Not that we North Americans are too much better. I’m still morally convinced that in two hundred years every white man and woman will be convinced that they’re ‘Cherokee’ and that the ‘American people’ have lived on these lands since the beginning of time. Read any American history or literature textbook and tell me I’m wrong.

But it’s not always the case that Deep Sociological Insight is the sole thing to be found when reading about the influence of modern nationalism on historical consciousness. Sometimes you just get pure fun like this man from Bulgaria who

…claims to be an expert in linguistics, cryptography and transcendental analysis…

[From Gradeshnitsa tablets - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

If you want more backstory, read on and follow the many links for a quick explanation. But really, I’d just like to savor the words transcendental analysis.

I also learned that I should never, ever, try to write a webcomic.

There is also a one page ‘Origin of Angerman’ that may, at some point, be transfered from paper to glorious digital quality. Which is highly unlikely since these days I adventure under the name ‘Apathy-man’.

I was once drunk and bored and without a lot of money, walking with a couple of friends in downtown Minneapolis. We were heading to a party, but we had plenty of time to get there. As we were walking, I said, HOLY SHIT, THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY! THEY HAVE FREE PERSONALITY TESTS! LETS GO!

One friend ducked out and went to have a cup of coffee. But me and Isaac, we bopped on in, where we were given a multiple choice test, in format almost identical to the standardized tests that represent the keys to the gates of education in America. Having been a washout from University, I wasn’t up for it. I always hated these tests, so I just did the random thing. I made nice patters; christmas trees and so on. Isaac, a graduate student, could take a test as well as he could take his liquor (provided it’s not cognac), and dutifully (but easily) answered all the questions quicker than I did.

The man, with gray/blond thinning hair combed straight back, wearing a gray sweater that I normally associate with librarians, came back and took our test forms to correct them. We assumed he would scan them through a machine and have our results in a moment or two. So we excused ourselves to the restroom, took a shot off of my friend’s flask, and then I stole some coloring markers (my Scientology markers, which I kept for a long time; I told people I was saving them to draw something crazy). When we returned to the table where we had taken the test, we waited…and waited…we finally noticed that he was entering the results of the test into a computer by hand. And the computer looked like a 386. Maybe a 486. This was in like 2004. I remember thinking, Jesus, Tom Cruise better make another movie, because the Church is really going to hell. What was Elron thinking, out there in Outer Space, on his non-corporeal research trip into the cosmos?

Also, why were taking the test, my friend noticed (I didn’t) that the phone had been ringing fairly frequently while we were there, and the man kept answering, Hello, Church of Scientology Minnesota. I thought nothing of it. But my friend (who is perceptive) noticed that was all he said. He just would hang up after that. Was it wrong numbers? Did they have a similar phone number to some very popular or well used number? Or were they people angry at the Church, calling and yelling expletives? But in that case, I’m sure they’d just block the number.

My theory was this: They had set up an automated calling machine, maybe inside the Church building itself, and had it calling the main number every five minutes or so. This way when people were in the building, it would seem even more busy than usual. Now, to pull this off, the person answering the phone should say something like, Hello, Church of Scientology, how can I help you? Why yes, we do offer that service! Would you like to make an appointment?

But it’s kind of a drag. I mean, every five minutes, having to have a fake conversation? It’s one thing to talk to a real person every five minutes, but it’s another to have to invent a person to talk to every five minutes. Even if you take away the constant invention and have a nice cheat sheet of scripts to use, it’s still boring to play the same role constantly.

So like every job, he was slacking. He was still doing his job, but you know, he wanted to get by as easily as possible. Yes, praise Lord Elron. May he be exalted, etc. I deem you Clear. And so on. But as far as he’s concerned, that first hour of work is his, Elron-dammit, and leave him alone until he finishes his first coffee, and he’s had a chance to visit his friends who are working in the education center on the third floor. He’ll wander down to the staff room, maybe grab a doughnut, lazily say whatever the Scientology version of Grace is, and then he’ll be more than happy to get to work, thank you so much.

(We can maybe imagine this is why after inventing the idea of plurality God had to go through with it and really create it. It was just to hard to imagine plurality all the time. The universe tends towards entropy because the agents of the universe tend towards laziness.)

