© 2004 by John Varley; all rights reserved

Arlington West

I have to admit, I was feeling pretty down today. We stayed up late last night, until it became obvious from the geologists that Ohio was going to slide down into Texas like a great glacial moraine. We drooped around all day, taking a call from one of my sisters, who said she was thinking of moving to Canada, and that my other sister had come over, crying. 2000 felt like I had been mugged, beaten to a pulp, and spent a month in the hospital, waiting to see if I’d survive. (Diagnosis: You’ll live, but you’ll have an idiot for President). This felt more like a death in the family.

Then The West Wing came on tonight, and it all came clear to me in a blinding burst of insight. It felt like I imagine it must feel to be “born again,” or possibly what it feels like to suddenly lose one’s mind ... but I’m not crazy! It’s so obvious when you finally see it, I wonder why I didn’t catch on before?

We’ve been fooled, my fellow Americans! The joke is on us!

During one of the commercial breaks there was a promo for something called “The $25,000,000 hoax.” I have no idea what it was, some dreck about beautiful yuppies chasing after a phony prize like the rabid dogs they so closely resemble, I guess.

Ask yourself this: What has been the most popular new form of entertainment during the “Bush Administration?” Reality television, that’s what.

We’ve watched in horror as people connive and cry on desert islands.

We’ve been treated to more than we ever wanted to know about the intimate and repellent lives of the Osbourne and Gotti families.

We’ve observed, like alien anthropologists, humanoids pursuing the good life in the form of a job with Donald Trump.

You ever see one of those shows where they invade your house while you’re gone and create some designer horror, then stick around to film you as you try to act pleased that you’re going to have to live in this shithole until you can afford to redecorate?

That’s what’s happening! We’ve been trapped in a reality TV show!

They’ve rearranged our reality, and they’re filming us. There is no “Bush Administration.” There will be a “second term” ... but only because they renewed the show!

Later, in 2008, when the whole sham is revealed, are we going to be embarrassed! We fell for it, hook, line and stinker.

Did you really think the United States of America elected a simpering, mean-spirited, lying, warmongering, stupid, petty, incoherent asshole who had never succeeded at anything in his worthless life, President in the 2000 election? By half a dozen stolen votes in Florida, and that the election was finally decided by one vote in the Supreme Court? Come on, get real! The whole scenario has “Hollywood concept” written all over it.

And 2004 ... well, they figured that if we’d fall for that, we’d probably fall for last night’s “election results.” High drama! Massachusetts goes for Kerry! Texas goes for “Bush”! Which way will Ohio go? The ratings were wonderful.

But just look at it. In four years, “President Bush” has gotten us involved in an unwinnable war. The economy is ailing. Jobs are being outsourced overseas. He has cut taxes for the richest 1% while tossing the rest of us poor dogs a bone, quickly snatched out of our mouths by the increased taxes to pay for his war. He has re-written the Constitution. We went from a budget surplus to the point where we are losing a trillion dollars a year, paying interest on it every day.

And they expect me to believe that, in a time of war, 59,054,087 Americans will vote for a combat-dodging, drug-taking, deserting, sniveling son of a rich son-of-a-bitch who partied all through the Viet Nam War, instead of a decorated combat hero?

If you can swallow that, you can swallow anything.

I’ll grant you, it hasn’t been easy, this vast project. It probably couldn’t have been pulled off twenty, even ten years ago. But that’s the whole point. Now they can, and now they did.

Where do you get your news? Television? Radio? Newspapers? Wire services? All owned by the same very small number of companies. Internet? The same companies.

They control it all! Like on the old Outer Limits TV show: We will adjust the focus, we will control the horizontal, we will control the vertical! (For you youngsters: You used to have to turn knobs to control a lot of stuff on television sets. Really!) A few corporations like Time / Warner / CBS / AOL / Disney / Halliburton / Safeway / Fox / Merck / Murdoch / Shell control all our media. If they want to control our “reality,” they can!

What do you think “reality television” is all about, anyway? A bunch of weirdoes screaming at each other?

No, it’s the “Nightly News.” It’s “Election 2004.” It’s computer-constructed images on the digital HDTV with names like “Tom Brokaw” and “Dan Rather” and “Tucker Carlson.”

