Thank Goodness

When they changed the colors of the American flag to pink, tan and gold the first day following the International Declaration of Eternal Forever World Peace back in the twenty-first century, it was a grand gesture, an historic signal heralding the rebirth of innocence and integrity, that is, in the elite upper classes, at least, who, by that time, were stuffed and cranky, tired of everything and ready for a change. Nineteen-hundred-and-forty sounded antiquated a long time before then, but in the early part of the new century nostalgic replicas of 1940’s peplum suits began to appear in the women's fashion industry, scary dark tweeds, coordinating gloves and hats with a lot of pink, tan and gold cuteness underneath, and it became paramount to let art mimic life rather than to repeat bad history.

In parallel accord, the middle class was championed in a series of media message giveaways to continue to develop moral qualities without having to be brainwashed into bondage and drained of their life energies. It was a new concept. There was a period of adjustment, about a year, until most people knew what to do with their newfound freedom. There was a supersizing of attendance in book clubs and literary societies. A new philosophical movement called Fantasticism, founded by a colony of writers and poets from New England, was embraced by academia, and it’s performers were paraded and paparazzied in the media-odd fellows with ashen faces, twinkling eyes and crooked teeth.

They wrote in a romantic style about the angst that comes with change, with a magical sensuality bound to earthlike perspectives. Fantasticist groups held concert readings, standing on a small stage surrounded by an 8' moat, in the middle of grand stadiums, racetracks and polo fields. To add to the effect, they had push-button breeze and wind machines above their marks and on either side over the isles, and used a holographic light-filtering projection apparatus that made everything look like a charcoal drawing on a wrinkled brown paper bag.

It was the biggest ticket in any venue, and packed a kind of hypnotic effect that animated the audience into shouting, singing, adding sound effects, and even fainting. No one had ever seen a phenomena quite like it though some nostalgically compared it to The Beatles. Some compared it to the Southern Baptist Church, though when coming up the stairs to the stage the poets looked like Dickensonian characters.

A new slogan was dancing off the tongues of the happy newage revolutionaries, following the tune of "We Shall Overcome". "One CounTRY ONE Wor-or-orld, One In-Fin-It-TEE-ee-ee..." That chant, echoing from the malls of every Miracle Mile from the west to the east marked the beginning of the Happy Movement. They were called "Happies", and they were genuinely mirthful. One Country, One World, One Infinity.

The chant they used while marching made people stop in amazement the first time they heard it, and once they heard it, noone could forget it. The words were about as easy to learn as it was to do a circle dance, so people everywhere joined in the chant and circle-danced all over their towns:

I’m freer than I think I know,
I’m freer than I see.
As free as gentle breezes blow,
as free as free can be.

I’m safer than I’d ever need,
I’m safer than I know,
Safer than a mustard seed,
as safe as safe is so.

(these were repeated and often people made up their own pertinent verses)

Since then, noone has ever been obliged to wear a uniform with an unappealing style or to sport a business logo either stamped, embroidered or sewn onto it. (Although button-badges were advocated, as a way to offer observable symbols of personal issues. By way of reading and taking mental note of their buttons, one could experience the integral identity of a person, in addition to whatever labour they may perform, and gain insight into their burning passions, and most of all, determine the amount of respect they deserve for being whoever they are.)

During uproarious times of adaptation it was necessary to take a dispassionate view and respectfully bow to acknowledge another citizens buttons rather than attempt to immediately sort out the problem of proper placement for particular preponderating personal or professional preferences post facto, precluding priceless prodigies proactively producing precious prototypical pieces, prolific poets, precocious painters, ponderous professors and pastry-chefs whose proof of the pudding put plates of pumpkin pie on penniless platforms and provided people plenty of petty cash to purchase portions, profoundly precipitating powerful and pure progress as prophesied.

These changes were accomplished in a few simple steps without jeopardizing basic human rights as outlined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which were then overhauled to feature certain key phrases typeset in bold and double-underlined, and rewritten to introduce a new set of basic and extended animal and wildlife rights, and the rights of the natural world, in a series of articles in addendum.

The revised documents were published with illustrations, and given to every citizen during an inaugural release celebration, with the idea that everyone would be able to read and understand them. Especially the part about all men being created equal. In a public policy sweep, an alliance of renowned advertising agencies created a campaign in which the lower class was targeted, encouraged and allowed to think that one over as a focus group, after which special educational programs and business funding opportunities began to mushroom in the fertile areas.

The Upper West and areas of the Bronx and Washington DC began to gentrify and developed a look resembling resort towns in the Bahamas, with pink, tan and gold buildings, wide green parks with Italian-style marble fountains and flowering fruit trees. The Chicago convention center, schools and universities, and all the sidewalks of the city were remodeled using pink marble rhodochrosite imported from Argentina, which engendered a complete economic renewal for the Argentines and started a worldwide fascination with the Tango. The city was renamed Chic Largo, and across the board, everyone in Chic Largo won the freedom to take an afternoon nap. Chic Largo became a mecca for relaxation and meditation.

