Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

The people-and, even more, the other politicians-were outraged. They called Fuller a mugwump and wanted to punish him. Unfortunately, the only way to punish a politician is to refuse to vote for him, and Fuller was no longer a politician and refused to run for any office, so they had to be satisfied with just calling him a nut.

That was in the 1930s, and everybody forgot about Fuller until the 1960s, when it turned out that his hobby- odd geometries-had a lot of practical applications.

But still nobody took Fuller's money theories seriously, except Dr. Naismith, and Eve Hubbard, who had run for President in 1980 on the Libertarian Immortalist ticket ("An End to Death and Taxes!").

There was another President of Unistat who resigned, actually, but he "only" (as they say) existed in a novel. This was a science-fiction thriller set in a parallel universe and was called Wigner's Friend. It was about the worst possible President the author, a Harvard professor named Leary, could imagine.

The President in Leary's book, called Noxin, was a monster. He got the country into totally unnecessary wars without the consent, and sometimes even without the knowledge, of Congress. He lied all the time, compulsively, even when it wasn't necessary. He put wiretaps on everybody- even on himself. (Leary, a psychologist, claimed this bizarre fantasy, which smacked of satire, was possible, for a certain type of paranoid mind.) He used the FBI and the IRS to harass every citizen who resisted this tyranny. He not only took bribes, but even had a team of enforcers who extorted "campaign" money from corporations under threat of turning the IRS on them. His political enemies all died in a series of strange assassinations that couldn't be explained. When Congress started investigating his crimes, he betrayed his own co-conspirators one by one.

Noxin even misappropriated government money to fix up his house, and cheated on his income tax.

The book was a runaway best-seller, because it had a taut, suspenseful plot and because Unistaters could congratulate themselves on not being dumb enough to ever elect such a President.

Naismith, despite his Texas accent, was no imbecile; he had his finger on part of what was really going on.

The Federal Reserve did create money out of nothing. So did all the other banks.

The laws of Unistat allowed this, by permitting banks to issue loans up to as much as eight times the amount they had in deposits. Every time a bank made a loan on money they didn't actually have, they were creating money.

Most of the people who knew about this (aside from the bankers) went paranoid worrying about it. This was because they did not realize how much of their Reality was created in similarly occult ways.

The Federal Reserve made it possible for other banks to loan what they didn't have. The Fed "guaranteed" the credit of the banks.

The Fed was able to make this guarantee because it had lots of credit itself, in the form of government bonds.

The government bonds were good because they were guaranteed by loans from the Fed.

The loans from the Fed were guaranteed because the government gave them bonds.

And this was safe, because the bonds (remember) were guaranteed by the Fed.

That's why Clem Cotex laughed for half an hour when he finally figured out the Unistat economy.

The Communists had instituted this monetary policy because it made virtually all commerce dependent on money that didn't exist.

The Communists had abandoned pure Marxism in 1904 and were now following a system based partly on Marx and partly on traditional shamanism.

The whole Communist movement had secretly been taken over, in 1904, by General E. A. Crowley, the famous explorer. Crowley had learned a lot from the tribal shamans in the "backward" parts of the world he frequented. Chiefly, he had learned that the universe is created by the participation of its participants.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was hand-picked by General Crowley to manage the Communist takeover of Unistat. Crowley picked Roosevelt chiefly because of his radio voice. The agreement was simple: Crowley would keep Roosevelt supplied with women-"That crip Casanova never gets enough," he was soon complaining-and Roosevelt, in turn, introduced Nasrudin's magic wand to political economy.

Even though many clear-sighted, patriotic citizens saw through Roosevelt and warned, repeatedly, that he was leading the country to communism, the majority paid no heed to these voices of reason. They were charmed by Roosevelt's radio voice, as Crowley had predicted.

Actually, Roosevelt kept before him, every time he spoke on radio, a large sign with a wise saying attributed to the man who won the Bad Ass Hog Calling Contest in 1923. The sign said:

YOU'VE GOT TO HAVE APPEAL AS WELL AS POWER IN YOUR VOICE. YOU MUST CONVINCE THE SWINE THAT YOU HAVE SOMETHING FOR THEM.

Unfortunately, Roosevelt was assassinated by a disgruntled office seeker in 1937.

The Communists found an equally loyal servant in 1948, however, in the famous General Douglas MacArthur, who was a military genius with one fatal flaw: he had an ego so large that only by contemplating the mathematical definition of infinity could anything so limitless be imagined.

MacArthur completed the Communization of Unistat in return for having his picture put on pennies, nickels, dimes, dollars, postage stamps, paintings in every public place, G.I.-issue condoms, the ceilings of barber shops, Mount Rushmore, the Sistine Chapel frescoes (advising God during the Creation), all government documents, the chief balloon in all Macy's parades, in place of the test pattern on TV screens, marriage licenses, dog licenses, and in various other places that he thought of frorn time to time.

A brave and patriotic senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, attempted to expose MacArthur's government, which was staffed entirely by card-carrying Communists. (The Communists carried cards because, with so many conspiracies going on at the time, it was the only way they could identify themselves to one another.) The senator was smeared by the press, censured by his colleagues, and hounded to an early grave.

"Ike" Eisenhower, a popular Western film star of the period, contributed to McCarthy's demise by making a national tour supporting the President.

"I don't know anything about politics or military strategy," old "Ike" would tell audiences, his face full of stupid sincerity. "But I know General MacArthur is a smart man and a tough man and can outfox the Commies every time."

Like almost everybody else, "Ike" thought the Communists had taken over Russia, not Unistat.

One of the most insidious things the CIA Communists did when they took over Unistat was to change the Constitution.

The original Constitution, having been written by a group of intellectual libertines and Freemasons in the eighteenth century, included an amendment which declared:

A self-regulated sex life being necessary to the happiness of a citizen, the right of the people to keep and enjoy pornography shall not be abridged.

This amendment had been suggested by Thomas Jefferson, who had over nine hundred Black concubines, and Benjamin Franklin, a member of the Hell Fire Club, which had the largest collection of erotic books and art in the Western world at that time.

The Communists changed the amendment to read:

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged.

All documents and textbooks were changed, so that nobody would be able to find out what the amendment had originally said. Then the Communists set up a front organization, the National Rifle Association, to encourage the wide usage of guns of all sorts, and to battle any attempt to control guns as "unconstitutional."