Bash Bash Revolution

by Douglas Lain

  She didn’t bother introducing me to her parents, because her Dad started in quoting scripture at me before Sally had a chance to explain anything.

  “Once they were all inside the Ark, the Lord shut them in,” her father said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “God has shut the door to outsiders. For years we were welcoming to all, we had an open-door policy, and anyone could join us in faith. But now, during these final days, God has shut the door. There is no joining the chosen now. You’re on your own and can’t come with us,” he said. He turned right on Duke, drove a half block, then turned into the Dairy Queen parking lot.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t want to come with you, I want Sally to come with me.”

  “God has sealed the door,” her father said. “Get out!”

  Sally, her mother, and her father stared at me, expecting me to give in. Of the three of them, Sally and her father looked the most alike, as he was a rotund man who had a look on his face that communicated both arrogance and ignorance. He had a fat and stupid face, but he was smiling at me with something like pity.

  “Sorry, Matthew,” Sally said.

  “Yes. We’re very sorry, but the door is closed,” her father said.

  “No, no. You don’t have to be sorry. I should be the one apologizing to you, sir.”

  “Why is that?” he asked.

  “I’m about to leave and take your daughter with me,” I said.

  “Are you?” her father asked.

  “You are?” Sally asked with something like expectation.

  I was.

  “Bucky wants to talk to you,” I told her.

  3:27 PM

  I was lying, of course. Bucky didn’t want to talk to anyone except for Yuma, my Dad, and, strangely enough, me. That is, Bucky had set up a subroutine, his own chatbot surrogate, to talk with the Pentagon, the CIA, and the President of the United States. This chatbot version of Bucky would respond to anyone who had direct access to his network, but Bucky himself only wanted to talk to his inner circle. I didn’t tell Sally this. Sally didn’t realize that I lied to her, because I logged her into the NSA portal for the Bucky chatbot and let her type and type as we slowly made our way back to the OMSI theater. The Bucky chatbot was glad to answer any user’s questions, and I let her keep her eyes on the phone as she walked. I acted like her seeing-eye dog, directing her this way and that down the street, to the bus stop, to her seat, and then off the bus again. Downtown Portland was jammed full of cars and pedestrians. Just taking a step required a negotiation, so it was actually difficult to keep her on target and out of harm’s way. On the corner of 4th and Clay, Sally stepped blindly into the path of a woman in what looked like a ballroom gown who was pushing a shopping cart filled with Chromebooks she’d looted from a nearby Office Depot. The lady was wearing a tiara and a rose, her dress was pink and frilly, and she didn’t seem to give a shit about cops or about breaking the law.

  “Woah, bitch,” the lady said as Sally swept past her, as though the whole sidewalk belonged to her alone, as if the whole of downtown was merely a backdrop for something much more important.

  Walking back to the theater with Sally, I started to feel like the world wasn’t going to be saved. My Dad had been in a race against stupidity, but he’d lost. What he didn’t understand was that the very tools that he’d used to help his side, the very computational powers he thought made it inevitable that his side would win, were precisely why people were so disengaged, so alienated, so ready to accept one blunder and atrocity after another.

  “What is Bucky telling you?” I asked.

  Sally looked up from the screen. “Everything,” she said.

  Glancing at her phone I read the Bucky bot’s last text to my girlfriend:

  “Do you doubt your God speaks through you?”

  Maybe the whole world had gone insane. Maybe there was no coming nuclear attack, but everyone was acting like there was. There was no way to use the AI to change the world, but my Dad and Ned and Yuma and Greg were all acting as though Bucky was their only hope for survival. And finally, God wasn’t talking to my girlfriend, and certainly wasn’t talking through her, but she was hearing what she wanted to hear.

  “I really like you, Sally,” I said. I reached out to her, tried to take her hand, but she was in the middle of texting and jerked away.

  “Can you help me decipher or translate what God says when he speaks through me?” she asked aloud as she typed the question in with her thumbs.

