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  FUTURE HISTORY

  (REFLECTIONS ON AMERICAN HISTORY)

  A Newly Revised 2190 Version of the

  2160 A.D. Edition

  Dr. Hugo Gottfried

  Published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by Hugo Gottfried

  Copy-edited by David Dodd

  Cover Design by David Dodd

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  And hark what discord follows. Each thing

  in mere oppugnancy; the bounded waters

  should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

  and make a sop of all this solid globe;

  strength shall be lord of imbecility,

  and the rude son should strike his father dead;

  force should be right, or rather, right and wrong,

  (between whose endless jar justice resides)

  should lose their names, and so should justice too.

  Then everything include itself in power,

  power into will, will into appetite,

  and appetite, a universal wolf

  (so doubly seconded with will and power)

  must make perforce a universal prey,

  And at last eat up himself.

  -William Shakespeare,

  Troilus and Cressida,

  Act 1, scene iii

  If all things are Caesar's, what then is God's?

  -Tertullian

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Jeffrey Sackett

  Preface to the 2190 edition, by Bartholomew Wickhampton

  I Interpreting American History: the Problem of Terminology

  II The Collapse of Moral Standards

  Interlude: Dialogue with Tryphoid 1

  III The Corruption of the American Political System

  Interlude: Dialogue with Tryphoidia

  IV The End of American Education

  Interlude: Dialogue with Tryphoidides

  V The Collapse of the American Political System

  Interlude: Dialogue with Tryphoid 2

  VI The Second Great Depression and the Third World War

  Interlude: Presidential Rankings

  VII Leviathan

  INTRODUCTION

  A common fantasy among historians is the coming into possession of a history book from the future. It is precisely this that you will begin reading in a few moments.

  An old friend of mine, Carlos Renzi, contacted me recently from Brazil with a remarkable claim: his great-great-great grandson will be a physicist two hundred years from now, and he will discover a means of transporting materials backwards in time by doing something called inverse resequencing with something called tachyons. I am a scientific illiterate, and thus have no idea what this means; but the book my old friend sent me seems to be exactly what he claimed, a history book from the future.

  From the book's internal testimony, it seems that the author, Hugo Gottfried, will write and will privately publish this book in the year 2160 A.D. He will be arrested by the State and almost all copies of his work will be destroyed. Then, soon after Gottfried's death thirty years later, a man named Bartholomew Wickhampton will recover, edit, and republish the book. It is this edition, the 2190 A.D. edition, which you, dear reader, now possess.

  The future the author describes is, if we take the American experiment in self-government seriously, one of unthinkable tragedy. I was startled and angered when I first read this work, and for that reason I am making this attempt to present it to the general public. We are still, at this point, able to redirect our political, social, and economic life, and we must, we simply must, take action while we still can. I hope the reader agrees.

  Jeffrey Sackett

  PREFACE TO THE 2190 EDITION

  The recent death of Hugo Gottfried (2085-2185 A.D.)1 impressed upon his admirers the necessity of publishing a new edition of his privately circulated work, Reflections on American History. Though we mourn his passing, it is at least gratifying that the prohibition against his works was automatically lifted when he died, because the Dissemination of Information Act is notoriously lax regarding posthumous censorship of works written since 2030. We believe that his essays will be instructive, cautionary, and thought-provoking. "The past is immutable," Dr. Gottfried often said, "but the future is malleable stone awaiting the sculptor's hands."

  Hugo Melanchthon Gottfried was born in a small pine cabin in the woods of what was once called central New York State on December 16, 2085. He once quipped that sharing a birthday with Beethoven doubtless engendered in him a sense of universal harmony, and sharing a date with the Boston Tea Party predestined him to a contrarian life.2 His parents were self-described Thoreauniks, which was a term used in the middle of the last century to describe contrarian groups who chose to withdraw from the regimented conformity of what had come to be called Patriotic Democratic Centralism, and to live what were admittedly eccentric lives in acetic circumstances. His parents and their associates adopted an arcane ancient eastern religion called Zen Buddhism, in stark contrast to the atheism and agnosticism common in their generation. Gottfried's later adoption of Christianity cannot thus be attributed to his upbringing. It was a conscious decision derived, he maintained, from an existential intellectual process. (See the two dialogues with Tryphoid below.)

  He lost both parents at an early age. His mother Lucretia developed breast cancer when Gottfried was five years old, but was denied medical care because, as a Thoreaunik, she was deemed non-contributory to society and thus ineligible for public medical assistance, which was the only kind of medical assistance in existence. His father Emerson died in a hunting incident the next year. He was hunting in the forest when a member of the Deer Protection Society killed him.

