![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Stick a fork in us
Sep. 14th, 2011 09:28 pmPicture the United States as a jumbo jetliner with Congress in the cockpit fighting over how to fly it. The supposed pilot in command, Captain Obama, has no authority, and Republicans refuse to unlock the controls unless he agrees to burn 60% less jet fuel and allow them to saw off the left wing. Meanwhile the jet spirals earthward out of control.
I can't see this continuing much longer.
A little part of me wonders if the upcoming "first ever national test of the Emergency Alert System" this November might be something rather different. I almost wish it did happen; it's deeply painful to watch things go as they are going. Of course, the first act of the new government would be to close down 90% of the radio stations in the country as redundant. I doubt any of my clients would be spared; they are all secondary stations with sub-optimal coverage. Boston would need only WBZ and one or two FM's. WGBH would likely survive, and WSRS in Worcester; between them they reach pretty much all of the state east of the Berkshires. But of course they'd sound nothing like they do today.
WHOM on Mt. Washington reaches almost all of northern New England, so it would be a logical choice, too. The rest of us would be of little use to the new regime but potential targets for dissidents, so we'd all get closed down pretty quickly, I think.
I think most of the Internet would get shut down, and the cellular telephone network too, lest they become vectors of resistance.
Taking control of something as big as the United States would require masterful coordination. They'd have to do a lot better than the GKChP did in the USSR twenty years ago.
In Germany in the 1920's there were several parties in parliament who were actively trying to undermine the Republic, with various aims in mind: the restoration of the Kaiser, or a Soviet state of the workers and peasants, or a military government, or a nationalist greater German Reich... but there are no Nazis here.
Perhaps the Russia of the 1990's is a better comparison: the inept Boris Yeltsin presiding over a corrupt dysfunctional state and a basket case of an economy, with a powerful and well organized state security apparatus waiting in the wings for power to drop into its lap.
Regardless of what may follow, it's clear that the United States we've known is history. As Mr. Straczynski might have us say, nothing's the same any more.
I can't see this continuing much longer.
A little part of me wonders if the upcoming "first ever national test of the Emergency Alert System" this November might be something rather different. I almost wish it did happen; it's deeply painful to watch things go as they are going. Of course, the first act of the new government would be to close down 90% of the radio stations in the country as redundant. I doubt any of my clients would be spared; they are all secondary stations with sub-optimal coverage. Boston would need only WBZ and one or two FM's. WGBH would likely survive, and WSRS in Worcester; between them they reach pretty much all of the state east of the Berkshires. But of course they'd sound nothing like they do today.
WHOM on Mt. Washington reaches almost all of northern New England, so it would be a logical choice, too. The rest of us would be of little use to the new regime but potential targets for dissidents, so we'd all get closed down pretty quickly, I think.
I think most of the Internet would get shut down, and the cellular telephone network too, lest they become vectors of resistance.
Taking control of something as big as the United States would require masterful coordination. They'd have to do a lot better than the GKChP did in the USSR twenty years ago.
In Germany in the 1920's there were several parties in parliament who were actively trying to undermine the Republic, with various aims in mind: the restoration of the Kaiser, or a Soviet state of the workers and peasants, or a military government, or a nationalist greater German Reich... but there are no Nazis here.
Perhaps the Russia of the 1990's is a better comparison: the inept Boris Yeltsin presiding over a corrupt dysfunctional state and a basket case of an economy, with a powerful and well organized state security apparatus waiting in the wings for power to drop into its lap.
Regardless of what may follow, it's clear that the United States we've known is history. As Mr. Straczynski might have us say, nothing's the same any more.
