by LeMay, Jim
The United States did not escape this desire for division. In the late twentieth century, a small group attempting to reestablish Texas as an independent republic had to be put down by armed force and Staten Island unsuccessfully tried to secede from New York. After the turn of the century, Northern and Southern California finally did succeed in dividing into two States. At least two groups in the United States formed quasi-governmental entities of their own. One was a white supremacist group spread thinly across the northern states from Minnesota to Idaho, living mostly in rural areas, calling themselves the Aryan Nation Under God. The other was an Islamic sect known as the American Caliphate whose adherents were found almost entirely in the cities. Both groups had their own governments, levied taxes and militias, and were illegal as hell.
Nearly everywhere one looked, any place around the globe, from Ireland to the Balkans in Europe, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, anywhere in Africa, Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego in the new world or over all of the islands in the oceans, the imperative toward separation could be found. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were nearly 200 nations; in 2072 there were over 250. The western culture was dismantling one of its proudest accomplishments, one so painfully created during the centuries of its adolescence, that exquisite bearer of civilization, the nation state.
Two of the few exceptions to this general dissolution of empire was China, apparently immune to dismemberment over the millennia, and the European Union which held together, though barely, as one of the world’s chief economic powers along with China, Japan, Brazil, and the United States. But, though Europe remained a viable economic power, there were strong movements among its individual member nations toward increased political autonomy.
For the most part centralized federal governments had gradually lost power over the last half-century, though there were notable exceptions in the cases of China and Brazil. An economic union officially existed in Africa, but the member nations couldn’t quell squabbling over local interests long enough to act in the interest of all. India’s federal government became little more than a place for official arguments between different states, religions, and castes. Indonesia had regressed from a united nation to a collection of autonomous islands. Many even abandoned the official Indonesian language established in the mid-twentieth century to return to their original tongues.
States rights became such an obsession in the United States that it weakened the federal government and the nation’s political and economic strength until it ranked fourth
as a world power and appeared to be declining further. The Pan American Trade Alliance was formed in 2012 as a hegemony, under the control of the United States, to compete with the other world economic powers. Its members included most nations of the Western Hemisphere. Internal squabbling, however, especially between the chief economic powers, the United States and Brazil, had led to its collapse in less than a decade.
As the power of central governments declined, that of the megacorporations increased. Mergers of corporations, many of them multinational, had increased until some of them had annual budgets larger than that of most nations. In fact some of them effectively owned many smaller countries. They controlled prices of food, consumer goods, medicine, and most other commodities all over the world.
As a culture slides tiredly into final decay, many of its proudest accomplishments take on new, unexpected, and often outlandish aspects. The struggle for individual freedom, along with the corresponding limitations that prevented one’s rights from encroaching on those of another, had been a distinctive characteristic of Western culture from its beginning. Late in the twentieth century, this feature began to manifest itself in people’s dress. To demonstrate their rejection of elegance or refusal to attract the opposite sex, they carried the concept of “casual” dressing to new extremes. It started with such practices as wearing faded or torn jeans and tattered sweaters and quickly advanced to purchasing garments with ready-made flaws such as stains, patches, and tatters, though these clothes were anything but inexpensive.
The unkempt, and even unwashed, look became acceptable in places where such dress had previously been unacceptable; at the office, at first on “casual Friday” and then virtually every day, in nice restaurants, at airports, or even at church one saw jeans, polo shirts, and baseball caps worn backwards. A writer who chronicled the beginning of the modern world’s decadence quipped that the decline started in the mid-twentieth century when everyone started wearing baseball caps. He died before their use began to abate in the mid-twenty-first century, though he probably would not have claimed that their disappearance signaled the resuscitation of Western culture.
In the twenty-first century, merely dressing in flawed or dirty clothing was no longer a sufficient expression of freedom. Everyone had to dress differently. Of course the moment a distinctive style appeared, everyone had to have it, at least until the next one appeared on the scene. The same applied to haircuts. In effect new fads swept the world, one frantically overlapping the last.
Newfound freedom in dress and haircuts encouraged behavior that defied other conventions. Civility between persons declined, particularly in the cities. Deference toward women declined, encouraged by feminists who often considered such behavior condescending. Elderly people, of whom there were many in this long-lived world, could expect no more courtesy than anyone else. First names were used almost universally. In this era of near-equality, authority declined. “Role models” included sports figures and entertainers whose chaotic lives mixing wealth, travel, fantastic homes, and frequent public appearances with drugs, promiscuity, and scandal, were avidly followed in the media.
Even though personal freedom had finally become possible for most people, few true eccentrics could have been found. Restrictive systems breed eccentrics. In a world of near-universal freedom, with no such system to protest, conformity is the rule. Everyone jumped on each fad in personal adornment as soon as it became popular to show his or her “individualism”. People liked to do things together. They flocked to music concerts, nightclub shows, movie theaters, and team sports more than ever before. Despite the advances in media technology, fans still filled stadiums, more often now that the new virtual stadiums enabled hundreds of thousands of people to observe each performer and every sports play close at hand. Entertainment, whether enjoyed at home or in the stadium, was passive and required no active participation from its audience. And there was more of it available than ever before. Imperial Rome had come nowhere near matching it.
