us trying to live law-abiding happy lives without spending hours trying to figure out what that crowd in D.C. is up to you.

For sure there are real “low-information” voters, those who can’t read, who don’t own a TV or have access to the Internet, the homeless. It’s not at all the same as citizens who try to live a law-abiding happy life and “tune in” to the political front around election times and such.

Anyway, that’s my rant, I’ll shut up on it. I keep hammering at this clarification only to illustrate how the so-called opposition party totally failed to fight back against the party in power, as the common sense would deem prudent. It was the Republicans at the time, but it’s no mind. The Democrats were the same way when the Republicans held the power. The political class is the political class and in the end,- as this low-information voter discovered after hearing some truths I needed to hear-the political class takes care of itself.

Oh I get a lot of push back on that concept. “Pat you had those endless hours to hear the entire story, to learn the truth, during that national blackout. Even if the Republicans had come out with the hard truth as we learned it, would you have listened?”

Probably not.

But what? Why couldn’t the Republicans have used sound and sight bytes like the party in power?

What we had, folks, was a massive propaganda campaign waged upon us with a whole lot of corruption and power-grabbing inter-woven through it all.

Yes, it took a national power outage, an endless public rant by some rabid radical homosexual and boom, quite a bit of time to discuss amongst ourselves.

The Perfect Storm, again.

Some say Nah….what we are calling The Perfect Storm was really God Blessing America.

Clarion Call-Chapter 8-Reality Settles In; The World Reacts

I must suppose that if one were writing a fictional account of the United States suddenly being plunged into darkness with all known leadership completely gone, the writer would most likely lean towards a plot that would involve chaos, panic, crime and despair across the fruited plains.

I must also suppose that the country’s former climb to dependence on government for everything might well have prevented that very same scenario from happening. It could be argued that a country prepared for its President’s annual state-of-the-union speech was even more expectant of government intervention to come save the day. Just throwing it out there, even that preposterous tape of Mickey Major playing over and over again surely had the country sitting on its collective thumbs awaiting for the Calvary to arrive.

The presence of so many generators in the era of a new, more energy independent millennia kept communication going for many days, there were places to go for light and warmth but mostly, for almost three full days, the country just shuffled along. There was no nationwide panic the day after the SOTU when no President was there to finally set us straight. It was mostly neighborhoods, frankly, that found the solutions, took care of the infirm, watched the young, provided the warmth and fed all.

Truth was, as I offer my People’s Scribe self , it is but my opinion- the biggest fear the citizenry felt after three days as the generators began to fade and gasoline ran scarce, was what on earth was going on with the rest of the world? Was our army working? Were foreign enemies encroaching on our shores, inching past the boundary to capture and enslave a helpless American public?

This fear was discussed at the many tent medias along the highways and byways. For the first two days of the blackout we not only did not hear from any of the political elite, we did not hear or know where the country’s military was, were they on alert, were they helpless like the rest of the country?

The concern about a possible foreign enemy amongst us, ready to rob and pillage as we were at our most vulnerable led, on around the third day, to formations of volunteer citizen groups. Guns, goodness we had plenty of guns, even the urban gangs were offering their guns, asking if they couldn’t be city soldiers in the manner of guerilla warriors.

We had no idea whether the rest of the planet had power or not and thus had no idea what they knew about the American blackout and what they planned to do about it.

It would turn out that the rest of the world did, indeed, know about the nationwide blackout, but of course. We found out so much after the fact and the American military did take over the protection of the country even if most of us were not aware of it.

