---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The True Story of the InterNet Part III InfoWar Final Frontier of the Digital Revolution Behind the ElectroMagnetic Curtain by TruthMonger <tm@dev.null> Copyright 1997 Pearl Publishing ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- InfoWar Table of Contents * Everything You Know Is Wrong ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Everything You Know Is Wrong ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I think that we're all Bozos on this bus!" Alexis glanced at Bubba Rom Dos with a worried look showing on her face. Was he drifting back toward Never-Never Land as a result of a fresh backlash of InformEnergy from their renewed use of the Trei Transponder? "Don't crush that dwarf, hand me the pliers." the Cowboy said, seemingly in response to Bubba's strange statement. Bubba and the Cowboy sat grinning like banshees at each other and Alexis, but she couldn't discern whether their lunacy was their 'normal' lunacy, or the 'abnormal' lunacy coming from a hundred years in the past, compliments of Peter Trei and ? the Lunatic. Alexis threw up her hands, and said, "I give up! Are you you crazy, or are you him crazy?" "Firesign Theater crazy." the Cowboy responded, with a chuckle, as if that was supposed to mean something. Alexis was happy to see Priscilla, d'Shauneaux and Melissa approaching, thinking that there was safety in numbers when faced with the combined mirth and madness of Bubba and the Cowboy. Still, she couldn't resist saying to the three as they approached the table, "I think that we're all Bozos on this bus!" As the three gave Alexis a puzzled look, Cowboy added, "Don't crush that dwarf, hand me the pliers." Bubba rose to speak to the assembled group, but d'Shauneaux stopped him short with a wave of his hand. "Hold it!" he said, abruptly. He reached for the Jack Daniel's, poured the three newcomers a shot, knocked back his shot and poured himself another, tipped his hat to Bubba, and said, "OK, Bubba. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" Priscilla and Melissa hurriedly knocked back the shots of bourbon sitting in front of them, as if failing to do so would result in their being left vulnerable to the unspeakable evil that was the inevitable result of remaining sober during one of the grizzled sage's grand monologues. Bubba nodded to the group, gave himself a hitch in the crotch, lifted his arms upward and outward, as if blessing the masses gathered at the base of the Holy Mount, waiting for the Word from On High, and told those gathered before him, "Everything you know is wrong!" The small assembly looked at each other, nodded in agreement that this was obviously one of the great truths of life that everyone instinctively knew was true, but which nobody would ever be able to explain, and they rose as a group, as the Cowboy said, "Well, that's all for today. Let's go home…" "Sit down!" Bubba commanded, trying to look offended. As the group retook their seats, Jonathan arrived, saying, "Bubba, are you about to explain one of those things that is unexplainable, and draw us into your sticky web of beyond the fringe reality, convincing us, once again, that we actually understand and agree with your madness?" Bubba looked hurt. "Of course not. You're much too smart for me to even hope to accomplish such a thing." He pushed the bottle of Jack Daniel's toward Jonathan with a grin and a wink. "I am hoping to accomplish this devious task with the Magic Circle and CypherPunks who currently stand at a crucial point in history where their actions have the potential to make a difference between a Global Electronic Renaissance taking shape, or a Fascist ElectroMagnetic Curtain slamming down around them, imprisoning all on earth within a virtual reality that will be structured and controlled by a privileged few who pay tribute to the diablerie of their own opportunistic self-interest." Bubba paused to gauge his small audience's reaction, thus far, and decided that he was on a roll and could pull out all of the stops. He sat down, poured himself a shot of Jim Beam, and leaned over to whisper to his coconspirators in their desperate fight against the tide of history and humanity which strove to sweep them into the great ocean of group mind. "Everything you know is wrong…" he whispered, his eyes taking on a great sadness that swept over those gathered with him around the old oak table. "…which is why we laugh." he added, breaking into a melancholy, ironic grin. "All truth lies in comedy." the Cowboy interjected, with a slightly less sad smile, indicating that the theme for the day was going to be "The only way out is through.", meaning that he and Bubba were about to help them step into a world where reality lay on the other side of the laughter or lunacy, the happiness or sadness, the Yin and the Yang of every conceivable thought, belief and emotion