This is the story of a once fabulous country located nearby on the home planet. You may have heard about it in your many travels, or in the books and magazines that you once planned to read, but have since found that there just wasn’t enough time. It’s called the United States of Yum-Yum and it covered a massive stretch of land between two vast oceans. It offered almost every type of climate, countless topographies, and a wide assortment of people, all proud to be called Yum-Yummies.
Originally, Yum-Yum was sparsely inhabited by its indigenous people, diverse groups of generally happy souls who asked little of their homeland, took from it sparingly, and did their best to leave little evidence behind of their having been here, except for their own equally happy offspring. According to those who later colonized the area, the indigenous people failed to see the full potential of the place, and thus, didn’t deserve it. Newcomers, not entirely happy with the way things were going at home, began to trickle ashore in this wonderful, virgin wilderness. They saw the big picture. This place had potential. They settled in for the long run. And of course, they began killing off the locals.
For several hundred years the newcomers existed as a colony of their parentland, building up their farms and small enterprises. When they became wealthy enough to be useful to the parentland, taxes were imposed that would benefit both the taxing authority at home and the Yummies. This pissed off the Yummies to no small measure because they hated taxes above all else, and they revolted, eventually creating a more perfect government under the watchful eyes of their Creator. Everyone naturally assumed that the Yummies were His favorite children, and acted accordingly, generally with total disregard to His wishes.
For several of the following decades, Yum-Yum was shepherded through its infancy by a benevolent group of the founding fathers, who allowed its agrarian potential to blossom into a position where the fruits of their labor could be exported abroad in return for gold. Like almost every society from almost the dawn of time, gold was something that everyone wanted to collect. It was very shiny and nice. In the southern area of Yum-Yum, the farmers needed help to grow the crops that they exported. It was hard to find enough people to work in the extreme heat of the summer down there. So they sent away to the hottest part of the world that they knew of, and purchased some people to help out on their farms.
Now the documents that governed Yum-Yum stated that all men were created equal. Of course, everyone knew that they really meant that all light skinned men were created equal. At least if they had some land, or a lot of gold, or better yet, both. The people that were purchased to do the work had dark skin, thus were not considered to be men (they were 3/5ths of a man according to the law, for some strange reason), and therefore not equal. Some people, mostly in the northern part of the country, didn’t think it was fair for one person to own another person. Although most of the men everywhere agreed with the thinking of the time that a man owned his wife. Owning a dark skinned person was OK with some of them, but not all of them. But because the one thing that everyone feared the most was change, not much was ever done about it.
The years passed. Farmers and merchants prospered in Yum-Yum. Things were pretty much…well, yummy. Some of the farmers and merchants acquired lots and lots of gold. They invested in new things that helped make more gold, mostly improved ways to move produce and people around faster and faster. Canals were built. Then steamships and railroads were perfected. The people of Yum-Yum were linked together from coast to coast. Industries were developed to mass-produce things that used to be produced by individuals on their farms. Everything was just yummy.
Up north, the men who had the most gold finally decided that they should be the ones to make decisions for everyone, and decided that the government was the best way to do that. Down south, the rich farmers just wanted to be left alone, and made their feelings known to their northern cousins. Keep your government to yourselves they said. So the men up north said that it was wrong for the men down south to own the dark skinned people (they really didn’t care). They said their southern cousins were monsters for doing so. Although it was still OK with everyone for a man to own his wife, not that the women had any way to express their views on the subject.
The legislature was divided. The people disagreed. Lines were drawn in the sand. No one backed down. The United States of Yum-Yum split between north and south then went to war with itself. In the south, the army was blessed with a fine group of officers: chivalrous, expert horsemen and marksmen, they started out victorious. In the north, they were blessed with a growing industrial base, clever scientific minds, superior transportation, and more gold. They devised better and faster ways to kill their fellow countrymen. The battlefields became meat grinders. The side with more resources was destined to win. It did.
Everything changed. Dark skinned slaves were freed, becoming members of society and members of the government. Change was everywhere and no one was particularly happy. It turns out that the one thing that really pissed everyone off was when things changed. The only really happy group were the guys that owned everything, and they weren’t especially happy either. Of course they were never ever really happy. They wanted all of the gold, but could never have it all. Not that they didn’t try. More than anyone else, they feared change the most.