Well of course, it’s the U.S. military and it has plenty of gasoline and generators are almost the norm at many military posts. Just as soon as the first light failed military stations across the planet went onto generator backup. All of the armed forces were aware of the blackout as soon as it happened. The Coast Guard immediately sent out ships to patrol the country’s borders. The army went on high alert and quickly got to pre-determined destinations just for this exact scenario. The navy patrolled the waters beyond the coastline and ships steamed quickly to pre-determined water locales to best guard the American mainland. Submarines function as a completely independent vehicle so it was small matter for the entire coast line to be surrounded by quiet nuclear submarines, all waiting for any action against our weakened country. The air force sent several planes out to strategic locations in foreign countries, mostly to conduct flyovers to ensure no country gets it into their head to suddenly send out battalions of air craft to harm or destroy us from the air.

This exact scenario had been presumed in the parlors and tent media across the country.

“The military’s been ready for this action by foreign enemies since Christ was a Kid,” is how my rather irreverent neighbor explained it to that evening’s parlor gathering in our development.

“You gotta figure that one of the first ways a foreign enemy would attack us is by cutting down our power supply,” my niece’s boyfriend offered.

Since no onslaught of foreign soldiers jack-booted their way through our neighborhoods after two powerless days we figured that the country wasn’t under attack. There was fairly regularly news service those first couple of days and consensus was that the blackout was nationwide, that it was not the result of a foreign attack, that it will all be fixed soon.

It was a mélange of emotions, none of us will ever forget it. There was the inconvenience of not having power. It was in the winter, heat was needed. It was Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs on a nationwide basis.

First we satisfied our most immediate needs of life: warmth, food, shelter. My family had a kerosene heater that we’d purchased just for a power outage and it held out for the entire blackout. Of course we all had to sleep in one room and wear piles of clothes. Our neighborhood real quick created a sort of “food exchange” set-up after 24 hours. By that time freezers and refrigerators were thawing and spoiling good food stored within. We picked a vacant house in our community and we took all the food we thought would spoil soon. Since it was winter we set up a system to keep the stuff outside with an assigned monitor taking turns to guard it from the animals and elements.

We had lots of milk and meat and in due course, like in the famous story “Stone Soup”, we had hamburger rolls for the ground beef and cereal for the milk. One neighbor would make a wish and another would shout out that he or she had some in their home-“hold on while I get it”.

Our neighborhood had a watch crew set up almost immediately, bunch of bored guys got their guns and divvied up patrol hours. It started out somewhat in jest but as the darkness went on and on we were very comforted knowing they were watching the neighborhood.

It was like my neighborhood across the fruited plains, in the inner cities, on family farms, in suburbia. We did what had to be done. We weren’t happy about it but you do what you have to do. I wouldn’t put the halo of this sort of collective action solely on American citizens. I truly believe that this sort of communal survival that sprung up during the country’s nationwide blackout is a human trait and the same would happen in France, Africa, even in Egypt.

As for the political impact across the planet, the general consensus was that the entire planet earth was just plain flummoxed that the mighty United States of America was without power from sea to shining sea. Russia did not hurry to send nukes our way, China didn’t even mobilize its army. The Muslim countries continued business as usual. Al Queda was, and still is, a major problem but it’s like a dog that might finally catch a passing car; once it’s caught, what to do with it? For no matter how vulnerable America was (and, again, the country was not vulnerable at all thank to military action) or may have been perceived to be, a bunch of pathetic losers really didn’t have the mega-power to attack the country, they didn’t have power to build their bombs for one thing.

We didn’t know it at the time but a cadre of military superiors had taken over the country, at least in terms of self-defense and communicating with the rest of the planet. This sort of thing too, as we learned later, had been part of a previous plan.

It was dinner time the Wednesday following the nationwide electric blackout that the country got restless and decided to take action.

We’d listened to Mickey Major’s rant for many hours before most of the country managed to stop the endless and silly verbiage. We’d waited for the President to give us a State of the Union Address over that same national emergency broadcasting system. We’d rigged up a sort of national media system and so far as most of us knew, there were no riots or massive deaths due to the lack of electricity.

I remember that Wednesday quite well as it was my sick husband who began the day with a rant of his own that quite shocked me.

