Chapter 13: Excerpt From a Diary

April 20, 1987

If there was any color that described my timeline, it was the color gray. The landscape was gray; gray buildings hovering over gray streets filled with people wearing gray baggy clothes that hid the bodies beneath them. There weren’t even the splashes of color that graffiti would have brought. Graffiti had been eliminated through the simple expedient of banning paint. The only color was the blue sky above and there were too many days when even the sky was gray.

The broad expansive streets, used primarily for pedestrian and bicycle traffic, ran up to rows of concrete form benches that lined the fronts of buildings. Breaking the expanses of benches were metal bicycle racks. Weather, not automobile traffic, had left the streets pockmarked with holes. Here and there were patches of black; asphalt filling holes too large to ignore.

The concrete buildings were marked by an absence of windows. An occasional banner proclaiming the magnificence of the Great Orator broke the broad expanse of gray. Under pictures of the great man were short slogans praising the role of a benevolent government in assuring that all are treated equally. Only a small percentage of the country could actually read the slogans, but everyone knew them by heart.

At any time of day, people could be seen trudging down the street with shoulders slumped and heads down. The most common form of dress was sweatpants, tee shirts, and sneakers. These were clothes that didn’t require closets or special care and fit easily into a lifestyle dictated by life in the coffins. There weren’t any witty saying on the shirts since people couldn’t read them.

I would have to say that reading the sayings on tee shirts occupied a lot of my time when I first arrived here. Advertising the things that were of interest to a person in that fashion was such a novel concept to me. When I had saved enough money on my first job, I went out to purchase a tee shirt. I spent days trying to find one that expressed my thoughts most clearly. I ended up getting one that had a smiley face on it.

Having witnessed the Cultural Revolution during the early part of my stay in this timeline, I can say that the fashion of my timeline was not quite as restrictive as the one which was forced upon people in China. The landscape of common clothes was broken by a handful of people wearing the trade uniforms of police and utility workers. When I was an apprentice cop, I wore a blue police uniform of a style dating from this timeline. When I entered the FBI, I was required to wear a black suit cut in a style that I recognized from The Blues Brothers movie.

The overall mood was one of lethargy. Smiles were rare as were frowns. The common expression was one of dull hopelessness and boredom. Those in their fifties and sixties walked in despair at what had once been and what had been lost. Those who were younger moved with an air of boredom. There were no children, no sounds of laughter, and no signs of camaraderie.

I remember when I visited the South Side of Chicago in this timeline. I was struck by the fact that it had that same atmosphere of hopelessness that was common in my time. There were too many unemployed people wasting their lives sitting around, waiting for the next handout. I kept wondering as I walked around there how it was that people could allow the future — my past — to become like this.

In my time, there was a marked absence of independent businesses lining the streets. With food dictated by government, there were no restaurants, bakeries, snack shops, or fast food places. There were hair and nail salons, massage parlors, theaters, and laundries. A few stores sold stews and TV dinners, zero-calorie flavored beverages, clothes or bicycles.

Bars were common, but not the kind of bars that were typical of the twentieth century. They looked more like the fast food places of the twentieth century. They sold glasses of flavored water, provided music, and dance floors. They were places to escape the weather rather than a place to go to for entertainment. Although a bar wasn’t supposed to sell alcoholic beverages there was usually some guy near the back who dispensed shots of distilled alcohol that could be added to the flavored water. Many an hour I spent drinking some alcohol distilled from government bricks — remember they were mostly grain and filler. You haven’t lived until you’ve imbibed a drink fermented from a fish flavored brick — pretty bad.

There were hotels that rented rooms by the hour. People of this time wouldn’t recognize them as hotels. The room was actually a small space with boundaries established by tattered curtains and occupied by a single bed. The beds, not much more than cots, were usually covered by a single sheet. The high-end places actually changed the sheets between customers. Rather than serving as layovers for business travelers or vacationers, the hotels were used by couples wanting to have sex without suffering from the cramped quarters of a coffin or being watched by a crowd of bored people.

