[Nettime-bold] FW: Who Knows? 3/3, 2002 The Daily Brew

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Who Knows? 
© March 3, 2002 
The Daily Brew 


First, his brother rigged the election by illegally purging voters from the
roles, but he still didn't get enough to win. So his political party paid a
mob of their employees to start a riot and stop the votes from getting
counted. A few days later, a couple of judges with family members on his
payroll provided the decisive votes to declare him the winner.

Within a year, he was repeatedly bragging that he had hit the "trifecta", by
which he meant a war, a recession, and a national emergency. It was a
strange thing to brag about, but it was true, all three had come to pass
since his coup de tat.

The recession began when it became obvious that massive deficits would be
brought on by his tax cut, the vast majority of which went to a tiny
minority of millionaires who had funded his startling ascension to the
pinnacle of global power. The war began after his surrogates deliberately
threatened well-known terrorists with imminent extermination, while
simultaneously softening the nation's key defenses against those very
terrorists. As it happened, the attacks came while he was setting the record
for the most time any President had ever spent away from his office. The
terrorists then attacked the greatest super-power the world has ever known
with knives, as he scurried about looking for someplace even more remote to
hide. 

During the days after the attacks he grounded all air traffic, but an
exception was made for the relatives of the terrorists, who had prior
business dealings with his father, who were allowed to fly out of the
country. Simultaneously, the leader of the only branch of the government not
controlled by his party was attacked with biological weapons, which almost
certainly originated from an individual associated with an agency under his
direct authority, or one of their contractors. While the opposition leader
survived, the biological attacks forced he and his colleagues from their
offices for months.

An irrational fear among the populace was then fomented by repeated
announcements of unspecific threats of future terrorist attacks, attacks
which never materialized. The pseudo-hysteria this propaganda campaign was
able to muster was labeled a national emergency, and while the opposition
party was unable to occupy their offices, he declared a never-ending war
against an amorphous collection of enemies scattered everywhere across the
globe. Despite the fact that he could not definitively identify the goals or
combatants of this war, he demanded the country go into hundreds of billions
of dollars of debt to pursue it. Leaders from his party attacked the
patriotism of any who dared question any aspect of this ambiguous plan, and
accused them of conspiring with the enemy. His military commanders announced
that they would deliberately lie to the media but then later retracted the
announcement, begging reporters to ask the question; where they lying then,
or were they lying now?

It was impossible to tell, because from the minute he entered office, he
systematically removed from public view all government records related not
only to his administration, but also from his father's, dating back more
than 20 years. He is currently fighting several lawsuits, one by the
government's own independent auditors, to maintain the secrecy of those
records. At the same time, he has freely released any records of his
predecessor that could conceivably embarrass or discredit him. His
surrogates have repeatedly lied about his predecessor, his commanders have
repeatedly lied about events on the battlefield, and his Vice President has
moved to a secure location, from which he refuses to release records related
to the biggest bankruptcy in history of the world. Simultaneously, his
senior staff set up a shadow government from secure facilities far away. The
legislative branch was only informed of this shadow government through a
press leak. 

Who knows what the future holds? An email a few days ago claimed he planned
on killing 5/6's the world population by attacking them with a deliberate
outbreak of influenza. It sounded too incredible to be true, but when I
looked back on the past year, I couldn't rule it out.


---


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