|
k |
kkkkkkkkkkkk |
k |
|
k k k k k k k k |
BLACK HELICOPTERS EPISODE 11 SUNDAY the NINTH - 8:12 PM "Snap to, Dannie?" the
station manager challenged. "Coalition for a New Consensus! Where’s our
dirt on 'em... ready to go?" The kid swallowed whatever Russian
quip that had come to mind; Nelson's cigar having drawn an invisible
demarcation line between Here and Too Far. "Uh... just speeches, you
know. The usual, locals. Tillerman and the Catfish, from the morning briefing.
Shit about Mayor Potter in the last election, using Conk volunteers to get
the East End voters out. Rumors of
bribes and prizes..." |
k k k k k k k k |
"Borr-ring,”
Nelson removed and waved the stogie. “Manuzzo?"
"Nothing," Dannie looked
down.
"Screw Tony, then, that queer runnin’ cop’s runnin’ on the
other network anyway. Crisp!" he bellowed to the old man at the studio's
editing console, "cut me thirty on Catfish. Fuck Tillerman... he's nuttier
than Trump, even, without being entertaining; threaten to kill anybody
different from the usual suspects today? No? Then, while we're waiting for
Bill, go down to Archives, kid, bring me up some old riot footage. Bill
no-shows, we'll use Omaha or... I don't know, St. Louis? But not that fuckin'
Arch or anything that anyone would recognize, something dark and noisy... cue
in the breaking glass noise and Turks standing round, no recognizable faces or
buildings. Street-level. Choppers and drones, above. Niggers with
bricks… don’t look at me that way!
Mexicans! With machetes... or
maybe Chinese with tongs! Fire! I'm calling Ted..."
He picked up the phone, dialed, waited
for the beep. "Ted! Yeah... great, but no Bill. Still! Look, Jack told me
there was some sort of security shakedown inside Masty Hall 'bout a couple hours ago, but it's wrapped
tight. Pinhead went in, didn't come out. Roach motel!... yeah, I wish! Cops and
Turks know nada, Conks won't say, except what a wonderful platform they have,
wonderful hosts we are, dada dada... yeah, it smells.
Smells! Something's gonna break, I know, probably at 10:59. Bill! Hangs around
to get footage, then forgets to bring it back before airtime. Prob’ly stopped off for a drink. Moron! Yeah, talk to 'em." He hung up,
glared at Dannie. "What the fuck are you looking at? Take your hand
out of your pocket and whup your ass on down to Archives!”
"Fuckin' kid," the editor
swore to himself when Dannie was gone. "Fuckin' Bill!" The studio
editing console was old; it held only four screens. Old surplus equipment, old
staff or else snotty kids... castoff talent and morons. Fifth-rate station in a third-rate city. And rules... if he ran the station,
Nelson would have canned Marla and brought in Tom Lavin, but the affirmative
action people would have that killed and their horny old CEO in Dallas
would’ve crawled up his back. Corporate stiffs were all over management to move
the colored guy from sports to news and hire a Puerto Rican or Chinese. Maybe
another woman, if he could find someone cute, but smart... like that Asian
chick on the morning shit-chat-show, a double... but she’d cost, and some big
market would steal her away within months.
Weeks! "Crisp... speed it
up. More sound!" Pictures on the screens jerked and whirred, Donald Duck
voices gabbled: "Cool and Clearing!" "Food prices back
up!" "Bradashian
press conference at Chilean earthquake site." "Community activists
protest project demolitions!" "Helen," barked Nelson, "cut
out another spot on Baby Claire. Thirty seconds. Fuck you, too!" he jabbed
his cigar at the ceiling, encompassing Corporate and Marketing, the Turks'
black helicopters and, maybe, God. A denatured God of the evening news... bleeding to lead, then trivia and banter;
dreams degraded, archangels busted for DUIs, Papal divorces... sheep defending,
unto death, the sanctity of their delusions then sports, the weather and
something inspirational to wrap. And less than three hours, now, until
"Eleven at Eleven"!
|
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk |
k |
THURSDAY the SIXTH - 8:05 AM
Glenn Savitt
nimbly tweaked open the little envelope, more like plastic than paper... a sort
of plasma, really... Anne and the pink-cheeked, three-piece-suited doll, Ralph
Laird, still talking at him. His concentration was wholly, utterly, on the
morning's ritual. Small white flakes, dropping into the cup of rancid black
java, dissolved in tiny, galactic whorls. Glenn stirred the liquid... black
coffee and white processed dairy substitute becoming a light, tan-colored
compromise. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Obamology!
The essence of any political dispute resolution – too damn bad, he
scowled, that Washington couldn’t be more like a cup of bad hotel coffee
anymore during this post-partisan depression....
Anne's voice still wafted through the
steam.
