Gay Inversion Rapture

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Having sex with straight  men is a type of social game of chance that many gay men find challenging and life-affirming. I’ve played this game myself, and “won” a few times. Winning usually involves manipulating men who are desperately horny into agreeing to do some kind of sexual act with you that involves orgasm completion and little more.

Trying to sleep with hetero-men is the Bush Doctrine of globalized gay sex: it involves some pre-emptive homo attack-sex  (cock and awe), and the drama of this shock is used to mask inner feelings of insecurity. Pursuing this as a gay social persona, one’s own unfulfilled domestic needs of  love, tenderness, and belonging are forgotten in order to concentrate on forcing some semblance of these abstracted ideals onto the outside world. And so the search for a straight man to save – a constructed foil who gives the gay narrative a bad guy (or bad sexuality) with which to become a hero by saving.

The well-meaning gay imperialist often believes that perhaps the entire world is gay but just really, really repressed and in need of being saved. And this saving replaces any kind of inner change that might produce personal fulfillment of the same needs that are projected and fulfilled via domination of the other in Bush Doctrine gay sex.

Nonetheless, victory is victory, and I could see myself standing on an aircraft carrier with “Inversion Fantasy Accomplished” emblazoned on a huge banner featuring a rainbow flag. There I am, prancing in front of the cameras like a real attention whore – an international social climber. “Look at me! I am amazing! I am the new messiah!”

Meanwhile, all the smart people are staring at my accomplishment with horror. “What kind of arrogance allows someone to be so vain and stupid at the same time?” they are asking themselves between doritos and gulps of diet Pepsi.

Of course, Inversion Fantasy Syndrome isn’t supposed to provide people like me with a goal. It was never supposed to turn into The Gay Dream. It’s more accurately a social condition, a fetish, a disorder, and a cult of snobbery.

Inversion Fantasy Syndrome describes a social phenomenon that occurs when smalltown gays and their more savvy urban cousins finally come out their closets in the large cities and begin to form their own small communities and family-type units.

Many of these gay social capital noobs try to avenge their high school trauma by treating straight acquaintances and tourists with the same ridicule that they experienced as closeted adolescents. Freshly-out gays  frequently calm their existential fears with schadenfreude, finding reasons to sneer and judge straight white trash or whatever social group they had previously felt rejected by. “Take that, you straight trash breeders!” They invert the hostility and rejection they themselves felt, and they fantasize of a gay world that needs saving. Thus, it is called Inversion Fantasy Syndrome.

A major problem with attempting to bring this fantasy to life is that other lives are involved who aren’t in on the fantasy. Play-Pretend Inversion is never going to lead to a real world sexuality rapture where all the men – both gay and straight – begin to speak in gay tongues. The inversion is a personal fantasy, and not a sexual, physical way to be in this world. Even if it were possible and a true physical inversion occurred and gays were suddenly 90% of the population of every nation on earth, it would be the straights who would adopt the snobbish and cackling coping strategies that gays use today. The fantasy is supposed to remain in the metaphysical world, where it was created through masturbation memories, and if lived out in the real world, would lead to a lot of angry victims.

Gay Inversion Rapture – a dangerous ideology? Or is it the appropriate founding chauvinism of the first Gay nation-state?

Promised Ice and the Loveboat Fantastic

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Almost every night, Cindy wakes up from the same recurring dream. Tonight, her worried mother Orca is sitting beside her in bed combing Cindy’s forehead with a broken and faded Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comb.

“Cindy, honey, I heard you whimpering in your sleep and I came in to see if you were alright. Did I hear you call me a veggie lush?” Mom giggles at their little inside joke.

“Mom, is Teddy really getting bigger and bigger?” she mumbles as she looks down at the Theodore Roosevelt doll sitting next to the plastic crayon container.

“Oh my dear Cindy, I don’t know what’s happening  to you these days. Ever since we had to leave the ANWAR, you’ve been having these terrible dreams. Doctor Escalade thinks you may need to take medication but no one knows what the side effects would be like.  Did you do your exercises tonight?”

The television blinkers in the living room downstairs. It’s another bubbly propaganda piece from what was formerly called Anglo-Exxon.

“Chosen Oil finally arrives at the promised ice fields!” says the slogan at the end of a series of images of ice fields being smashed by Exxon icebreakers while  smiling-and-skinny big-busted women wave in a sexually provocative way from the bridge. “Mission Accomplished” was their previous slogan by another advertising agency.

