The future is here!
It’s a brave new world in 1971, a world of pocket calculators, digital watches, and floppy disks. A dozen eggs go for a quarter, a gallon of gas is 40 cents, and you can see a movie for a buck-and-a-half. Polyester, bold prints and platform shoes are all the rage. Ursula Le Guin makes dreams real in The Lathe of Heaven, while Charles Bukowski works in the Post Office, and Abbie Hoffman advises you to Steal This Book. Family rooms and basements are awash in the glow of The Partridge Family, Mary Tyler Moore, and The Mod Squad. Archie Bunker makes his first appearance. Rod Stewart and James Taylor rule the airwaves. Janis Joplin sings of a desperate freedom in “Me and Bobby McGee,” Three Dog Night brings “Joy to the World,” and everyone gets down when Isaac Hayes does the theme from Shaft.
JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King are all dead, killed at the hands vicious players in the power game. The stakes are high, sky-high and beyond. Astronauts drive dune buggies on the Moon; the Space Race is the popular face of a cold war going hot in proxy conflicts throughout the globe. East versus West, ideology battles ideology for supremacy. The USA and the USSR are in a Mexican Standoff with nuclear ICBMs instead of sixguns.
The 60’s consciousness raising and social movements become a grotesque parody of themselves. Dissent at home has become culture. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, mask a nation of violence, and fear. Americans huddle together in the dark and watch The Andromeda Strain and Dirty Harry while waiting for The Bomb to drop. Children are on the forefront of politics when public school buses carry out racial desegregation. Vietnam War protesters battle in the streets, and the TV nightly news bemoans hippies, peaceniks, and commies as 150,000 more young men are drafted. Nixon invokes the Silent Majority and invades Cambodia before yet another domino falls.
Unknown to most there is an even darker stain growing in this shadow play. The invisible history of the 20th century is rife with unguessed horrors. Ancient entities stir in the deeps of the earth, and in the icy depths of space. After WWII, Nazi wizards escaped to rekindle the Reich’s unholy sciences. Russia routinely breaks the Geneva Convention’s whispered sister, the White Pact, by deploying “unconventional” munitions. News of chemical weapon attacks are used as cover for less terrestrial terrors. Conspiracy theorists say Area 51 contains America’s true military deterrents, deep underground in it’s unplumbed bunkers. Is it all true? Could any of it be true?
Vast powers move inexorably closer to the fruition of their subtle, cosmic schemes. Will human life be snuffed like a candle in the turbulent ocean of eternal night? Who will believe the unbelievable? Who will fathom the unfathomable? Who, I ask you, will stand against the inevitable, enfolding darkness, and fight that which was not meant to be known?
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