"I don't think the Budget
Caucus safe, by any means. Maybe there isn't a concerted presence of a
single competitive force, the way Tillerman's engineered elsewhere... ethnicity
comes to mind, of course... but, maybe, the very confusion engendered by this may
lead to negative conclusions being drawn…"
Laird, a younger fellow, hovering near
to one side or the other of that trustworthy frontier of thirty, always carried
this little black notebook; he looked at it now for comfort and assurance,
pretending he hadn’t heard her Spoonerism before replying. "I hardly think
our friends from the universities and labor are so bewitched by philosophy that
they can't count votes. Offering pilot programs is realistic. As long as we
don't have anything to give away yet, what's wrong with promising the
moon and balancing the budget? Go the full-out Bern… free college, free
medical care, free uh… prisons? I mean…
ponies? Sure!... well, Teslas, at least, if they’ve fixed that little explosion
problem. And, on the same general topic,
why not divert more attention to Environment, make Tillerman defend his base.
After all, our demographics skew higher income, higher education groupings...
more favorably disposed to trust professional studies than the rest of the
delegates. I've got people, you know, making calls to that actress in
California who sits in trees… those people have trouble with some of Austin's
positions, but don't like the petro-Democrats, either."
"Oh?" Glenn recovered,
willing his attention drawn outward from the cup to the Ivona
Coffee Shoppe, its surroundings and clatter and the omnipresent Polynesian
sentinel lurking outside, to the people at his table, to their words, the
situation and solutions... further, to the aether of
ideas and Machiavellian considerations. Caffeine steam and the Judas kiss.
"It's a lost cause. Forget it! The best we can do is load up the bracero
and shoot-to-kill border resolutions with chaff about helping those shithole
republics manage their cartel problems, so that the opposition doesn't have the
rope to hang us with without risking offense to the Hispanic community. Whereas
Tillerman's shitcanned with almost all minorities, except a few Cubans in Miami
who think that Little Marco is too young and too slick to mount a primary
challenge and a few nwords, as Jack would say, too right-wing for even the
Herman McCain Republicans, God bless his pizza tossin’
soul. Meanwhile, we play up black-Latino
hostilities over jobs and perks… crack that Sanders-Warren split wide open and
pound on Biden as a hypocrite and a loser… keep running the softer, more
inclusive Americas-with-an-S-first line. Like Jack says: their culture
of contempt, not ours. With Obama lollygagging in Hawaii and pondering his next
book deals, the black vote still counts for something, except in California…
which the Dems have locked up… and Florida and Texas, the GOP’s bitches, even
if voting population's supposed to shift any day now, linguistically, what is it..."
"By November, according to
Demographics," Laird nodded, thumbing through his little black book.
"Registered, potentially, mind you, not actually voting – embarrassed by Beto and the Castro twins.
By opposition, did you mean Tillerman?
There’s talk about the Donald slipping him a little envelope of Russian roubles…" the operative’s voice dropping down to a
whisper…
"No," Anne snorted, "he
means the others, the Republicans and Democrats, anyone who's against the
Coalition as an entity, not just factionally. Glenn's been attending too many
caucuses with Homeland Security... he's glommed all their police-state lingo.
It's like the Army versus Navy or FBI and CIA. To each other, they're
competition. Opposition is the KGB, or used to be, I don't know now, it's...
it's... the President?
Ex-President?"
"The terrorists!" Glenn
snapped. "Never forget... anybody asks the reason for anything we're
doing, it's for the terrorists. Against
the terrorists… check that… and like the new Speaker and old Majority Leader
say, for the children. The ones as put down their schoolbooks and picked up
guns during the last variant, the terrorists' fuckin' children that we send the
drones in to obliterate or pack into concentration camps on the border… the
Honduran ones. On the other hand, our
home front terrorists..."
"Oh aren’t you talking about the
G.R.U., Putin’s old hangout, not as in the cartoon..." Laird replied
hesitantly, saved from further futile inquiries by the arrival of the waitress
with plates of breakfast... pancakes and sausages for Laird, cold cereal for
Anne, bacon and eggs for Glenn.
"My God those look
fantastic!" Anne said, drinking in the contents of Glenn's plate.
"I've never seen such a shade of yellow before... are they
real?" she asked, looking up at the waitress, "or are they some of
those ones that the biotech company's been engineering, genetically, with
saffron and jellyfish enzymes? Up at the
U? Wait... I've got to take a
picture!"
"Don't bother," Glenn began,
cutting into the GMO eggs and lifting a morsel to his mouth, but she'd ripped
open her purse and dug out the smart flashphone,
startling him with the snap, a small rivulet of the irradiated, bioengineered
yellow yolk dribbling down his lip. A picture to hold, and to remember.
"Anne!" He daubed himself clean with punctured dignity, she lay down
the phone and took a crunching spoonful of healthy granola.