imaginable. "George Carlin said it best." Bubba nodded to the Cowboy, thanking him for his support in treading boldly into the arms of the illogical in a journey toward the unthinkable. "I make my living telling people things they already know, but forgot they knew." Bubba quoted the Zen master of uncommon sense. "Lenny Bruce also said it best." the Cowboy added, proceeding to stand and pace like a junkie speed-freak whose feet were trying to keep his brain in close proximity to his racing mind, "People tell me 'You're Jewish. You killed Jesus.' I tell them, 'Hey, it was a party, it got a little out of hand.' "Lenny Bruce was Jesus." the Cowboy continued. "That's why he was crucified by the Pharisees of his time, as Jesus was in his own…they both spoke the truth and refused to renounce their own perception of reality. "This is why the CypherPunks will be crucified as well." the Cowboy touched Jonathan gently on the shoulder, knowing that this statement would cause him to relive some of the tempestuous memories of his childhood. "And the Author also said it best." Bubba lightened the atmosphere a bit. "There's no niggers left in Oakland, babe, and all my lies are true." The small group laughed, remembering one of the legends surrounding the Author, who was, in one of his incarnations, the King of Country Porno. It seems that he was in Africa, serving as a bodyguard for a group of white Berkeley intellectuals who spent all of their time hanging out in the tourist areas where they ran little risk of running into too many of the original citizens of the country they were visiting. At night, the Author would cruise the city proper, seeking good booze and good music. He was in a beer and music hall holding close to a couple thousand party animals, all of whom were of a different pigmentation than himself, and the band that was playing, upon learning that he was a musician, invited him to get up and sing a few tunes. He had launched into "All My Lies Are True," not realizing, until he approached the chorus, that the last line might be considered politically incorrect in certain circles. The Author bit the bullet, and sang it the way he wrote it. "I just talked to the President and he sends you his regards. And Willie Nelson told me he wants to make you a star. They just found Howard Hughes' real will, and he left it all to you. There's no niggers left in Oakland, babe, and all my lies are true." "So why wasn't the Author crucified, if he also spoke the truth, as he saw it." Alexis asked the question which everyone immediately recognized as something they were also wondering about, but forgot that they were, until she asked it. Bubba grinned, and told them all what they already knew. "Because…he was crazy." The small group all slapped their foreheads. "We knew that!" they said, in unison, and then broke out in laughter. Bubba stood, once again, to explain some of the oddities of the era they were currently studying, saying, "People who spoke the 'uncomfortable' truths that no one wanted to hear were generally classified as 'crazy' and given special dispensation, since nobody paid any serious attention to them. "Claiming to be Jesus, or to be speaking for this or that God, got you hospitalized or ignored," Bubba continued, "unless you gathered a following who believed you." The Cowboy spoke up, saying, "David Koresh, the messiah from Waco was really no different from a number of other self-proclaimed saviors of his day, except that he was claiming to be Jesus, in the heart of the Bible belt, and he had black followers agreeing with him. It is an anathema to claim to be Caesar, in the heart of Rome, as well. "People want to worship symbols. They wish to worship 'from afar.' If they are faced with the embodiment of their beliefs, then they are forced to confront their beliefs, and to act on them. If someone appears whose presence threatens to force you to face yourself, your hopes and dreams, your fears and shortcomings-then you have to kill them." The group sat in silence…each contemplating in their own way the things that the Cowboy had just spoken of. "The comedians of the Author's time were similar to the Fools in the courts of the Kings, were they not?" Alexis asked Bubba. "Very astute, my dear." Bubba lifted his shotglass in toast to her. Then he proceeded, saying, "The Fool in the royal court was granted a special dispensation to relieve the stress that comes with political intrigue. The Fool was allowed to speak the unspoken truths which were known to one and all, but which had to remain unspoken in daily life so that secret foes could remain public allies in their alliance against their public adversaries. "Likewise, the comedians of the Author's time," Bubba said, "were allowed to 'poke fun' at the sacred cows and authorities of their day, although it was an open secret that they were, in reality, 'poking truth' at the object of