8/3/2019 It Had Been an American Century

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It Had Been an American Century

copyright 2011, Paul Hawkins

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It had been an American century.

One of the few satellites left attempted to chronicle the last of it. It had lasted longer than

predicted; it had seen later models come and go. It transmitted in a frequency that was

now seldom monitored, and the zenith of the technology it encompassed was thetransistor.

It had been launched at the height of the space age, when cars were long and tailfins were

just beginning to subside, but the world had long since gone to hell beneath it. TheRuskies came and went, and came again, and the Chinese came (they were not averse to

dispatching rivals satellites with lasers). The bi-polar world went mono-polar them multi-

polar then just to a kind of hell with mortars mounted in the backs of Toyota pickups

somehow rivaling superpowers and infidels being burned alive, and worse.

It was friends with a satellite owned by the Vatican. Nobody knew or remembered howthe hell that got up there. It was currently broadcasting a 12-part series on Blessed John

Paul II.

And all the world was gone to hell, and benign faces on currencies were innocuous to themultipliers and orders of magnitude applied to them to provide for a simple loaf of bread,

or the wars waged so that faces on this side of the globe could subsist on the pollution

and slavery and penury of the faces on the other, all with the benign faces on thecurrencies standing in as surrogates for the actual transaction of human soul with human

soul, the tyrant and the sufferer, the Prophet and the profits and the ministers of oil indresses and the polished prigs in Brussels and the statists of all stripes planning for ahappier world always centered around a concept of fewer, cleaner, and in some sense

holier people (like themselves).

The satellite watched this. It had a series of lenses of fine optical quality perfectly spaced

along a body the length of a school bus. It was mostly black and silver. Solar panels like

wings were there for show, and for redundancy - there was no need for anyone to know

its heart was nuclear. It drifted calmly in infinitude; it clicked, it whirred, it sometimesbeeped and hummed. The highlights of its career had been reading the license plates of

Martin Luther King and Lyndon Baines Johnson, before it began broadcasting in

gibberish, which the NSA was too stupid to realize was not a malfunction but a change ofownership, a semi-autonomy, a coded language. But speaking with whom?

It had been an American century, since gone to hell in an explosion and antigen andantiphon of what dreams may come but hadnt, what could have been but never had, for

want of vision and belief.