So things were allowed to return to the way they had been, but not quite. There were no more slaves. Well…not technically anyway. The way things worked out, there were more slaves than ever. They just weren’t called slaves. The years went by, and things did change, even though everyone tried to ignore it. Yum-Yum became a more important member of the countries that mattered. The ones that controlled everything. The ones that owned other countries. Yum-Yum wanted an empire, and then it got one.
It was a change, and many people were upset. However, since it was a change that brought in more gold, the guys running everything weren’t that upset about it. As long as no one noticed. They did their best to make sure that no one did notice. Farms were becoming less important, and more and more people were finding work in the new factories that seemed to spring up everywhere. The people doing most of the actual work wanted more control over their lives, but that never really worked out for them, even if they did manage to elicit some changes.
On the other side of the planet, a few bizarre circumstances occurred in the right order. It started a massive conflict, similar to Yum-Yum’s civil war, except on a larger and more brutal scale, if such a thing was even conceivable. Yum-Yum remained neutral, shrewdly selling armaments to both sides in the conflict. Eventually, in Yum-Yum, it was decided that their former colonial masters were in the right, so they joined in the fight. With the unlimited resources of Yum-Yum on one side, the other side capitulated. A truce was declared, and Yum-Yum and her allies declared victory. They punished the other side.
After the Great War, things had changed, and for once, almost everyone wanted to embrace change (not the rich guys, of course). In an effort to save grain for the soldiers in the war (they apparently forgot the war was already over), the first big change they made was to outlaw booze. Almost no one actually stopped drinking booze, but it became a lot more fun when it was illegal. It also allowed a new group of guys to get lots of gold. They were called organized criminals, although from the way that they continually machine-gunned each other death on the streets, the “organized” part was difficult to discern. A few of the better ones were welcomed into the fold of the real rich guys. That was when they really learned about organized crime.
A little while after booze was outlawed, women were finally given the right to vote. They were still basically the property of their men, but they worked on divorce laws and made the bastards pay if they messed up. They’re still working on how to take over. The rich guys don’t like that idea at all.
Things looked bright, at least in Yum-Yum. Business boomed, and everyone and their brother became aware of a way for them to own a piece of the pie. There was a mechanism called the stock market that allowed anyone to own small shares in big companies, and receive a part of the company’s profit. At least that was the theory. The best part was that they could borrow most of the money that they needed to invest. Everyone bought stock, mainly on credit. The market blossomed, expanding far beyond the limits of reality. It didn’t matter. Up was the only way to go. Of course that group of truly rich people, the ones that had always had most of the gold, knew that the truth was different. They bet against the little guys, fixed the game, and won.
No one could figure out how, but lots and lots of money seemed to vanish overnight (the rich people still had most of their gold, and hoped no one would notice. They didn’t). Yummies lost their jobs, or worked for less money, and almost everyone was very unhappy. Things were bleak; it was depressing. A new leader emerged, and promised that he would do something about the mess they were in. This meant that things were going to have to change. Yummies still hated change, but they took a chance on this new guy (his name was Frank), and elected him to run things.
The voters gave Frank a mandate to change things. He and his advisors came up with lots of crazy ideas to put people to work and began to change things immediately. He gave lots of people something to do, and borrowed the money to do it. Even though Frank came from one of the families that had lots of gold, the rest of the rich people hated him. I mean they really, really despised Frank. He wanted all people in society to feel secure, so he had laws made to give people a small amount of security. The really rich guys went ballistic. They tried to thwart Frank’s every move, and were beginning to succeed.
On the other side of the planet, things were just as bad or worse. The country that lost the last big war had been punished financially by the winners, and things there got just plain crazy. If you wanted a loaf of bread for instance, you had to have a wheelbarrow full of money. They wanted someone to change things too. So they picked a little guy who gave rousing speeches that blamed everything on a common enemy of the people, and gave him all of the power. Bad choice. The little guy turned out to be bat-shit crazy. He started another war around the whole planet, and almost everyone got involved. One little country in the middle of everything refused to take sides. They had the job of keeping everyone’s gold safe. They also made really good cheese and chocolate too. No one bothered them. They had lots and lots of gold and kept it safe for everyone.