their humor." "The CypherPunks," Jonathan broke in, "were originally the equivalent of the Fools in the King's court." "They appeared on the cover of 'Wired' magazine, early in its existence, wearing hockey masks with bar-code numbers, and the like, on them." "Wired Magazine," the Cowboy explained, "was one of the first public indications that, not only was it true that 'The Medium is the Message,' but also that the operant, or user, was the medium. "The Department of Defense had designed the InterNet to consolidate the communications of the scientists and intelligentsia of their era, supposedly in the interests of security, but actually in the interests of control of and access to those communications. The development and dissemination of this cutting edge technology via the system of higher education of that era, meant that both the structure and the use of the technology were being influenced in a major way by youth who stood halfway between the foolishness of childhood and the seriousness of adulthood." Priscilla, the designated 'mother' of the group, picked up the thread of logic, instinctively knowing where it was going, although she knew little of the details surrounding the technology of the era being discussed. "We have to remember that the time period we are discussing was a transition point between the education of the masses moving out of the hands of the state and into the hands of the media. The governments of the time had gone to great trouble to use the media as a tool to reinforce the role of the education system in turning out well-formed cogs in the wheels of society. "Even those parents who still strove to keep the ultimate results of their children's education and the development of their belief systems in their parents own hands, little realized that their own values and beliefs were mostly the end product of public education and media reinforcement of those same values and beliefs." Jonathan, being more familiar with the details of the educational system of that period, backed up Priscilla's statements, by adding, "Quite so." "As Priscilla has pointed out, as the end of the millennium approached, the preceding generations of adults had been increasingly programmed by a benevolent system of 'free' education which had as its aim the alignment of psychological development of the masses with the goals of the industrial revolution. "The benefits of the printing press and the factory for society meant that they were seen as 'good' and of 'value,' which led to a common error that has been perpetrated throughout history, namely, turning what was seen as 'good' into a 'god' and proceeding to institute and worship it in every area of daily life. Public education was promoted as an efficient way to give the benefits of equal intellectual and societal development to the commoners, through structuring the education system around the 'mass production' techniques which had proven to be beneficial in many ways in the arena of industrial technology." "In many ways," Jonathan continued, "the system of public education was of benefit to both society and the individual." "Unless you were a 'round peg,' in a society that had established 'square holes' as the 'standard' of the time." Bubba cut in. "Exactly." Alexis agreed, picking up the thread of the conversation from the perspective of the anomalies of that time period, according to the areas she had been investigating. "And throughout history, the role of adults has largely been to shape the round eggs," she paused to let the others recognize her subtle humor, "into a shape which would fit the particular sociological-religious-political structures of their day. "I can see where Cowboy is leading with his indication that one of the defining features of the InterNet, which made the Digital Revolution it launched vastly different from the Industrial Revolution which proceeded it, was that it was now the youth who were shaping the technology of the medium of the future." "Yes!" the Cowboy got up and walked to where Alexis was sitting, giving her a kiss on the forehead and then hugging her. He turned to the rest of the group, and continued from where he had left off. "The advances of the Industrial Revolution had made possible the development of the computer. However, the original computers suffered from their propensity for the software written for them being molded to fit the design of the physical product. In short, the machines produced were just that-machines. "One of the reasons the Author attributed to his becoming a computer guru in an amazingly short period of time, was his entry into the computer arena as the apprentice of Bill Campbell, one of the designers of the Adam motherboards, and the Authors work with retarded children early in life." Bubba broke in, to explain, "At the time, the general consensus in the industry was, 'Computers can't think.' Even during his initial