He was a gentle man, my husband, not the sort to go getting involved in any sort of mass political protest or argument. Which is not to say that he wasn’t knee-deep in politics in terms of keeping up with the political debates and expressing his own rancor should the discussions not agree with him.

“Pat, something’s got to be done about this blackout. Let’s get some breakfast and go down to the media tent by the Exxon and see what’s up.”

Will’s sentiment surprised me because the LAST person on the planet to ever get involved with “something to be done” would be William G. Frey Jr.

Sure, he’d rant and rave over whatever politician was on Meet the Press on any given Sunday. I only watched Meet the Press because Will watched it. Up until the big blackout I paid little attention to politics. I always was more interested in spending time with my only granddaughter and/or my only daughter. I voted in all national elections but I was not registered with any political party.

Will was a registered Republican and last time he voted Democrat was for Bill Clinton. I’d voted for Obama the first time though Will yelled at me constantly that a President Obama would bring the country down.

In a manner of speaking, President Obama DID bring the country down in that he failed to provide any leadership when the chips were down and the power was out.

Oh no, the nationwide loss of power was not Obama’s doing. The eleven plus millions of illegal immigrants was not Obama’s doing. The collapse of the health care system, such as it was, was not Obama’s doing.

To be sure, President Obama didn’t do anything to make any of these bad situations any better. He got so involved with the “improving the infrastructure” money laundering scheme and a demand for government controlled health care that the economy also went to hell during his presidency.

History has shown, “history” being a very gentle use of the word as the term in this missive refers to events less than five years prior in most cases…but recent history has shown that the great blackout of 2014 came about due to, well hell’s bells, there’s that perfect storm again.

The blame falls mostly on the stupid Environmental Protection Agency, which no longer exists by the way, nor should it ever have existed. It began as a “punishment” of some sort against a power plant in Texas-rumored to have been run by political enemies of Obama and thus open to mistreatment as was the rule in his day- and the punished power plant, shut down by some federal bureaucrat, was a huge hub of electrical energy for the entire west up through Washington state.

The punishment was implemented on a day when many of the nuclear power plants were going to be shut down for some regular inspection. Several coal-powered electrical plants had already been shut down for other EPA “punishments” and add it all together and the perfect storm of government intervention and already crippled and hampered electrical providers and boom, you’ve got …well a nationwide blackout.

I’m not at all sure I understand why power was not turned back on, at least in some pockets of the country. As was discovered by Clarion Call employees at a later date, there was really no reason for the power grid not to be re-activated, even if over small geographic areas, perhaps a little bit at a time. The best reason I can ascertain as to why the power grid was not restored, ANYWHERE across the fruited plains, was because there was no one in charge telling the power plant operators to throw the switch back on.

There’s thousands of documents online explaining the cause of the power outage and why it remained off for so long. But one does not have to be a civil engineer to figure out what went wrong with restoring power. The failure of the power grid to return after the blackout was caused by a bureaucracy too heavy to handle the cadre of rules, regulations and authorized personnel. The Las Vegas electric people couldn’t turn on until the California people fixed their stupid system which forced “electric usage restraint” and the California people couldn’t fix the dumb system that their state government installed because somebody in New York had to give permission.

On and on and on it went and until the entire country’s electrical grid went down nobody in the government realized that getting it back up was so onerous, indeed almost impossible, to get going again in that situation. Of course the government didn’t realize it. It’s not like “the government” is one person, one big CEO type who is responsible for running things and will get fired if he screws up.

Actually we did fire the government in a manner of speaking, didn’t we?

On the third day, America arose again like a mighty Phoenix from the ashes of the bureaucracy.

Clarion Call -Chapter 7-Leadership In a Power-Less World…or Not.

Friday

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.
===========================================================

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.

