of the dark building past the muttering physics prof mumbling that this would never have happened in the Soviet Union.
In the Quad, a few thousand students mill about. Most classes are canceled. Running in what appear to be random patterns, a large herd of guys chase a soccer ball. Another group has attached a line of polyester rope between two trees and begun precarious displays of slacklining. Another group has chalked in and begun playing Four Square. Others, further out on the lawn, are organizing team frisbee matches. A few mimes dressed as Harry Potter and The Doctor wander about. Three jugglers in joker costumes mingle with the crowd. Some cluster and text message one another. One actually reads a book. Someone is selling handmade beaded jewelry on a black felt cloth draped across a bench. More than a few drug deals go down. Several guitar players strum. Some guy with a Pan flute bobs and weaves among the crowd. He is tracked by a gal in a multi-colored dress banging on a tambourine. A distinct odor of burning rope pervades all.
Eventually the wind picks up and the lights flicker back on. The circus slowly dissipates.
Jim wanders to the student union where he spots Ben sitting at a table drinking coffee and talking with Scott. Grabbing a cup of coffee, he walks over and joins him.
Time: 2:00 PM
"Radio show over?"
"Yeah, they didn't have much for me to do today, once the power went out. Kinda hard to broadcast without electricity."
"I thought you had a backup gerbil on a treadmill or something?"
"He called in sick."
"So, Scott, you're a big fan of all this political stuff. What do you know about this Munson visit? Is he for real? Will it make any difference?"
"He looks like the real thing and it certainly looks like there'll be a new constitution soon. I guess then we'll see."
"Are the old, big states gonna permit it? Won't they fight back?"
"No one knows. If enough states line up behind the convention constitution, which is what it looks like right now, and if the military signs on, DeWitt's states won't have much choice but accept it. If not, things could get messy."
"Like they're not a mess right now?"
"True, but more gunfire type of messy."
"Well, I hope there won't be any at the speech, I just got a job working security for the event."
"How many hours?"
"Not sure yet, mainly setup, ushering and tear down, as far as I can tell."
"Every bit helps."
"Sure does. So, what do the people at the station think of Munson?"
"Oh crap, Them? They're all moonbat Hillary addicts, just like the rest of the faculty. And Munson? They loathe him. He represents a threat to their whole system of beliefs. Libertarians scare them too. They can't comprehend living in a world where people get to do what they want, where every move they make isn't micro managed by some bureaucrat in Washington. I think they can't sleep at night worrying that somewhere, someone is making his own choices and living his own life without state supervision. It scares the crap out of them."
"Yeah, I guess the campus is pretty much a lefty regressive, monoculture echo chamber. Conformist groupthink run amok. The dysfunctional group dynamics of academic inbreeding."
"Well, what do you expect they way they hire people? Nothing to do with qualifications, just ideological screening coupled with race, sexual preference, and gender quotas. It's just one big political nut house. But, hey, they all sing from the same hymnal!"
"Totally orthodox."
"Yeah, I overheard some prof talking to another about some hiring committee he was on and how they were disqualifying all the straight white guys so they could fill the candidate pool with quota people."
"Probably explains some of the losers around here."
"How did things ever get so out of control in this country?"
"Well, first there was Obama and his people. After all the scandals, wasted stimulus money, losing Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Iraq, Iran got a nuclear bomb, the Crimea, the Ukraine, spying on the AP reporters, the NSA scandals, using the IRS to attack opponents, the Mexican gun running, the health care fiasco, the VA disaster, all the bankrupt crony green energy companies, he was just a lame duck. He lost control of Congress, even most of the Dems, so he started ruling by decree. To make it legal, he needed the courts to cooperate so he packed the judiciary with a bunch of lefty hand puppets. Once he controlled the judges, he could get away with anything and he did. He became the president Nixon always wanted to be!"
"Yeah, what a mess."
