The Bracken Anthology

by Matthew Bracken

  What was the name of that pop star vixen at the last Super Bowl? She was wearing a dominatrix outfit with shiny sharpened rivets in the usual places. And where did she come by her Aldous Huxley, singing “hug me till you drug me, kiss me till I’m in a coma,” nearly word for word from Huxley’s Brave New World? No doubt she’d never read a book in her life, much less that one.

  Before the collapse, the high-def screens had allowed each watcher to choose from a virtual infinity of customizable fantasies, but there was usually nothing behind those magical glass windows but a plasterboard wall and another stark habitation cubicle built the other way around for the next inhabitant over. Within the dying hive there was no incoming food, fuel, or running water. Not even electricity to move the stale air.

  Soon after the screens went black, the pharmacy-dispensed medications ran out as well, the cold-turkey withdrawal pouring more fuel on our raging social fires. Our Brave New World featured Huxley’s “Christianity without the tears,” until the Soma was gone. A gram is better than a damn, until there are no more grams left but plenty of damnation to go around—and people are damned mad when they’re starving.

  If you ask me, looking back, our society went mad long before the Rupture. Who could honestly believe that modern first-world economies could continue to borrow half their annual operating costs from their own future generations, and from foreign banks and foreign governments that were likewise borrowing from their future generations? When in history has that sweetly delusional practice ever lasted more than a few generations before cracking up? Never, that I am aware of.

  Frankly, for the rapidly diminishing minority of us left who were neither mathematically nor historically illiterate, the years before the Rupture were like living on the slopes of Vesuvius around AD seventy-something, while sniffing the stink of sulfur on the wind. What’s all that smoking and rumbling? a few of us asked. Smiling mainstream media news anchors answered: We’re not sure, but rest easy. Top government experts are studying it, and they will have a full report ready soon.

  In the meantime, pop another Soma and switch back to Celebrity Nation. A gram is better than a damn, so why not make it two? Who needs old-fashioned morality when we have fashioned a brave new reality better suited to our own modern tastes? New and improved, by Ford! Just Google it. Remember Google? Gone with the wind.

  I’m just a former world history teacher, but I believe that the edifice of Western Civilization was already rotten and hollowed out long before the final collapse—and it was an inside job by cultural traitors. The final toppling required only a light touch. By the end the Fabians’ disciples in politics and education had rendered Western man impotent, emasculated, ridiculed for his very maleness. Men were unneeded and unwanted by the brave new world’s brave new mommies.

  And what of modern woman? Increasing numbers were too busy with their newly unleashed career opportunities and personal ambitions to have children. Or they were simply too busy partying through their fertile years to bother to produce a next generation. And if a modern woman still wanted a human baby for a pet or a social statement or as a passing whim, a turkey baster and a petri dish could do the trick just as well as those vestigial appendages of the human species, those stinking Neanderthal knuckle-draggers formerly known as men.

  By the end, boy toddlers were suspended from school for pointing their fingers like guns: their brainwashing couldn’t begin too soon. What a disaster for the progeny of the ancient Saxons, the Celts, the Vikings, the Franks, and all the tribes who built the great universities and cathedrals of Europe!

  In the end their offspring were reduced to the degraded state of reservation Indians, fed a hundred brands of Soma and Victory Gin, legal by prescription or illegal with a wink, knowingly led into the fatal addiction of welfare dependency. Turn on and tune out; nobody will judge you. The smiling government agent will both purchase your Soma and pay you for your perceived disabilities out of the same bottomless digital bank.

  The cultures that built the cathedrals and universities of Europe were deconstructed and defeated from within by the prophets of post-modern anarchy and nihilism, a priesthood of elite traitors who knowingly poisoned the vigor of their own once-proud societies.

  Sufficiently weakened, these cultures were then beset from without by the disciples of a seventh-century madman who fashioned a cult of desert pirates so cruel and destructive that its most faithful adherents ban music, burn and blow up ancient churches, obliterate statues of the Buddha with artillery shells, and stone victims of rape to death for adultery. These alien desert pirates had been ushered through the city gates by the same Fabian traitors, who, not up to the ultimate job of strangling their own cultures, allowed its final assassins to infiltrate and amass to strike for the kill.

  Jean Raspail, where is your Camp of the Saints today? Our civilization disappeared in the long night, leaving us strangers in our own newly strange lands even before the final Rupture that tore everything and everyone down—rich and poor, saints and sinners, the good, the bad, and the ugly alike.

  In the crisis that befell us, metrosexual males who recently obsessed over their own appearances couldn’t even protect themselves, much less any stray women, orphaned children, or the lost elderly of their extended clans. These pitiful Peter Pans perished outright, or they were captured and enslaved, abused without mercy, and finally consumed for food. Mohicans every last one, their tribes were not even mourned in extinction, because they were already launched upon a voluntary-human-extinction project even before the electronic coup de grace was applied.

  We were a generation too busy staring at shimmering pleasure screens even to reproduce, until the moment that the fantasy windows winked to black and reality crashed down. A great truth was learned, too late: pixels, bytes, and digits do not endure when the networks driving them explode in clouds of zeros and ones and disappear forever.