  And, before I could try to hold her hand again, the number 21 bus arrived. It was jammed full of people, of course. Sally and I got separated once we were on board. Sally was shuffled to the back of the bus, where she stood by the window and texted, and I was pressed against the front seats, pressed against the legs of other passengers. The bus started moving and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to get her attention when we reached our stop. The exit for OMSI was in the middle of the Hawthorne Bridge; it would be easier for her not to remember it. Rather than wait, I just put out my hand, palm forward, and moved on the crowd. I pushed against a man in an expensive-looking blue suit, and when he didn’t make way for me I pushed harder.

  I think I was finally as crazy as everyone else in that moment, and after pushing I realized that going crazy has its benefits.

  “What are you doing?” the man asked.

  I just pushed harder.

  Video Games

  MATTHEW MUNSON, 544-23-1102, FACEBOOK POSTS 04/29/17

  5:02 PM

  There were only three hours left until the first showing of Aliens: Remastered, and Dad asked Bucky to write up a list of the possible causes behind the coming nuclear war. Then, rather than read the list off the big screen, the seven of us—Sally, Yuma, Kufo, Ned, Greg, Dad, and myself—had Bucky send the list to our phones so we could head to the OMSI cafeteria and read the list there.

  “Order off the kid’s menu. We’re running low on petty cash and it’s better to stay hungry anyway.” Dad said and then ordered himself a PB & J sandwich and a bottle of Table Wine #5.

  “Why should I stay hungry?” I asked.

  The idea was that I should stay alert, that too much food would make me drowsy as the afternoon passed.

  I played along, ordered some Mac and Cheese, which might’ve been too heavy, while Dad drank his first glass of a “full bodied wine with black plum and roasted mocha.” He sat there in the sunlit cafeteria with his chin on his hand, propping himself up with his elbow, and let his eyes slowly close as I read through the possibilities.

  “The first item of the list is dualism,” I said.

  Dad didn’t open his eyes but just moved his hand up and down so that he appeared to be nodding.

  “That is, subject/object dualism or mind/body dualism might be the big mistake, which means this nuclear war dates back to the 16th century,” Ned chimed in. He was still wearing his civilian clothes to blend into the suburbs, a green sweatshirt and jogging pants, and as he ate the pita bread from his hummus plate and drank juice from a box I almost pitied him.

  Yuma and Kufo were sharing a plate of fries and Sally was still texting her Bucky bot while ignoring a green salad, and I plowed into my Mac and Cheese.

  “Dualism?” Dad said. “What should we do about that?”

  We went back and forth on it for a while; it took us a little while to even figure out what Bucky was talking about.

  “The idea that there are minds and there are bodies?” Kufo asked. “How is that going to start a war?”

  Apparently thinking that we had minds, that we were special and different, that we weren’t quite animals but something more divine, all of that led us to be arrogant and controlling. We were doing too much, changing too much, and needed to get back to nature.

  “We need to understand that there really isn’t a difference between human beings and any other animal. We need to realize that we don’t have divine thoughts, but we’re only animals. We need to get out of our heads, get
into the real world more,” Dad said. “Is that it?”

  “Bucky says ‘maybe,’” I replied. I might as well have been shaking a magic eight ball.

  “Okay,” Yuma said. “But what are we supposed to do about it? Even if the reason we’re going to nuke ourselves is this Descartes thing, how do we teach everyone to stop thinking that they have a mind or whatever?”

  “We could dose the water supply,” Greg said.

  “What?” Dad’s eyes were open.

  Apparently it was a plan that had already been developed back in the late 60s, and the NSA had barrels of what they called EA 1729 on the ready at all times. “We have several hundred million hits of LSD in storage right now,” Greg said. “One of the most common effects of LSD is boundary dissolution. The idea that there is a separation between you and the world you’re experiencing becomes very tenuous if the dosage levels are high enough.”

  Dad wasn’t impressed by this suggestion.

  “Okay, we dose everyone, but how are we going to arrange it so everyone in the world listens to Jefferson Airplane at the same time?” he asked.