"But the public backlash grew worse and worse. The Dems knew they were going to lose the Congress so they came up with a plan to keep their grip on the White House. They started the mass immigration and legalization decrees. Millions of aliens flooded in and there were millions here already. His dreamers. Then the amnesty in the lame duck session. The Dems packed all their new Americans into a big city ghettos and loaded them up with welfare goodies. And then the epidemics started. Millions died."
"Yeah, that was a disaster."
"But they regrouped, started a new party and got their billionaire boys club to finance a huge end run around the Electoral College. They suckered Connecticut to sign onto what they called the majority electoral vote scam."
"Basically, they disenfranchised most of the country as a result. Sounded like a good idea at the time, lots of people bought into it. It seemed so fair. They said that each state should give all it's electoral votes to the candidate with the largest national popular vote, even if that candidate didn't win in that state."
"Bingo. Election over. With big city political machines counting the votes, and 60 million newly minted welfare dependents voting as told, they owned the Electoral College."
"Don't forget Internet voting and how they hacked that."
"True. Now six or seven mostly coastal states can control the outcome of presidential elections. The rest of don't count anymore. By the time people figured out what happened, it was too late, the progressives in the state legislatures could block repeal."
"So, now LA, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C, Cleveland, Atlanta, New Orleans, San Antonio, and a few others, totally control the result. That's why they spent all those millions busing in people from Mexico and Central America. They knew what they were doing. In reality, Progressives only have majorities in about six states, not nearly enough to take the presidency under the old rules but guaranteed with the new scheme."
"It's all part of the of the poverty-industrial complex, swarms of bureaucrats whose sole goal is expansion of the welfare state. They define success by how many people are put on welfare, not how many people they help get off welfare. A giant dependent pool of reliable robovotes. Progressives are looters. That take from people who produce and use the loot to keep themselves in power and paper it all over with focus group tested slogans. The progressive oligarchy sees the untamed productive classes as their true enemy. They don't control them, yet. They will or they will destroy them."
"So, now the other states are out of the picture?"
"Yep, as far as electing a president is concerned. And since a president can rule by decree, without Congress, we've became a nice, friendly, progressive, neo-fascist dictatorship."
"Didn't the Romans try importing foreigners too?"
"Yeah, Vandals and Goths. That worked out well."
"And don't forget Obama's war on the energy companies, hence the blackouts we have every few days. The economic mess he created just kept snowballing. Big companies fled to Mexico, Canada, Brazil, everywhere. Now the food shortages. Then the implosion of the dollar when the Chinese decided to bail. So, now Fed dollars are nearly worthless and we have to negotiate everything in Kansas or Nebraska dollars."
"And now we have DeWitt, DeWittless, is more like it, and her band of regressives."
"And her damn spy agencies."
"And the state run media and their nightly brainwash sessions."
"Hey! Don't talk about my network crapcasts that way! That's my main
source of creative writing material you're talking about!"
"They just do what they're told."
"It would be nice if we had some real journalists."
"Don't hold your breath."
"Well, there's FAXNEWS But it's social treason to watch that channel, you know that. You can be reported to the Equity and Enforcement Office if they catch you."
"Didn't these people used to be liberals or something? Haven't they become what they opposed?"
"I wonder about that. In reality, when you think about it, they're the political descendants of the old southern Democrat party. Owing and controlling people seems to be in their DNA. They're just another group of control freaks with saccharine platitudes on the outside but an anti-democratic authoritarian core inside."
"Just remember that the massive immigration push, huge increase in welfare enrollment, and the obvious efforts to destroy the economy during Whitman's administration was part of their plan was to overload the system, to cause it to collapse and then replace it. And it worked, up to a point but not the way they expected. They didn't factor in that their dystopia would be so geographically concentrated and that the rest of the country would rebel. They never factored in the possibility of a revolt. To progressives, disobeying government authority is unthinkable. It wasn't in their rule book. They always trust government. But, if Munson and his people don't win and run these fascists out of town, it's over. The country will totally breakup in civil war. But, until the apocalypse, I've got to go