  And no disappearing digits loomed larger during the Rupture than those on 50 million “Electronic Benefit Transfer” food-stamp cards. The wisdom of a thousand generations of hard reality teaching stern frugality had been wiped out, encouraging generations of near imbeciles to reproduce without limit—as long as those warm bodies could be rendered into votes for the Big-Government Party (left and right versions). “It’s free, swipe your EBT” became a mantra of the age. It was racist to protest.

  Instead of the historical level of under 5 percent out-of-wedlock births, guaranteeing a strong foundation of family life to undergird each new generation, we’d rocketed to an unprecedented rate of over 50 percent, the first Bastard Nation in modern history. Some 90 percent of the men incarcerated in prison were raised by fractured family fragments, and often didn’t know their own fathers. We shrugged these facts off as insignificant byproducts of modernity, and partied on.

  Natural laws learned over thousands of years were mocked, ridiculed, overturned, and even outlawed. Toward the end, homosexual drill sergeants prowled the barracks grooming receptive teenage recruits. Hey, we were told, it’s their business, and who are you to judge them? Later, they could get married in the post-interfaith worship center by a military spiritual advisor (“chapels” and “chaplains” having been purged from the lexicon for favoring the Christian faiths) and then move on to adopting children.

  And finally, the last old-guard bunker to fall: the Boy Scouts, completing the cycle of government-approved sodomite corruption. For a century the Scouts were morally straight? According to whose definition of straight? So why shouldn’t adult homosexual Scout leaders share tents with teenagers in our brave new world? Don’t be a homophobe, we were told. Each child can make his or her own free choice about their gender identity, but now with helpful adult mentors to guide them along the formerly forbidden paths.

  If it feels good, do it. Or have it done to you. Or even do it unto the little children. Tommy wants to become Tomasina before heading to kindergarten? Her brave new mommy agrees? A government-provided surgeon will perform the “gender reassignment�
�� operation. And if kindergarten isn’t soon enough to put the kids on the unrepressed road to gender identification, then start them on Heather Has Two Mommies and Prince and Prince cartoon books in the government-subsidized day care centers.

  Smiling experts assured us that we were merely throwing off the shackles of our repressed sexualities. Dissent is hate, and hate is not tolerated around here, mister, so shut up and get with the program. Well, I couldn’t get with the program, so I quit my public high school job. As a world history teacher, moving from a public school to a Christian academy (at less pay and fewer benefits) gave me a couple more years of insulation from the social wreckage cascading down.

  I kept looking up for the big asteroid, but we didn’t need God to smite us from outer space. In the end, we smote ourselves with our hubris, believing that we were replacing God’s wisdom with our own. The proud decadence and in-your-face cultural perversions didn’t cause the Rupture, but they were surely flashing red signs warning that the end was near.

  It must be the history teacher in me who always seeks historical precedents and comparisons. The former USSR, with the full power of a mass-murdering totalitarian state behind it, attempted for seventy-five years to create a new society of atheist but socially altruistic New Soviet Men—and failed utterly to achieve it. The Soviets considered this a goal worth slaughtering tens of millions of their countrymen, and they still couldn’t achieve it. Not even across four generations and with an entire archipelago of Gulag slave labor camps.

  But not even the mass-murdering Soviet rulers were foolish enough to attempt to outlaw sexual differences and mandate a New Genderless Person in the name of perfect political correctness. What sane person in the United States could possibly have thought that our own vastly more ambitious experiment in social re-engineering would turn out any better than the simpler economic revolution attempted by the USSR?

  Our modern human folly is so easy to understand in retrospect. A gullible generation or two can be brainwashed into believing that up is down, that there is no absolute wrong or right, and that the old natural laws can be abolished according to the social and political fashions of the age.

  But of course even widely held false beliefs are not the same as the truth. The belief that the law of gravity has been repealed as being unfair to the heavy can easily be tested with a single step away from a cliff. The enduring truths of other supposedly outdated natural laws took longer to test, but in the end the proofs were just as conclusive, and just as fatal, but on a much vaster scale.

  When the Rupture occurred, it had been a hundred generations since Jesus carried His cross up Calvary. What a conceit of history to believe that we, uniquely among the generations that had come before, had mastered the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and put them behind us for all time. Health and hunger reduced to economic equations and tax policies. Fukuyama’s End of History.

  We believed that we had created a Brave New World, where candy-cane lies and Santa Claus promises could trump hard reality at the election booth every two years. But if all good things must come to an end, how much sooner must the corrupt and the unreal collapse into rubble and tears? Imbalances so great, in a machine running at such a high speed, could only result in calamity when the connecting struts gave way and the beast flew apart.

  When was the last generation that saw such a population drop as after the Rupture? When was a population reduced to such a point that nobody was in a position even to estimate it? The Black Death of the 1300s reduced Europe’s population by a third, but even that wasn’t a truly global event. Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland in the 1600s? The Thirty Years’ War in Europe? Paraguay in the 1860s? As horrific as they were, those democides were localized events.