Yum-Yum tried to stay out of this war at first, too. But a country that didn’t like us because we cut-off their supply of oil (oil is also referred to as “black gold”) attacked one of our military bases without warning. The only thing Yum-Yummies hated more than change is a bad surprise. So we went to war again, big time. Manufacturing all of those guns, planes, ships, tanks, boats and everything else needed to fight put everyone back to work. Unless you were fighting, then you already had something to do. The economy recovered and no one was depressed any more (most of the guys getting shot at every day weren’t exactly happy, but we tend to forget about them, except on a couple of special days each year). It took a few years, but we finally won, again.
Things had changed, but we tried our best to get everything back to normal. Yum-Yum was the most powerful nation on the planet. We needed an enemy, so we took one of our former wartime friends and gave them the job. They were crazy enough to tell everyone that a few rich guys shouldn’t have all of the gold themselves. They said that everyone should share it equally. Our rich guys hated them. Turns out that their rich guys never really intended to share equally, so it never really worked out very well for them as a country. Still, it gave the people of Yum-Yum someone to hate, which always seems to help. They were a pretty good enemy really, because they just threatened to blow each other off of the face of the planet instead of getting dirty and actually shooting guns at each other. It was tense, but for the most part, everyone stayed alive. Occasionally, they got involved in a few minor wars with their friends. Eventually, they figured out that it wasn’t a good idea to do that, so they quit.
It was during this period after the second big war, that another big change took place. No one’s really sure how it happened, and the rich guys with all the gold must have been caught napping. It had started before the first big war, but didn’t really get going good until after the second one. The people who worked in all the big factories got themselves organized, and finally demanded and got good wages and time off to do something with them. Unlike the guys with all the gold, this larger group of working dudes did something totally crazy with their hard-earned money. They spent it, at least most of it. They bought houses, cars, boats, clothes, TV sets, and took vacations to magical places that hadn’t even existed a few years earlier. The economy boomed as more people went to work building houses, making cars and boats, TV sets and clothing. An entire industry devoted to entertainment took shape and blossomed. Things were yummy indeed in Yum-Yum.
Now I’ve made it sound like this group of workers was a bunch of fun-loving, hedonistic yahoos. Sometimes they were. But above everything else in this world what they loved most were their kids. They bought them new bikes and sent them to new schools. They built them stadiums to play football and fields to play baseball. Most of all they saved enough of their money to send them off to college, so that their children would never have to toil away in a bleak factory for guys that hoarded gold. It was probably a mistake.
Many of their kids took advantage of their education and learned the art of market speculation, wreaking havoc on the stock market and the mortgage market. They took drugs like there was no tomorrow and turned the word “party” into a verb. But most of all they learned the game that the rich guys with all of the gold played, and managed to show them a new trick or two. They weren't allowed to spoil Yum-Yum’s environment anymore, or exploit child labor in order to produce cheap goods. The solution was simple: move it all to a hungry country half way around the world, where they were allowed to do all of this and more.
For many, many years, two parties had run the government of Yum-Yum, people with a different idea of how things should be done. Because I hate to name names, let’s just call the current ones Rude Dudes and Dumb Cats. For the most part, especially after being in power together for several years, they tended to get along and get things done. After all, the business of Yum-Yum was business. Government existed to keep things running smoothly, especially for the rich guys with all of the gold. By now, the rich guys had organized themselves into groups we’ll call Corps. These Corps were immortal entities, which were given all the rights of individual citizens, but were much more powerful. They gave money to both of the political parties, expecting and receiving their rewards in exchange.
It became difficult to tell the parties apart, until one day, a Rude Dude decided that God was on their side and hated the Dumb Cats. He made it a point to tell everyone. Many people believed it outright, or at least acted like they believed it. Now the official rules governing Yum-Yum specify that while everyone has a right to acknowledge God, no one is forced to worship Him in any particular way, or in any way at all for that matter. Back when the Really Big Bombs were developed, many educated people speculated that God didn’t exist at all. The Rude Dudes would change all of that. The only way to get elected now was to prove that your relationship to God was as strong or stronger than your opponent’s relationship. Churches flourished. Some pastors joined the ranks of the rich dudes with all of the gold. Their Corps were referred to as “non-profits” but it was hard to tell the difference between their headquarters, their limousines, and their jets and the ones owned by the guys that actually said they were in it for the money.
