To this day Professor Schwartz had lived out most of his comatose existence in low-security institutions that mirrored the appearance of correctional facilities, institutions that came in all shapes, sizes and could have even been, for example, churches, museums, or airport terminals at one time, or another. Security could range from armed sentries to part-time help from local temporary agencies. Facilities could be high-security, prison-like places, or low-security, prison-like places and all generally had chain link fences surrounding them.
The place Patient No. 112 now called home was Grey Hall Sanitarium, an all-male facility and former elementary school, a red brick with white trim building surrounded by a chain link fence and an impenetrable wall of shrubbery that kept the tenants of the surrounding housing project and inmates free from seeing, though not from smelling or hearing one another. Grey Hall was a low-security facility where patients were docile, heavily sedated, only partially clothed and stinky.
During our hero’s time at Grey Hall, or any of the myriad of facilities the former scholar had once called ‘home,’ the former big cheese never uttered a coherent word, was often seen drooling, and frequently just stared off into oblivion...something his former colleagues would have thought a sign of intelligence. There was no higher consciousness, no brain waves to speak of, just the mind of a primitive with those blank, blue eyes occasionally blinking. That goofy smile unexpectedly appeared then, just as suddenly, disappeared...and the stench...the reekiness of his countenance remained a constant reminder that it needed to rain soon. Whew! It needed to rain REAL soon!
His records gave no age, no indication of where the former faculty member had come from, or why he had been admitted, even though the last point was fairly obvious. The answers to those and other relevant questions had gone up in smoke during the Food Stamp Riots of 2025.
By 2050, over eighty percent of citizens were wards of the State: alcohol, pot, crack, crank, uppers, downers, hallucinogens, et cetera, et cetera, had become legal for anyone above the age of fourteen, and the republic’s economy was still mired in what the media establishment were calling “The Greatest Depression of All Time,” still claiming the Republican Party were the ones at fault, still forgetting the Republican Party had ceased to exist some two decades earlier.
The empire was bankrupt, the money was worthless and the private sector...well the private sector had been taxed into nothingness and was now predominately owned by the Department of Bankruptcy. Literacy had fallen to such a low juncture most Americans could neither read nor write and English...English was now being called something else depending on the region of the country, either Ebangish (Pronounced ē-ˈbang-ˈish), or Egangish (Pronounced ē-ˈgang-ˈish), or Edangish (Pronounced ē-ˈdang-ˈish): Ebangish-Egangish-Edangish.
In the past, the odd slang of uneducated people had been back stage, only in use when people moved in and out of different cultural situations. Now, those once strange localisms were up front, center stage and embraced by the entire nation. What had started out as local social snafus had become national treasures with phonetics the centerpiece and star attraction. Americans were using sounds for pronouncing words, for spelling out terms, for writing expressions and for making up utterances. Sounding expressions out was fun and well within the grasp of today’s masses...a truly, wonderful and wondrous thing.
Ebangish-Egangish-Edangish was an example of what happens when you take a large homogeneity of commonality and confine it to neighborhoods where the most alluring kind of work was hustling drugs or pimping out prostitutes. They were locations where schools were little more than places where someone might usually get shot. So, given circumstances like these, it is no wonder concern over learning English made little sense and naturally fell off everyone’s radar.
Ebangish-Egangish-Edangish was literally twenty-five cultural bastardized variations of original English all rolled up into one spectacular, out of this world, sensational means of communicating with one another. To give you an idea of how far the republic had fallen, one only had to ask any European forced to interact with today’s ordinary American; they would often describe conversations as very similar to exchanges with the Irish by around mid-afternoon: generally incoherent dribble, a few words making sense, but mostly drunken, meaningless sounds…but, so what! Who cares what the foreigners thought! It doesn’t matter what they thought anyway, not as long as one’s fellow Americans understood what in the world each other was saying...at least enough to make out some of the conversation.
Ebangish-Egangish-Edangish was sort of like conversations you would find in the Amazon rainforest...you know when you’ve got a diverse collection of tribes interacting with one another to discuss things like how to make shrunken heads, how to properly dress out a tree sloth for dinner, or how to get the tarnation out of the bug-infested jungle and to some sort of civilization.