Entertainment was more important than ever because work no longer offered people satisfaction. Shorter workweeks gave people more free time, and most jobs consisted of mind-numbing drudgery, repetition, and the use of high-tech equipment that seemed to have little relationship to the world or the rest of the workers’ lives. In comparison, even the blandest entertainment offered excitement usually in the forms of violence and sexuality.
Passive entertainment was not enough for some, though, those sensitive and intelligent enough to seek more personally dangerous outlets. A few of these took to such activities as mountain climbing, racing high-speed vehicles, or diving to obscure ocean depths. Still others indulged in the no less dangerous, though hazardous in a different sense, activities of corporate fraud. Most of these practitioners weren’t in need of the money. Their bland lives had made them long for the feel of the adrenaline rush as they beat the system whether they ended up in jail or not. As many did. But then, many did not. A lot of the multi-national corporations were so huge that their leaders were beyond the touch of any government. Many of the corporate bandits who carried on with impunity under the noses of all of earth’s governments became heroes to many people without the skill, courage, or opportunity to fight the system.
Despite a worldwide increase in religious zeal, sexuality and violence permeated life as people sought to liven up their bland lives. Half-naked bodies posing seductively could be seen everywhere, in advertising, films, and magazine
s. Pornography, protected by the laws of free speech, was ubiquitous but nowhere near the quality of ancient times. The sexual act was often imitated in plays, film, and at musical concerts. Violence became so ordinary in real life as well as in entertainment that the younger people growing up with it often confused the two. A shooting or knifing on the street was observed in much the same way as its counterpart on film.
In addition to sex and violence, modern entertainment also relied on crudeness and vulgarity: cruel harmful practical jokes, depictions of filth or human waste, raucous music that reminded one of nails scratching a chalkboard, songs and dialogues laced with obscenities and bad grammar. It seemed that the creators of entertainment were trying to destroy it.
The arts generally declined in quality. Producers of films and plays felt obligated to surfeit their audience with an abundance of sex, violence, and filth. The publishing industry suffered. While reading requires at least some effort – some books even force one to think! – people had become accustomed to entertainment that took no participation on their part. In defense, publishers began to place the same strictures adopted by film and theater producers on their authors. Nothing got published that didn’t contain large dosages of sex, violence, vulgarity, and filth.
Modern pictorial art depicted the mundane and, as with the acted and written forms, the sexually explicit and violent and even more than the others, the filthy. Many of these works were collages of photographs or objects or sculpture. Probably the best of the few serious mid-twenty-first century painters was Bedrich Hudacek, the Eastern European who depicted the horrors of modern guerrilla warfare. He became world-famous, and his paintings sold for enormous sums. When he discovered that his paintings had gained fame as scenes of rapine and slaughter without recognition as antiwar commentaries, he refused to sell or even to display any more of them.
The twenty-first century witnessed the slow demise of rock and roll. It was gradually replaced by so-called “world music” which was actually a miscegenation of many types of music gathered from all over the world and combined in new ways. One of the most popular types was a complex blend of smooth sensual Brazilian and West African rhythms reminiscent of Bossa Nova. Many types contained Arabian or central Asian styles, but most were based on African rhythms. Most of this music would have seemed eerie or otherworldly to Western ears of the late twentieth century. It would also have seemed lethargic and anarchic and only remotely pertinent to their lives. In fact, much of the music was unaccompanied by songs, and many songs had no words but were sung in meaningless but haunting syllables.
The music seemed to illustrate the malaise that hung over all the arts, as if acknowledging that, since everything worthwhile had been done, there was no point of trying anything new. Perhaps the muses recognized culture’s decay and patiently awaited the rise of a new culture, phoenix-like, from its ashes.
Despite its decadence though, the culture retained a little life. The libraries contained the wisdom and literature of this great culture. Its masterful paintings and sculpture dating from its birth during the Renaissance and before still reposed in the art galleries. One could still hear Bach, Beethoven, or Berlioz in the symphony halls or watch Carmen cavort on the stage with her toreador. A few radio stations still played Ellington and Ella. The skyscrapers remained intact, and people still drove their cars and worked at their computers. The great works of this culture’s past still remained. Most people sensed the wane of the worldwide culture without recognizing it as such. They might have felt a vague unease, as if something were missing or incomplete. Such a vacuum, like one found in nature, is abhorrent to a culture and must be filled. Most people seemed to find solace for their individual vacuums in religion, usually in a bellicose fundamentalist form, a trend that had also begun in the late twentieth century. Religious strife increased all over the world. Even faiths that had historically eschewed radicalism and violence, such as Hinduism, now promoted it. People who had previously made religion a minor or non-essential part of their culture, such as the Chinese, now adopted fundamentalist faiths from other parts of the world or invented their own.