I remember my first visit to a hotel. It was back when I was serving my apprenticeship as a cop and didn’t have much money. I was tired of having sex in the public room of the coffin complex where I was living. It seemed like someone was always trying to slip a cock up my ass while I was having at it with some woman. I had talked a young woman into sharing the cost of a hotel room with me. We paid our ‘hotel bill’ and went to our assigned cot. The sheet on the cot was soaked with semen. I was going to complain to the man at the door, but the woman didn’t seem to mind. She stripped and got on the cot. Rather than argue, I climbed on top of her.

There were also bath houses. These were places where people could take a shower or a bath in relative privacy. For a little extra money, one could even have hot water. A few places even provided towels although the hot air blower was the most common means of drying off. The dryers didn’t work all that well and it was common practice to finish drying off using a tee shirt.

I was reading once about medieval times and the signage by which businesses were identified. Symbols, rather than words, were used to identify the kind of service provided within a building. The symbols were necessary since most people were illiterate. In my time, almost all businesses used symbols to advertise their services. It is discomforting to think that 500 years of increasing literacy was wiped out by 50 years of social programs that emphasized self-esteem over real accomplishment.

It did take me a long time to understand the concept of self-esteem. In my original timeline, self-esteem was just something that everyone was supposed to have. It wasn’t until I arrived here that I learned it was about feeling good about yourself. There was too much emphasis on the needs of the many over the needs of the few (with the exception of the privileged few) for there to be much self-esteem. We were expected to just make our way through life without support from anyone other than government agencies and those government agencies only cared about the bureaucratic rules they followed.

In watching people of this time, I’ve come to the conclusion that good mental health is taught at home. A school is the worst place to teach people how to be mentally healthy. It requires a lot of individual attention and good role models. Those two things just don’t exist to any degree in a school. Anyone who thinks that kids can serve as role models for each other should spend an afternoon reading Lord of the Flies.

Schools, particularly those in these times, are artificial and unnatural environments. People are segregated by age and common social backgrounds. There are exceptions, but for the most part kids in middle-class suburbs go to school with other kids from the same neighborhoods. Urban kids go to school with other urban kids.

With thirty or more children per teacher, the number of adults present inside a school is overwhelmed by the number of children attending the school. As a result, teachers have a lesser impact on the social development of the children in their care than the other students. One teacher saying “good job” disappears in a chorus of thirty voices replying with “You’re a suck-up!”

In my time, there weren’t that many adults around when I was young. We were herded around in small groups of ever-changing membership. We were never given a chance for a cohesive social group to develop. Everyone wore the same clothes. There weren’t any kinds of things available for creating an individual persona.

I see that I have digressed from describing the environment in which I once lived.

Completing the city-scape, there were the government businesses including health clinics, social work offices, food distribution centers, and public housing. Government businesses were easy to spot since they all had a large eagle displayed near the door. The majority of businesses had eagles.

I guess this would be a good time to mention that individuals did not own the buildings. The buildings belonged to large corporations that had been given the initial contracts by the government to build them. I found out later that the heads of these corporations left the country shortly after being awarded the contracts for places where their wealth would be better protected. The rents that we paid for living outside of the coffin complexes went to corporations based in countries like China, Russia, and Venezuela.

Comparing economies between my time and this time is nearly impossible. My salary as an apprentice cop was a million dollars a year. Of that, six hundred thousand dollars went to income, social equalization, retirement, and health taxes. When I became an elite FBI agent, my salary was nearly ten million dollars. I paid ninety-two percent of my salary in taxes. It always struck me as unfair that increasing my income by a factor of ten resulted in only doubling my spending ability. I made an additional hundred thousand dollars a year in bribes. The nice thing about bribes was they weren’t taxed.

We paid VAT taxes on everything that we used or purchased that wasn’t government provided. The VAT tax was close to one hundred percent on food. The VAT tax was two hundred percent on durable goods like bicycles, clothes, and PDAs. Services were taxed at the rate of two hundred percent. Government provided services required bribes as well as paying fees in the form of stamps on the paperwork.

