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GUEST ARTICLE
Regular article posted earlier.
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"If Present Trends Continue"

by D. Ritchey

Prologue

The land crabs come in and you look for a new place to live. You think that this time it might be different. But Man's life on this ball is a matter of scuffling and dodging. Always has been, always will. It is the same; the technology is different. You have little power over the land crabs unless you have influence; if not, your government doesn't see you. You are too small. So you are on your own. The fact is, the government fears the land crabs. The government feeds them because land crab management is where the money is. The government takes your money and feeds them. And the more you help the land crabs, the faster they displace you. This is one of the dilemmas of charity. The government fears the land crabs, not you.

Part 1.

Holzville bloomed out of human energy. Back in the old days Holzville made things. It cut trees from the forests and turned them into useful products. It employed people and they put roots down and improved their little town. It became a good place to live. Life was good even if you didn't have much money. Eventually the timber ran out, but the town hung on because it was a good place--way up the coast, with a healthy climate, and the sea hitting its beaches rough and gray. Fish was cheap and extraordinary protein. Wilderness surrounded Holzville and this gave it an atmosphere of adventure. It brought men out of their sleeps and they remembered what a man is, and the women appreciated it. Now the forests had come back and crowded the little town with mystery and a sense of danger. And for some time now it had been attracting people fleeing the south.

I arrived in the early days, well before the main flight. I had good intelligence about the place, and I figured right. Holzville was great, but I knew it would be discovered, successively by the groups coming out of the south. Same pattern. The invasion, a few years of trial cohabitation, then flight. I analyzed such things "for a living," as the saying says. And so I knew from the first that Holzville was doomed. And my estimate of its lifespan turned out to be accurate, too. I gave it 13.5 years before the land crabs; it turned out twelve. My thinking was tuned to the south. I was pretty good at looking at it, imagining its thoughts, analyzing what the people there might do. I called it "the old country." I gained a reputation and people paid me to write about it. They paid me because they were worried about such things. They were wealthy and every wealthy man or woman fears two things above all: loneliness and mobs. So they paid me to write their tarot. These contracts came frequently enough, and paid well, not too high, not too low. I even turned down jobs. I knew something. Not much, but enough.

Who else paid me? Governments, insurers, holders of commercial property, lots of it, or of residences worth millions of dollars. To these people it was very, very important to know what the land crabs were going to do, which way they were going. After decades of analyzing the land crabs I had made my name. One of the things my clients liked most about my work was the metaphors I used. I used metaphors that didn't make them nervous. They appreciated that. And so I knew when the old days were over: when the metaphors stopped working.



This morning I am about to describe started badly. Number one, Sylvia was away, giving a presentation in Portland on saving the children. She was like me, a paper pusher, not good at useful work. She worked for the Foundation For Excellence In Everything. We were both overpaid, being theorists scribbling on government contracts, or anyone with the bucks. We were hired guns. We swayed minds. It was an easy life. Our toenails were very clean.

That was the morning the manuscript arrived. I didn't want any more packages, they reminded me of what I did for money. I felt like I should be doing something else. But she was away and I was in bachelor mode, walking around in my boxers, smoking, drinking too much coffee, not cleaning shit, leaving shit laying around, looking through my telescope, and so forth. I was done with excessive order and cleanliness. I used to do all that stuff in the army. All that orderly strack shit. It's all adrenaline. You think you're transcending, but it's only adrenaline. It's not real. I've had enough.

I was telling you why that morning marked the beginning of the end. It started the moment of that knock on my door. I knew immediately it was nothing good. I felt a shift; something out there had changed. I knew it... And the knock. The crisp haste of it. It felt like efficiency, like snap, crackle and pop Americanism. Some bugger was going to ask me something. Some poor fellow or girl, bright, personable, doomed to underemployment. I am always kind to these people... But someone had my number... I answered the door. A deliveryman was waiting with a mailer. I signed for it. He was indifferent to my surprise. I stood on the porch, turning it over as he roared away in his truck. Hamilton, NJ was the postmark. I didn't know anybody in Hamilton, NJ. Never heard of it. This was a standard postal mailer with which paper pushers like myself were familiar. How long did I stand there wondering? It wasn't a big deal; I received mailers all the time. I set it aside in my den and returned to work.

A few days later and Sylvia was still up in Portland. FEE had extended her. Out of boredom I opened the mystery mailer. What did I find? A typed manuscript. I mean typed on a manual typer, like Underwood style. Its title page read:



The Replication of Warlord Culture in Urban America

by



Dr. Randy Hohler

Dept. of Sociology

Elmendorf Hall

Rutgers University

May 3, 1969



The year 1969! Was this a hoax? Where the devil had it been, and who sent it to me? The manuscript was yellowed, some of its edges crumbled. I turned it over a few times, then removed the clip. About 200 pages, mimeos done on the old crank copier with the negative plate on the roller. Not bad. I flipped through it. Nothing jumped out at me. I set it down, wondering who wanted me to have it.

I returned to my seat and started pecking on the computer again, but my attention drifted back to that manuscript again and again. That stack of paper had power. It knew something. It was wise. I told myself I would read it that evening.

