CSI: American Carnage (Sunday, January 5, 2020)
IN THE CYBER – Little Timmy, pup reporter, and the Professor’s small strike force have picked their way from the mouth of the cave across fields pocked with festering craters, decaying and archived tweets, deleted bodies, and fallen furries cut down by abrasive comments and savagely derisive photoshopped images. The smell of putrescence is everywhere. Timmy shakes his head at the carnage. He says, Senseless, all so senseless. Sarah, Timmy’s friend from the resistance potluck, says, The autocrat cares nothing of sense. Sense is his enemy. That is one of his most important qualities. Timmy is about to respond when a low drone is heard from above. It stops. Mohammed, Timmy’s friend, shouts, Incoming! Incoming! The group dives behind a large boulder just before a tremendous blast rocks the landscape, spewing confusion and misinformation everywhere. The Professor brushes away the debris. He says, That was huge, a Big Bertha Tweet if I ever saw one! There must be something serious going on. Timmy picks up part of a paper that has drifted down and reads, They attacked us, & we hit back. If they attack again, which I would strongly advise them not to do, we will hit them harder than they have ever been hit before! Gosh, Professor, that’s some really bad tit-for-tat, zero-sum gaming going on! Before the Professor can empty his pipe and clear his throat, Sarah holds up more paper and reads, Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have………targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats! Mohammed, Timmy’s friend, says, This is ridiculous! The US orchestrates a coup, installs a brutal dictator, drains the country of its most precious assets and pockets the profits, allows widespread torture and killing by its puppet, the Shah, and a half century after the Iranians finally overthrow him and take back their country, this is the response? It’s ridiculous. Boris, genial triple agent says, Only people who died during 1979 embassy standoff were killed when US helicopter crashed in the desert on its own. Sarah says, This is a typical ploy by the autocrat. He knows nothing and cares less about the Iranian people. They are all simple assets to be used for his own purposes. In the depths of his reptilian brain, he has grasped a vague grisly image and now projects it. Members of his cult, similarly, are able to recognize the image, pulling up primitive memories from their own reptilian brain structures that are associated and reinforced by constant propaganda. The medulla, pons, cerebellum, mesencephalon, the oldest basal nuclei, the globus pallidus and the olfactory bulbs are critical for the success of the autocrat. They hold powerful emotions and simple memories. Boris says, In other words, he uses pictures and fear and ancient desire for revenge? Sarah says, Of course. After greed and sex, revenge is a prime motivator for the autocrat. It is what drives him; he stokes the same primal memories and urges in the cult. The Professor says, That’s all very interesting and will help us when we return, which should be shortly if we take this backchannel right here. And it is true, the strike force is standing next to one of the main backchannel trunk lines. The Professor says, We must step through. – Sunday, January 5, 2020