A house in this time is the most expensive item a person purchases. In my time, the most expensive item was the PDA. Now at the time I write this (1987), Personal Digital Assistants haven’t even been invented yet. They won’t become common place for another twenty years. PDAs start out as handheld computers. In time, cellphones will replace the handheld computer and evolve back into something like the original PDA.

Everyone in my timeline owned a PDA. Life was completely impossible without one. Just about every official transaction required a PDA despite the fact that the official mechanism for payment was based on the arm tattoo. They were the most technologically advanced item in our entire society. They all were made in China.

A PDA cost as much as a house does now. It wasn’t so much that the device was expensive, but that we were nickel and dimed to death with little costs for applets. If you wanted to listen to music, you paid a monthly fee to a music station. If you wanted to listen to the news, you paid a monthly fee to a news service. If you sent a message to another person, you paid a monthly fee to a messenger service. There were hundreds of little applets; each of which cost a flat fee of ten dollars every month. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that each applet was taxed.

You were required to pay for the government announcement service. This was a channel that broadcast public service messages, changes in laws, political speeches, and other important pieces of information from the government. There were laws stating that if you owned a PDA, you were required to listen to the public broadcasting service for at least four hours a day. The law was passed in response to a common complaint that people were unaware of laws that affected them.

In writing about PDAs, I am reminded that I never understood freedom of speech until I arrived back in this time. In my time, freedom of speech had transformed into freedom to speak. No one would deny a person the right to comment on the weather or the size of the nipples on some woman. Regardless of that, a person had to be careful about the kinds of things one said. Enlightened self interest demanded that everyone embrace any changes in law and to do otherwise indicated a criminal nature. Commenting on the color of a person’s skin was a sign of a sociopath and society has a right to protect itself against people like that. Promoting religion was against the constitution and an act of treason. We had the right to speak but not freedom to speak what we thought.

Enforcement of speech laws was pervasive. All PDA messages were monitored for seditious content. There were enough snitches around looking for quick money that criticizing the government was an insane act. It wasn’t so much that one would end up in jail for minor criticisms, but it would cost a fortune in bribes to stay out of a jail cell. Major speech crimes could lead to a visit from an FBI agent, followed by death.

Excerpt from a diary

May 1, 1988

In my opinion, the Great Orator was the most evil man in the history of civilization. I have read history and about people like Attila the Hun, Vlad Tepes, Robespierre, Khomeini, Idi Amin Dada, Leopold II, Pol Pot, Ivan the Terrible, Mao, Stalin, Caligula and Hitler. The Great Orator was even worse than them. They wanted to increase the power of a few at the expense of many. In my opinion, the Great Orator just wanted to punish his own culture.

For some reason that I never understood, the Great Orator hated the United States. He intentionally pursued economic activities that were contrary to the advice of leading economists. He allowed a swarm of illegal immigrants to remain in the country. His foreign policy was designed to weaken the country. He laid the groundwork for a huge secret police organization that ultimately became part of the FBI.

Even I will admit that the economy had been in the dumpster when he came into office. The housing market had collapsed, the major automobile companies were nearly bankrupt, unemployment was high, financial industries were in ruins, the stock market was plummeting, and the GNP was negative and heading downwards. The previous president had passed legislation that prevented the very large financial companies from failing under a “too big to fail” argument with the result of increasing the national debt significantly. It was election time and the whole effort became a Kabuki Dance of the worst kind.

On getting into office, the Great Orator passed a huge spending bill intended to kick start the economy. This bill was extremely controversial and included provisions that would have long term negative impacts. Government agencies were given obscene amounts of money without guidelines on what they were to be spent on. The heads of those agencies had socialist and Marxist agendas that they pursued. The intent of the money was to produce jobs, but the corruption was so bad that each job basically cost two hundred thousand dollars to create and lasted only a short period of time. Some of the construction jobs only lasted two days.

The bill might have had greater effect except for the fact that a significant portion of the money was spent overseas. One example was a project to install windmills for power production. The majority of that money went to China to buy the windmills rather than allowing American Industry to produce them. This stimulated the Chinese economy rather than the American economy. The only money spent within the country on that project was to pay people to install them. The windmills were installed and then the people were unemployed again.