November 15, 2009
Drone Wars: Death Lottery
"Our kids don't have clean drinking water! What are you going to do about the sky-rocketing child mortality rate?" Sonora Philemon yelled from the back of a town hall meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
"It's not like blah-blah-blah, the Fed's totally broke, and that's the joke," Senatorial candidate Loudan Rich was thrown off his Republican talking points by the unexpected outburst.
Her stars-and-stripes flag was ripped from her hands by secret service agents who knocked Sonora Philemon to the ground, hogtied her, and led her out of the building.
Despite efforts by local police to beat them down, protesters closed in on the windowless, bunker-like, black angular edifice of the newly erected government sponsored church. Banners and painted cardboard signs read "Down With The Supreme Christian Council of the United States!" and "No To The Death Lottery!" A dark cloud of swarming nanodrones (reportedly subcontracted to Russian Federation prison inmates) menaced the marchers.
Sonora Philemon was arrested and booked along with the tens-of-thousands of others who had protested outside the building. They were all temporarily rendered to a provisional corral set up outside of town.
To an otherwise cheering audience Senatorial candidate Loudan Rich vowed to challenge the young Center-Right President's "Death Lottery". His rallying cry was that the administration's "sweeping historical" legislation was far too liberal. "Social Security, Welfare and Medicare is what got us into this mess!" he pronounced. "Well that's all ancient history. Now the pragmatists have substituted those old entitlement programs with raffle tickets. To win the lottery ya gotta die first and just maybe your number will come up. 'It's better than nothing,' the President says. But we say even after they're dead there ain't no free lunch for dissidents!"
Strip-searches were mandatory for all Federal detainees. Sonora Philemon was ordered to undress, hosed down, and rudely probed by a latex-covered finger. As far as she could make out the only reason was to humiliate her.
"The young administration can relocate their 'New Federal Government' to the Dominican Republic for all we care," Senatorial candidate Loudan Rich sang out before the highly screened audience. "The traitors can run, but they can't hide. The Supreme Council knows where they are!"
Specs for Drone-Wars IX were posted all over the prison camp. It clearly stated that hits on Federal detainees were worth Drone-War Idol "Bonus Points". Arrested protesters sat outside their tents and tried as best they could to make light conversation, weary of the constant buzz of the circling drones.
"Not now, not ever!" Senatorial candidate Loudan Rich proclaimed to the cheering town hall crowd. "The Far-Christian-Right position is: 'No Death Lottery for illegals and insurgents!' I will fight it all the way to Capitol Hill!"
"Everyone dies sooner or later don't they?" a slight man who introduced himself as Charlie Frost tried to rationalize the policy. He sat next to Sonora Philemon outside the prison tent. "That's just a plain fact ain't it? Now the country's gone bust, we can't expect the government to keep folks alive for living longer than they are productive members of the economy, can we?" He lit a cigarette. "My great aunt was one of the first lottery winners. The government buried her in style in a huge mausoleum. Her family is set for life!"
Some effort was required on her part, but Senora Philemon bit her tongue. It seemed to her that mainstream, corporate media's "either/or" version of reportage was some kind of weird enabler for crackpots like Charlie Frost. "I put my numbers in at the local convenience store on my way to the town-hall-meeting," she offered the gaunt man blankly. "I heard no one had won for the last three weeks going and the prize was up to twelve billion dollars."
In the prison pen nanodrones were worse than horseflies. "Worse than skeeters," the skeletal Charlie Frost complained. The remote control bugs took pictures of everyone in the dissident holding area and transmitted the information back to National Intelligence Agency servers. The information was in turn coded, filed, and published on the Internet so that Predator Drone gamers could easily isolate those deemed preferential high-value targets by the government from the rest of the rabble. Senora Philemon swatted at one particular electronic insect to no avail. No matter how often she waved the metal bug away, it came back and hovered within inches of her face.
To everyone 's dismay Charlie Frost took a hard drag from his cigarette and coughed: "I think Loudan Rich is going to be our next Senator. For one he's got the money. Besides he ain't got no truck with illigels. He says they shouldn't get a dime from the Death Lottery and I sure gotta agree with that reasoning. I think he's gonna bring the current administration down on account of their soft position on insurgents."
"Radical-Right-Wingers were the ones who lobbied for the Death Lottery in the first place!" another much younger man in the circle blurted out. "You make it sound like a Center-Right bill, but the Right-Wingers were the ones who pushed it through. Now you want to blame the Administration for the holes in your own maniac legislation! "
You would never have thought by looking at her that the delicate looking homely woman who sat next to the young man had it in her, but she twisted her mouth up and blared out: "It sickens me we gotta do everything by the lottery. The Right says it's Christian, but this ain't no Christian way to go about saving folks. 'Landmark Health Legislation', what a lark, the Center-Right and the Far Right can take a swim. It's usury, gambling, and money worship pure and simple!"
"Now I wouldn't mind a solid gold headstone, " the young man played it like he was reasonable, "but them death worshippers on Capitol Hill," he about faced and angrily pounded the dust out of his hat, "just want to make everything good in this old world illegal -- including and especially life itself!"
Everyone knew it was just a matter of time before the drones swooped in. And eventually they did wipe out the camp -- for most Drone-War Idol contestants the extra points were simply too tempting and easy to pass up. But before the Hellfire missiles were let loose on the tent city, Charlie Frost raised himself up on the two wobbly pins he had for legs, pulled out a silver pistol as long as his lower arm and heavy enough so he had to hold it with both hands to keep it steady, and fired directly into the group of folks huddled around the tent. Bodies flew backwards like so many rag dolls. He later turned the gun on himself and, with one single shot, blew off the entire right side of his head. Senora Philemon was among the dead. She left behind a husband and child.
"Eyewitnesses claimed the man yelled out, 'Praise the Lord' just before he opened fire on his fellow inmates," Pirate Radio 1 railed. "Afterwards it was officially revealed the gunman was a well-known psychotic religious fundamentalist. The government purposely planted him in the prison camp. Military brass and FBI -- clearly evidenced by internal memoranda -- were well aware of Charlie Frost's zealous beliefs and his fragile state of mental health. They knew he was a suicidal, ticking bomb. It was simply a matter of time before he went off the rails and did something crazy. To them the lunatic was a potential weapon, and the decision was made that the man could best serve the government if he was separated from the population at large and placed among dissident inmates to stir up trouble. Maybe, officials glibly figured, he would take out some enemy insurgents before he killed himself. Unfortunately, they were right.
"On a side-note," Pirate Radio 1 added. "Loudan Rich narrowly won his bid for a Senatorial seat in New Mexico, but has since been implicated in the prison scandal."
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2009