After using the E-meter and the spiel that he’s given a hundred times before, and telling us how depressed we were, he could tell, oh yes, look it’s right here on the graph (as if not realizing that using graphs to make a point is a technique that died when Ross Perot used them in the longest infomercial in American television history, and convinced the American people that if Ross Perot stood for anything, it was that he was boring as fuck).

He asked us if we watched the news on TV or read the newspapers. We told him that we were, indeed, well-informed individuals, full of information about the world.

Well, he said, why don’t you try, just for a couple of weeks, to avoid this sort of information. It’s almost always negative, he said, and it’s what’s depressing you. He said, Do this, and come back in two weeks, and take the test again, and I think you’ll find that you’re a lot happier.

And because I was drunk (because I am not normally such a daring smart ass), I looked him in the eyes, with deep seriousness, into the pale and faded blue surrounded by pale and faded blonde hair, eyes that had the look common to both kinds of Catholics; practicing and non-practicing: When you ask about religion, you’ll find that ex-Catholics and Catholics answer in the exact same tone of voice, one of weary resignation. And they both have that look in their eyes, that says, yeah, yeah, I know. So here was this Scientologist, eyes saying, yeah, yeah, I know. And when I said (out loud and not with my eyes), “So…ignorance IS bliss?”

And he looked at me, with his yeah, yeah, I know eyes, and said earnestly, Exactly. Like it was the first time he’d had someone come in and who had actually got it.

And that’s Scientology.

At least 19 other states, including California, have slashed court budgets and other government services as their economies have tanked, said Daniel Hall, vice president of the National Center for State Courts, a nonprofit in Williamsburg, Va. [From Economic Crisis Hits State Court Systems]

An interesting but novel way to curb civil liberties, eh? Not that I’m suggesting that’s what’s going on here. This is definitely a budget crunch thing. Just sort of a possibility I’d never considered for a dystopian future. Civil liberties cost money, and we’re just short of cash, sorry. Please get in this unmarked van, it’s a police van, but we couldn’t afford to get it painted. Really.

Yves Rossy aimed to reach speeds of 125mph[From BBC NEWS | UK | Pilot completes jetpack challenge]

No, I’m talking about the class of married men who never say a single good word about their wives. Wives who are deficient in every possible way: stupid, lazy, free-loading, etc. At least if one listens to their husbands.

They talk and complain, and bitch, and in general are kind of a pain in the ass to be around, because their conversational turns are as predictable as a NASCAR track. “Hey, did you see that throw Ichiro made yesterday?”

“No. I told my wife to tape Sportscenter, but she didn’t. SHE IS A HORRIBLE CUNT.”

“Uh, you know, you could probably catch it on YouTube, or it might get played again later today on like ESPN News or something.”

“SHE CUNT AND ME HATE! RAH!”

And there it ends.

Because the universe is an ever recurring leitmotif of ‘STUPID CUNT’. All other melodies are relegated to playing counterpoint to that basic point. And I can’t understand why they think this way. I can’t even begin to wrap my head around the level of negativity and pettiness that’s necessary to look at the world that way. Thank the Lord.

Whenever I meet guys like this, and if there is no way for me to get out of the conversation, I always tell them that’s why I’m happy to be single.

But what I really mean is I’m happy I’m not a misogynistic douche bag.

Clarrence Darrow eventually moves west to help the labor rebellion, stealing plans from his bosses at the railroad companies to help them out.

Clattering clockwork steampunk mechanical American West labor rebellion. Steam and clockwork technology is not in the hands of the everyday person. This is the equivalent to the stealth bomber. The industrial revolution has hit, but we haven’t yet entered into a world where there aren’t still yeoman farmers the farther west you go.

America in the late 19th century, regardless of what you’ve heard or seen in movies, was an absolute shithole. The cities were dirty, and the politics dirtier. Tammany Hall, the election of 1876, the Free Silver movement. William. Jennings. Bryan. I totally need to re-write the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech to reflect steam and clockwork…

Have you ever heard that shitty seventies song, ‘Black Betty’? It was by Ram Jam, and it goes something like ‘Whoa Black Betty, bam bam bam” over and over. I thought this song was about a woman when I first heard it. But it’s actually about the whip that they used in Texas prisons of the era, usually on African-American prisoners. One of the dirty secrets of the post-Reconstruction South is that black folk were rounded up on a regular basis for ‘crimes’ such as jaywalking. They were sent to prison work camps, and basically re-enslaved on this basis.

