The nation was founded several centuries ago with the finest rhetoric plantation owners could buy. Soaring eloquence about the rights of man, the question for life, liberty, and justice for all. It’s founding texts are still immensely quotable, like a popular Twitter rant, but only on paper.
Our young protagonist is inspired by these words, and the pageantry of flags and statues, that support them. Sadly, as he matures, unsettling glimpses of another reality pierce his patriotic bubble. That founding document was brilliantly written by flawed men who were in thrall to the young nation’s economic engines of slavery and indentured servitude, a system of trickle up fiscal policy, where workers made less than a living wage and the fruits of their labor benefitted the every new iteration of plantation owners. The wonder of this system was that it was flexible enough to be retrofitted with new names and additional soaring rhetoric as technology and the means of mind control evolved. Guns, a handy devices for hunting animals and people, were mentioned in one of the founding documents and elevated into a religious artifacts over time, a projectile spewing death machine so revered that possession of its God like power over life and death, allowed many to see the ritualized murder of children by guns as a by product of people NOT HAVING ENOUGH GUNS.
With this our protagonist, long in denial, finally had to acknowledge that he lived in an upside down world where much of the nation’s official language was a weapon of double speak. All pregnancies must come to term but, once in the world, these babies will be subject to all forms of sexual abuse, neglect, miseducation, and violence, followed by soaring rhetoric of sad hearts, minds and prayers — always empty prayers. Shook by these revelations the protagonist seeks solice in religion, relying on an ancient document full of stories and metaphors shaped by its interpreters to mean whatever fits their most recent talking points.
One day our protagonist realizes that the nation’s founding documents, along with its state sanctioned religion, are control systems who’s language is the debased sound of hypocrisy, mendacity and plain old foolishness. There’s no red or blue pill option for our protagonist, since the naked reality he’s trapped in can’t be ignored. Just as frightening is that many of his fellow citizens have even abandoned the bandaid of rhetoric that held the nation together, embracing the once coded values of racial supremacy, religious intolerance, and guns as the final solution. Fearful of absolutes offered by the right and left, our protagonist does what the nation wants him to do - he buys a cache of automatic weapons, monitors the media for signs of the coming apocalypse, and hides out in a basement, leaving only for food, what passes for fresh air, and whatever en vogue narcotic is available.
As he waits for his nation’s contradictions shatter the status quo, the protagonist watches the distraction industry recycle its hampster wheel of narratives, bolstered by the most addictive technology money can create. Bereft of hope, his psyche stunted by dreams of the nation’s totems in pieces on a distant shore, he pulls out a sheet of white paper liberated for a stationary store, and scrawls a manifesto of soaring rhetoric with his AR weapon close by. The protagonist thinks the founding words were inescapably good, but they were written by a cabal of salesmen, con men, and connivers. Despite his best intentions the protagonist is an inheritor of all their malarkey. Putting pen to paper the protagonist writes, “And justice for all,” gambling foolishly that he can inspire a new national religion from the ashes of this one. And then, from outisde, he hears the distant sound of video game gun fire.