Over a million jobs were created in the process of publishing the new constitutional documents. Hemp and rice were farmed for manufacturing vast quantities of paper, factories soaked and pressed the pulp, more factories finished and dried it. Diligent graphics specialists hammered out typesetting, clerics and intellectuals were responsible for proofreading. Colorists mixed inks and printing machines were kept humming day and night. Binderies opened, distribution centers were outfitted with trucking caravans and numerous stock clerk, secretarial, accounting and managerial positions provided steady work for both blue-collars and professionals. Jobs were secure even after the constitutional overhaul, due to a vast increase in publishing interests, and yearly reprints. Everyone whistled while they worked.

Artists and educators were given substantial grant funding to participate in a call for Neo-Constitutional article illustrations, and finalists were judged by a panel of students representing every art college in the country. There were a variety of mediums chosen: several wood-cuts, some cartoons, photographs, paintings and sculpture, and web addresses printed in primary blue next to certain passages directed the reader to sites where one could hear music, view videos and films or watch an animated short, which later became a full-length feature.

It was called "The Will of the Wild" , featuring a brown bear, an eagle and a deer engaged in conversation with gentle anecdotal references to articles in the "Rights of the Natural World" section of the new constitution. The full-length version of the cartoon was composed in an Ingmar Bergmanesque-style of drama, using animated characters in situational sequences, with visionary daydream and poetic deep thought overlays creating layers of experience and depicting the gripping gritty saga as eleven from each species of the various animals of the Disney world sauntered slowly up the line and onto the decks, lofty platforms and sub-level berths of "No Way’s Ark". They were all leaving the planet since it had been discovered that ultimately, there was no way to get from point "b" back to point "a". The movie was a huge success with audiences from toddlers to the elderly, and its theme song became the new international anthem for friendship, an updated version of "A Whole New World" from Aladdin.

Schools everywhere began to establish top-quality facilities and faculty were paid enough to become members of the upper class. The doors to education were open to one and all, myriad programs to further opportunities for the gifted, the talented, and the needy were added and multiplied.

Factories making electronics, casements, machinery, tools, hardware, software, furnishings, textiles, ceramics and packaging industries sprang up in every town to manufacture the products that had been profitably produced previously through the exploitation of subcultures who, mired in overpopulation, poverty and a low standard of living, were a bargain.

The worker bees among the upcoming generations were guaranteed manufacturing jobs with secure wages and regular work-weeks, benefits and long term contracts set up for profit-sharing and a yearly minimum 15% increase based on productivity scales. Workers and employees who had to break a contract due to ownership changeovers or company politics were guaranteed 100% equal salary yearly until gainfully reemployed. Retraining programs were available at every level of expertise and in every area of interest. There was good reason to be Happy.

Raw materials used for manufacturing were developed to eliminate toxic chemicals from the manufacturing processes and refinement methods. Packaging had to be 100% non-toxic under any condition of heat or cold, and design engineers invented One-Touch Instant removable packaging, with simple biodegradable disposability, such as the ability to dissolve in rainwater and provide nutrients to soil and plants, and no product of any kind, including disks and video-tapes, could be packaged in any way below that standard according to law.

For the first thirty years, if any new manufacturer experienced decreased productivity or profits, the surplus funds that became available through the farming, cultivation and tax on the sale of cannabis of various grades to people over 25, was legislated for business grants in the category of upgrades and improvements.

The surplus income from the cannabis tax was used for health insurance, and also provided full coverage for patients needing cannabis medicines, a point which poked a pin-prick into the rigid infrastructural dam keeping medicine from flooding the hoi polloi. Slowly the breach grew and slowly the walls crumbled under the pressure. There was a leveling of the incessant struggle to control the profits of pharmaceuticals. There was a leveling of the incessant struggle to control, period. No one wanted to do it any more, as it had been routed out as counter-productive to peace and equality. The tax rate was based on quality, the higher the grade, the higher the tax (the same rates were applied to liqueurs, champagnes, cognacs, brandies, wines and single malt scotches.) A simple straightforward way of releasing the dark buttresses that held the Great Wall of History, chippoed and cracking, in front of the entrance to the fifth dimension. Eventually the wall fell, like in Berlin, and a theme park took it’s place. It was the favorite place on earth for scientists, artists, thrill-seekers, adventurous sorts, and FastiManiacs. Walls were coming down and dams were bursting.

This approach also afforded a way for law enforcement to continue uninterruptedly arresting eighteen-year old college kids with fake ID’s until the sense of panicked urgency that drove youth to distraction was lifted by a focus on artistic and intellectual pursuits, bolstered by the newfound security system of educational mentorship in schools and psychological, emotional and physical mentorship at home, along with the home itself for anyone homeless.

