Stephen King? More like Salman Rushdie. \u201cThank you, Trombone, that was…interesting.\u201d Seditious? Libelous? Paranoid? A good way to get yourself permanently silenced?<\/p>\n
\u201cI think he\u2019s right,\u201d somebody calls out, earning a murmur of agreement.<\/p>\n
I think so too, or at least I have to say it bears consideration, but I\u2019m certainly not going to admit it to my class, every one of whom has a substantial sentence that might be reduced in exchange for juicy information, such as subversive comments by the instructor supporting a conspiracy theory implicating the President in the greatest crime ever committed in this country.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m scared to even know<\/em> the kid, let alone to have assigned this spook-magnet of a fairy tale in the first place. CIA spooks, not \u201cI\u2019m an ignorant redneck\u201d spooks.<\/p>\n Particularly if he\u2019s right.<\/p>\n Naw, couldn\u2019t be. Nobody\u2019s that<\/em> evil.<\/p>\n Except Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot…<\/p>\n \u201cI like that line about \u2018procession of demons,\u2019\u201d someone says. \u201cReminds me of 1984<\/em>, how they put the mythical villain Goldstein on the screen every day so everybody could hate him together. Makes you wonder if these guys are even real. Like, if Hitler hadn\u2019t existed, someone would have had to create him, to end the Depression. If the world ever ran out of real tyrants, they\u2019d have to make them up in Hollywood. How would we know the difference?\u201d<\/p>\n All of this is making me very uneasy. Sunny Oaks doesn\u2019t seem to be an appropriate setting for the the founding of a revolutionary cell. At least, not my cell! \u201cNow, back to techniques-\u201d I begin.<\/p>\n A bald prisoner sneers impressively. \u201cThey don\u2019t need to fake<\/em> megalomaniacs. The world is full of them. They just have to give the nutcases they want to put in power an edge over the Extreme Liberation Front of Popular Music or whatever, riding the bill for coupe day tots around the world while making them unthinkable here, and let them individually flip their lids with power and ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI remember thinking, all those flags, it was like everybody was hypnotized. I knew this crazy hippie guy, on the outside, had this theory that the news was full of subliminal messages that patriots were sexier and flags attracted money. He also said that the Bush family was dedicated to carrying on Hitler\u2019s work, which according to the hippie had nothing to do with racism. The real reason the Nazis were killing Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and drug users, was that these groups were likeliest to contain magical practitioners. Rivals, who could oppose black magic efforts to bring extraterrestrial psychivores-\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat the hell is a \u2018psychivore\u2019?\u201d calls out a grizzled old biker.<\/p>\n \u201cA soul-eater,\u201d the bald man explains. \u201cThe idea was that Hitler was into raising demons, but hell is actually this other planet. Enough simultaneous slaughter creates a vacuum here that can suck the psychovores through a wormhole,\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHey, where\u2019d you score mescaline?\u201d a young prisoner demands. \u201cSwear to God I thought \u2018bout shit like that when I did some mescaline!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWho can tell me what metafiction<\/em> means?\u201d I interject, hoping to return to the harmless topic of fiction theory before men in black step out of the shadows, but the class has tuned me out. They have a new laureate, one of their own number, and I am last week\u2019s book review.<\/p>\n Another convict pipes up. \u201cYou reminded me of something else from that book, 1984<\/em>, the way the three supercountries maintain a state of continuous war, so as to keep their populations tethered to martial-law conditions. When\u2019s the last time, really, the U.S. was at peace? And now, can we expect to ever<\/em> be at peace again?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stephen King? More like Salman Rushdie. \u201cThank you, Trombone, that was…interesting.\u201d Seditious? Libelous? Paranoid? A good way to get yourself permanently silenced? \u201cI think he\u2019s right,\u201d somebody calls out, earning a murmur of agreement. I think so too, or at least I have to say it bears consideration, but I\u2019m certainly not going to admit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[71,60,59,63,64,62,69,66,23,33,67,106,102,65,152,61],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transmigrant-blues","category-transmigrant-blues-round-2","tag-american-pie","tag-blog","tag-book","tag-destiny","tag-future","tag-girl","tag-goddess","tag-metaphysical","tag-mystery","tag-reincarnation","tag-riverflow","tag-salmon-rushdie","tag-stephen-king","tag-transmigrant","tag-transmigrant-blues","tag-writer"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.amanamission.com\/transblues\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}