Sunday

Clarion Call-Chapter 5-The Blackout and Forbidden Speech

“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.
===========================================================

Chapter 5-The Blackout

The scene in my neighborhood was very similar to scenes across the fruited plains that cold January day of the annual SOTU speech. Folks walked around in a daze, battery-powered radios blared the story of the nationwide power outage. Somebody got out some charcoal, somebody else began a fire. Steaks were found from defrosting freezers and warmth was provided by barbecue grills as steaks were seared and grilled and discussions raged.

Local yokel radio stations across the fruited plains turned on their backup generators and got out the word. Local TV stations too sent out word but so many folks have cable nowadays that the few with rabbit ears to catch the signal were few and far between.

“Electricity is out nationwide,” our local guy shouted. “So far no one knows why, or no one knows why for sure. Word now is that the Chinese sent a major virus to an enormous computer system used by the power companies that somehow stopped all electricity-making processes. This is why there is no power even in areas supplied by nuclear power. Unless the computer indicates to keep on going the reactor shuts down.”

That crazy story about a Chinese virus was just one of many hundreds spread about before all TV and radio signals got hijacked by the crazy national emergency broadcast system. For several hours it was believed that a freak fire in a mid-country power plant melted a major hub in the electrical distribution circuit, a statement that pretty much meant nothing to most ordinary Americans. I didn’t understand a word of it.

What we did know was that the entire country was without power, indeed we knew this. We weren’t happy about it but in due course word spread across the neighborhood, around the country, over the fruited plains, across stormy lakes, that President Obama was going to talk to the nation about the nationwide electrical outage via the country’s fancy new emergency public broadcasting system.

Around 8pm that night battery powered radios and rabbit-eared televisions played on porches and decks and community common areas across the fruited plains. Thousands of Americans squatted on front stoops, huddled in outdoor tents, crammed cold living rooms across the country. No matter what any of us thought about President Obama he was our president and truthfully, most of us were glad someone was still in charge, surely it would be fixed soon, we’ll talk about what happened later.

I cannot imagine the nationwide shock when the television and radio stations still with working generators announced the President would soon come to the podium, although no podium could be seen. The TV stations could not broadcast video at the time, I don’t know why. It was weird as all get out though to be told the President is approaching the podium when all you could see was blackness.

My jaw has never fully recovered from its drop to the floor when a strange male voice could be heard. Soon another male voice joined in and in due course all of us cats realized that we were hearing a conversation we weren’t supposed to hear. President Obama’s voice was nowhere on the audio.

I am certainly not going to excerpt the entire audio of the exchange between Representative Rick Morrow and Obama Chief-of-staff Mickey Major –the Rick and Mick Show-as some smart alecs came to call it. The audio is linked on the official Country Class party web site and will for sure be part of the new historic national archives currently being established by the temporary government.

There were, of course, certain parts of the exchange that are more germane to my story than others. Morrow and Major discussed several procedural issues that took up almost 15 minutes of that audio, boring stuff. The juicy stuff lasted about eight minutes and if you don’t think eight minutes is a lifetime try being a citizen of a country and hearing the following:

(I begin my quotation somewhere five minutes into the audio, right after a discussion by the two men of possible new filibuster rules)

“Come on, Mickey, I’ve got people screaming at me about the restrictions of this new Affordable Care Act even though you didn’t implement but about 25% of it. Now they’re upset about this immigration bill, dear Lord the immigrants don’t have to get health care but natural born American citizens do? The caucus sent me in to try and plead with you and the President. We’re afraid of fomenting a revolution, I’m serious Micky.”

We didn’t have the advantage of seeing the gestures and facial expressions of the speakers during this verbal exchange but at this point there is a long silence. I don’t know if the Chief-of-Staff was glaring at this interloper in anger or perhaps one of the men was busy with something else.

Soon the silence was met with a derisive snort.

“Rick, you go back and tell your caucus to stuff it,” Mickey shouted. I could only imagine him poking a stiff angry finger in Representative Morrow’s chest.

“Mickey, you don’t work with us on this, we’re going public.”