Anglo-Exxon has just had its name changed to Chosen Oil by Saatchi and Saatchi who go on to win a Nobel Marketing Prize for the clever rebranding.

“Mommy, Van at school says that the Loveboat was actually an evil icebreaker that killed millions of bears. Is that true? Was the Loveboat really a bad boat?” Cindy asks.

Orca is getting worried about Cindy’s mental health. Moving from ANWAR to a tiny village in Canada tore apart her little daughter’s social circle, and eight-year-old bears sure need their friends. Little Cindy just can’t seem to trust anyone anymore now that her life has been uprooted so many times by the consequences of people she’s never met. Her parents are unable to keep up with the trauma, and their little girl feels unprotected.

“Cindy, Honey, when your uncle Rusty gets home from the soap factory, we’ll ask him about the Loveboat. In the meantime, why don’t you play with your barbies for a little while.”

So Cindy gets out the pink SUV and barbies and plays “airbag suffocation” until she feels sleepy.

She sings the Loveboat theme for a few minutes, and then dozes off. “If only all ships were as nice as that one,” she fantasizes just as Rusty finally walks in with his furry paws full of human blood.

The Road to Gameshowdom

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FMJ gains a small fan-base while teaching an Economics course at Naza U, and is asked by a student (who is his cousin) to participate on a popular Economics gameshow called The Road to Gameshowdom. The producer is FMJ’s sister-in-law so he agrees to appear.

Mary Contraire – plastic tits pointing dramatically through a metallic blouse – holds an index card while carefully articulating each word of her introduction.

MC: “So FMJ, you were given the three challenge questions regarding Economics in real historical contexts. We’re now going to ask you to tell us your answers.”

**she beams a huge horse-smile as she backs away from the Vegas-style lite-up board behind her, arms outstretched in a way that communicates hugeness of scale**

MC: “First question: If you were the captain of the Titanic, how would you have bailed out the troubled ship and saved all the passengers using only Economics?

**she purses her lips while still smiling**

FMJ: “If I had been the captain of the Titanic at that very moment it struck, I would have immediately sold the lifeboats and bought cocaine. This is because – in the first few seconds after the ship hit that iceberg – liferafts would be way over-valued and cocaine would bottom out. So it would make sense to sell the lifeboats when they’re high, and buy cocaine when it’s low. You know, Mare, Economics isn’t rocket science. It’s high-end common sense for the thoughtful.

**the audience applauds**

MC: “Excellent answer, Jesus! Now for the second question: A scroll manuscript rumoured to have been written by Milton Friedman himself has just washed ashore on a Chicago beach. It says that Socialism and Sodomy are basically the same phenomenon and appears to be written in Aramaic or something. What is this visionary trying to tell us?”

FMJ: ”That Sodomy and Socialism are basically the same thing. The ancient texts tell us that Lot left his village because the Free Market told him to. Sodom, at that time, was an example of social democracy. In ancient Aramaic, “socialism” and “sodomy” have the exact same pronunciation: dem.

Likewise, in 1775, England tried to impose universal health care on its colonies. The colonists didn’t want this imposition of socialism on their state, so they threw vaccines into Boston harbor. These Free Market faithful rightfully interpreted social medicine as a type of sodomy.”

**the audience awes in unison, and then applauds**

MC: “What an excellent and quirky answer, FMJ! Let’s go on to question three, and then we’ll cut to a sponsor break.”

**camera pans to neon logos on signs in the parking lot of the studio**

MC: “Okay, FMJ – it’s story time. There was once a humble altruist who saw that a gang of monkeys had acquired bombs and rocket technology. The altruist immediately yelled at the monkeys, What are you doing? You’re going to for sure hurt yourselves with those bombs, you idiots. Okay, FMJ – finish this story with an Economics theme.”

FMJ: Okay. Well, the smartest monkey – the one wearing the monocle – he tells all the other guys that he’s debunked the altruist’s so-called theory.  Monocle monkey tells everyone that the altruist is in reality a closet socialist and sodomite insurgent.

The moral of the story is that these guys – the socialists/sodomites – they’re the guys we’ve got to be on the lookout for at all times because they want to take away our bombs so that they can control the world themselves.”

**sponsor break**

Neither Do I

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Suvee and Van get off the monorail just in time to avoid their fur getting caught in the rubber strip on the outside of the automated doors. It’s lunchtime, and the little bears are off to get some free sushi from the People’s Chinook a half a kilometer away in the public school they have never attended.

“How was Modern World Problems class this morning, Van? Did you see another movie about spike thaws?”

