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2065: America Fifty Years After Obama
The President at Dawn
Chapter 1 of Mr. Tucker’s novel 2065, which we will serialize in the coming months.
(Page 2 of 4)
“Massa President, your National Security Adviser wants to talk to you right away. Something in the Pacific.”
“You know I don’t want to be bothered before 7 o’clock,” s/he said testily.
“We know. But this seems like an emergency.”
“Well, it will just have to wait. I’ll see him in five minutes.”
Over the Intercom Jean could hear a buzz of voices. There seemed to be a lot of scurrying up and down the hall outside as well. Maybe something unusual was happening.
“Alright, Massa President. We’ll do as you say.” The sarcasm fairly dripped from the Intercom.
“It’s ‘Mizza’ President, if you don’t mind,” Jean shot back. “If you can’t master that maybe you’d better find yourself another job. I don’t want any of this ‘Massa President’ stuff. It makes me sound like a 19th century slave-owner.”
“I’m sorry,” said the voice, only half contrite. “But the NSA says it’s urgent. He’s outside your door right now.”
“Tell him to knock.” Jean switched off the Intercom.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” said President Jean Armageddon.
It was Darwin Slater, herm National Security Adviser. Completely bald except for a monk’s tonsure, he was a frumpy, disheveled man of about 60 who always seemed to have just brushed crumbs off the front of his baggy suit. Slater was the rarest of birds — an old white male who seemed to have survived on servility. Jean had intended to replace him with a person of color but he had been the first of herm inner circle to master the “Mizza” protocol and Jean appreciated that.
“Mizza President,” he began with perfect diction, “we have a serious situation in the Pacific.” He fumbled through his armful of briefing papers. “The Chinese Navy has sailed into Pearl Harbor…” he struggled to find the right place… “with three battleships, two destroyers and two troop transports carrying an unknown number of infantry.” He looked apologetic. “We knew they were doing naval exercises in the region but had no inkling there would be anything like this. They seem to have hacked our satellite system overnight. We had no reports of movement in the area.” He was a bit embarrassed. “They have two aircraft carriers waiting outside the harbor as well.”
Jean stood dumbfounded. “What’s going on? What are they trying to do?”
“I’m told there’s a hologram communiqué from the Prime Minister,” said Slater. He began fishing into his pants pockets, finally pulling out a shiny black obelisk, the latest version of i-World, along with a few crumpled Kleenex. “I’ll play it for you if I can figure out how this thing works.” He fumbled with the gadget, pointing it toward the wall and jabbing the screen to no avail. Then suddenly there was an effect. The neatly tailored figure of the Chinese Prime Minister appeared before them — but only from his waist down. His top half was missing. “CShitizzdenf offfff thehia Undietedf STatjls …” began an obviously garbled audio transmit. “Just a minute,” said the flustered National Security Adviser and ran to the door and called outside. “Madam secretary, could you send in that intern?”
Letter to the Editor View all comments (27) | Leave a comment
More Articles by William Tucker
More Articles From 2065: America Fifty Years After Obama
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/09/11/the-president-at-dawn
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Havoc| 9.11.12 @ 7:49AM
xxx
Alan Obama Fan Brooks | 9.11.12 @ 5:36PM
White trash escatology; Tucker ought to do 'Left Behind' screenplays.
Alan Obama Fan Brooks | 9.11.12 @ 5:42PM
Eschatology, that's what it is.
And AS wants to serialize it??
But it is easy to write:
food stamp counterfeiting robots
welfare Batmobiles
pregnant welfare King/Queen hemaphrodites...
Bob K| 9.11.12 @ 8:40AM
Serialization worked for Charles Dickens but he wasn't writing lampoon.
We will see.
Bob Grant| 9.11.12 @ 8:50AM
2065?
Will we even HAVE a country at that point?
The book should have been titled 2020 or 2016. Ooops, 2016's been taken. How about 2015.
Louis Jenkins| 9.11.12 @ 9:24AM
Glad to see you dumped that cardigan sweater Mr. Tucker. This maybe worth following.
Louisa| 9.11.12 @ 11:06AM
Cardigan sweater? How about that gorgeous scarf! I hardly recognized Mr. Tucker without that Hermes scarf draped so artfully around his neck and framing his face so beautifully.
After I posted the photo of Mr. Tucker and his scarf on my FaceBook page, it went viral and created a tsunami of comment.
I don't think I've ever seen a more beautiful scarf in my life.
Ken (Old Texican)| 9.11.12 @ 9:28AM
Send me a title when you finish the darned book, and I will buy it at amazon.com.
Finish your work first.
Harry the Horrible| 9.11.12 @ 10:34AM
All I can say is that if the USA has reached the state described: "Go China! Go PLAN!"
A nation that defiled deserves to be destroyed.
Anti-Statist| 9.11.12 @ 10:42AM
Perhaps he should name his novel "Forward".
RCV| 9.11.12 @ 11:31AM
Thanks for saving me the trouble of buying this nonsense. Could the writing be any more terrible?
Tom Kyba| 9.11.12 @ 12:45PM
You're an uber-liberal. How would you know good vs bad writing?
fmm| 9.11.12 @ 12:14PM
Congrats Mr. Tucker. Love the herm bit.
Mars the Avenger| 9.11.12 @ 12:21PM
Good read. Strikes me as the immediate precursor to Idiocracy. Or, perhaps, idiocracy happened first? I suppose, if you look around, we are well on our way!