“YOU’RE GOING PUBLIC ARE YOU?”

(I type the above in all caps as this is a Blogger story and Bloggers type in caps to indicate loud talk/emphasis.)

“Mickey there have been civilian actions over the last couple of months that surely even you and Barack can see are escalating. This country is turning into Egypt, Mick. America’s getting a bad reputation and even the media can’t help you out of this, Mick.”

More silence as if the responder was in thought, deep labored breathing.

“Egypt? America is nowhere near Egypt, Rick. You know what Egyptians make a day, Rick? The average Egyptian makes .98 a day. Americans are spoiled all to hell,Rick. You can argue that Egyptians had a right to revolt but Americans are too busy working for unbelievable amounts of money so they can go home to their air-conditioned homes, watch cable-tv reality shows and plan their four weeks of vacation. Americans are the luckiest people in the world, so you got a few hard-edge Teabagger types always complaining about something. They’re no threat. Go back and tell your caucus that Obama will not back off from the mass amnesty due to be granted in a few months, Affordable Care is here to stay, tell your caucus the spoiled morons of this country will soon enough back down for another dollar an hour.”

“We don’t believe that Mickey,” Rick Morrow said after a breath-wind of exasperation. “Colorado’s hardly any kind of tea-bagger state and I’ve got talk about mass work stoppages. And Mickey, put down the vodka for a minute, will ya?”

With this we heard a slam of what sounded like-since we knew it was vodka- a glass being slammed down on some table. Then a demented laugh.

Yeah, demented, no other word to describe it.

“The caucus told you to mention the vodka did they?”

“Yes. Yes they did.”

At this point there was a stretch of silence almost a minute long. At this point all of us listening began to look at each other, wondering what on earth we were hearing, could this really be? I never heard of Rick Morrow but then there are almost 500 elected Representatives in America’s House and Colorado is nowhere near me. I vaguely heard of then Chief-of-Staff Mickey Major, mostly because of the alliteration of his name and the jokes about it that wrote themselves. Mickey Major is a gay man, a fact widely known and quite frankly, not of much import to most Americans.

By this time in the national drama Rep. Morrow was right, the Country Class was getting to revolt. It was but a few months before this that I’d signed up with Clarion Call to be a Blogger. Not that Clarion Call used Bloggers all that much but they did direct local advertisers to local Blog sites. Getting registered as a Blogger with Clarion Call was a big deal. Clarion Call did not have any kind of major interview mechanism beyond an on-the-job training system. So if one signs up to be a wedding planner, say, Clarion Call asks for a link to the applicant’s web page and that’s pretty much it. If the applicant knows nothing about weddings this will soon come out and Clarion Call will be notified and the applicant will be removed from Clarion Call’s referral list.

All applicants were expected to have a web site, indeed, if they were applying for a business of some kind. This was yet another attempt by Clarion Call to adhere closely to IRS rules. Not that the IRS was going around inspecting the web sites of Clarion Call contractors-though one never knows, does one?-if a Clarion Call contractor suddenly was in business making millions, that individual could be contacted-or maybe “monitored” is a better word- by anybody in America, including the IRS.

I’m sure many Clarion Call contractors work “under the table” but as much as possible Clarion Call does not want to be in the business of tax collector so it insures that the tax collectors can find out phone numbers/addresses/emails of contractors receiving money from Clarion Call and at that time there’d never been an attachment of contractor payments for federal taxes.

Bloggers are unique in that, well they are expected to be reasonably able to write. If Clarion Call referred a client to my Blog site for sidebar advertisement they want to make sure I am worth it and will not embarrass the company. So I had to pick a Blogging area of expertise and for Clarion Call I billed myself as both a political writer as well as a culinary expert.

I only said I was a culinary expert because I’d been chosen by Taste of Home magazine to be one of their field cooks. I did work with Ellen often with her catering effort so I wanted advertisements on my sidebar for the locals to contact me. Every once in a while I’d put up a post about a recipe I tried.

