The Rag Blog

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / January 4, 2010

MEXICO CITY — Book-ended by mass amnesia under the American bubble, 2010 was yet another year to erase from living memory. Although Planet Earth was coming apart at the seams with the usual volcanoes blowing their stacks, earthquakes rearranging the landscape, flood and drought rampaging from one continent to the next, nuclear war raging in the Middle East, and serial economic calamities inducting a billion more sentient human beings into the starvation army, First World elites navigated through daily disaster delusionally convinced that everything was honky dory.

Children played happily with their Chinese mechanical hamsters until the batteries went dead and families gathered around home entertainment centers, even the millions of families who had been evicted from their homes. Neighbors exchanged pleasantries as they cruised empty super market aisles (most brand-name products were recalled because of suspect Chinese-induced E Coli contamination), oblivious of the unseen poor parboiled in their own sweat and tears far beyond American shores. Scientists attributed this massive indifference to the plight of the planet to the presence of toxic amounts of Ambien in the water systems of major U.S. cities.

The majority of U.S. citizens were not even aware of their failing memories and did not know what was missing. Still mass forgetfulness had grave political downsides. One example: no one could remember the name of the U.S. president when just a year ago, it was on the tips of everyone’s tongue. Indeed, no one could recall much of anything anymore. Even after the physical environment collapsed and the faithful were taken up in the Rapture, no one seemed to miss them.

JANUARY – The failure of climate change negotiations in Copenhagen (they will reconvene in December 2010 in Mexico City, the most monstrous megalopolis in the Americas) and the formation of a cartel of the world’s pollution leaders had immediate repercussions when Somali pirates captured an iceberg floating in the Red Sea.

In accordance with the U.S. Zero Tolerance For Pirates protocol, President What’s His Name stealth-bombed the dusky buccaneers who were towing the huge block of ice into port and so-called depleted uranium radiation liquefied it, triggering monumental flooding — all of Yemen and parts of east Africa remain underwater and the quat crop has been decimated for years to come, causing wide-spread depression on the Dark Continent.

Further north, global warming had a more fortuitous fallout when the melt-down of a thermo-nuclear power plant in the capital city of Nuuk converted the Greenland Ice Cap to boiling water and the Inuit Riviera caught fire as a hot tourist attraction

Back under the American Bubble, on the first year anniversary of his hope-saturated inauguration on the Capital Mall, 78% of those polled by the Pew Institute On Domestic Dementia could no longer remember the President’s name — 72% referred to him simply as “you know, that black guy.” Another 16% still had the President confused with Osama Bin Laden but 9% could correctly remember his first and last name although not at the same time.

On the other side of the political ledger, the words “Republican Party” had no name recognition for 81% of those who responded to the Pew poll. Alarmed pollsters hypothesized that the results were symptomatic of mass brainwashing, probably due to “something in the water.”

FEBRUARY – Whatever his name was, The President of the United States was confronted with his umpteenth international terrorist crisis when Taliban technicians, employing Sky Grabber technology on sale at Radio Shack for $26 Americano, seized control of an unmanned and unwomanned drone over North Waziristan and redirected it to Kabul where the rebels launched missile attacks against the seat of the puppet government, flattening President Karsai and his entire cabinet, which included three of the world’s most influential heroin dealers.

The obliteration of central authority quickly splintered the Afghan Crusade into a series of local mini-wars. Caught in the crossfire between feuding warlords, the U.S. death toll climbed to 502 for the month, topping even Iraq at the nadir of the illegal American invasion and occupation. Both the Nobel Peace Prize winning president and his Commander-in-Chief Stanley McChrystal extolled the high death toll as proof that the U.S. was winning the war and vowed to dispatch 60,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

When Taliban Sky Grabber gear hijacked two more drones and targeted Blackwater/Xe training facilities in the Great North Carolina swamp, Obama or Osama or whatever his name was closed down all Radio Shacks in the continental U.S.

Also under the bubble, cheap Chinese pork chops were deemed responsible for an outbreak of an inscrutable strain of Swine flu (“Swinear flu”) that convulsed the breadbasket of the country.

Since the White House greenlighted the overthrow of right-wing leftist Mel Zelaya in Honduras in June 2009, 11 Latin countries have suffered “golpes de estado,” 10 of them this year (Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Bolivia, Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay). The wave of coup d’etats is almost certainly being orchestrated by the U.S. South Command operating out of seven state-of-the art bases recently installed in Colombia.

In Paraguay, the U.S. 4th Fleet parked itself off the coast while military gorillas dethroned former liberationist bishop and father of 14, Fernando Lugo. Up until January 2010 Paraguay had no coastline but global warming has brought the Atlantic Ocean to that impoverished majority Indian nation’s doorstep.

Meanwhile in Mexico, scattered rebellion has broken out to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. In early January, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation occupied sacred sites throughout the country including Chichen Itza in the Yucatan, Palenque in Chiapas, and Teotihuacan near Mexico City, calling upon ancient Mayan and Mexica deities to join their uprising.