  But what in God’s name is happening in America’s cities, if not a word comes out of a solar-powered radio high up a mountaintop tower, and not a single jet contrail can be seen across a sapphire blue Southern Appalachian sky?

  Or is it me? Have I survived past my due date in remote isolation, like the Japanese soldier who hid in caves on Guam, unaware that World War II was long over? But if that’s the case, then why can’t I see a moving vehicle, or a waft of smoke from a distant ridgeline?

  Oh, what I’d give for an hour-long hot soapy shower to erase three years’ worth of stink! I want to throw away these rancid buckskins and change into clean, dry cotton. Then slip between clean, dry sheets and sleep without fear for a dozen hours on a soft mattress and pillows. Then wake up and put on new clothes that were not cut off of corpses and crudely resewn, or made from animal skins. Oh, to rejoin civilization, if it still exists! Knight-errant seeks castle. Will teach a variety of subjects for room and board. Make me an offer.

  I spent two months of my second snowed-in winter with only a Bible for a companion. This experience had left random Bible passages liable to float up into my mind at various times, like the suggestions in a Magic 8-Ball. Passages like Romans 1, for example. Then there was something in Psalm 106 about the Canaanites killing their own babies in order to pursue inventions and go whoring. The God of the Bible was not pleased in either case. There was one from Revelation—where else?—that came into my mind.

  “Standing far off for the fear of her punishment, crying Alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city, for in one hour your judgment has arrived!”

  The new Babylon was a place where modern man grew so mighty—in his own estimation—that he replaced God’s hard-learned natural laws and eternal rhythms with his own latest impulses and basest desires. The new Babylon was where mankind gorged its morbidly obese body and deconstructed spirit on endless food and limitless pleasure, grew like a maggot fattening upon the bloating corpse of Western Civilization, and then burst and devoured itself in a final death-feast.

  The man-machine social engine believed that it had become God, but all man-made constructions are imperfect. The bridge to the future supporting humanity’s billions of lives was built of pixie dust suspended in the ether by magnetism. It all shattered to atoms when the props were kicked out from under the whirling techno-machine, and we all had to live on what we could grow or raise within our eyesight without murdering each other.

  It had to happen sooner or later, and it happened sooner. We couldn’t even pump clean drinking water without electricity. Electricity was the oxygen we breathed, and without our technology, we died like stranded astronauts on an abandoned space station. Ground control to Major Tom, your circuit’s dead.

  The primary lesson I have learned over the past three years is that it is much harder to build and sustain a stable and functioning civilization (even an admittedly imperfect one) than it is to destroy a pretty damn good civilization in the name of establishing utopian perfection by government decree.

  And maybe if we hadn’t gone insane first, we might have kept it all running for a while longer.

  Modern mankind’s quest for utopian perfection was a form of mass delusion. Computers lent a veneer of artificial wisdom, but they were simply powerful yet fragile tools, tools which extended our society far out over a worst-case precipice. In the end the price of computerized perfection was all or nothing, and in the pursuit of all, we wound up with nothing. The glittering screens were pretty while they lasted, but they turned into broken glass in our bitter hands.

  We were led into the desert by sirens, luring us there with mirages. Alas, our brave new Babylon!

  Now it’s time to descend from this broken tower and get moving again toward the sea. My route is laid in a series of compass bearings that eye-level terrain will prove laughable within a mile. No matter: it won’t take a Davy Crockett to find a river and build a raft. Southeast fetches the Chattooga River and my possible deliverance.

  Adjusting my bow, I went to all fours on the cold steel grating and crawled toward the rungs. For a moment I was facing toward the path I had hiked up the snowy slope. On the far side of the tumbled upper sections of the radio tower was a line like a zipper in the thin snow, where footprints had mel
ted and exposed the dark leaves beneath. My own fresh prints on the near side were not melted. We had either crossed trails a few days ago, or we might sometime in the near future. I was down the rungs and into the trees like a weasel, feeling watched every moment.

  Now, southeast goes the hunter—after a closer look at those tracks.

  Matt Bracken was born and raised in Baltimore, and graduated from the University of Virginia and Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training in 1979.

  He has written four novels about defending freedom in an era of steadily encroaching tyranny.

  Excerpts of his novels, and most of his recent essays, may be found at EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com.

  Table of Contents

  #1 March 2010Arm Thy Neighbor

  #2 July 2010 The CW2 Cube: Mapping the Meta-Terrain of Civil War Two

  #3 September 2010 In Praise of Duplexed AR-15 Magazines

  #4 November 2011 Professor Raoul X (short fiction)

  #5 February 2011 Q& A With Matthew Bracken about Castigo Cay (Western Rifle Shooters Association)

  #6 May 2011 Just A Working Man With His Tools (covert rifle carrier)

  #7 August 2011 Review of Joseph P. Martino’s “Resistance to Tyranny”

  #8 February 29, 2012 Gangster Government and Sakharov's Immunity

  #9 August 2012Night Fighting 101