Tony Rubolotta

Far-Fetched But Not Crazy
August 21, 2009

Every once in a while, I indulge myself with the thought of writing a fictional novella based on some far fetched but possible idea. I’ll jot down some notes on the plot, save those to a disk and then forget where I filed them. Oh well! I’ll just jot some down here for later recall.

A federally mandated national healthcare database would note among other things your blood type, tissue type, age and any specific medical disorders affecting your organs. This would be a tremendous resource for politicians, czars, well placed bureaucrats and the liberal elite needing organ transplants. Some enterprising genius with access to this information could make a fortune arranging lethal, non-mutilating accidents for potential donors. The victims of my plot are the niece and nephew of a well known senator in need of a heart transplant. The hero is a local cop investigating a fishy carjacking that leaves two young people brain dead. Far fetched but not crazy.

Certain vintage movies will never go into Blu-Ray production because the messages are simply too cynical and dangerous for the public to handle. The very mention of the titles may be criminalized. "Logan’s Run” and "Soylent Green” come to mind, with pirated versions being distributed to senior citizens. The heroine of this tale is an older woman resisting the efforts of her children to evict her from her home. The discovery that she possesses forbidden movies is deemed a "mental disorder” of "self inflicted anxiety” by an administrative health judge, who commits her to an indeterminate period of psychiatric treatment. Her attempts to incite a grey revolt of civil disobedience at the dread Elysian Fields hospice are punished with increasing severity, including various shock therapies. Far fetched but not crazy.

The Department of Justice, in a surprise move, launches a full scale investigation of voter fraud and intimidation in federal elections. The Attorney General authorizes a massive investigation of the suspect organizations by federal authorities, including the FBI. Community organizations, such as OAKNUT, various labor unions and college campus activists groups come under scrutiny as a flurry of search warrants and subpoenas are issued. Congress launches hearings as the President intones warnings about the threat to democracy by a vast left-wing conspiracy to steal the 2010 election. As the evidence of the magnitude of the fraud mounts, President Obama declares the threat so grave and the damage so deep that the 2010 elections must be suspended until the investigation is complete, the voting roles cleansed and the wrong-doers punished. Democracy, he insists, must be restored. Far fetched but not crazy.

Negotiations with the Chinese over the financing of government debt are not going well. Draconian measures by the US to reduce oil consumption are just the latest in a barrage of measures that have crippled productivity, which has crippled earnings and tax revenues. While the dollar has remained fairly stable against other currencies, it has sharply declined in value against commodities, particularly crude oil. While US negotiators dismiss rumors of a general tax revolt, the Chinese don’t buy. They want collateral for loans and they know exactly what collateral they want. A secret deal is struck but within several months, the US defaults on payments because of an anti-inflationary provision in the deal. The President calms an uneasy nation by declaring a new age of energy development to restore American prosperity, including ANWR, western oil shale and coal deposits on federal land, once banned by executive order. The development won’t cost Americans one cent since those areas are now the property of the Chinese government. Far fetched but not crazy.

An Islamic group has requested an audience with the President to discuss an issue of "extreme mutual concern”. The President, more out of curiosity than courtesy, agrees to the meeting. Over the past 5 years with the assistance of a friendly and sympathetic foreign power, the group has managed to place 12 very dirty nuclear weapons in the US. The sites were carefully chosen to avoid detection and maximize radiation damage from fallout. The weapons were also designed to detonate if any attempt were made to move or disarm them. Any one weapon would cause unimaginable economic hardship by poisoning major water supplies and crop lands, and producing no-go zones in the transportation system. All 12 weapons would turn the US into an economic wasteland for thousands of years. Convert or else. Far fetched but not crazy.

Fiction and science fiction novels about the evils of totalitarian government or inept leadership have been around for quite some time. I acknowledge George Orwell as the master with an uncanny sense of getting things right though the timetable may be off. I suppose you could blame Orwell for planting the ideas in the first place, but I disagree. I believe all that Orwell did was take the nature of the totalitarian state, as evidenced by history, and give it use of modern technology and knowledge. Other authors wrote their fictional accounts of Utopia, but every trip to Utopia seems to end in Oceania. Why is that?

I suppose I better start writing my fictional novellas before they become documentaries. Far fetched but not crazy.