Requiring police to be lawyers evened out the overabundance of lawyers and the lack of qualified police. Police also had to be certified college level physical education instructors in some field of athletic discipline.

Doctors were required to obtain a master’s level in visual fine arts and art history, (plastic surgeons were required to be licensed artists) and lawyers had to receive at minimum a master’s degree in music composition, theory, instrumentation and cultural history. Those preferred members of the doctor/lawyer stratum could receive a license to practice only if they were able to include being practicing artists or musicians as methodology. Those who were disinclined toward creative expression in those areas had the option of becoming nurses and practitioners or bailiffs and police captains, or could opt for melding into the literary field through special charter programs. At first it was said that these new structures were overly complex, and somewhat obtuse, but then again, there was the familiar ring of tacit acceptance with authoritative dictates that people were quite comfortable with, so the new policies were able to use that weakness to the greater advantage.

Prerequisite to being nominated, elected or appointed, aspirants to the legislative branch and the judiciary were expected to compete in Olympic sports and/or take over operation of somebody else’s business for one day and demonstrate a quantitatively higher profit than the day before.

During elections, candidates for the top offices engaged in three televised board games - checkers, chess and monopoly. The verbal debate procedure used in earlier times had been unanimously kiboshed in a special vote back in 2008, due to a widespread sentiment across the nation at the time that actions speak louder than words anyway. Finally, once common knowledge had given way and accepted that it had become pitiful to expect anyone to be truthful, candidates and their wives trained for a three-day televised dance marathon which was held the week before the election.

It was the single most highlighted event of any major race for office, and for three days, no matter what time it was, or what day it was, the media ratings soared off the board. There was no question of suppressing any kind of sentiment after the first 24 hours of steady dancing. Evidence of sweating, authenticity of composure, balance of emotions, and many other decisive characteristics could be examined. Everyone recalls the time a certain Presidential hopeful had hysterics during the last two hours, but was so funny that she got elected anyway. And it was great fun and good entertainment.

For a period of thirty years no one who was a bizzillionaire was allowed to accept any governmental position. No one in any governmental position was allowed to earn more than $250,000 a year while in office. It was called "The Great Purge". The reasons for the strict limits became clear once the changes that were being introduced brought about an increased standard of living and a decreased cost of living. The international debts were paid off in a few years and financial aid in spades was available to make up for past mistakes of wanton destruction.

Culture was being infused into the anemic lifeblood of society from an IV of evolved understanding, leading to the creation of a public policy advocating awareness, patience and dedication and adopting leisure as a new national sport.

In the year 2004 it was documented in the Akashic Records that the religion of the Republic would condone the mutilation in war of men and women barely grown, and yet would not hold stomach with late-term abortion, infusing their speech with teasingly horrible spectres of malevolent murders of innocent beings, based on an espoused quasi-reverence for life, in order to sway sentiment, while clutching at their hearts. As cause and effect would have it, the sentiment would often sway in the opposite direction.

The Democracy, presenting a wall-sized banner showing an enormous enlargement of a tattered antique photo of themselves with God craquelured onto the side, sought to dispute the premise of war, while still insisting on hunting down and killing enemies of the state as if there were no other alternatives. The banner was somehow reminiscent of the Fantasticists stage show, with it’s time-worn stylization and sepia tones. Anyone who wanted to make an impression of coolness wanted to look like the "Fastics", as they were called in the vernacular, but had to change the details the required 20% so as to avoid copyright infringement.

With everyone’s sensibilities blind to the capoot point that all the popular political issues of the time were moot as long as any civilization continued practicing solidarity of hatred and sending men and women off to war to die young, the aperture had narrowed and the resulting image was underexposed.

However when Happy agents secured the negatives and delivered them to the CDC, a highly specialized research team was able to bump up the image and conduct experiments through a glass darkly, discovering proof of just what was wrong with that picture. Tiny microbes. The populace were infected with Beta-fication, a virulent malady that clouded the vision. It distorted everything, it drove them crazy, it made them sick and tired and old.

There was a baby-factory mentality dominating the popular attitudes towards women behind the central power operations that wanted to control the reproduction of workers and soldiers to keep it’s instruments in good order. While setting strict legislative limits on cloning and medical research, they funded massive underground experiments to scientifically produce a slave class divided into four groups, or races: the personal/domestic slave, the worker slave, the war slave and the media slave.

The laboratories were literally part of an underground tunnel system: office buildings, research centers, upscale malls and restaurants in clusters that were called "towngeons" along a subterrannean highway that stretched from Washington DC to Brownsville, Texas, with another smaller branch, a straight, narrow two-lane road, that tunnelled under the Poconos and across New England, where it finally came to a dead end off the coast of Maine. Eventually they planned to enlarge it, adding a route from Maine northeast to Iceland and northwest to Alberta. It was no secret that the tunnels were considered prime property and many renowned trumpsters who could afford the price points, purchased "dungeon packages" and "digs" for hundreds of millions of dollars.

