DATELINE–Near Chelyabinsk-70, Russia

“In our review of the situation it is apparent that errors in judgment were made by not asking the right questions prior to the sale and by not raising the issue to the top of our organization for consideration,” saith Edward R. McCracken, CEO of Silicon Graphics (NYSE:SGI). “I take full responsibility for this situation.”

Hey State Department! Get off of SGI’s back! SGI sold the Russians nuclear simulation hardware, not real nuclear weapons. Everyone knows the so-called “Cold War” is ancient history. Duh. Kruschev, Nixon, Mao: all two-bit players in a canceled theatrical production engineered to amuse the masses. Ecce: The Iron Curtain. The show must go on. Nuclear warfare is a scientific process of speculation and projection, not a political catastrophe of projectiles and population loss.

The fact is, Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) mathematically guarantees a peaceful stalemate for all. Hey, I’m OK, you’re OK.

What’s your damage, State Department? Our greatest movie actor and president, Ronald W. Reagan, designed his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) knowing full well that nuclear warfare exists only in science-fiction and the last chapter of the New Testament. Why else would Reagan, our most beloved president, prophesy in People magazine that “this may be the generation that will face Armageddon,” AND simultaneously dub his hi-tech nuclear weaponry “Star Wars?”

Coinky-dink? We don’t think so.

Reagan knew. As SDI goeth, so goeth SGI. In this day and age of virtual democracies and even more virtual meritocracies, the Evil Empire is a classic to be rerun on the big screen, not a dubious sales lead to be verified on some SGI salesguy’s (monochrome) monitor.

How is Joe Stereosalesman, now peddling SGI “Reality Engine"™ multi-processors, supposed to know that the Russian Scientific Research Institute is actually Chelyabinsk-70, the “former” top secret city and nuclear weapons facility?

SGI should be thanked, congratulated even, for bringing our most powerful computers to the “ex-"commies. Real-time visualization software is the stuff of goodwill between once-warring nations. Nothing says “I trust you” better than a fully rendered red rose floating atop a flowing field of 64-bit grain. Let Carter rue his wheat shipments to the Russians, our technology president will not bat an eye at McCracken’s egregious oversight.

What, after all, is a supercomputer if not the realization of 50 years of direct funding from the military/space complex? Who are we to say who deserves to buy a node of parallel processors originally designed to calculate the durability of diverse nuclear warhead types?

Who is the U.S. State Department to determine whether the fledgling and volatile Russian democracy can enter into the fast-paced world of feature film-quality digital effects? On the contrary, let us encourage our colicky Yeltsin to spur on his third world superpower and produce a Jurassic Gorky Park that would make even Spielberg, himself, weep like a child.

SGI should be supported by the American people. Their obscenely powerful supercomputers are the girders under the Bridge to the 21st Century. It’s too late to “dig our heels in” on the slippery slope of international arms trading. Yes, Virginia, there are multi-national corporations based on American soil who have no national allegiance in the marketplace. Simulation today, global thermonuclear war tomorrow.

Dateline–Excelsior District, San Francisco

South to the Future (SttF), a San Francisco-based nonprofit, announced today that it has trademarked History for usage relating to the World Wide Web and other digital media.

This unprecedented move by an industry unknown has created a ripple effect that insiders predict will radically redefine content-development in traditional entertainment spheres and new media ventures alike. Unlike the nominal use of history made by the History Channel during the heyday of cable television in the 1980s, SttF’s ownership of History™ will position it as sole proprietor of nearly 10 millennia of human activity.

Exclusive rights to History™ would allow SttF to define the future of the information age. By licensing historical figures and events as prepackaged, ready-to-publish copy, SttF is guaranteed to remain a step ahead of the major networks, private corporations, and even government and military agencies across the globe.

Microsoft, TCI and Disney have filed lawsuits. In the meantime, the SF-based nonprofit continues to line up multi-million dollar contracts with international private and public interests.

During a brief but bizarre press conference at the “MOM is Cooking” restaurant in the largely Mexican-American Excelsior section of San Francisco, SttF’s spokesperson, known only as Gerardo, explained the organization’s strategy as one of both foresight and “serendipitous myopia.” What follows is a transcript from this morning’s press conference.