Ebangish-Egangish-Edangish had been spawned by a variety of cultures whose origins ranged from white-trash trailer parks of the South, correctional facilities all across the nation, low-income housing projects of the Northeast, Bohemian districts in places like San Francisco, New York...any major metropolitan city and just about any migrant community from any third-world dominion south of the border, including the Caribbean and West Africa (except for Guyana)…basically, your ordinary, everyday Democrat voter.
Ebangish-Egangish-Edangish had much-of-a-muchness sounding expressions that had some similitude with English, a language that was no longer ‘numero uno.’ It was something more akin to Latin, the basis for many terms, but otherwise totally extinct and unused outside one of the half-dozen remaining centers of higher education. This was quite probably going to be the professor’s worst nightmare. After all, his whole waking life had been dedicated to the now defunct style, so his credentials would in all likelihood also be worthless. Who knows, the possibility might exist that the former scholar had some money rat-holed somewhere the IRS could not find it? Conceivably the moronicist was still a “have?” Perhaps the professor could avoid debasing himself from activities associated with that four-letter word all liberals loathed with great disdain, “Work!”
Nevertheless, what if the former English professor did not have anything? What if Patient No. 112 was no longer a “have?” What then? I mean really, what could the gentleman do with a PhD in Literature? Taxi driver? Garbage collector? Possibly a gig at the United Nations as a translator?
This line of reasoning leads us to a further series of riveting questions. Why had English been transcended by Ebangish-Egangish-Edangish? Was there any chance English could be resurrected? Was there a chance the scholar’s PhD in English might be worth something in the “New, Future America?”
The answers to the last two questions were unequivocally, No! No, for good reasons, reasons that also answer some major points surrounding the first question. For one, English was an exacting jargon and arduous to learn. English was inflexible, almost like it was written into stone and totally nonuser friendly. Sure, English could be used in conversation, the dialect could even be used to communicate through the written word, but alas, the damn thing was too exacting and much too difficult for today’s American majority…a populace which had been “dumbed down” so far, well, the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis comes to mind.
God...no, not “Gaia.” God came down to see what humanity had become and did not like what he saw. Then, like now, there was a universal language, in this case for the union: English. God then said, “Come, let us confound their speech." This was the part where the liberals picked up the ball fostering the surge in popularity of various confusing dialects. That’s why Congress adopted the 32nd Amendment, relegated English to history and replaced it with the more than accommodating, more confusing, Ebangish-Egangish-Edangish, the discourse of variation...the lexicon of the future!
Communities across the land wholeheartedly embraced their own confounded languages and all was good. The lemmings, however, did not realize that the move by th
e authorities was all part of a “master plan,” a plan to keep them permanently uninformed, a plan that hampered the ability for Americans to unite…because the liberals helped confound the speech of all. But, there was much good to come out of the transition thanks to the phonetic diversity of Ebangish-Egangish-Edangish.
Phonetics was indeed the strong suit of the new, national style, that and its colorfulness, breadth of variety and abundant use of four-letter words for emphasis...DAMN IT! For example, the professor’s name, anyone’s name, evolved with time to become increasingly fascinating, more colorful, more confusing; it was much like the evolution of surnames during the Middle Ages...only this was 21st Century America! The transformation of the professor’s name would never stop changing thanks to the phonetic diversity of Ebangish-Egangish-Edangish.
Some of the orderlies now called him “Bic,” the one nurse, “Dick,” and the doctor that visited every six months: “Vik.” At least they were consistent in never getting his real name right; nevertheless, truth be told, Schwartz did not actually care what he was called. The former English professor responded to just about anything the orderlies yelled at him: “Hey idiot,” “Hey mo'on,” “Hey stoopid,” “Hey imbécil,” “Hey Bic,” “Hey Dick,” “Hey Vik,” so long as whoever it was trying to get his attention whistled first.
The tweeting of a whistle...Tweet!