learning stage in the computer arena, the Author always rebelled against this view. "His would always protest, 'Of course they can think! They think like retarded children.' And then he would proceed to recount a period of time when he received room and board from a woman who also had boarders who were outpatients from a local mental health facility, and who were considered mentally deficient. "He would tell of a fellow boarder, Paul, to whom the lady of the house would say, 'Paul, please take out the garbage.'" Bubba smiled along with the others, as they all knew the story, but always loved to hear it again. "The Author would then tell those listening to his analogy, 'After a few minutes, the lady would stick her head out of the doorway, and holler, "Paul…come back!"'" The small group broke into laughter, although they had heard the story many times in the past. The Cowboy spoke up, telling the others, "My research has indicated that the first computer software was a dismal failure, because the programmer had merely programmed it to 'go.' After he had sold it to 'a billionaire to be named later' it was rewritten to add, 'come back' to the command structure, and computer software was born." "Like the 'find' command, in UNIX." Jonathan laughed at the memory of his own foolishness. "Upon hearing that it was one of the most powerful and useful commands included in the operating system, I spent a considerable amount of time 'book-learning' all of the intricacies of the command. When I applied the results of my efforts to use of the command on the computer, itself, however, nothing ever seemed to happen. "My mentor was watching me entering all of these complicated, esoteric commands designed to do this, or that, only to have the end result once again be an empty prompt staring back at me from the computer screen. He leaned over me, calling up my last command, and added the '-print' option to it." Jonathan laughed at the memory. "As he walked away, with my screen scrolling madly, reporting the voluminous results of the command, he smiled and said, 'come back.' Point taken…" Bubba rose, once again, to continue his dissertation to the group. "Which brings us back to my original statement." Bubba nodded to Jonathan for his contribution to the thread of the conversation. "Despite having spent a great deal of time and effort in 'learning by rote' the details and intricacies of the 'find' command,' everything Jonathan knew was wrong. "Why?" Bubba challenged the assembled members of the Magic Circle. "Because what he had learned didn't do him any good." Priscilla spoke up. "He didn't know the importance and the purpose of the various aspects of the command whose details he had memorized." Alexis suggested. Bubba looked to Jonathan, who had told this story before, without ever really seeking the true lesson which it potentially held for him. "I was expecting to be spoon-fed." Jonathan said, in awe of what he had just realized. "Yes!" cried all of the small group, at once. The tattered remnants of the Magic Circle each sat quietly, writing, typing, or thinking about the full implications of their discussion, so far, on the possibility that, as Bubba and Firesign Theater had informed them, everything they knew was wrong. "Everything you know can be as right as rain," Alexis pointed out, "until you take a step back, and a step to the left…and then it is all wrong." Jonathan scanned what he had written on the GraphiScreen and added, "You may be the consummate master of hand-to-hand combat, but if you bring a knife to a gunfight, then everything you know is wrong." The Cowboy laughed, understanding perfectly the line of thinking that had at one time been used in Texas as an argument for the superiority of one race over another. "AND, OR, IF!" All eyes turned to the Cowboy. "After 'GO' and 'COME BACK' had been established as the essence of computer programming," he smiled, "the 'retards' in charge of programming computers began to get fancy, including the basics of elementary logic in their programming structures. "They began to realize that 1 AND 0 would inherently return results that were different from 1 OR 0, in certain situations. Upon recognizing that the same command would return different results in dissimilar situations, then they began to realize the power of being able to qualify the command with IF." "And for many years," Bubba added, "these 'geniuses' became the elite of the computer industry for their ability to say AND, OR, IF, at a much faster rate than the pencil-pushers were able to do. "While ridiculing the idea that a 'mentally retarded' member of their society could be classified as a genius for deciding that 'IF' his hand hurt like hell when he told it to 'GO' to a hot burner on a stove, 'THEN' he would remove it, they nonetheless held themselves and one another in high esteem for their rudimentary ability to write code that said, "IF