  “What?” Greg asked.

  “It’s a stupid idea,” Dad said.

  But I wrote it down anyway and emailed our answer to Bucky. I didn’t have to wait very long to get an answer back. Apparently dosing everyone on Earth wouldn’t stop the bombs from dropping, but it would increase the crime rate during the few days we had left on Earth.

  5:35 PM

  Dad ordered another bottle of wine and then another and we were all a bit drunk when we got around to discussing how to solve the problem of the market economy. We’d already gone through racism, the loss of Christian morality, premarital sex, the Avian flu, and US Imperialism without coming up with any good solutions, but we were starting to have fun. With all of us joining in with answers and comments it was like a game. I’d read the problem, one of us would float a solution, and then we’d each take it in turns trying to offer the silliest answer. Even Sally joined in.

  “The Soviet Union,” she said. “That’s the answer, right? If we have to get rid of market forces then we’ll need Stalin again.”

  “Can I get another bag of pretzels, Dad?” I asked.

  After a couple go-rounds, we settled on State Socialism as our final answer, but not before admitting that it was the worst answer yet.

  “What’s wrong with free markets again?” Dad asked.

  According to Google, before the industrial revolution “gain and profit made on exchange never before played an important part in the human economy.” Kufo read Wikipedia from her phone. “This guy Karl Polanyi thought we lost our connection to family and community because of how Europe got caught up in trade and markets and all that back in the 19th century. So the free market is making us bad people.”

  Dad looked around, befuddled, then he turned to Greg and Ned and gave a command. “More wine!”

  “That’s probably not a good idea,” Ned said. “We only have two hours before the Aliens movie starts.”

  “Come on! We need to celebrate the return of Soviets.”

  There was one more possibility, one more reason why Trump was President, one more reason why the Russians were coming, one more reason why Yertle the Turtle and mushroom clouds were suddenly relevant again.

  “Commodity production.”

  It was the final item of Bucky’s list, and it was a stumper. Sally had returned to her phone to talk to Bucky’s bot, Kufo was reading about Karl Polanyi, and Ned was fetching another bottle of wine despite his better judgment. Most everyone thought we’d reached the end of the list and had merrily failed. Reading the final item felt like a futile gesture, an afterthought. We’d either create a new version of the Soviet Union in the US, put together a live-stream event espousing the virtues of anti-Imperialism, convert everyone to Christian pacifism, or dose the water supply with EA 1729. Those were our options, and if none of them worked, then we were drunk enough to think we were ready to face the consequences.

  Except there was one more possible cause for the whole thing.

  “Commodity production,” Greg said. “Isn’t that the same thing as rule by the free market?”

  6:12 PM

  Back in the IMAX, Bucky showed us a clip from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood when we asked him to explain how commodity production was a different problem from rule by free market; a five-minute-and-thirty-two-second video entitled “How People Make Stuff” was absolutely tiny at 360 dpi. We had to all stand in the front row, just below the box on the screen, to see how it was that yellow crayons are made by workers in a crayon factory.

  “Those things that go around crayons? Those are labels. So this is a machine that puts labels on the crayons.”

  We watched as a woman wearing rubber gloves picked up a pile of crayons and delivered them to the bin where they would be sorted and packaged for sale.

  When the video was over the map of the world reappeared on the screen and we found that we were huddled around South America, we were staring at Rio de Janeiro or at a dot on the South Atlantic coast of Brazil.

  “Come on, Bucky, how is it making crayons could lead to World War III?” my Dad asked. He seemed equally embarrassed and frustrated. Bucky was his creation and now, at this late hour, Bucky was his fuck up.

  “We don’t understand what we should do,” I said. “Are you saying everybody needs to stop making commodities?”

  That was, apparently, the right answer. In order to save the world we had to stop making things, stop buying things, stop using things, and maybe stop being things.

  It was a like a scene from The Wizard of Oz. Bucky was sending us off to kill the Wicked Witch of the West or, in this case, to “transcend the commodity form,” only instead of a dog and a scarecrow and a tin man and a cowardly lion, I was with a fundamentalist Christian, some NSA agents, two Gamers, and my stupid Dad.