Panicked by the prospect of declining tourist dollars, fraudulently elected president Felipe Calderon pulled 50,000 troops out of his failed war with the drug cartels that has now taken 25,000 Mexican lives, to dislodge the Zapatistas. The strategy backfired when the cartels seized statehouses in Sinaloa, Sonora, and Chihuahua.

On March 18th, the 72nd anniversary of the nationalization of Mexico’s petroleum from the transnational Seven Sisters, President Calderon was found dangling from the rafters at Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, an apparent suicide — however, an autopsy turned up a note apparently pinned to the inside of his tie with a single Mexican expletive inscribed: “RATERO!“

Further scandal erupted when photographs emerged of Calderon’s corpse, clad only in jockey shorts and plastered with bloody Mexican and U.S. bills, amulets, crucifixes, and rosaries in classic narco fashion, raising questions about the dead president’s cartel affiliations.

APRIL – Global warming was deemed responsible for the near-biblical migration of small, undocumented mammals abandoning a disintegrating Mexico for El Norte — badgers, gophers, skunks, coyotes, foxes, and bats had little trouble burrowing under the 1,000 kilometer-long Separation Wall between the two distant neighbor countries or flying over it. Hundreds of thousands of acres in the southwest were destroyed by the marauding illegals.

Passions in the Middle East boiled over in April when Iranian patrol boats sunk a Liberian-flagged tanker carrying 176,000 gallons of Chinese-made flan to Spain. The sinking cargo soon gummed up the Straits of Hormuz through which the bulk of oil destined for Europe, the Americas, and China passes each day. Oil prices immediately shot up from a seasonal low of $50 USD to $250, deflating the dementia-driven euphoria on Wall Street. Acting on the self-interest of his Goldman Sachs advisors, the President floated multi-billion dollar bailouts.

MAY – After five months of testy reconciliation conferences between the House and the Senate during which Dennis Kucinich challenged Michelle Bachman to a duel and was shot dead on the House floor, the U.S. Congress announced that it had reached agreement on a compromise version of all but forgotten health care reform. Indeed all the health care reform provisions in the John Doe Omnibus Health Care Reform bill (named for a bus driver who had to sell both his kidneys in order to feed a starving puppy) had been stripped from the measure before it arrived at the White House for the first Afro-American president’s John Hancock.

Among the provisions of “John Doe”: renewed funding for the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kerghizstan, and Uzbekistan (two Stans will be added every year though 2018); the criminalization of abortion; and the restitution of the universal mandatory death penalty.

A new Pew poll prepared by the Institute for Domestic Dementia indicated that many Americans (a whopping 77%) had forgotten all about health care reform by May.

Sabotaged by the flan crisis, the economy was again in freefall despite White House lies that the 2009 depression was officially over and the country was growing again. As jobless benefits dried up, many families in the lower socio-economic brackets were forced to reduce their daily caloric intake and unemployed carnivores threatened to eat the rich.

Fortunately, rolling black- and brown-outs as river flows slowed to a trickle due to global warming and shut down hydro-electric power plants, caused widespread refrigeration meltdowns and millions of tons of spoiled meat, fruit, and dairy products poured into dumps and landfills where hungry garbage pickers were eager to harvest the putrefying bonanza.

Also in May, the last U.S. daily print newspaper, Rudolf Murdoch’s New York Wall Street Times Journal Sporting News, closed up shop.

JUNE – Food riots became generalized in such depression-wracked formerly industrial cities as Detroit and Houston and Fox News Chief Albino Glenn Beck encouraged Tea Party Patriots to arm themselves for self-defense — the average white North American family now owns 12 to 15 automatic weapons to hold off their equally heavily armed neighbors, according to the Pew Institute On Domestic Violence.

Beck encouraged Tea Party Patriots coagulated around a doddering George H.W. Bush in Texas and Dick Cheney in the Wyoming-Colorado Theater to seize state armories and hold nominating conventions. With armed insurrection being urged on cable news channels, the first Afro-American President of the United States retreated to a hollowed-out mountain in Virginia to watch the NBA Finals.

The Finals themselves generated alarming news when it was reported that Kobe Bryant had been genetically engineered on a farm in Kansas once owned by assassinated late term abortionist George Tiller — it was not known if embryonic cells were employed in Kobe’s modifications. A federal raid on the “farm” led by General Jeff Novitsky (he won his stripes in the Barry Bonds genocide campaign) uncovered thousands of Kobe clones in various stages of assemblage.

In other sporting news, the World Cup Matches in South Africa had to be called off when starving rioters set stadiums aflame, roasting tens of thousands of first world hooligans.

By mid-summer with the doomed president’s jobless recovery in full flower, 36% of all American families were living in their cars, according to the Pew Institute On Vehicular Gridlock, transforming the nation’s highway system into a coast-to-coast parking lot. Then cars began to commit suicide, blowing sky-high with no warning. Homeland Security blamed explosives sewn into drivers’ underwear for the plague of car bombings although some experts speculated that the automobile industry was just depressed.