It was absolutely clear to everyone ex-terra that there would be no chance for survival in the event of a holocaust unless you owned some digs. Amazingly enough, no one cared. Later we all came to know why. The mass volume consciousness that hadn’t been able to put the energy into believing the oft-repeated and pumped-up predictions of hellacious future events had been able, without knowing it, to change the course of history. There just wasn’t enough opposing force to match the energy generated by a huge volume of volcanic passion, so the genetic code for trumpstering devolved, and even then, noone was very surprised about it.

In the meantime, the PoMo’s (PowerMongers) excitedly anticipated setting up shop to accommodate volume slave production within four years, planning to staff the care-and-nurturing-of-infants facility with rotating infusions of unwed teenage mothers who would work for nine months and then release their progeny to the factory upon termination for further cloning in order to vary results by spicing up the genetic recipes, and to ensure permanent staff.

The illicit progeny would be minimally educated and put to work in the factory at the age of 12. While PoMo endeavored to present a rightsided deterrant to promiscuity, which they didn’t really believe would work, nor would they want it to, (but it played well) their own research had shown that it was unlikely that any threat, whether emotional, psychological, spiritual or physical would ever have enough grist to make a more powerful impact on young people than pheremones and burgeoning puberty already had.

Operating from the basic view that human beings were mostly a species with a high percentage of liquids in their physical makeup, and though complex and intelligent, were still an animal species, it could be determined that the need for abortive services would increase incrementally based on the level of conviction involved. Since so many youth were easy targets after Beta-fication, they were able to successfully factor in a solid projection of plenty of thousands turning out morally disconnected, trapped in a day-time drama, and nourishing what little emotional need they had been able to muster by nursing on attention gained through grand-scale existentialist sufferings, enough to count on expecting the bus at the gate to be dropping them off in droves for years to come.

They were expecting to make a delightful 5,200,000% profit for at least a couple of decades before an expected revolt would come about, ensuring their continued prominence in World Control for most of the rest of their lives without their having to be elected for anything. But if they were still kicking, they planned on regaining political power during the slave revolt. If they were too ill or old by then, they would replace themselves with their daughters or sons, who could also boast of being well-schooled in war. And with a devil-may-care facade imparting the illusion of confidence, they fully expected to win. Again and again and again.

However, their efforts were foiled when persistent intelligence agents from the Happy Movement managed to infiltrate and streamline the legal processes right under the noses of the judicial system using their own native language, generating enough clarity so that evil could be easily identified and halted on its path. The shock of it caused reverberations that spread in undulating waves across the land.

Two specially trained teams of bouncers, The Big Guy Brigade and The Lumberjack Berets were called in to surround any compromised governmental compound and take the wrongdoers out by the hand. Protocol required that the captured wear chainmail from top to toe for protection and detention, and hitchhike across the country within a week to a psycho-rehabilitation facility in Los Angeles. Anyone who took longer than a week to arrive, was spanked. After three years they were briefed and released to work in kitchen and textile factories, and there were many to choose from, although most chose to work with weaving and screen-printing in Florida.

The unfortunate mistake that the PoMo’s made, a sacrifice which inadvertently effected the hastening of their ultimate salvation, was that they hadn’t developed the foresight to include aesthetes in their line, who, though largely invisible, were a serious threat to the upkeep of status quo illusion.

Thus artists and people of vision had been left alone to flourish quietly until there was space enough in the spectra of human experience for perception to be altered and consciousness to be upgraded. The whole universe had been waiting for the next phase of evolution to errupt, but so many sparks of humanity had been Beta-fied and De-Alpha-tized, that only a core group noticed at first although the recognition factors and signpost phenomena were manifestly apparent. The variables that set off the elemental DNA extrusion that caused an avalanche of progression to a higher consciousness, were brewing with enough energy to wake everyone up to smell the coffee.

It was a desperate time for those people who had unwittingly been the product of a culturally deprived education. It was an era where the ludicrous visage of smirking absurdity had reigned ridiculously supreme until it was tickled into unconsciousness and passed out of fashion while being given CPR in a supersonic ambulance on the way to a clinic in Canada.

When accurate attitudinal positioning in synch with effort. passion and chance instantly became an addendum to human instinct and natural sensibilities, human beings began being born with an extra little chunk of brain on the crown of the head, creating the cranial dome that we now affectionately call the Boodah Bump. Thank goodness for the world as it is now.

GrandMs. Rose Fiddlesticker
on her nine hundred ninety-ninth anniversary
Chic Largo, Illinois 3264