  “But, how do we stop making commodities without starving to death? How would we do it without causing riots and all the rest? How could this possibly work?” Ned asked.

  Bucky flashed a quote across the screen. It spanned from California to China:

  “Modern technological expertise, just as it makes everything considered ‘Utopian’ in the past a purely practical undertaking today, also does away with the purely fairytale nature of dreams.”—The Revolution of Everyday Life

  “Guys,” Dad said. “I think our AI is a Marxist.”

  7:02 PM

  The weirdest thing isn’t the fact that the ET video game works great in augmented reality and is one of the more popular realities in the new GameCube economy, it’s not the fact that most of Lake Oswego has been converted into a GTA arena, and it’s not even the RadioShack orgies. The weirdest thing is that all of this is happening because Yuma insisted we visit the earthquake house, insisted that we enjoy the exhibits rather than debate whether central planning and state control of the means of production would be enough to get rid of commodities.

  The problem seemed insurmountable. Bucky said that we had to get rid of commodities, but commodities were all we knew. Sure, we could imagine doing without Coca-Cola, we didn’t need to go to Target or Walmart, we could do without the newest iPhone, didn’t need to wear Adidas or Abercombie & Fitch, but we did need to eat, we did need clothes to wear, and we wanted to keep electricity, plumbing, and a thousand different pharmaceuticals. As we looked around, as we thought it over, we realized that in our technological world of digital wonders, everything was a commodity. The shingles on our roofs, the pipes underground, the commune wine at the Jesus is Light of the World church, all of it was the same.

  “We’re not going deep enough,” Dad said. “What is a commodity anyhow? It’s not just any object, it’s not just something we need. It’s an economic term. It’s something we make in order to sell it.”

  “So, what we need to do is control distribution,” Greg said. “State ownership of the markets, of the factories, of the industries.”

  “But that won
’t work!” Dad objected.

  It wouldn’t work. We’d run that simulation a dozen different ways, and it turned out that Trump would launch a nuclear strike against North Korea if there was any move within the government to nationalize industries. And if we got rid of Trump and tried to grant some new administration control, Russia would strike first.

  Yuma herded us out of the IMAX theater and down to Turbine Hall, where he made us play with bottle rockets, had us try out designing paper airplanes that would fly straight in the wind tunnel, and insisted that we try our luck in the earthquake house.

  Ned, Greg and Dad seemed intent on rehashing the entirety of 20th century socialism, but they went along with Yuma, doing what they were asked to do absentmindedly. Dad stepped across the threshold of the earthquake house, a miniature one-room house made of metal and carpet, but didn’t stop talking. We all of us huddled together under the frame of the roof and listened to this old 50s song on a loop. “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” by Jerry Lee Lewis blasted out, interrupting Dad as he tried to explain how commodities couldn’t be produced if the State owned the land. Then there was a piercing noise as the Emergency Alert System started up. Then the room began to shake, and the Richter meter blinked on. When we reached 5.5 on the Richter scale, Dad stopped talking.

  “Isn’t that fun?” Yuma asked.

  We got to 6.0 on the Richter scale and then 6.5, and I thought the earthquake house was malfunctioning. I worried that the gears underneath our feet, the hydraulic pumps or whatever, were going to slip and that the floor would slide away from the mechanism. I grabbed onto Sally to keep from falling, and then when we both started to tip I grabbed the window frame to my left. The Jerry Lee Lewis song was blasting again and we reached 7 on the Richter scale before the machine started to slow.

  When the mechanism came to a standstill, when the music stopped, we filed out one at a time and in silence, and then, when Dad and Greg stepped down from the ride, Yuma made an announcement.

  Kufo had spent the night reading about the 60s, she’d spent the night investigating the Situationists, and she thought she knew what the solution was. Yuma said that Kufo had a good idea about how society should function, about how to stop the new Cold War from going nuclear.