If there were a problem with Ebangish-Egangish-Edangish it was that it was not consistent, was forever changing, becoming more sophisticated, more refined and yet, would never legitimately lend itself to being written, or read, which as it turned out was fine on account that it was fun. Ebangish-Egangish-Edangish was a lot of fun...and took no kind of real education to figure out...a real necessity for today’s elementary school dropouts.
Tweet!
Oh yeah, the whistles. Patients like the professor responded to the noise of the whistles as much as having something resembling their name yelled at them. Wait a minute! Every patient responded when someone blew a whistle leading to more than a little confusion at times.
The sanitarium staff found a police whistle worked best; each had one tied around their neck in view of the reality that it needed to be real handy, a person could lose their voice yelling at the patients all day. So, the police whistle was standard equipment, that and fly swatters. If the tweeting of a whistle did not get a patient’s attention then, WHACK!...the fly swatter was sure to work, but the whistle generally worked best.
All day and much of the night the sweet sound of whistles could be heard throughout the surrounding government project.
Tweet!
It was, for all practical purposes, like the neighbors were living next to Grand Central Station.
Tweet!
The neighbors must have loved those sweet, piercing tweets when they happened every five to ten minutes, carried on the winds, filling their ears morning, noon and night!
Tweet!
More than once the neighbors had displayed their gratitude for the shrill, piercing sounds of those whistles by hurling rocks at the former schoolhouse, shooting guns in the same general direction, or by tossing an occasional fire bomb up over the hedge at night, apparently to keep what the freeloaders, the housing project tenants, called “retards” entertained. The fires the neighbors created from time to time were a real treat for those patients not tied in their beds. Those that were ambulatory would gather around the windows peering out at the flames, most with their glassy, empty stares standing stationary up to the time when the next whistle caught their attention.
Tweet!
The reaction of the patients to whistles had become so Pavlovian most of the orderlies amused themselves by standing at opposite ends of the long hallways taking turns blowing their whistles. Most of the patients thinking, or not thinking, they were being called would follow the whistling noise moving back and forth from one end of the hallway to the other, back and forth, back and forth. This could go on for hours depending on how many orderlies were involved. The administration endorsed the practice, saw the active herd of zombies for what it was, a genuine way to improve employee morale, provide some laughs and stimulate the patients, cardiovascularly speaking.
Those whistles; they could be heard going off all day...and much of the night.
Tweet!
You will see the patients being referred to as “walking vegetables,” or “zombies.” That was because that’s what they looked like most of the time largely after the morning gruel was served.
The Food and Drug Administration had long ago endorsed and mandated the use of tranquilizers for prison inmates, sanitarium inmates, military personnel up through the rank of ‘Major’ and youth over the age of fourteen. By the time Americans reached adulthood, they were usually strung out on some sort of drug, or corn liquor, so there was no need for authoritative mandates to kick in, at least until that time was reached when that part of humanity became miscreants, or insane and entered a penitentiary, a rehab center, or a facility like Grey Hall.
Tranquilizers were seen by the “Forever President” as one of the best methods for helping curb violent behavior, creating a more compliant populace and maintaining what was left of the economy through drug taxation. The Food and Drug Administration only described what dosage and kind of barbiturates could be used on the youth, or in the military; the choice was left up to the individual institutions to decide those issues for themselves.
At Grey Hall patients were fed a combination of saltpeter and horse tranquilizers in the morning gruel: a mishmash of mostly corn, some unpasteurized milk, peanuts, beans and sunflower seeds all blended into something like a thick, pasty porridge. On notable occasions: Earth Day, Food Stamp Day, May Day, Labor Day and Federal Day; the cooks would even throw a case of bananas into the mix, a real treat that would go largely unnoticed by most patients in their near catatonic states.
All right, so that’s some background on our hero’s little world. We have reached a time where you, I, and in all likelihood, the author, can start getting into the “real meat” of this little adventure. A time when the primitive mind unwittingly took the professor on the road...literally onto a highway...the first series of steps into this new, fantastic world...the world of the moronicist’s dreams!
A New Day