Until today, the age of information has been retarded by unprecedented shortages in the narrative data known as ‘content.’

In a time awash with offers of Future, the Past proves to be in scant supply. And in an age dominated by over-abundant marketing copy, the scarcest product for sale is text, itself. We feel that the most lucrative text market will be, specifically, ‘context.’ Hence, History will become one of the most exciting places to be.

By trademarking History™, SttF is issuing a wake-up call to industry Goliaths and Davids, alike. We are about to make history with the past. Our art department is even toying with the idea of launching this campaign by teasing ‘Just undo it.’

Q: Can I get the nopales tamale combo?

Time and again, we’ve seen brand name identities created, circulated and even sold months before any exchangeable products were developed, let alone actually purchased by consumers.

To this day, hi-tech companies will spend millions of borrowed, interest-free dollars on ad campaigns that promote only the premise of the information age as a market. In these multi-million dollar half-minutes, they say nothing of the products or services they might have for sale should this age ever dawn upon us as we wait, speechless, in the shadows of a disintegrating public sphere.

You see, the reported dearth of ‘content’ on the Web is merely a euphemism for the death of ‘culture’ throughout America; a fate which can only be avoided by injecting large doses of a multicultural reality into the system – not the multimedia fantasy you see everywhere today.

Q: Could we have another order of guacamole, please?

With History™ now technically on our side, the writing on the white-washed walls of a million cubicled, air- conditioned and electronically-monitored fiefdoms is destined to become more like the seemingly illegible graffiti you might see today in East L.A., Miami, West Oakland, Watts, the South Bronx, or the South Side of Chicago.

South to the Future will not be bringing History™ back from the grave, but History™ will surely bring America back to the south that is its future.

Dateline–Claritin, Wis.

“Drugs are here to stay,” says former Drug Enforcement Agency operative Juanito Salazar, “because America is here to stay.” Mr. Salazar, who worked under “deep cover” for most of his career with the DEA, has recently stepped forward to make public his experiences as an undercover agent.

Juanito Salazar, born James Bo Hackett in Peoria, Ill., acted as a crucial relay between the DEA and America’s biggest drug families for over 17 years, retiring only at the request of the Agency. Salazar, it seems, may have learned too much about the underground economy of the drug trade in America.

In an exclusive interview with South to the Future’s Aspen, Colo., correspondent, Roberta Menchu, Salazar confessed to engaging in flagrantly criminal and, at times, even murderous behavior at the request of the DEA. “What I did, I did because D.C. wanted me to do it. Them guys [sic] with the suits and the ties know what I did just as well as I do.”

The activities Salazar refers to as his “black days with the DEA” include misinforming the press, eluding drug enforcement agencies in all 50 states, and collecting millions of dollars in bribes from drug manufacturers. In one instance, Salazar claims to have been present at a dinner party thrown on behalf of a major international drug dealer by a group of top-level Washington officials. “There were candles on the tables and no spoons in sight,” says Salazar, who also admits to having a drug problem while working for the DEA.

The most serious of Salazar’s accusations places America’s largest corporations at the center of a massive prescription drug ring; a circle of violent dealings large enough to encompass Americans of every race and socio-economic background: man, woman and child. Salazar claims that this nationwide conspiracy, while not apparent to all involved, is nonetheless responsible for most drug-related crime in the United States. “You’re talking everything from car crashes to child abuse, embezzlement and adultery, even murders, mass-killings, etc.”

To those of us who have taken the drugs Salazar alludes to collectively as “Synth-Opium,” the charges seem far-fetched if not downright seditious. For nearly two decades now, more and more Americans have been buying drugs like Prozac, Xanax, Melleril and Zoloft at their neighborhood pharmacy, and some have even had their own drug of choice prescribed to the family dog or cat. Despite this sustained twenty-year surge in the consumption of socio-psychologically addictive drugs, not one scientific study has been able to correlate this massive increase in consumption with simultaneous increases in reported levels of depression, alienation, and, more tangentially, assisted-suicides.