“No, we didn’t. But you know how melodramatic Miss Glaciermelt is. She spent half the class telling us where the expression kangaroo bar comes from. As if that’s important.”

Suvee looked off towards the bad end of town. “I ran into a really weird roobar a couple of days ago. It was really creepy. He kept singing the same old song over and over to scare me. Where does the expression come from? It is Latin or Greek?”

“Miss Glaciermelt says that the word originally referred to an accessory that humans used to attach to the front of their motor vehicles. Apparently, these decorative metal things killed children. They were so dangerous that the European Union banned them for the entire continent, but some of the other continents liked the way they looked – dangerous and masculine. It was an English word originally.”

Suvee shook her furry head. “They used to kill their own children with useless decorations? No wonder humans went extinct.”

As they spoke, a giant mutant seal popped its head out of an ice hole the size of a breeder reactor.

Suvee continued, “I used to think that the humans got themselves in trouble because they didn’t understand nature. But now that I know that they understood it enough but just didn’t care, I don’t feel so sorry for them anymore, Van.”

“Neither do I, Suvee.”

Liewood Acres

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Soon, the bears became so successful with their post-human survival program that they decided to have a civil war. The bears who were the most free also had the worst slums which were full of willing and desperate bucks. These starving caveless bucks were known as kangaroo bars or – more commonly – roobars in Veggie Hamlet.

One night, little Suvee was walking alone in a strange bearhood littered with roobars selling ice trinkets and slushees.

“Excuse me, sir? Where’s the nearest monorail station?” he said trembling as he came across a hunched roobar leaning against a hydro pole.

“Wanny buy some crap? If not, leave me alone, puppy,” the kangaroo icily slurred.

At that very moment, the Eastern Bear Army (EBA) flew by in their flying crazy carpets. The leader was always riding a red one, while the others rode blue. Suvee always thought it was interesting that they didn’t even have the freedom to choose the color of their crazy carpet.  He rarely thought about why roobars didn’t have a dry place to sleep though. Western Bear media emphasized the misery and incompetence of the East between informercials.

The EBA was always trying out innovative psyc ops. For the post-reality school of war theorists, there was little more to war than discourse. The leader of the school, and general of the EBA – Aztec Brougham – was inspired by a story he had read about the last years of human civilization. It described a psyc ops used by one of Freedomia’s many victims – The Oilerians. Their last effort before being completely obliterated with cluster bombs was famous as being the bestest psyc ops moment in history.

In the heat of an aerial bombardment on the east coast of Oileria, the crafty Oilerians set up a complete communications jam that played the second line of the Bruce Springsteen classic Born to Run over and over and over and over and over on all their communications equipment.

The pissed off and cold kangaroo bar starting singing that very line to Suvee.

“Runaway American Dream. Runaway American Dream. Runaway American Dream…”

So Suvee ran away.

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The planned suburban subdivision where Suvee’s family moved to a few years later was one of the nicest ones within a half-hour drive of Veggie Hamlet. Ice Flow Acres is 500 hectares of the best Modern architectural planning that the bear world has seen in these parts. One of the bungalows was even featured on the reality-TV show Bears with Ideas.

So why is Suvee so bored most of the time?

“Why don’t you walk down to the Ice Sheet Simulacrum and play Survival with the virtual kids there?” his mom asks between commercials. Without answering her (she’s back to her program anyways),  Suvee heads down the slippery hill to the Ice Flow theme park. The admission is free to children with a special Ice Flow Acres identity card.

But when he gets there, there is no one there.

“Welcome to Ice Sheet World!” yells the electronic penguin that sits next to the mall entrance.

Suvee walks past the self-serve metal detector, and enters into a simulation of an actual film of a realistic copy of one of Hollywood’s ice-flow special effects. And yet, Suvee feels bored in spite of the exciting ice flow action that’s taking place on widescreen TVs suspended on the walls all around him.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a slushee square he was saving for before dinner.

“I will eat this and ruin my appetite,” he deviously plots, as he looks around at the moving images on the screens. He gets so distracted that he doesn’t notice the trap door and accidentally falls into the garbage incinerator. Soon, the TV screens will be filled with burning fur and screaming bears. That is as close to “incineration” as the theme park is allowed to represent.

Suvee gets bored and walks back home to chat with his gay cousin in Greenland.

WTM and the Coach

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Jesus locks and unlocks his new airplane, sending loud electronic yelps through the village. As he pushes the keys on the remote starter, the repetitive “bleep! bleep! bleep! works like an ear-shattering cry for help, and his freshly plucked face squeezes into a pointy smile.  “This is the kind of therapy I probably need” he says.

