An excerpt from a sermon preached by Elijah Traynor at the Displaced Civilians Assistance Zone (DCAZ) outside Fort Lee, Virginia on December 6, 2000:
They call it "order," what them boys in the base are building. Steel walls, crisp uniforms, rifles at the ready, but it ain’t order they’re offering. It’s fear dressed up like law – a scarecrow stitched from scraps of the old world, strung up on bayonets, and fed with lies.
I’ve seen their kind before. Men who think a badge and a mandate makes them righteous. Men who'd sooner shoot than stoop. Tell me, what Gospel do they preach at Fort Lee? The Book of Logistics? The Gospel of Supply Chain Management? You can’t heal the soul with MREs and marching orders.
They burned Richmond to save it. That’s what they said, right? Rooted out the rot. But I ask you: who sowed the seed of that rot? It wasn’t just the ones who put on the New America flag. No, it was the whole rotten orchard – the lobbyists, the generals, the technocrats, and every last priest of Progress who bowed to Mammon and called it "freedom."
I ain’t blind. I know what New America is. A wolf dressed like a shepherd – all fire and thunder, no grace. Only folks who’ve never cracked open a Bible could mistake that kind of bloodlust for righteousness.
Babylon is falling, brothers and sisters, and it's falling fast.
Some of these folks here, they’ve put their hope in the men behind those walls. Others, well, they whisper different names. But me? I don’t put my hope in men. I’ve read the Book. I know what comes next.
Don’t trust too easily, brothers and sisters. The Beast don’t always wear horns.
F*ck the USA
ReplyDeleteOooo aren't we of so edgy today.
DeleteAh, science fiction as prognostication.
ReplyDeleteI still say certain ...um..."political figures"...read a lot of science fiction as kIds and interpretted it ALL WRONG.
I feel like maybe I should buckle up for the comments on this one…
ReplyDeleteAnd seeing as there’s already a “F the USA” posted, I’d say I’m right.
Yeah. It's ... interesting the way these Twilight: 2000 posts bring things out in readers. Equally interesting is the conviction that they take inspiration from or have relevance to current political issues, when the truth is I'm just running a RPG campaign, nothing more.
DeleteWell, they have relevance to current political events if people perceive that they do. The error is to assume that you intend that relevance. It's a bit like Tolkien's comments on applicability versus allegory: "the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author."
DeleteThat's fair.
DeleteHope you'll continue to post these slice-of-life summaries of your post-apocalypse campaign, even if they do inevitably bring out the perpetually-political sort. And again, I'm reminded of the worldbuilding from Warday -- the religious impact of nuclear war, in this instance. One thing that happened after the exchange was a capital-U Unification between the Catholic and Protestant churches (via official proclamation by the Pope?) no doubt in order to pool resources, both physical and spiritual, as part of the ongoing recovery efforts.
DeleteMeh, it shows me that things are no where near as bad as they claim if the have time to show up here and project their personal bugaboos onto some fictional world.
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