At any rate, since I was supposedly a political writer, it became time for me to learn about politics. It was a perfect time to dip my toes in the political waters. This, plus the fact that my beloved husband finally gave up his struggle to live with failing lungs. I had a lot of time on my hands.

All my life I’d been a Democrat and as I stated upthread, I voted for President Obama the first time.

I soon learned that it wasn’t about Democrat or Republican. It was about Codevilla’s infamous ruling class.

After that minute of silence that seemed like an hour, we heard some shuffling around, the sound of a glass sliding across a wooden table. Suddenly there was the sound of a large clang of broken glass. Many of us jumped out of our chairs in surprise at this sound with no video. In our electric-less world we were confused by sounds with no sight.

“You tell your stuffy caucus that they can shove their worries where the sun don’t shine,” a very slurred voice said. By following the flow of conversation we deduced that Mickey Major was drunk and on a verbal roll.

“We got Affordable Care passed even though your pantywaist Republican colleagues tried their best to stop it. You guys love to make fun of the homosexuals with your limp-wrist imitations but the whole bunch of you got more air between your legs than a team of gay guys. We got the amnesty bill passed because we didn’t back down like the biggest wimp of all, your hero George W. Bush. HE’s the one that chickened out, not us fairy fellows.”

I was in my living room at the time with my family. We listened to this exchange and at the part of about the homosexuals we looked at each other with puzzlement. What on earth did any of this have to do with the country having no electricity and why were we hearing this thing broadcast across the Emergency Broadcast System?

“Here’s what you go tell your silly caucus, Rick. You tell them the American people have spoken. They re-elected Barack Obama despite the Affordable Care you guys claim to be so hated. We passed the amnesty act and sure a lot of Americans are upset about it but they’ll get over it. And here’s what else you tell your caucus, Rick…” At this we could hear the sound of unknown movements and then a long human gulp as if swallowing a large amount of liquid.

“Maybe I should come back when you’re not glugging down all that vodka, Micky.”

“NO. You stay right here and let me tell you what I’ve been determined to tell those nasty Jesus-loving co-legislators. You tell them that given time we will have control of every aspect of this country. Hispanics will be in the majority and with amnesty so denied them they will move on to take over the courts, the legislators, even the citizenry. We will soon all have health care and we will not have to pay for the cheap skates who get their health care on the public dime.”

Another long period of non-talk though heavy breathing could be heard.

“When we’re done, Rick, young men who fall in love with older male mentors will finally be able to live with and share their love. The wages in this country will drop because lazy Americans done priced themselves out of business in the wage market. Hispanics will do the work. Anyone who needs health care will get it and we won’t be wasting money on doing heart bypasses for 85 year old criminals. This country needs some common sense regarding health care and it’s time for people to just die when it’s their time. The only “white” Americans left will be those who willingly accept the government dole, who want their food stamps and shut up with the complaining. We’re making this country better, Rick….go tell your caucus that.”

At that point the infamous sound of furniture falling, shouts of pain and then….complete silence.

It was a tape that changed the country. Along with the national blackout, of course. It was played over and over for the next several days and by the time the country got back up and running all Americans knew of the tape and all Americans were quite unhappy with this Ruling Classes’ plan for us.

Monday

Clarion Call-Chapter 4-Codevilla’s Book and a Nationwide Blackout

“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.
===========================================================

Chapter 4-Codevilla’s Book and a Nationwide Blackout

“In "The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It," Angelo M. Codevilla argues there has been a searing rift in the relationship between the governing and the governed that is unlike the normal left-right pendulum swing to which we're accustomed.”

No, the book by Angelo Codevilla did NOT explode upon the literary scene to cause disgruntled Americans across the fruited plains to revolt after each chapter. Take it from me, a former “low-information voter”-AKA “LO-FO” voters, I never heard of Codevilla and even if I had his writing was not my favored genre.

