2051, Aaronson’s Disquisition: III
XXXIV. Power, Politics, and the Narrative State
When territorial imperatives cease to function in places where anything can exist in a dynamic state, that is, to function with even the smallest hope of survival, the new imperative is to simply move. Over the course of many years, the faction of the Brotherhood called the Column, with its Remnant soldiers, migrated to a place that echoed hope. But like the echo itself, hope dissipates until it seems to disappear. Yet, echo is sound, sound is air, air is matter; and as matter cannot be destroyed in its entirety, the echo remains an eternal subsonic ricochet in some unfathomable way. The ricochet was a reverberation to a long-forgotten place—Territoria—the Confederacy of North American States (CNAS).
America
Part of the Omni States of Oceania, Territoria was once dominated by a lower confederacy, formerly called the United States of America. For the Party’s strategic purposes, this united confederacy never existed, as “united” was an unfamiliar term; and it was never called America except in derisive terms because of its historical and geographical claim to exceptionalism, crowning itself above the other Americas.
Officially, it’s major districts were called Airstrips 7 and 23, with 7 alluding to the closest eastern Atlantic district under Oceania’s control, radiating west to 23, the farthest western Pacific district, which was under the jurisdiction of Eastasia. Much of the interior territories between these wrecks were toxic wastelands but are still contested by Oceania and Eastasia as a way to perpetuate war, reduce populations, and control the coasts, whose inhabitants suffered from the inevitability of war, even if most of them had little remembrance of any of the Last Wars. As part of the larger theater of war, these American airstrips were easily conquered but remain in administrative chaos by virtue of their distance from central authority.
America’s size was unmanageable, its diversity irreconcilable, and its freedoms could not accommodate the persistent chaos that resulted. The sheer number of conditions and institutions suffering from political and social atrophy devastated the United States: America’s unending wars and covert crusades, its race and gender riots, its vast unmanageable penal systems, the concentration of wealth among its own corporatist oligarchs, the illusion of government and democracy, with martial law supplanting the rule of law, its permanent suspension of habeas corpus, its surplus of personal arms leading to gang wars and unregulated rural militias, the end of public health and education, and the arts, the mockery of science and the rise of ancient superstitions and radicalized faiths, as well as the pandemics, mass executions, unending curfews, global cyber cloud wars, and countless urban civil wars—all of it left a nation shattered, abandoned, helpless.
The Last Wars in Territoria were born from carefully calibrated race and gender civil wars—building from more than two centuries of self-deception regarding civil rights and exacerbated by white insurgencies and militant anti-suffragettes determined to purify race and gender through comprehensive discrimination regarding civil rights, social and institutional behaviors, and procreation—specifically women’s reproductive rights.
Other collisions followed. Fiscally exhausted from within by its own excessive greed and consumption, political corruption, barbaric cultural distractions, disappearing literacies, unrelenting propaganda, and decline in public health brought about by multiplying pandemics, America’s extenuating substandard of living debauched and marginalized most of its subjects. As a result, the listless citizenry moved somnambulantly through daily life, at odds with every difference the once noble dream of diversity had promised. Mass poverty was exacerbated by a state of permanent debt, mostly attributed to funding an outdated military that had abandoned conventional war strategies in favor of spending its substance on advanced weaponry for technological war preparations that existed only in the paucity of this nation’s sheltered imagination. Consequently, America abandoned its soldiers and could not muster any loyalty or combat talent to defend such a civically and spiritually defeated people.
It was a matter of course that the northern territory, once called Canada, was powerless to defend the entire confederacy but was substantial enough to exist apart from the superstates. It was a nation-state nearly forgotten or ignored by the others, and chose to isolate itself by using its vast timber resources to partition itself from its southern neighbors, and by rerouting its border waterways to create other impenetrable barriers to prevent a refugee crisis that never materialized after the Last Wars. A darker truth was that Canada was left untouched by war because Inner Party and other superstate leaders coveted its provinces as their breadbasket and safelands—eventual power resorts reserved for the privileged—away from the dirty business of perpetual war and ethnic genocides.
With relentless effort many Remnants successfully emigrated to what they called the Green Zone, ignoring Newspeak’s cautionary reference to Canada as the No Place. Green Zone communications to the southern airstrips were strictly strategic and tactical, but the oddly dated communiques indicated that the Canadians were no longer proceeding into the future with their calendar, but reversing it. Whether this was a political effort to mock how the various superstates have turned back the clock on humanity, or a way to distinguish the Green Zone from what they would refer to as the Euro No-Zones, the marking of the minutes, hours, days, months, and years indeed went backward. Whatever year it was in the other superstates, in Canada it was the previous year.
It was bewildering to rationalize such an existential decision, and Oceania and the other superstates scoffed at the nonsense of it all. The derision was immortalized in Canada on Collapse Day—a day celebrating the end of decay. The metaphor was not lost on anyone who experienced the actual disintegration of the United States, Territoria’s most notorious nation.
Thank you. I would like to attach some kind of coda to these documents: We all resisted in some form or another, but what ultimately defeats tyranny is time, the human story, and, as my father insisted, the song. We will now take questions.
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These excerpts are from Edward Morneau’s forthcoming novel, A Conspiracy of Ravens. The annotations serve to give a basic context to these excerpts. This experimental work explores four intersecting stories: “Honeyboy,” a Holocaust parable; “Remnants,” an extension of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; “The Holes,” the strange effects of a cosmic singularity; and “Territoria,” the collision and culmination of the these stories through the establishment of a new world and the discovery of an impactful cultural relic.
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