About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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October CountryIn honor of this being my 100th "Tales from the Third Lobe" article, I decided to do something special. It was nearly a "Top 100 of my favorite articles published here", but I figure I'll wait another year and make it my "Top 125". Or, to make it a nice round number, "Top 128".
But since the numeral 100 isn't very special to me—base-10 was not my first love—you get something else. You get my favorite article that I will publish in the future. This article is from the latter part of 2007, and it's called:
October Country
A couple of years ago, the Sundance Channel aired Original Child Bomb, a documentary composed of film clips suppressed by the Truman administration in 1945 to keep us from seeing (back then, at any rate) the civilian horrors and devastation and bizarre lingering illnesses caused from the nuclear fallout of two of the smallest nuclear devices ever intended for military deployment. It took sixty years for us to find out the truth of what happened there, the bone-level and skin-level truth, because, for some reason, if we don't hear it from the mouths of our own officials, it's not believable.
Twenty-one years ago, we are told that thirty people died from the Chernobyl nuclear accident. It's been twenty-one years, and the truth is still coming out, a couple of megapixels at a time. "Thirty" is off by a couple of orders of magnitude, I figure. Remember back in 2004 when the elementary school got seized, a couple of bombs got blown up, and 340+ people died, and maybe 700 got injured? Remember how low those numbers were while the hostage crisis was still ongoing?
The sources you trust the most will lie like goddamn dogs for as long as it takes to get you to react how they want you to react.
At this the moment I write this, a couple of non-US sources abroad (Australia and Italy) are tracking radioactive clouds drifting over a corner of the Caspian Sea and into Turkmenistan. For the maybe one in a hundred of you that have heard of these clouds, we've heard that the official story is that they are part of a weather analysis project so that our troops on the ground in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan can better predict and adjust for weather conditions. But the truth appears to be that we have just nuked Iran. Could have been Israel, but Israel being Israel, they wouldn't be quiet about it.
Dick Cheney has wanted this to happen for a long time. Since back in the "Axis of Evil" days, certainly. Probably for much longer than that, seeing as he has been in Washington since the Nixon era.
Those clouds must have traveled a long way, too, because the probable targeted site of our missile was on the Persian Gulf coast, all the way on the other side of Iran. This is not good. Pure conjecture here, but what else is there? We won't hear of the running and screaming and the people on fire in the streets and the three-month lingering deaths from rotting bloody blisters for sixty years—hell, some of those deaths won't happen for sixty years—if our "trusted sources" have anything to do about it. Al-Jazeera not being one of our trusted sources.
So what's the official story to be tomorrow or the next day, or by the time you're reading this? A Chernobyl-style nuclear release from Bushehr? Simultaneous refinery accidents at Natanz and Arak?
Back in the forties, it was in the newspapers as soon as it happened. There was a couple of nukings in Japan, some pictures in the paper, and an unconditional surrender. But that's not how it works anymore. See, wars are only won and lost when you have army generals and navy admirals to capture. We haven't had that kind of war in more than fifty years. Hell, we've hardly had soldiers on either side since the middle of 2006.
So now nukes come out, and the story is, "Nukes? What nukes?" At least until retroactive popular support can be whipped up to cover the "minuscule" bunker-busting tactical nuclear device use. All that fallout? That’s from their nuclear weapons manufacturing facilities. Our bombs are clean. There wouldn't be a mess at all if they hadn't been doing what they ought not have….
Boy, times sure have changed. Or maybe they haven't.
But I think we'll own up to the nukes in tonight's press conference. The blogosphere has had all day to massage public opinion, and politically the timing couldn't be better. Campaigning for the 2008 election has been going on for maybe half an hour, and this time my own hat is in the ring—along with the 2000+ other cranks and madmen that'll never have a chance of getting enough signatures to be on the ballot. But now there is a worldwide nucular [sic] situation that doesn't have a chance in hell of being tamed in a mere fourteen months, and we'll be completely awash in a "patriotic" tide of "Don't change horses in mid-tsunami." There probably won't even be a 2008 election, and I'll have wasted my postage on the FEC forms. Not worried about my time filling them out. They weren't very complicated.
Considering that this is 2007, not 1945, and damned near everyone has their own nuclear devices. Even boy scouts can make them. There might not even be a 2008. As of tomorrow, maybe the end of the week, there will be checkpoints on every major highway, curfews and travel restrictions, rationings of several different kinds, and a shiny new form of draft that doesn't depend on age or gender but training and expertise. The clogged prisons will empty their drug-offenders into the Army and Marines, and every company with fifty or more employees will hand over their Human Resources records to the Department of Homeland Security.
Phone and internet communication tapping will happen at random, mail will be opened, and many, many more people will vanish. Just vanish. And that will all be absolutely fine, because, you know, World War makes everything okay.
The nuclear carnival has come to town. Buy your tickets, see the spectacles, ride the rides. Your life will never be the same. October will last forever.
Four hours and thirty minutes down, a thousand years to go. The only light in this tunnel is what we brought with us.
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Vidicon was the Buddha but the pay was lousy. |