The therapy he probably needs is a result of the magazine he’s got in his hand. The cover of it’s got an illustration of Moe  Silverberg’s  satirical novel I Saw Something Nasty in the Manger. Inside, the Silverberg-owned publication contains a particularly inflammatory excerpt as its centerpiece.

The latest twist in the FMJ trial scandal is that Silverberg’s newsmagazine is cross-promoting his own scathing fiction story, one which resembles – a bit too closely – the actual people and events in FMJ’s glamorous life. Free Market lawyers are already preparing a libel case, but they can’t really move forward to the litigation stage while FMJ himself is being sued from so many angles. There just aren’t enough overpaid hours in a day.

FMJ is taking other steps – besides playing with his obnoxious remote locking-device – to deal with his trauma. Murray Davidson, Registered Professional Motivational Coach – a paid friend to CEOs worldwide – has been hired to build up FMJ’s confidence during his trials. And Jesus has hired a private investigator to dig up some dirt on Moe.

But he still feels vulnerable and victimized. His bottomless well of pride has been filled with tears, and he just hasn’t been the same old messiah/attention-whore that his self-centered associates know and pretend to love so well.

FMJ tucks a thousand-dollar handkerchief into his Gucci slacks: “Sometimes, in the morning rain, I feel like a useless rich bitch who was born into money and just had to kiss all the right asses to succeed. It’s like I live to exploit other people – to bully them out of their human dignity and their spare time  – just so that I can have an obscene number of useless status symbols to ease my isolation and self-inflicted pain.

I can’t even sing my own fucking songs – I get a million-dollars per concert, and yet I can’t even impress my own family at a karaoke bar. But for a few hundred thousand dollars, I go out there onstage in a few tons of makeup and I just lip-synch to the prerecorded track and strut around. The only original talent in my shows are the costumes and the financing.”

His Registered Professional Motivational Coach turns to FMJ, and speaketh: “You know, Jesus, I think your main issue is that you just don’t believe enough in yourself enough. And if you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will believe in you either. Always believe in yourself. Always believe that you are a god among men.”

FMJ will repeat this self-love mantra at least twelve times a day. Doctor’s orders.

…

I Saw Something Nasty in the Manger
Mortimer Silverberg
(extracted from Chapter 4;  A Gangbang on Salt Street, p. 68)

The pervasive noise from the NASCAR finals nearby masks her ecstatic screams as White Trash Mary is serial-nailed by Joseph and his buddies from carpentry school. The percussive engine buzz and rouge-tinted air make everyone hornier and hornier.

She takes another deep hit of amyl nitrate, lies back and enjoys each plunge of the non-stop penetration being provided by five well-built Italian jocks with thick, calloused hands. The drug cocktail makes her numb and giddy – she feels like she’s riding a rotating roller coaster sitting on a fleshy, vibrating prod.

Waking up covered in Italian cum a few hours later, WTM sniffs a fat line of coke off the glass table. She catches a reflection of herself as she vacuums up the energy powder. Pantyless and out of breath, she quickly throws on a make-shift toga and a third layer of mascara, and then jumps onto the jet-ski to go and meet her dealer/fuck buddy in the middle of the Dead Sea.
…

Technology and the Little Bears

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The soundtrack above the illustration is playing on Bimmer’s toy radio when the glass door slides open. “There’s no airbag in real life, boys. You just go right through the windshield, split your head wide open and die!” Old Bear Roger has been listening to their storytelling the whole time.

“Roger, you scared my fur right off!” gasps little Bimmer.

“Well, I must be going on home now,” chugs the old bear. “I really like how you integrated wiki articles into your little story, lads.” And off he goes into the frozen air, back past the Climate Institute, avoiding the oil mercenaries on ANWAR hill.

“I’m sort of scared, Range,” adds Bimmer. “Maybe we should go downstairs and play with the girls’ barbies just to calm down. I’m not gay or anything. I’m just kinda nervous.”

“I used to find barbies sort of faggy too, Bim, but if it’ll help you sleep, why not. I’m confident enough in my bearhood that I think it can withstand the occasional fashion drama.”

They head to the girls’ room and quietly sneak out with a nice set of tastefully-attired dolls.

