Word Soup (Scratch Pad)

It was 1978 when it was decided that truth would need to be assassinated.

It didn't take long, perhaps only three decades of coordinated white noise, marketing messages and counter-spin, spawned in the whitewashed back rooms of political event-centers in the nation's most prestigious think tanks. For decades, men had hovered over milky white conference tables, spawning binders full of tactics on how to have reality bound, gagged, and shoved in the trunk of a 1978 Chrysler. Metaphorically speaking.

The men called this plan "Reality Redistribution".

The engineers of the plan were plump comb-over businessmen and eager young wealthy sucklings with clammy palms. The kind of men who buried their misogyny and racism deep while in polite company, but whom always enjoyed a good bitch or nigger guffaw while sipping cognac in cherry-wood rooms. Absolutist thinkers for whom empathy was a mystery.

Over the years, they managed to dress up greed, intolerance, and ignorance as a political and moral ethos the nation could be proud of.

The artists were rounded up first because they were the least susceptible to marketing. Lured by promises of free screenings of Fellini films, they were drugged and tazered, forced into slave-labor marketing material camps in rural Utah.

Through a regimen of carefully applied violence and personally tailored hallucinogens, most of the artists proved easily malleable. Those who proved difficult to manage were chemically lobotomized and placed in positions of authority at the Recording Industry Association of America and other like minded organizations.

The scientists were slightly more difficult. By nature scientists aren't fond of the bright light of politics, but they do write rather teethy editorials, which began to appear in papers nationwide. Since three decades of coordinated marketing had redefined intellectualism as a character flaw, nobody read them. All of the nation's scientists were ultimately rounded up and forced to work solely on planned obsolescence.

The key to everything had been coordinated marketing synergy. It had made political activism decidedly unsexy. It had made musicians who voiced political opinion as fashionable as parachute pants on plump retirees. It had even tamed the great Internet, as artificial blogs and planted propaganda ultimately made the Internet a wall of noise where truth became so fluid, so dictated by who yelled loudest, it slowly became irrelevant.

Truth was reconsituted and manipulated over three decades by the planners, aided by the creativity of the nation's best artists and scientists. Mindless gluttony was redifined as success, stupidity was redefined as stoicism, and intolerance was redefined as patriotism. Anyone who felt twangs of subdermal doubt about the surety of capitalistic pursuits or the absolutism of the new cultural dogma found themselves quickly medicated.

With the slow creation an endless stream of national chain stores, chain dentists, and chain mental hygenists, every city in the country had its local economy sterilized, the money funneled back to the godhead - ultimately creating homogenized, corn syrup induced mental lethargy across the land.

My name is Reggie Armonk. Until recently I was a third generation Iowa farmer paid to produce absolutely nothing. The planners didn't account for me.