  Gottfried was then taken into protective custody by the Federal Child Services Bureau, sent to a re-education center for two years, and then placed in a Young Patriots Labor Camp. He injured his left leg when a mine shaft partially collapsed on him, rendering him unfit for physical labor. He had a quick and supple mind, however, and a sinecure was soon found for him. His parents had taught him how to read (he became a voracious reader), and so he was placed on the team of the ongoing program of organizing (i.e., purging) the archives of the huge research library on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It took but a short time for him to become acquainted with the technology required for cataloging purposes, and he was able to purchase his Ph.D. in 2113, largely on the basis of his work. (It should be noted that the degree of Doctor of Philosophy was not earned, but purchased, after the educational "reforms" of the late 21st century.) But in the process of his labors in the subterranean labyrinthine stacks of books in the nether recesses of the Library, his eyes were opened to something that neither he, nor anyone else at the time, suspected even existed: the truth about the past.

  Gottfried explains the causes and the process of the end of eff
ective education in the United States in one of the essays that follow. Suffice it to say for our purposes here that by around 2100 A.D. education (i.e., the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next, as well as the mental disciplines and skills needed to comprehend, utilize and expand it) had ceased to exist. All historical study had been so polluted by propaganda, and all expected retention of facts on any level in any field had become so scant, that no real understanding of the past was any longer possible. (In other fields, such as science and technology, advancement had also ceased in the U.S. and Europe. Were it not for India, China, and especially Brazil, it might very well have ended globally.) But Gottfried's work in the Library enabled him to open a window on a heritage long suppressed, lost, and by his day unimaginable.

  The original nature of American government, traditional morality, economies based upon the free exchange of goods and services, the concept of the family, the idea of God, the rule of law, Western Civilization itself, all of this knowledge had been either hidden, forgotten, or so perverted as to be unrecognizable, until Gottfried rediscovered it. Of course, the redefinition of words and the infusion of propaganda into all written sources prevented the "literate public" (and the term is used advisedly) from realizing that the past was not like the present. To provide two simple examples, all of American History was not merely prologue to the triumphalist presidency of the third Roosevelt, nor was all scientific inquiry aimed at proving that nothing exists except matter in motion.

  Gottfried was fond of saying that, "I, like Champollion before me, have illumed a lost world." The reference is unclear, but a lost world is certainly what he illumed. In 2160, after a lifetime of obscure and anonymous research, he was able to circulate the original manuscript of this book. Needless to say, he was unable to avail himself of the conventional means of electronic publication. He and a few trusted friends wrote out copies of the book by hand, and then distributed them to other trusted friends and associates. Startled and impressed by what they read, these people in turn wrote and distributed copies, and the results was as the ever-spreading ripple of the stone tossed into the lake. The editor is proud to be able to say that his mother was one of the original copyists.

  This undertaking could not long escape the notice of the authorities. The F.B.I. confiscated as many copies of the manuscript as they could find, and arrested Gottfried in 2162. He remained in custody until his death in 2185. No cause of death was announced, and foul play was suspected by his admirers, but this is doubtful. The authorities regarded him as an annoying eccentric, not a threat, and it is unlikely they would have bothered to kill him. Besides, he lived to be 100! Murdered? Not likely.

  Nevertheless, as already noted, his death makes possible this formal electronic publication. We are confident that too few people in positions of power will read it until, we pray, it is too late to prevent the contents from becoming common knowledge.3 Despite official efforts at eradication, four complete and nine partial manuscripts survive, and the text presented here is reconstructed from them, with variant readings noted in the footnotes. It is impossible at this late date to discern Gottfried's variant readings from glosses by other copyists. Inasmuch as all of the manuscripts were literally "manuscripts," i.e., hand-written, Gottfried apparently revised his text continuously as he copied it. Under such circumstances, the editors can only record the variant readings without commenting on their origins. All footnotes are additions by the editors, who are solely responsible for them.

  I wish to thank Jasmine Jones of the cafeteria staff at the Library for her editorial assistance.

  Bartholomew Wickhampton, head custodian,

  The Library of Congress Museum,

  Roosevelt-Kennedy, D.C.

  I – INTERPRETING AMERICAN HISTORY:

  THE PROBLEM OF TERMINOLOGY

  War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

  - from 1984

  Words are like people. They have life spans. They emerge, they flourish, and then either they morph into something else, they live on in a truncated form, or they just fade away and die. On occasion, they are intentionally perverted.

  The morph can be one of form or of meaning. Take the morph of form. Most of us eat asparagus (if we have to) without knowing that it was originally called "sparrow grass," until people started mispronouncing it; we know men named Ned without knowing it is short for "mine Edward," women named Nell without knowing it is short for "mine Ellen," and that Ned and Nell may call each other "sweetheart" without knowing that it was originally "sweet tart." (The confectionary, of course, not the lady of easy virtue.)

