Political Humor |

Welcome to the first installment of a blogging community written, on-line political satire novel.  What this means, is that we are asking you to volunteer (you don’t get paid) for the ultimately prestigious honor of writing a subsequent 400-700 word chapter.  This  generous offer is open to all of our readers, so you don’t even have to have you’re own blog to join in.

Radioactive Liberty may not be the first to do this, but who else a has ever given you a chance to play in a satirical future world of Global Cooling?

Mild Max should be written in the first person and remain in the genre of those old, schlockishly penned, dime store novels. Next week, our very own taser waving lawman, JumpOut, will be adding chapter 2.  The following week it’s Snig, of Snigsspot fame’s turn.

Want to get in on the fun?  Drop us a line at lesjameshumor, that’s at gmail, and we’ll be happy to give you a date.  No, not that kind of date, the date we expect perfection from you in the way of a well crafted piece of literary art.  Then just pretend you’re at the DMV.  Sooner or later, it’ll be your turn. Hey, it’ll be good practice for the Obama soup kitchen lines.

We’ll need your contribution by midnight on the Wednesday the week your post is scheduled to be published (Publish date is Friday).  That only give you five days to be brilliant. Not like you’ll need that much time.

This first chapter is kind of long. Sorry, it was necessary, to get all of the background story into place.  Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess.

Chapter 1: Behind Thunderdome

It’s a dark and stormy night -somewhere on the planet. It just isn’t very dark or stormy here. Here is San Francisco. Here it’s daytime…in August… and it’s snowing lightly.

My name is Max. I use to be a traffic cop, when there was traffic, when it didn’t snow on Frisco in frikkin’ August, or at all for that matter. Back then we were all worried about man made Global Warming but that was almost twenty years ago. That’s when the Mayan calendar ran out -back in 2012- and so did the warm weather.

Stupidly, we all listened to Al Gore and his band of butt kissing “scientist”. We banned coal during the first four years of the Obama Presidency. Next, we turned every plowable square inch of California and the mid-west over to planting corn and wind farms. Then Cali Governor, Jerry Spaceship Earth Brown was more than happy to give up his limo and drive around in a Chevy Volt. What that lead to, was all of the petroleum-powered cars in the state being taxed right off the streets.

Most of the rest of the country was right behind them. Only Alaska, Texas and Idaho held out, but soon enough, even they crumbled under the economic pressure. Thousand of scientists, worldwide, held conferences, wrote papers, went on TV -when they could- to warn us that global warming was a big hoax.

They screamed that the planet was cooling, not warming. The idiots in Washington and at the E.U. didn’t listen, they didn’t need to hear it. They already knew . It was the power from energy manipulation that they were after, and a little inconvenient “truth” wasn’t going to stop them from getting it.

Most of the scientist drowning them out, got their grant money from the power-hungry politicians, who wanted a crisis that could be “scientifically proven”. So instead of preparing the country for frostbite, we got handed sunscreen. A lot of people bought into the lie and then a lot of people bought it.

Europe went straight to hell when Russian Putinist destroyed the natural gas pipelines that heated a lot of the continent. Civil unrest wrecked what was left of the Russian economy. The Red Army still had plenty of fuel then, to overzealously run over all who stood in their way, and a lot of those who hadn’t.

China and India didn’t fare any better. The end result was the same, hundreds of millions of freezing, starving people. South America and Africa weren’t very stable to begin with. They didn’t stand a chance.

Australia, Canada, northern Europe and most of Asia are all packed in ice. San Francisco is the new Anchorage.

By end of Obama’s second term, the price of oil had dropped to record lows but the taxes to pay for all the 2008, 09, and 10 bail-outs, jumped the price of gas up to over 12 bucks a gallon. The bottom dropped out of what was left of the economy and so did the mercury in those now outlawed types of thermometers.

The basically bankrupt oil companies went to Washington to beg for help but they just got flat turned down. Congress signed their death warrants. The gas stations soon went dry. Not that anyone could afford gas anyway. So we got stuck with electric cars that needed to be plugged in to re-charge or those running on biofuels. That pretty much killed interstate commerce. There should be a punchline in there somewhere but I don’t remember anyone laughing.

When the snow began falling year round, the corn crops failed and the solar panels got covered. The government called out the National Guard to sweep off the panels but they couldn’t get anywhere, since they didn’t have fuel for their trucks. The photovoltaic panels, that were supposed to be so all hell-fired wonderful,  never produced more than about 10% of the electrical needs for our city.  Now with the cloudy days and almost constant light snow, they’re down to about zip.

The military couldn’t defend the wind farms, when the eco-terrorist started toppling them because they were killing the frikkin birds. They couldn’t stop the same groups from blowing-up the hydroelectric dams because they were preventing salmon from migrating up-stream. Those morons reduced the available power around here to almost nothing.

It would have been too much, if the cold and suicides hadn’t killed off the majority of the population. Between not enough crops able to grow, no way to transport what there was, frozen water pipes, and no heat, most people didn’t stand a chance. It became survival of the fittest or maybe just the unlucky.

Those of us who made it through the worst were still royally screwed.

Somewhere in his third term, Obama just disappeared. Not that anyone cared by that point; we hadn’t heard much from Washington for a while. Most of us had stopped even listening anyway. What were they going to say to us? Sorry?

Over the next few years we adapted. Things got better but never good. Not like the old days.

So here I am, bouncing at Thunderdome. It might be the asshole of the world, but it keeps a warm roof over my head. “One goes in, two come out”, they say. Usually hand in hand. Soft, limb-wrested, hand in hand. It makes me sick but it’s the only work I could find.

I use to enjoy seeing these guys get beat to hell, now I protect them from it. Twisted karma is what that is.

They named the bar after that classic movie. All the guys that go in there all made up, dressed in black leather, lots of skin showing. Makes me want to puke.

It was there, one night, that I overheard a couple of theses flitters talking about a place down south, where the sun was warmer and there was crops not growing inside old building, turned into hot houses. Outside in the light and all, like nature intended. I’ve heard rumors over the years that the tropics might still be all right. Some say it’s got to be more like what Missouri used to be – not too bad. But no one here really knows for sure.

Yeah, I’ve heard it all before and I’ve even thought about leaving. But I got a safe place to stay -as long as I make sure to sleep lightly, with my shotgun across my chest, in my windowless room, with the steel door locked from the inside. OK, maybe it’s not perfect. Actually… it’s pretty shitty.

The problem is getting to this mythical land. Outside the city’s defenses, bands of bikers roam wild. They got their turf divided up between the Roadies and their fast, skinny-wheeled machines and the Off Roaders with their full suspension mountain bikes. You just don’t want to mess with either one of these groups. Beyond them is a vast blank space.

The few citizens that have made it into Frisco, tell stories of hiding from wild, four legged animals and even wilder animals that walk upright. It sounds like the Wild West meets Genghis Khan out there.

Still, I hate it here and can’t see any good reason to stay. I don’t know if it’s really any better, down in what use to be the tropics, but I can’t see it being any worse.

I’m starting to seriously think that I’d rather take my chances out there, with the biker gangs and bands of rabid, vegan hippies, than wake-up some morning to find my skull cracked and my pants around my ankles -behind Thunderdome.