"Right, then," Laird
stammered, pretending not to have noticed. "At least we should be working
more directly with Geiger. It may come down to the Catfish having to tell them
it's for their own good. I think Foreign Affairs a more hopeless case than
Environment, but it's equally hopeless trying to get that point over. What do
your buddies in the Homeland Security Caucus call the ones who disagree on what
to do about the competition?"
"You mean… losers? Sorry,"
Glenn waved his yellow-bloodied napkin, "but it's a given. Take away
Tillerman's white power and militia support and the rest of the Environmental
Caucus would be more at home outside with this guy Anne and I used to know
here. Professional protestors," he winked.
"You did used to live here, didn't you?" remembered
Laird, snidely.
Glenn nodded grimly and pointed south.
"Anne was born in Weslington, just over the
river, and I did undergraduate work here. Back at the ass-end of the
eighties," he added, swallowing. "George Bush... read my lips… the
first. Big hair, punk rock… well, in our
case, that New Wave rave stuff… disco and diseases; AIDS and, as ever, Iran. All the same swill on the boob tube as today
except the game shows were daytime, not prime!
And, then, the immaculate Clintonian conception…"
"Well, it sounds like some people
you must have known never grew out of that time. My parents warned me about
them... out to make trouble and occupy, I dunno,
places? Portland? Albuquerque? I read in the Journal they had promised to take the streets back
from the Trump occupiers; stuck nails in their protest signs yesterday, nails
to stab the police. The editorial called it the work of anarcho-terrorists who
seek suicide and murder as valid political ends. Not means, ends! Like
Arabs! The police are supposed to have
confiscated two black flags!"
"Imagine!" Anne wondered,
the sound of her crunching cereal seeming to grow louder in the ensuing, silent
interval.
"The Journal's a lying,
reactionary rag, same as it was decades ago," Glenn finally clued Ralph
in. "We used to call it the Urinal, suppose kids still do even now that
circulation is a quarter of what it used to be and the Monday and Tuesday crib
sheet clocked in at seven pages of hard copy for a buck fifty. Four large for the Sunday you couldn’t use to
swat a mosquito with all the advertisers going digital – waiting for Cap City’s
rag to buy ‘em out. Anyway we've been warned... they threw a shit fit when
Pinhead won, an even bigger one when he quit the Democratic Party... Anne,
didn't you say he leaned Reform back around the Y2K?"
"Always wanted T. Boone's
money... or Perot's when he was District Eight Councilman, during that
phase," she rolled her eyes, between crunches.
"Then they hit the ceiling when
the Coalition accepted his invitation to bring the Convention here. Good move,
I'd have said, if it wasn't for the protests. Nobody knows about this place
except the people who hate it from all the jokes on Colbert and those
Jimmies... God, I miss Nightline, even Letterman and Leno - at least they could
surprise you once in a while, not like those dreary Socialists!... even if
things turned out as bad as those black protests about the police shooting of
the week or the World Trade riots in Seattle, or Minneapolis, last year,
Pinhead needs the publicity. Poor alcoholic fuck!... everything he touches
turns to shit. Always has. But nobody's interested in the seventies and the
eighties anymore, let alone the sixties, right?" he challenged Laird.
"Ralph's part of the sensible generation. Part of… what was it… the Yang
Gang? Except for those Occupational
losers, still out spraypainting banks and post
offices with slogans ‘cause there’s nothing worth occupying here, Andy and his gang..."
Anne brightened. "Andy's
Gang?" Ralph looked puzzled.
“Governor Cuomo?” he ventured, Glenn
fairly spat, annoyed.
"And, really, nobody remembers
the Playboy Mansion fifties. Or wants to! All you'll do is make people think
you're older than your parents," he warned, eyes focusing on motion in the
lobby, the way a rodent instinctively detects predators, "then there isn't
anything in Rayna's little bag of cosmetic tricks that'll save you. Now sober
up. Here comes the Archbishop!"
|
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk |
k |
RETURN to "BLACK HELICOPTERS" directory
VIEW CURRENT COLUMN by JACK "CATFISH" PARNELL... "ENTROPY and RENAISSANCE"
Go to the Generisis HOMEPAGE, at which useful
information might be obtained!
Check out the unique Generisis
LINKS and REFERENCES!
Take an excursion through the GENERISIS catalog...
Have a glance at the current episode of our occult
serial, wherein a young American encounters bizarre foreign artists and occultists
– from Aleister Crowley and William Yeats to Alfred Jarry and a young, feral Adolph Hitler…
When the FCC moves the Superbowl to a premium channel accessible only by a scarce and
expensive black box, hordes of desperate football fans storm the local electronics
outlets to fight for their right to watch, in…
A ragged gang of starship bloopers
from a galactic Skid Row centuries into the future and far, far away as they
rehab a derelict boneship and drive it towards the
white hole at the center of the Milky Way in a reckless quest for a forbidden
truth… (and... why deny it... money!) in...