They’ve made it all up!

Think about it. Have you ever actually seen “George W. Bush” ... in the White House? No, you have not. You’ve only seen him on TV, or distantly at a “rally” (carefully staged) or passing by in a dark limo surrounded by the 3rd Armored Division, or flying over in that bloated whale, Air Force One. He’s entirely a television construct.

It took some pretty determined googling, all night long, but I finally managed to get into the secret website of the show they’re filming, which they intend to release in 2008 shortly before the next “election.” Naturally they’ve camouflaged it pretty well, but nothing could escape my new-found zeal; I would not be denied access!

My life could be in danger if I told you too much. You know how those network execs can be in pursuit of ratings. I’d rather take on the Soprano family any day. But here’s what I can tell you:

The new show will be called W!

I got a look at a few of the scripts for the second season. Can’t say much, just a few hints. There’ll be a lot of goose-stepping ... I mean, marching. Half a dozen constitutional amendments will “pass.” Loyalty oaths for teachers and librarians, that sort of thing. Mandatory church on Sundays, attendance to be taken by the FBI. Possibly forced sterilization for registered Democrats, as genetic undesirables. But don’t be alarmed when they march you to a “re-education camp.” It’s all a joke, remember. Think how you’ll laugh at your own lugubrious expression when they run the film of you standing there wearing the big D sewed on your striped flannel pajamas as they load you onto the boxcars.

I did manage to penetrate into one more awesome secret in my explorations.

The West Wing is the real thing!

That’s right! All during this sham first term, a small group has been laboring in secret ... right out in the open! Masquerading as a television show, when in truth they are the real government! Cameras follow them 24/7 as they show us the real American Executive Branch, a place where people actually care about government as something beyond the rapine and pillage of all our precious institutions. While that trained ape “George W. Bush” smirks and sniggers, President Josiah Bartlett is really there, in the real Oval Office, bearing a remarkable resemblance to that actor fellow, Martin Sheen, agonizing, worrying, sometimes actually hesitating before he makes a decision ... caring about us as something other than trained monkey voters who can be persuaded to believe anything.

What we’ve been seeing, of course, is just highlights. The real show, when it finally airs, will knock your socks off!

As for the cast of “The Bush Administration,” I think it’s safe to say the 2008 Emmy Awards will be a clean sweep. Take the as-yet uncredited actor playing “George W. Bush.” Have you seen a more convincing doofus on TV since, maybe, Art Carney’s Ed Norton of The Honeymooners? Maybe Ted Baxter, on Mary Tyler Moore? Gilligan? Les Nessman or Arthur Carlson from WKRP? Dumb as dirt! It’s a career-making role. We’re sure to be seeing more of his close-set eyes, his jovial did-I-sit-on-a-whoopee-cushion look of bafflement, hear his irritating stammer as he struggles with a language he has never entirely mastered: English? I promise you, “nucular weapons” will be the catch-phrase of 2008. People will say it to each other and collapse with laughter. Did we really believe a president would say nucular? Did we really fall for that? Whoooo! Did we ever bite! Can you believe it? Molly Ivins is going to shit a brick.

“Dick Cheney?” The dude, whoever he really is, sometimes seemed to be positively channeling Adolph Hitler. “Condoleeza Rice?” What zany sitcom writer came up with that name? Same dude who wrote “Urkel,” I’ll bet. And the lady can act. Played Lady MacBeth for three years, so goes the rumor. She’ll be compared to Angela Lansbury’s classic psychopathic fascist in The Manchurian Candidate. And right on down the list. Who will believe, in retrospect, that we ever swallowed these clowns as statesmen and department secretaries? It’s “The Clampett Family Moves to Washington.”

Anyway, I’ve figured out what I’m going to do for the next four years, and I suggest you do it, too. I will no longer watch the “Nightly News.” From now on, it’s The West Wing for me. The first three seasons are on DVD. I’m going to buy them all, and run them every night in place of the news to see at least a glimpse of what’s really going on.