You here a lot of fringe left and right wing people (and not so fringe) talk about the Posse Commitatus Act, which prevents the government from using the military to act as a police force. But what people either don’t acknowledge or don’t know is that it was a response to having Federal troops in the South. The Federal troops that were protecting some of the early black schools from being destroyed by people like the Klu Klux Klan. The Posse Commitatus Act was a part of the informal deal worked out after the election of 1876 in which the Democratic candidate won, but a committee of thirteen Republicans and twelve Democrats ended up awarding the election to the Republican candidate (go figure). Rather than start up the Civil War again, the Republicans said, okay, let us have the Presidency, and we’ll pull the Federal troops out of the South. Southern Democrats, eager to begin beating down on black people, readily agreed.

As stupid as American politics is today, few people realize how utterly fucked people were in the late nineteenth century. I mean, the American census had specialized terms for people who were one-eighth African-American. (If you were, you were an octoroon.) On top of this, there was almost universal grinding poverty, and a spectacularly bloody labor struggle.

The people were already covered in muck. Lets just add a little more soot. A Steampunk America that uses so much coal that it has to start importing it from overseas…China, if I remember my Henry Adams, had a lot of coal. A world were China gets industrialized quicker… Or what would be the Chinese equivalent of an emirate? Dependant on foreign coal?

Hmmm…All just ideas right now. I’m going to have to go back to some good American labor history. And thank God I bought the Oxford Companion to American History, because I can’t remember all of this shit. At a certain point, even I want to just forget it.

Another well-known case involving Windigo psychosis was that of Jack Fiddler, an Oji-Cree chief and shaman known for his powers at defeating Wendigos. In some cases this entailed euthanizing people suffering from Windigo psychosis; as a result, in 1907, Fiddler and his brother Joseph were arrested by the Canadian authorities for murder. Jack committed suicide, but Joseph was tried and put to death.

[From Wendigo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Jack Fiddler is a pretty cool sounding name.

This particular scientist is doing lab work on Resident W. Resident W was also a scientist, but decided that he’d figured out the real trick wasn’t to be bitten by a zombie and turn into a brainless automoton. Oh no, he was pro-active. He theorized that eating a zombie was as pro-active as you could get. And by theorize, I mean that his brain went bad through a combination of dealing with zombies all day and staring at desolate tundra on his days off.

Our scientist-our HERO scientist-is studying this madman, because he turns out to have been right. He’s mutated into a creature with skin like charred marshmellow, black with white pus oozing out of it. But he’s also super-strong, and not mindless. Just utterly mad. And out HERO scientist is engaged in a contest of wills, trying to figure out how to deal with this ugly bastard. His bosses want him to figure out what it is and bottle it, but oh, please, could you skip the madness bit?

The lady in charge of security at the facility is the daughter of some old friends of the HERO scientist. He meets with them, and though they don’t know exactly what the facility is up to, they do know that their daughter and their old friend work together, and that she doesn’t really like our HERO scientist, but they don’t know why. Talking with them, our HERO scientist also admits he doesn’t know either.

The security chief is at the cafeteria (even ultra-secret government research facilities that study zombies have cafeterias), and is discussing the difference between guilt-culture and shame-culture with a collegue. Shame culture is pre-Christian, and is best demonstrated by Oedipus. He was ‘innocent’ in the sense he couldn’t have known that he was killing his father (who was demonstrably a massive bastard) or marrying his mother, but he still commited those acts. The acts themselves were the important thing, not his state of relative innocence, or feelings of remorse. In post-Christian society, remorse and intent become important features of determining responsibility. The way in which the subject views his relation to the object acted upon becomes more important. Hence we se Oedipus as somewhat alien. He couldn’t have known, so it makes no sense to us as to why he felt he must be punished for commiting a crime he was incapable of realizing he was commiting.