Ten minutes into a mediocre round of How do you like this outfit?, Bronc’s doll has a flash of doll-playing brilliance. “I just discovered an amazing new technology, Rangina. Want to try it out? It’ll revolutionize your life…”

“Why sure, Nurse Bella!” Ranger walks his Chanel-knock-off-cloaked Barbie over towards “Nurse Bella,” Bronco’s nurse-uniform-wearing counterpart.

Bronc whips out a can of industrial varnish and gently sprays a few wisps onto Rangina’s hard, round cheeks. Putting on an exaggerated high female voice, he says: “I am not endorsing or soliciting anything, but I just know that this product will give you a lively complexion and a glow that Ken will love!”

He empties the entire can into the trendy doll’s smiling face.

“I LOVE my new look!” shrieks Rangina in a faux-excited  Barbified voice. But then, the doll’s plastic hair catches fire from combustion with the varnish fumes and Ranger drops the glamorous melting clump of plastic onto the snowy tundra.

“Oh, I think my face is melting, Nurse Bella!” Ranger giggles. “Maybe you should have tested your product a bit more.”

“As it says in the fine print, I’m not really a nurse. The nurse outfit is just a way of branding my technology. It gives it a science feel that everyone can believe in.”

And then Nurse Bella hops into her expensive beach bus and drives quickly to the next town where the local Barbies have never heard of her or her “revolutionary” product or service.

My American Dreams

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My American Dreams

By Ann Aipac Monrovia

Submitted to:
Mr. Tomley
Twelfth Grade Enriched English,
Deering High, Portland, May 15, 1980

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My first American Dream happened after my first ever nightmare! When I was about six years old, I had a recurring nightmare where my mother gets squished by a giant Lego block.

The child psychologist at school told my parents that this was because I felt ashamed to grow up in a one-story house. So, my first American Dream was to live in a two-story house where Mommy would be safe from the blocks.

When I was seven, I got my dream! We moved into a larger bungalow with a finished basement and I stopped having that nightmare, which I later found out was a Socialist one. The new house had the same stereo system as the one that my mother dreamed about (from the Lucy Show) and had a carport which my dad dreamed about watching I Dream of Jeannie. I love to make my dad egg salad sandwiches and bring him fresh Tang when he’s thirsty, just like the very dreamy Mary Tyler Moore used to do between commercials.

Then, my American Dream of 1972 was to own an Easy-Bake oven. I cried and I cried every time I saw one on TV. But, through prayer, crying and promising not to pull my little sister’s hair, that wonderful empowering dream came true! And – not coincidentally I think – it came true on the savior’s birthday ! American Dreams are related to Jesus !

And then there’s the story in Iran. They used to have a pro-Western Shah who was in favor of Easy-bake ovens and Lite Brite. But then the people went crazy because they don’t have Christmas, and then they stopped making toys, and the people couldn’t dream correctly any more. What a tragedy for dreams.

Now, my brother Allen wants to have a phone with no wire like the crew on the USS Enterprise. Of course, it’s still just a dream, but this is America. And I’m sure that one day, he’ll be able to bravely call people who have never been called before! (Just like on the show!) Or maybe not, but it doesn’t matter. The dream lives on.

A lot of people criticize the media, but it helps us find our dreams. It’s sort of like the song “Dream Weaver.” The media weaves together the dreams of all the audience members into one big, great dream that is fantastic for everyone who watches movies and eats ice cream. And that dream is called America, and it happens every single day !

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Mr. Tomley, her draft-dodging English teacher, wrote:

Ann, you didn’t really fulfill the assignment criteria. You were supposed to discuss a modern world problem. And though you do touch on the Iran problem very briefly, you haven’t really made this the main bulk of your essay. Nonetheless, you obviously care about this subject, and you did such a good job, that I’m giving you an A.

It was later revealed that Mr. Tomley’s wife worked for General Electric – proud sponsor of the American Dream Series of Films for High School Students that may have inspired Ann’s precocious essay.

Towards A Gay Homeland

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Gays have been discriminated against since the beginning of organized heterosexual religions. Forced to live scattered among the world’s (often violent) heterosexualites, a diasporaed Gay Nation has nonetheless thrived by cultivating enriching international relationships and by setting up parallel societies within the hetero cultures in which the Gays find themselves trapped and repressed.

But if the Matthew Shepard Tragedy/Iranian Hangings have show us anything, it is that the time has finally come for a Gay Homeland –-  a nation-state where Gay culture and values can thrive and evolve with the needs and desires of its loyal Gay citizens.