AUGUST – The dog days extended into August with no relief in sight. Despite the intense heat, the Tea Bag Patriots were on the move, traveling mostly at night towards Washington D.C. for the much ballyhooed Palin-Bachman same sex nuptials set for later in the month despite Michelle’s pending indictment for gunning down a liberal congressperson on the House floor.

Diplomats shuttled in and out of Islamabad seeking solutions to this latest geo-political crisis. One no-show: Osama Bin Laden who had passed away many years before trundling his dialysis machine over the Khyber Pass. A proposal offered by Tuvalo’s ambassador that Washington change places with his low-laying Pacific island nation was rejected by the United Nations Security Council on the grounds that moving the U.S. Capital would be an extravagance a bankrupt world could ill afford.

Feeling excluded from the international spotlight, Israel, with a go-ahead from the White House-in-exile, launched a nuclear attack on the Iranian holy city of Qum where the Ayatollahs were putting the finishing touches on their own minaret-tipped nuclear missiles. Mamoud Ahmadinejad, hanging on to power by the skin of his wolf-like teeth, ordered retaliation against the Zionists but his delivery system fell short of Tel Aviv and obliterated Syria and Jordan instead.

SEPTEMBER – By Labor Day weekend, the Tea Party Patriots were encamped on the White House lawn and demanding that the first Afro American President turn over the keys to the executive mansion for the on-again off-again Palin-Bachman nuptials.

The serial catastrophes that now included the incineration of vast swaths of the Middle East had an upside — Americans no longer worried much about global warming. Although world temperature readings had jumped another point, the calamity was no longer an issue on the 24-Hour news cycle or the Sunday morning talk shows. Despite the fact that humpback whales were beaching themselves in record numbers on whatever dry land they could find and birds had begun to fly backwards, a sign that the Apocalypse was in the pipeline, the general public seemed more preoccupied by Palin’s and Bachman’s never-ending domestic disputes.

Finally, fed up with the first Afro-American President’s stonewalling, the Tea Party Patriots broke into the White House and a troika — Sarah Palin, her sometimes lover Michelle Bachman, Dennis Kucinich’s assassin, and George H.W. Bush, now suffering terminal Alzheimer’s Disease — was sworn in. Glenn Beck was appointed Secretary of Defense and Alex Jones got State. Mel Gibson bought the movie rights.

OCTOBER – While the right-wing fanatics squabbled over power in Washington, most of the planet was either underwater or so radioactive that the land could no longer sustain life. Slowly falling ash blotted out the sun and in the feeble light no one could tell if it was dawn or dusk anymore. Water, although there was plenty of it, was undrinkable and the food chain tainted. Cannibals roamed the roads in packs. Indeed, outside of the Washington bubble, the earth had become a road show of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Inside his Virginia mountain, the former president tried to watch the World Series but he was too depressed.

NOVEMBER – All was not lost yet. Vulture Capitalists saw profit in the new holocaust and took steps to bolster their failing fortunes. Murdoch bought up what news was left and changed the channel. A new television season kicked in and sponsors returned. The slate was wiped clean: no more nuclear war, world hunger, mindless terrorism, and global warming. Ambian dosage was increased for all citizens.

The new shows looked a lot like the old shows but since no one could remember the old shows, reruns became the real thing. New generations were enchanted by Lucy and Desi and Ed Sullivan’s “Toast Of The Town” (“Gilligan’s Island” was submerged deep beneath the graying sea.)

Outside of the bubble, of course, the rainforest was on fire and 39% of all children were born with multiple deformities (the Pew Institute On Monstrous Deformations.) The cities of the world had been abandoned.

Here in Mexico City where 23 million people had once lived cheek by jowl you could spend a whole day without speaking to anyone. On the Day of the Dead, I walked out to where Chapultepec Park lay in ruins behind a curtain of toxic smoke. It was then that I saw my neighbors tramping north towards Mictlan, the direction of the dead, and I tried to stop them. “Wait!” I urged, “Stay! The U.N. Climate Conference will convene here in December and surely, the leaders will fix things up…” But my neighbors just kept marching towards Mictlan.

DECEMBER – Inside the bubble, the Holiday Season was in full swing. Americans went shopping for mechanical hamsters again, not remembering that it was last year’s toy to die for. They went to Church forgetting that God was dead and wagered on the Stock Market as if the bottom had not fallen out of the Big Board long ago. Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny led parades and made patriotic, optimistic speeches and Santa promised to visit every home.

So the families went home, those who still had one, and set fire to their furniture and hung their stockings by a roaring hearth. They wrote letters to Santa and left out cookies and cocoa for the jolly old fruitcake but although he had promised, Santa Claus never showed up.

Indeed, he would never show up again. Late-breaking film from the Arctic Circle showed the old gentleman and his eight reindeer keeled over in their North Pole sweat lodge.

[John Ross will launch a three-month, coast-to-coast book tour with his latest and much-buzzed cult classic El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City in Fresno, California, this February 4. For further info and suggested venues (Chicago area and east coast dates are solicited) consult johnross@igc.org.]

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