  Take the morph of meaning. Four hundred years ago, "gay" mean colorful. Then it came to mean cheerful, and by the end of the 20th century it meant homosexual. When King James II (whose father, King James I, by the way, was homosexual) first saw architect Christopher Wren's masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral in London, he described it as "awful, amusing, and artificial," which today would be absolute insults, but which in the 17th century meant awe-inspiring, a cause of pleasure, and displaying artistic skill.

  Take a word's truncated life. Sometimes words survive in exclusively negative forms. We still use the term "disheveled" to describe a person who is somewhat unkempt, but we do not describe a well-groomed person as "sheveled." (Nor, for that matter, do we call him "kempt.") One can be inept, but not ept, nonchalant, but not chalant, ruthless, but not ruthful, indignant, but not dignant, incorrigible, but not corrigible, et cetera. One can be disillusioned; but can one be illusioned? Certainly, as the past two centuries can attest, but such phraseology is never used.

  Sometimes, as noted, words just fade away and die. We used to have the word "ugsome," to describe a thoroughly distasteful person. (Can a person be tasteful, by the way?) We also used to have the word "slubberdegullion," to describe a lazy slob. What a fine word. Don't we all know at least one person like this, at least one slubberdegullion? What about the demonstrative pronoun "yon?" If something, a chair, for instance, is close by, we say, "this chair." If it is in the general area but not right at hand, we say, "that chair." But we also used to be able to refer to a distant chair as "yon chair." Useful word. Dead as a doornail, though it survives somewhat in the infrequently used word "yonder."

  The point is that human vocabulary is always in a state of flux. In the past, the evolution of language was a naturally occurring process, reflecting social and cultural changes and external influences, not to mention lingual and linguistic sloppiness. But the past two centuries have seen a different form of evolution, an ultimately sinister and cynical morphing of language, namely the intentional manipulation of meaning to affect the nature of thought and, consequently, perceptions of reality. Political, legal, educational, diplomatic, and cultural verbal expression has been twisted to obscure rather than to illuminate, to obfuscate rather than clarify. This process, when first noticed in the past, was referred to as the Orwellian Shift.

  To make our examination of certain topics in the history of the United States over the past two centuries useful and productive, it is necessary first to examine and then to replace the old terms, still in use among so-called academics, "left" and "right," and the subsequent related terms "liberal" and "conservative."

  The first two terms originated in Europe in the late 18th century, and were byproducts of the French Revolution, referring to the seating pattern in the national legislature, with those desiring radical change seating themselves together on the left of the chamber, and those attached to either the old order or a moderate impulse toward change seating themselves on the right. As the ideas of the Revolution spread by fits and starts through the 19th century, the terms liberal and conservative came to be used to refer to the left and the right respectively. But it is important to understand what the terms meant in their original European usages, because they are not really applicable to American political history. The continued use of these terms in America made possible a distortion of meaning.

  In the 19th cen
tury, European Liberalism meant a belief in constitutional government which could be either a limited monarchy or a republic, a representative legislature (with control of the budget) chosen by a narrow electoral base, government run by a ministry responsible to that legislature, free trade and laissez-faire capitalism.

  In the 19th century, European Conservatism meant a belief in monarchy, either limited or absolute, a ministry responsible to the monarch, either a national legislature with very limited influence, elected by a narrow electoral base, or a council of the kingdom based upon the traditional division of noble, clergy, and commons, and the maintenance of tariffs and other forms of regulated economic life.

  Obviously, neither of these definitions is applicable to political positions common in the United States during our recent past (nor, for that matter, do they apply anymore in what was once Europe either), and our adoption of them in the early 20th century was somewhat haphazard and inconsistent. American politics in the late 18th century spoke of Federalists and Anti-Federalists (in a debate over the ratification of the Constitution), Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans (in a debate over the interpretation of that Constitution), in the 19th century, Democrats and Whigs (who hates Andrew Jackson? who loves Andrew Jackson? and what about the Erie Canal and that National Road?), then Democrats (slavery is okay, let's let it spread) and Republicans (no it isn't, and let's not), and then, after the Civil War, will the Democrats or the Republicans help themselves to the national treasury for the next few years. After the War such political distinctions as existed were trivial. (High tariff or low, how far to expand the civil service, that sort of thing.) At the end of the 19th century new economic problems led to a series of "reform" movements known as populism (rural) and progressivism (urban). The terms have continued to be used ever since, the former (populist) usually as a pejorative reference to the cynical manipulation of the emotions of frightened voters, the latter (progressive) as an idealized self-praise by the advocates of centralization of power. It was not until the 20th century that the European political terms became widespread. The term "liberal" was introduced to the American political vocabulary much earlier than the term "conservative," but both meanings were at first somewhat fluid.