To South to the Future, Salazar and his ilk acutely represent what’s wrong with today’s generation. His total lack of respect for the American way ("A fool is born every minute” + “What you buy can’t hurt you") is indicative of the fraying of this once great nation’s moral fabric. This isn’t Valium we’re talking about, it’s our right to choose how and why we check out of reality. It’s about our constitutional right to avoid political and social realities and to endure their tragic effect upon our personal and interpersonal life with a pathetically ambivalent attitude.

Why confront marital abuse, underemployment, sexism, a deleterious lack of public health care, and a rarefied history of segregation and colonization when you can simply “elevate” your mood, turn off the “bad feelings” and regain your “inner sense” of tranquillity? Who needs personal agency when licit drugs can now lend you a perm-press personality?

As to Salazar’s outlandish claims, the American Drug Enforcement Agency has refused comment.

DATELINE–State of the Union Exegesis

A wise man once said “Don’t take away a lame man’s crutch if you can’t give him something better.”

President William Jefferson Clinton has done one better: he’s taken away the safety net for America’s poorest, most broken-down families and given them something they can really use instead: interplanetary space travel.

We must continue to explore the heavens – pressing on with the Mars probes and the international space station, both of which will have practical applications for our everyday living.

Why? What secret strategy lurks beneath this political genius with womanizers for advisers and a torrid history of marital infidelity? Could it be that this Jefferson Clinton has finally resolved the fundamental crisis of the American democracy: the discrepancy between de jure equality for all and de facto poverty for the many?

My fellow Americans, the state of our union is strong. (Applause.) But now we must rise to the decisive moment, to make a nation and a world better than any we have ever known. The new promise of the global economy, the Information Age, unimagined new work, life-enhancing technology – all these are ours to seize. That is our honor and our challenge.

Yes. Space probes and race wars will go hand in hand on the Bridge to the 21st Century. Yes. Jefferson Clinton’s plan is to absorb the anti-social force driving America’s newest technology industries and to turn that spirit of “life-enhancing” alienation loose on the unwitting public-at-large. The road to the stars is now being paved with fiber optic cables. What “unimagined new work” could President Jefferson Clinton have in mind?

The “practical applications” of fantastic voyages to neverlands are only just beginning to be understood. The digital networks which thus far have divided the rich from the poor will now permanently release the poor man from the shackles of American citizenship.

But we cannot stop there. As the Internet becomes our new town square, a computer in every home – a teacher of all subjects, a connection to all cultures – this will no longer be a dream, but a necessity. And over the next decade, that must be our goal. (Applause.)

Our duty, as Americans, is to assist the President in his visionary plan to accelerate the very processes which are now debilitating our nation’s oldest and noblest social traditions. Tear out the moments and places of casual communication: install the means for instantaneous gratification. Even the chronic loneliness built into an economy of constant labor (so that one may enjoy the consumer goods of the upper class) can now be remedied by means of intravenous Internet (yes, IVI):

And I challenge the private sector tonight to start by connecting every children’s hospital as soon as possible, so that a child in bed can stay in touch with school, family and friends. A sick child need no longer be a child alone.

Without Food Stamps, Medicare, and the income supplements welfare could once provide a strained family unit, American children, the fastest-growing segment of America’s poor, can now be assured the true conviviality that an ISDN hook-up with an inner-city public school can offer. We pity the fools who suggested that psychiatric and psychological relief centers be worked into mainstream American society: what America’s dispossessed and depressed really need is a modem, a 900 number, and, as always, a faster connection between their terminal and the master computer of their choice.

Therein lies the clandestine plan of the Jeffersonian man who wants to be known as the “President of technology and children” or, alternately, “the Father of technology’s children” – whoever, or whatever these might be.

Like the promiscuous “Father of our Democracy” who begot the Lazy Susan, the Dumbwaiter and a handful of illegitimate mulatto children, this Jefferson Clinton’s true legacy will be a race of disinherited miscreants. William Jefferson Clinton’s slave children are destined to die in poverty; glorious man-machines, they are the abandoned offspring of a mind pregnant only with itself.