The traditional Gay lands of Sodom and Gomorrah have been inhabited by members of the Gay community since before the age of religions and nation-states. Throughout the region, there are stone-age cave drawings depicting Gay acts which pre-date the Sodom/Gomorrah period by over 40,000 years. There have actually been Gays living in the area continuously for over 60,000 years, long before the Akadians, the Sumerians, the Arabs or the Zionists.

The biblical story of the tragic genocide of the Sodomites demonstrates the extent of state-sanctioned persecution the Gays have been subjected to since the beginning of heterocentric religions and nations. The events of the last few years in Wyoming and Iran point to a pressing need to provide a safe haven from homopobianism – and the Levant is the most significant region on earth for Gay History. With a thriving and successful Gay nation in the Holy Land, Gays all over the world will benefit from the presence of a pied-a-terre at the center of world politics and oil production.

It is time for the Gays to return to their Ancestral Homeland (as promised in an email signed by Barack Obama). The current heterosexualist “states” of Lebanon and Palestine are their ancestral home. The current inhabitants are opportunistic heterosexualites who could live comfortably in any other part of the word. There are over 200 heterosexualite nation states, and NOT ONE Gay state. The absence of a Gay political entity is the reason for Gay suffering, and Gays will only know freedom when this situation has been remedied – when the earth has at least one rock-hard Gay nation state.

Lubeland and Phallus-stein (their original names) are the natural provinces of the Gay Homeland. Together, with Sodom and Gomorrah as their undivided capitals — one for gay men, the other for lesbians — this new state will be a beacon for Gay Culture that shines out all over the world – a safe place to live out the Gay Dream. It will also provide a model of what can be accomplished when the earth’s crust is divided into various thematic tribes, when some of them just have more fashion sense and irony than the others.

It’s time for the Gay Nation to rise to the occasion in the beauty pageant that we sometimes call civilization! It’s time for the Gays to return to their Gay Homeland!

Little Bear Authors

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Ranger and Bronc have decided to downsize Old Bear Roger. His terrifying stories are making sleep difficult, and Ranger has started picking the fur off his inner thigh because of what his beariatrician calls Generalized Environmental Anxiety.

“Bronc, until we get the TV back, let’s make our own stories instead of getting Old Bear Roger to come over and creep us out with his,” suggests Ranger. “This way, we can stop them just before they get too scary. Or slap on a happy ending.”

Ranger nods. “That’s a great idea, Bronc! I already have an idea for a story. I wanna tell about how airbags were a form of military-industrial propaganda back in the human days.”

“How’s that, Range?”

“Well, airbags were supposed to save human lives after they slammed their SUVs into telephone poles, right? Well, in this way they’re sorta like the douce axe machinia that always saves everybody at the end of a scary movie or TV show. No matter how badly the good guys screw up, the airbag saves them from paying the price. With the airbag, you don’t have to assume adult responsibility for your own actions. It’s empowering in a way. It lets you do some pretty violent and dangerous stuff.”

“I think it’s called “Deus Ex-machina,” Range. What does it have to do with airbags? Try to frame your answer using a critical vocabulary. Don’t just rely on folkloric cuteness and terrifying punishments to tell your story, like Roger does.”

Ranger straightens up. He has just written a mid-term test on Critical Polar Bear Discourse. “Well, the airbag acts as a commonly shared metaphor. This symbolic saftey-net manipulates the general public into feeling that automakers and governments will always come up with solutions to whatever damage their previous products cause. ‘In an interstellar burst, they come back to save the universe,’ as that miserable human being Thom Yorke used to sing. This is a type of spin.”

Bronc smirks. “So car-makers use a comforting historic symbol that is taken from a commonly shared mythology? Are you arguing that airbags – and perhaps all technology – are miracle signifiers? And that humans treated them as if they were actual miracles from a special magical messiah corporation?

If humans were so good at saving lives with miracles, where did they all go? And how did such smart creatures end up believing in magical miracles?”

They look up at the black-light Star Wars poster on the bedroom ceiling and start chuckling at the airbag cupidity that was so socially accepted just before humanity’s endtime.  “He’ll save us. The airbag will save us!” Ranger laughs so hard that he drops his Spiderman doll.

Bronco continues. “I think it’s a great idea for a story, Range. And why don’t you include the Radiohead song by the same name?”

“I would, but I can’t get the copyrights, Bronc. And anyway, it might be overkill to use a song called Airbag in a story about airbags. Maybe I’ll  just root through Roger’s old record collection to find an obscure Australian techno track, and quote some of the Radiohead lyrics in my story…”

In an interstellar burst

I am back to save the universe.

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