After the “correction” of the country, the book by Codevilla was put on the official History Site of the Revolution. Reading is not required as one benefit of the revolution is we are all now free and not under the thumbs of endless bureaucrats. School children of the future might read it; for now the reconstruction of the country’s education system is still in process and it goes just fine. Remove the unions and the bureaucrats and the brothers-in-law of local school officials selling a new educational tool and boom, so much we could do with not a dime more than the budget the Ruling Class had and used unwisely.

Heretofore I called them the political class and frankly I will always consider them thus. They do not rule me and never did. They drove me nuts and I avoided breaking stupid laws for the bother but I had no respect for any of them. So I call them the political class but essentially it is the Ruling class outlined by Codevilla.

So we had the infamous Affordable Care Act, followed by Benghazi followed by the IRS scandal followed by the Zimmerman trial along with the Sherry Morton ruling capped off by the immigration fiasco all outlined in the Codeville book.

Then came the national blackout.

There are a million web sites documenting how the nationwide blackout came to be. I am a Scribe, formerly a lo-fo voter, I cannot begin to understand how this entire country ended up with a blackout and it was, as we all know now, the key, the huge key, that opened the mind of Tea Partiers and lo-fo voters alike. Nothing gets your attention like lack of power.

As I understand it, the blackout was a result of new coal restrictions put in place by President Obama. I would like to insert right here that in the first election I voted for President Obama. I didn’t the second time as I didn’t much like that health care thing. I have no great rancor for the former President; by me he did what he does, he pushed his political agenda, he never lied about a thing.

The Republican party, if truth were to be told, did more lying on any one day than President Obama did in his lifetime and this is substantial.

The Republican party’s part in all of this is more for lack of opposition than necessarily major bad actions on their part. They waffled about immigration in the House, they allowed the Affordable Care Act to pass and didn’t defund it as they could have. They didn’t fight hard enough against the EPA and for implementation of the Keystone pipeline.

Clarion Call did manage to get the pipeline installed and operational. The Republicans and the Democrats, both, allowed a national blackout to happen and for that, plus that amazing sound byte of truth and clarity, was all this country needed to take action.

Clarion Call filled in all the blanks.

As best as I can understand it, the problem was all about coal. Let me state right here that I know very little about electricity-how it’s generated, that sort of thing. I now understand that coal is used to fire the burners that will burn the fuel that will, with the help of magnets, somehow generate electricity.

The EPA had somehow, intentionally or unintentionally-it hasn’t yet been determined-stopped all coal from delivery from electricity generating plants that used the fuel. Somehow that awful bureaucracy managed to stop the railroads, as I am to understand, and coal simply was not delivered. I do not think the EPA intended to shut down electricity for the entire country, especially in view of how it changed things and yon reader will note, the EPA is no more.

There are many generators of nuclear energy as well and at the least one would expect that these electric-generating plants would have remained open and would have provided SOME electricity, even if serving only a few areas. Let us not forget the windmills and other forms of “green” energy, which in toto might have supplied electricity for maybe a dozen people. Dear Lord, even the wind stopped blowing that day.

As for me, all I knew was, boom, the electricity went out in my house. I looked around and decided, oh well, this too will pass. Electric outages were not that unusual in my area, what with being a tourist area and the crazy drivers who come with this setting. They are on vacation, so goes the logic, I cannot get in an automobile and hit a pole, I am on vacation! I took a nap.

I awoke over two and a half hours later. This was the last restful sleep I would have for many months.

Indeed it was unusual for the electricity to be out for over two house, goodness our local guys got the thing rolling within an hour, almost always. I walked outside and noted none of my neighbors seem to have electricity either. So I knew it wasn’t just me.

“Cheryl, we can’t get a hold of Delmarva,” Charlotte, my neighbor to the right told me, holding up her cell phone to indicate she’d been calling.

“All of the cell towers aren’t working as I understand it,” another voice in the neighborhood shouted.