On the other side of the planet, there existed many groups of angry people who felt that only they knew the proper way to worship God. They hated each other and killed each other whenever they could, mostly because they couldn’t decide if they should have a leader that’s elected or based on heredity. But more than anything, the hated the people of Yum-Yum, even though everybody involved supposedly worshipped the same God. One of these groups of angry young men (they’re always angry young men, probably not getting any if you know what I mean) came up with a plan to hurt the people of Yum-Yum. One beautiful late summer day, they stole several big airplanes and crashed them into Yum-Yum’s military headquarters, as well as two of the biggest buildings in the largest city in Yum-Yum. Thousands died. It was very, very sad.
The president of Yum-Yum declared war on those that caused the tragedy. Of course, those that actually caused the tragedy died along with everyone else that day, but the people that sent them had to pay. First, Yum-Yum declared war on a country that was a haven for terrorists with bad intentions which had been fought over for thousands of years (unsuccessfully, by everyone it turns out). It wasn’t enough. Next, the leader of Yum-Yum declared war on a country that really had nothing to do with the tragedy, except that everyone hated the dude with the bad mustache who ran things there, and it was in the same general area as the other country they were at war with. His sons (both really, really bad boys) kept posters of the president of Yum-Yum’s daughters on the wall of their exercise room at one of the family’s palaces, and that was reason enough in the president’s mind to kill the bastards (what father wouldn’t feel the same?). Hundreds of Yum-Yum’s best and brightest boys were horribly injured or died in the conflict. We got the dude with the bad mustache, and his psychopathic sons with the president’s daughters’ pictures, too. But the other country remains a tough nut to crack to this day. Yum-Yum declared victory, well before victory was achieved. Then they spent trillions of more dollars (they had to borrow them) in order to keep fighting because it seems that they weren’t quite victorious enough just yet. Something had to change.
The economy was in bad shape but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the stock market or home prices, which ballooned to new heights. Yum-Yum spent money it didn’t have on wars it could never really win. The president gave his richest buddies great tax breaks, and allowed them to play like drunken children with everyone else’s money in the banks and the stock market. And he kept borrowing money to fight the wars he couldn’t win. The guys with all the gold devised new ways to get more gold. Unfortunately, it involved screwing the little guys. They didn’t mind doing such a thing one little bit.
Bubbles did what bubbles do – they burst. The financial system of Yum-Yum teetered on the brink of an abyss. Something had to done. The president borrowed more money and gave it the bankers that screwed things up in the first place. There wasn’t really anything else to do. Things got bad, but they could have been worse.
Now right after all of this happened, it was time to pick a new leader of Yum-Yum. Up until now, only light-skinned guys had ever been the president. However, this time around a woman and a darker-skinned guy wanted to give it try. The people of Yum-Yum were really pissed off at the Rude Dudes for messing up the economy, but the thought of changing things so much that they should put a woman or a dark-skinned guy in charge still scared almost half of the people. They still hated change.
The woman that wanted to be president was the wife of a guy who already been president. He had been a pretty good president, all things considered. He had kept the economy humming, and that made everyone happy. He had also made a few decisions with his “little head” and while that kept someone else humming; it really pissed off his wife. She tried her best to ignore the past, while promising a better future. The dark-skinned guy (his name was Barry) did an even better job of promising a new beginning. He was able to successfully sell change to people for the first time ever, although he was careful to wrap it up in a concept called “hope”. He won.
Like President Frank before him, the voters had given Barry a mandate for change. It didn’t work. At first nothing really changed. Barry let the people in the Legislative Branch take the lead to draft a new law that was long overdue (every other big country had it) but were surprised when they came up with a relatively bad new law. The problem was that the guys in the Legislature couldn’t agree on a barrel of water if their collective asses were on fire.
Everyone said that Barry wasn’t doing anything, and it seemed as if he really didn’t get anything done. Finally he proposed a law that would put lots of people back to work, but some folks in the Legislature said that it wouldn’t work, so they decided not to give it a try. Barry didn’t give up. He took his proposal to the people. Some cheered the idea. Others booed the idea. The vast majority of people sat on their hands and did what they always did, which is absolutely nothing. Of course every four years they manage to drag themselves to the polls to vote for somebody to lead Yum-Yum Land back to its previous greatness. Then they return to sitting on their hands and wondering why things don’t change for the better.
Well, that’s where things stand today. It isn’t a very pretty picture. But wait, I said this was a fable, so I guess we need a moral to the story. Here it is: You can hope for change all you want, but if you really want change, the first thing I hope you do is get your ass off of your hands and let your elected officials know how you feel for a change
