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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 3 of 4)
The two of them stood for a moment in embarrassed silence. Slater fanned himself with a briefing memo. Then a 22-year-old youth rushed into the room. He had spiked hair and tattoos on his neck but still managed to project the fresh, innocent look of a poli sci major just arrived in Washington.
“Could you make this thing work?” Slater handed him the device.
“No problem,” said the intern, as if taking a rattle from a child. He sneaked a look across to Jean and rolled his eyes. S/he did not respond.
The young man tapped the screen a few times and handed it back. “There you go,” he said, “just double-click the icon. Press this to pause.” Slater double-clicked and immediately the imposing, well-tailored holograph of Prime Minister Ling Chou stood before them. He was a man of about 60, elegantly dressed, his face showing no sign of wrinkles, his hair black without a trace of gray. Although his eyes were fixed directly upon them, he could see nothing. Although Jean had long become accustomed to people sending holograms to each other, s/he was still impressed.
“Everything alright?” said the intern, stealing Jean another look.
“Yes, thank you. That will be all.”
“Citizens of the United States,” began the ghostly figure. “Today the People’s Republic of China takes title to the Islands of Fang Wen, known to you as Hawaii.”
“Is he really speaking that or is it dubbed?” whispered Jean.
“We’re not sure,” whispered Slater, adopting herm conspiratorial tone. “He speaks pretty good English.”
“The People’s Republic has several reasons for returning Fang Wen to proper ownership,” the Prime Minister continued. “First, we claim it as settlement for the $64 trillion owed by the United States to the People’s Republic. We have no hope of recovering this debt in a currency of its original worth so therefore we are foreclosing on property. Our assessors have determined the value of the Islands to be equal to the value of the debt. We have filed a claim in World Court.”
“Just a minute, stop that thing,” said Jean, incredulously. “They’re claiming Hawaii? Did I hear right?” Hawaii was Barack Obama’s birthplace. S/he was scheduled to go out there next summer to commemorate his childhood home as part of the ceremonies for making his birthday a national holiday.
“There was a claim put in to the World Court last month,” explained Slater. “We haven’t gotten around to responding. We didn’t take it very seriously.”
“Alright, go ahead,” said Jean in frustration.
Slater tapped the screen and again the Prime Minister, who had dissolved into a cloud of static, became animated. “The Chinese people own Fang Wen by ancient rights. Our scholars have located maps from the Qin Dynasty that show Fang Wen as Chinese territory. Our navigators reached these islands during the reign of the First Emperor and claimed them for his court. This antedates the arrival of imperialistic powers.
“Finally, we act on behalf of the Chinese Polynesian people. We have heard their cries for liberation and we respond. We trust the imperial American government will not want to continue to reign as a colonial oppressor.”
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.