Meanwhile Resident W is huddled in a corner of his cell, and realizing that he can make contact with the mindless zombies being studied in the lab. He can see through their eyes. He can hear what they hear. He doens’t know how it really works, so he’s just experimenting, and smiling. He is happy, oh yes, he is very happy. And waiting. When HERO scientist shows up, he asks Resident W what he’s smiling about. “I’m having such wonderful dreams.”

HERO scientist and security chief run into each other. He confronts her about her dislike of him. Points out he’s an old family friend, and that they’ve known each other since she was a little girl. She lets him know that as the security chief, she was given the background information on all of the people working on the base. He visibly reacts to this. “Yeah, I know all about you and little girls. I know they made sure that you didn’t have to face prosecution because they needed you for this project.”

“That was ten years ago. I went ot counseling for five years. You’re head of security. You’d know if I was looking for this stuff on the Internet, and it’s not like I take a vacation from this fucking place.”

“Yeah. HERO scientist. Overcomes his addictions and works really hard on research to make up for it. Except you don’t take vacations because you love doing this. More-how much I don’t know-than you like child pornography.”

“Jesus Christ. Look. What do you want me to do?”

“What is there you could do? I found out about this, it ruined a part of my fucking childhood. Every memory of my fun ‘Uncle’, every time my parents left me alone with you, it feels like a fucking violation.”

“It’s not like…I never…acted out..I know all this shit is…was wrong. I never. Not you, not anyone, I swear to God.”

“Lovely. You never actually raped children. You just masturbated to photographs of horribly abused children. You truly are a HERO scientist.”

She walks away, leaving him with this.

MEANWHILE…

Resident W manages to break out, co-ordinating the other zombies, controlling all of the ones that had been created by the one that he ate. The others are unaffected. There is a loss of power as the virus (or whatever, will add Science Words later) is diluted across generations. (Also, mindless zombies don’t eat each other. Why? I have no idea. But it seems Important.) So with a small brigade of minions, he breaks out and starts marching across the tundra toward the nearest city.

Security chief is scrambling to deal with all of this. She manages to get some sort of strike force together, but probably won’t be able to deal with small army of zombies and Resident W, who is of course super strong, impervious to damage, etc. blah blah.

(This is the weakest point, because we have to believe that the government can’t deal with a few dozen zombies and some sort of revenant. Then again, after Katrina and Iraq, maybe it is believable. Still, probably needs some fleshing out. Just like all the other gaping plot holes.)

They realize that he’s going to get to a city, and they won’t have time to stop them before they start infecting people, and so Plan B is readied: Just nuke the whole city. It’s pretty much their only option.

UNTIL…

They realize the HERO scientist is setting out overland to intercept Resident W. And he’s eaten the flesh of one of the late generation zombies. He’s not as powerful as Resident W, but he’s also hoping whatever it is working away at his body will give him a window of sanity to deal with the bastard long enough for the security strike team to deal with Resident W without nuking a city.

(Yes. GAPING PLOT HOLES AHEAD. Do not fall in.)

HERO scientist manages to defeat/delay, in a stunning and brilliantly laid out fight sequence (Bam! Pow! Whack!), and the security force gets to him. He tells the security chief that he realizes that she can’t get her childhood back, and that it is his fault. “I did this because I did that. This is my accepting responsibility for what I did.” He looks away from here. “Now get rid of me. I’m a monster, and we know what happens at the end of the movie.” She nods, and takes out a gun, and shoots him.

FIN

Alternative teaser ending: HERO scientist wakes up in a cell in a different lab. His skin has turned blackened charcoal, like Resident W. Turns out he’s retained his sanity, but otherwise completed the transformation. Which makes the government very happy, because they think, perfect, we found the right dose of zombie flesh to make super soldier zombies that still have brains, not just an appetite for braaaiinzzzz. He is HERO scientist no longer. He is now ZOMBIE SCIENTIST, at odds with the government he once worked for, which I think deserves an ongoing series. Or not.

Prior to 1931, New York Times reporter William Buehler Seabrook, allegedly in the interests of research, obtained from a hospital intern at the Sorbonne a chunk of human meat from the body of a healthy human killed by accident, and cooked and ate it.

[From Cannibalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]