And The West Wing ain’t no bed of roses, remember. There’s all sorts of troubles there, too, but at least they don’t have to do with a junta from Texas taking control of the government. Leo is at death’s door, and his whole insane load of work is about to descend on CJ. Is she up to it? President Bartlett is worried sick that he drove Leo into a heart attack. Donna was almost killed by Palestinian terrorists. Jimmy Smits is rumored to be on his way, though I don’t know just what a recently-dead cop is going to do in the White House. Alan Alda, too, and I suspect he’s going to be trouble. He always looked a little shifty-eyed and sounded a little weasely to me.

But one thing I can guarantee. The real occupants of the West Wing will deal with their problems, the country’s crises, all manner of situations as human beings who care for their fellow man. They will agonize over every compromise. Sure, they’ve made compromises before and they’ll make them again; this is Washington, this is politics, and you never get everything you want. But they will have principles, not tactics. They will have plans to make a better life for all Americans and all the world, not agendas of world domination. They will have lines they will never cross, they will do what is best for the country. They may seek guidance from their God, in prayer, but they will never accept marching orders from him. They will not indulge in the politics of fear and hatred and lies.

Heck, just last week they got the leaders of Palestine and Israel to sit down together at Camp David and talk to each other. Could “George W. Bush” have done that?

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What? You don’t buy that?

But I thought I made a pretty convincing case ... no?

Okay, try this one.

The best theories of physics tell us that, whenever an atomic nucleus can make a transition from a higher quantum state to a lower one by emitting a particle ... it does both things. It emits the particle, and it doesn’t emit it.

Some have theorized that this means that every time a particle is both emitted and not emitted, a new universe is created. Think about that. Every time. Do you have any idea how many atomic nuclei exist at this moment, at this zeptosecond? (That’s really a word; means one-sextillionth of a second.) Any idea how many of them, most of them in a highly excited state in the middle of burning stars, will change their quantum state in the next zeptosecond? And the next? And the next? And that they’ve been doing this every zeptosecond for about 475 petaseconds? (475 quadrillion seconds, our estimate of the age of the universe.) And that, each time one universe splits into two universi, both of those universes start splitting at the same mad rate into new ones?

The math is beyond me, but I suspect that number is by now big enough to make a googolplex (10 to the 10th to the 100th) seem like counting on your toes. If the universe, fifteen billion light-years across (in curved space) was packed edge to edge with nothing but electrons, and you wrote a quintillion quintillion quintillion zeroes on each of those electrons, you wouldn’t even have made a dent in that number.

A very large number of universes. Not infinite, maybe, but laaaaaaaarge.

Thus, anything that can happen, anything at all, is happening, as I write, in one of these universes. Somewhere, in these near-infinite universes, there is one—probably trillions and trillions—where The West Wing is the real world.

I’m going to find that universe and move there.

I’m convinced it exists. I’m also convinced that, out of all those universes, this is the only one where George W. Bush was re-elected yesterday. They say that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters, hitting keys at random, would eventually type the entire works of Shakespeare, or the Bible, or something like that. But the odds of those monkeys writing the scenario that happened and didn’t happen yesterday (in a quantum way of thinking), are precisely this: Infinity to one.

Me, I’m getting out of here. I’m hard at work on a dimension-shifting machine (I’m a science fiction writer; I can do that). I’ve assembled all the parts: 3 Tesla coils, 5 Jacob’s Ladders, 100 Pyrex glass retorts with colored water and dry ice bubbling in the bottom, a small particle collider, a Mr. Fusion Machine, a Swiss Army knife, miles and miles of duct tape, and of course my faithful assistant, Igor. I will begin putting it together soon; I intend to be long gone by Inauguration Day. Lee’s got a deck of Tarot cards that should be useful in sorting through the vast number of universes until she finds the one we’re looking for. One where The West Wing is reality, where my beloved United States of America has not turned into the redneck joke of the world, almost universally despised, soon to be despised and hated even more. I’m going to miss the coming catastrophes that will probably make 9/11 look like a kindergarten spat, thank you very much.

While we’re at it, we’re going to make sure the universe we go to is one where the Beatles never broke up, John Lennon and George Harrison are still alive, and George W. Bush is the main butt-boy in the Huntsville, Texas, pen.

I’m taking reservations right now, but hurry. I can’t take everybody.

Bottom line: I refuse to live in a universe where 59,054,087 Americans could be so wrong. It’s as simple as that.
 

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