By this time there was a small throng of people wandering our neighborhood and, intriguingly, there were no sounds of any traffic on the nearby big highway near our development. The sound of silence was scary.

Many of us had cell phones still charged, and many had portable chargers, but it was for nought. The cell towers weren’t working. We had no electricity, no way to communicate, no television.

Local radio stations powered up via generators across the fruited plains so bits of what was a nationwide electricity outage became known to all, even if only by radio wave and word of mouth.

It might be recent history but it will someday become American history, this American “Revolution” of the 20th century. It did not happen in a vacuum, we all know this now.

It began with the Tea Parties of mid-term election year 2010. Understand I was not a Tea Partier at the time though I never much thought the concept of meeting with elected officials at Town Halls across the fruited plains to be a bad thing. I did note that there were large swaths of human beings in DC in protest of something or other. At the time my husband was suffering from a brain infection and needed my attention 24 hours a day. Whatever feuds between the political class and the country class at that time went right over my head.

The Tea Parties of yesteryear didn’t much change anything in terms of social dynamics, even in the political landscape frankly. The Tea Parties of yesteryear were the first instance of a country class uprising. It is hard to control the country class. There are millions of them and they all have different lives, talents, residences and lifestyles. It’s like herding cats, so went the old expression.

Millions of Tea Party members joined up with Clarion Call, all just for the extra money.

Came the time to turn America around, Clarion Call was still a huge business alive to make lots of money. But it was peopled to the brim with Tea Party types. With the massive technological advances of our era, and with a political class that benefits from old or no technology now knocked out of relevance, it was small matter to herd the cats to get the power back on, fix the immigration problem, form a new albeit temporary government and goodness, ask around. Most Americans today are supremely happy now that the government doesn’t control them with endless bureaucratic minutiae or the political class ignores them by refusing to engage in the number one job of the federal government-enforcing the borders.

But I digress.

Even with the power outage and finger from the political class over immigration reform, the IRS nightmare, even with Affordable Care collapsing like it did…even with all that I’m still not convinced the cats could have been herded without the now infamous 23 minute tape caught live and clear on audiotape. It was Micky Major indeed, giving a House member a piece of his angry mind-President Obama’s Chief of Staff.

Representative Rick Morrow from Colorado approached Major with some concerns of his constituents re the then recently passed Mass Citizenship bill. It was the night of the annual State of the Union speech and say what you will about President Obama, he loved the spotlight and loved to tout his alleged “accomplishments”. In January of 2014, Affordable Care was in full effect-what they could salvage, as we all remember. The Mass Citizenship Welcome Bill of 2014 was passed by one vote in the House of Representatives and accepted, in conference, by both legislative Houses. It was a horribly disliked piece of legislation but there is always a line.

The line is crossed at different points by different personality types. Many of us regard an abused wife with puzzlement, wondering why she would put up with constant black eyes and verbal mistreatment, with no end in sight. Even that abused wife has a line, a line that cannot be crossed without –finally- causing the recipient to strike back.

Cat herds have thick impenetrable lines but even millions of cats will scatter as one should a common danger be upon.

The power went out and as the country survived 7 days before power was restored across most of the country, the cat herds were treated to endless tapes-23 minutes long-of Chief of Staff Micky Major scream at a Representative of the People about how America would soon be all Hispanic, the culture of the blithering Founding Fathers was soon to end, men will marry men and women will marry women and indeed so-called “children” (adolescents) will be allowed to love an adult male and receive love back without trauma or fear of a jail term.

Yes he really said that…well yon readers have no doubt heard the tape a million times and know it by heart.

For the power went down across the country the day of President Obama’s state of the union speech. We never did get to hear Obama’s speech that year.

In fact, the only sound wave to be heard across the fruited plains was that 23 minute tirade by Micky Major.

It all would have been funny were the whole thing not so tragic, and unnecessary.