Occam's Tool| 9.11.12 @ 8:46PM
Mars: might I suggest that you look at CM Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons?" It is the novella "Idiocracy" was stolen from, and it is better and funnier. Google it---it's available online.
TeaPartyNow| 9.11.12 @ 12:23PM
Romney and Ryan can not run on their records. Romney and Ryan have no plan that they can say out loud before the election. The American Spectator has no choice but to run nonstop hate stories until Romney/Ryan loses in November. This guy Tucker, needs to see a doctor. Or get laid or something. He is clearly living the life of someone deeply depraved. And of course, Spectator haters eat this stuff up.
Guess what guys? The American People were sick of hate a while ago. The more you keep it up, the more Romney/Ryan loses support. How pathetic you all are. The American right has never stooped so low as it has with Romney/Ryan. Very sick and very sad indeed.
Sure Obama is bad, but most Americans still want something better. Romney is not it. You should have had a conservative nominee with a spine, a voice, and a plan. But no...
Tom Kyba| 9.11.12 @ 12:48PM
You call yourself TeaPartyNow and then judge others to be pathetic. What's pathetic is giving yourself a phony username.
Al Adab| 9.11.12 @ 1:27PM
How would you define that "something better" which Americans want? They certainly deserve better than they have and Romney, far from perfect or frankly barely acceptable as indeed he is, does move in the right direction. Any movement away from statism would be an improvement
Not sure what you mean about the right stooping to Romney. Conservatives opposed him to the end. They are long tired of holding their noses to vote GOP when that party betrays them time and again.
Purp| 9.11.12 @ 12:35PM
You know the Republicans are in trouble when the pull out the SCARE MACHINE... sorry, you cry WOLF far too often to have much effect anymore.
But I'll end by saying - go back and look at the Great Depression newsreels to see what Romney's World would look like.
Soup lines, tattered clothes, shoes with holes in them covered over with old newspaper. Filthy children carrying buckets of water to and fro. Pits dug in back yards to serve as latrines and scratchy magazine pages as toilet paper.
But up on the hill sits "Daddy Warbucks", descendant of the Romney's languishing one of his 32 mansions worldwide, sipping lemonade and having the local waifs biting his toenails for his manicure.
The neighborhood choir cleaning the horse stable where he keeps the descendants of the Romney's Dressage Horse, must not have horse manure laying around - and the locals use it for burning in their stoves to eat and heat. But the stench in the slums that Daddy Warbucks owns is disgusting.
But up on SNOB hill, life is grand, clean, and floriferous.
A view of Romney's world - I'm just saying.
Tom Kyba| 9.11.12 @ 12:47PM
You keep trying to gain ground by projecting your deficiencies onto Republicans. It still isn't working.
Purp| 9.11.12 @ 2:52PM
Working? As in Mitt Romney is losing? Oh, I'd say it's working just fine ... but he's doing his best to lose almost every day - Did this guy EVER run ANYTHING right?
His campaign is a disaster.
CJW| 9.11.12 @ 3:46PM
President Romney. Vice President Paul Ryan. Get used to it, Purpie.
Obama will be writing a book, with the help of Bill Ayers, about his four years and the mean Republicans, and the racist Americans who would not re-elect him.
Alej| 9.11.12 @ 8:19PM
"Did this guy EVER run ANYTHING right?"
Olympics, Bain Capital first come to mind.
People, please quit egging this transgender Democrat on... ignore it for a week and it will disappear. It thrives on rebuttals, and and your attention, riposting with stupidities like this.
Starve it.
Occam's Tool| 9.11.12 @ 8:44PM
Alej: so true. I'm cheerfully voting for Romney, and I bought the T-shirt. Several of them. Since I work in Liberal land, I'll put the bumper sticker on after he wins.
Petronius| 9.12.12 @ 2:09AM
This slush appears to be the opposite number to Margaret Atwood's junker about what the country would be like if the Baptist fundies took the culture back by force. I can handle that up to a point. A government that won't put up with predators, perverts, and parasites is fine with me, as I'm fed up with being taxed to deal with the effects of those behaviors, which are detrimental to the quality of my life. The idiots would then flee on their own.
PolishKnight| 9.12.12 @ 3:05AM
Futuristic dystopian novels are a challenge because of the vast technological and sociological changes that even sci-fi greats such as Kornbluth, Dick, Orwell or Huxley could have imagined. In the immediate future, within the next 15 years or so, it will be trivial to track every citizens' movement via our mobile phones, car and RFID signature along with biometric and face recognition software coordinated with speed trap and monitoring cameras.
Simultaneously, during that same period, the endgame of the 1960's culture will kick into place as race entitlements battle it out with feminism and crony unions along with an anemic Soviet style economy. In other words, whose going to pay for all of these entitlements? With the technological innovations above, it will be trivial to throw the millions of beta males, including white males, into prison but prisons will continue to be expensive unless they are transformed into soviet work camps (which the right has tacitly agreed to via chivalrous "child support" payment rationalizations.) Again, this has to be balanced against the Democrat race entitlement groups that realize that their men will be their strength (and warriors) for their interests. Will they agree to the white gay elite agenda above? Most likely not.
All of this will come to a head by the year 2025 or so, max. By 2065, the world and the USA will be totally alien to us. The world is already alien to those of us born in the 50's and 60's.
Denver Todd| 9.12.12 @ 10:08AM
You lost me at hermie and s/he. Those words are like an offramp on the English highway.