Show me a paper, I will read it, and the older the better. So, you see, Nature designed me for writing papers. And I will tell you again, I have no useful skills. Come the Wolf Age, I'll be a useless eater unless somebody needs an office manager. But--being a minor expert in symbols, people think I am useful. They see me as a propagandist for them. I can't help it; that's what they see. And they pay me to write shit that makes them feel good and forewarns them about the land crabs. It's a job. Wouldn't you take it? Of course you would. You're a hypocrite like me. My clients like my definitions of "progress." I bring "progress" to the land crabs; I "mitigate" their problems. I have a reputation among "progressive" businessmen. The government also appreciates my work. I am a strategic planner. I am one of the best of my generation...

However, after our last jump, which was from Contra Costa, fleeing a land crab invasion, my friends and even my lovely Sylvia advised me to find another way to make money. People were beginning to whisper about my work. It made them nervous; they believed I was drawing the land crabs by thinking about them so much. After our flight up to Holzville I thought, well, I'll do one more contract. Write one more analysis of how to deflect the land crabs from wealthy areas. And I'll charge a killer fee, enough to retire on. And then I'll find another way to make money... And so Sylvia and my friends got me looking around. And it was true. Thought is energy and the more thought you give to an entity the more powerful it grows.

An idea had infiltrated my society of friends, the idea that my work attracted the land crabs. There was a homing effect, like an injured fish emanates vibrations which read "easy prey." You repeat and repeat and the words become symbols and grow powerful. The more I wrote about the land crabs the sooner they'd pick up my beam and home in on us. They'd pick up on our weakness. That was the theory. After a while this slander implanted itself in my mind as well. Now I suspected that the rumors that I used to know were not true, were becoming true. I was drawing the land crabs because I thought about them. Reason contradicted it, but it remained.

In the meantime, back in CC there was serious trouble between the new arrivals and the residents. It was a middle class rat race everywhere, made worse by the land crabs pressuring the borders. In Holzville were many refugees from the old country down south. They knew what was going on and this was the re-start of the old nightmare. No one would admit it. No one would name it. They were watching the news closely. Some people were becoming frightened by the disorder down south. They were worried it might find its way up the coast and reach Holzville.

I knew it would. I knew Holzville's days were numbered. The system in place in the old days was still in place. Meet the new Soviet, same as the old Soviet. That's why everything is doomed until the Soviet is gone. Yes, the land crabs were rioting down south--and big surprise? The refugees, the newbies of Holzville were sweating about doing what they had to do. And that was fight or leave. I knew they wouldn't fight. What they were doing now is what they had tried back in the old country. They were going to compromise so they could stay a little longer. So what was I defending? These people weren't going to help themselves. So what was I doing? Why should I risk my reputation and life, resisting? The rumors were flying around H'ville. Yes, the crabs were coming, spreading up the interstates.



When they arrived, what next? Back in the old days, I told people the truth, that the government used the land crabs, that the government deployed them to shake things up. Big business doesn't like contented people, just like the medical industry doesn't like healthy people. Contented people spend less money. Every few decades BB orders the government to initiate a new campaign of "progress," really a campaign of propaganda warfare, to shake things up, to get people frightened and spending again. Also starts a new anti-racism campaign. It is Stalinist terror and its intention is population transfer.

I knew how this worked and I tried to tell people, but they didn't believe me. They didn't want to believe me. One neighbor back in CC punched me. So eventually I took on the attitude, "Fuck 'em, let Darwin sort 'em out. Let's clean out the gene pool." So I looked at the mystery ms. by Prof. Hohler of Rutgers. Let's see what the fuck. I felt his mind before I read the text; I started reading, and knew pretty quick that here was a fellow, another "progressive", paid to manage the mobs of land crabs. Hohler was in the same racket as Sylvia and I. Forty years later and still going strong, eh, Hohler?

I skimmed it. I saw it was standard academia, too many adjectives, stupid with jargon, whining... and of course the dude had an agenda, which was keeping folks feeling guilty, focusing on the oppressed Kumkwats and this and that group, and gee, if it wasn't for racist exploitation the land crabs, too, would have colonies on Venus by now. And so forth. When I came to the section heading, "If present trends continue," I put it down. It was the same crap I wrote, meant to alarm my customers, to keep the checks flowing. In the meantime we in land crab analysis had moved on to other verbs. In 40 years we had polished our lexicon. Hipped it up, because the people who paid us expected it. They liked language that resonated with the stock market. So I would have termed that section, "The future is now." And this new language had to work on the stock market investors, too.

One theme I saw running through this boilerplate was the focus of urban gangs on white women. Hohler said it again and again, that white women were the prize, the top objective of the gangs. White women. That night I phoned Sylvia in Portland.

"Syl, I got a strange package in the mail. A study by a Professor Hohler, of Rutgers. Heard of him?"

"No, never."

"And it's 40 years old! Written in 1969."

Silence. Then she said, "Could it be from one of your rivals?"

"I have none. But someone is targeting me."

"Maybe it's a warning." She laughed.

"Oh no. We're on top of things. Right?"

"Of course." I heard side business. "Listen. I have to go. They're calling me."

"All right. When are you done?"

"A few days more. Not certain now."

"Okay. Well, take it easy, Honeybush."

"You too, Anteater. Be good." She hung up. I didn't mention the white women issue. That would make her nervous. I went to bed.