Because of global warming, the planet was warmer than it had been for a long time. Emissions from fossil fuels containing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases had spewed into the atmosphere until they blanketed the earth. They trapped the earth’s radiation, causing global surface average temperatures to rise. Most of the heat went into evaporating moisture, causing drying and droughts. Droughts promoted heat waves, crop failures, and wildfires. The moisture that dissipated into the atmosphere didn’t disappear of course. It was swept away by winds to be gathered into storms, sometimes hundreds of miles away. Invigorated by more than usual moisture, these storms dumped greater precipitation than they would have otherwise. Areas cleared by wildfires were subject to severe erosion. Calamitous flooding was common. Ironically, this was an era of both disastrous droughts and severe flooding.
For a long time scientists had worried that a general warming of the earth would cause the ice at the poles to melt and raise the sea levels. Their greatest fear was that the western ice shelf of Antarctica would break off all at once and raise the sea level in one disastrous action, sending tidal waves hundreds of miles inland all over the world. This seemed likely. The ice shelf was truly enormous and was totally unsupported by any land. Just the reverse happened though; the ice cap at the South Pole actually grew. It had been too cold to snow much there for a long time. As the earth warmed, great snows fell over the pole, and for a short while the sea level actually dropped.
Eventually, though, the sea level did begin to rise, slowly and inexorably. There was nothing to keep the northern polar cap from melting, and it thawed at a faster rate than the southern one grew. In fact it appeared that by the end of the twenty-first century, the planet would have only one polar cap, a massive one in Antarctica. No one knew how this would affect the cycles of ocean currents and atmosphere.
One result of the melting Arctic ice cap overjoyed the Russians: For the first time in history they had a major coastline, their whole northern coast. It was indeed the longest coastline of any nation in the world. The imperative that had driven Russia to become one of the largest nations in land area in the history of the world, the desire for access to the sea, had finally been fulfilled. They planned to use it to become a major maritime power
There was stupendous property loss due to the flooding, droughts, expansion of deserts, and loss of coastlines. Protecting the cities from the encroaching sea became so expensive that many had to be abandoned. Attempts were made to save some favored cities such as Venice and New Orleans, but when costs proved prohibitive, they were abandoned. Some whole countries, like the Netherlands and Bangladesh, were threatened. In the case of those two nations, their salvation depended on wealth. Thus, the wealthy Netherlands could afford to save itself while the people of impoverished Bangladesh fled inland as the sea devoured their land.
All these changes were incredibly expensive of course, and as usual the cost was borne by the underclass, in this case an increasing world underclass, in the form of taxation and loss of property and dwindling means of earning income.
Yet the world was not a totally undesirable place to live. Nuclear fusion, more efficient solar, wind, and geothermal energy, and yet other power sources formerly unknown made power for utilities and transportation readily available and inexpensive the world over. Food was also cheaper than it had been since the time of the hunter-gatherers.
General acceptance of foods resulting from genetic manipulation was a long time coming. In the late twentieth century, a knee-jerk neo-Luddite reaction to such products arose because of people’s lack of understanding and their distrust of science. The very terminology related to genetic engineering implied something “unnatural.” Those who viewed the science in that way did not realize that mankind had altered plants and animals through genetic tampering for millennia. Otherwise corn, apples, mules, the modern cow, and countless other p
lants and beasts would never have appeared on earth. A major difference between previous means of genetic modification and modern methods was that modern ones were vastly more efficient and thus faster.
But at last genetically altered organisms came to be accepted. Not because of any change in people’s understanding of or trust in science, but because of a much more prosaic concern: lack of money. Among the majority of the earth’s population, incomes were decreasing drastically. At the same time, the cost of engineered foods plummeted.
Genetic engineering had created food from sources previously impossible and unimaginable – from seaweed and fungus and even huge blooms of microorganisms raised in ocean farms – and modern processing methods made food healthier and more tasteful than ever before. Its appearance could be anything the manufacturers desired; no one had to realize they were eating pond scum when they opened a package. Genetic engineering also shortened growing seasons and made existing agricultural plants and animals more robust. So even as incomes dwindled, food became more plentiful and lower in cost as well.
An interesting paradox resulted from the fact that food production no longer relied primarily on traditional agriculture: Though the world population had doubled in less than a century, more people than ever lived in cities. In many rural areas, especially in developed nations, the population actually shrank.
For the first time in world history, ironically, the poorest citizens of the world ate healthier foods than the wealthiest. The more affluent no longer had to worry about the quality of their diets. Drugs countered or reversed the effects of fats, high cholesterol, excessive calorie intake, alcohol, nicotine (though few people used tobacco products anymore; marijuana had replaced its use in most parts of the world), and the myriads of other previously harmful results of poor diets. Because the human genome was so well understood, preventative cocktails of drugs could be designed individually for those who could afford them.