I>0…" Those gathered were laughing at Bubba, at each other, and at themselves, as they recalled the passage from "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre" which said, For men...it's like sex. You get half-decent at it, and you think you goddamn invented it. You look at those poor fools passing by on the street below and wonder what they would think if they knew you could make the variable 'i' count to a hundred, in increments of two, nonetheless, (or four, or ten, or whatever I decide---I have the power, the watch will do my bidding). But you could never explain it to them, they wouldn't understand. They don't have your knowledge. Or Power. It's a Secret that mere mortals can't fathom Priscilla, having become enamored with the rise of the FemiNazis in the Author's era, could not resist mentioning, "As long as computers remained the exclusive domain of the male members of the species, their development was basically limited to the production of 'bigger and better' penises, which performed at increasingly faster rates of speed." Alexis, seeing the chagrin of the male members of the group, backed up her mother's perspective by adding, "It wasn't until the female members of the tribe began to educate the male members that bigger and faster was not necessarily better, not only in sexual matters, but also in the realm of computer technology," she paused to receive a high-five from Priscilla, "that computers began to become somewhat useful for serving humans, rather than humans increasingly adapting their lifestyles to fit the design of the machine." "Yes…yes…a thousand times, yes!" Bubba roared, toasting the ladies, who returned his toast with an appreciative smile. Nonetheless, Bubba could not resist adding, "Now shut up and quit butting into men's business." After the women had finished pelting the old coot with ice cubes from their water glasses, Alexis returned Bubba's belittlement, kind for kind. "Yes, Priscilla," Alexis said, "we should let the man wearing the dress have the floor." Bubba smiled, smoothed his robe as if he was a debutante at her coming-out party, and continued. "Although both women and men were capable of fighting for survival when faced with a hostile world, the men tended to become the warmongers of various societies, since the hormones of the homo sapiens seemed to lean toward 'fight' in the males and 'flight' in the females. Thus the males tended to fight aggressively, to 'conquer' new territories, and the females tended to fight defensively, in order to 'defend' their territory, when it was invaded. "This was reflected in their respective roles in procreation," Bubba pointed out, "wherein the males would seek to penetrate the inner space of the woman, and the woman would seek to limit access to the inner parts of her physical being by exercising the power of personal choice as to who she would allow to penetrate her physical space and, therefore, her inner being." Alexis spoke up, saying, "Is it time for the children to leave the room?" "No, dear, you may stay." Bubba responded, winking at her. The Cowboy got things back on track by asking Bubba, "Wasn't the Author's era a time when humanity began moving past enslavement to the physical attributes of their bodies and their hormones, and toward accessing both the Yin and Yang aspects of the potentials that they all shared in common?" "Yes." Bubba stated, happy for the opportunity to move the discussion back toward the original starting point of the dialogue he had engendered. "To everything, there is a season. And a time to every purpose, under heaven." Bubba declared. "The Byrds." Jonathan said, then adding, "Or the Bible, if you are the religious type." "Exactly!" Bubba recognized the unwitting flow of the Tao in Jonathan's statement. "Everything you know is wrong." "When Jesus was the popular figure of the day, then one was 'right' in attributing the statement to the Bible. "However, once the Beatles became more popular than Jesus," Bubba was humorously referring to one of the meaningless, but important, ten-second sound bytes of the Author's era, "then attributing the statement to a musical group called the Byrds was 'right.'" "Does the warm or the cold water lie at the top of the lake?" Bubba asked, rhetorically. "It depends on the time, the place, and the season." "Twice a year, the lake turns over, with the warm water rising to the top, and the cold water sinking to the bottom, or vice versa. So no matter how 'right' you are at any particular point in time, then hours, seconds, or minutes later, you may be 'wrong.'" Bubba was about to bring his arguments full circle, bringing great metaphysical meaning to the things they had been discussing, but he realized that his mind had gone blank, and he could not remember what his original point had been. He motioned for the Cowboy to proceed. The Cowboy laughed, picking up the thread that Bubba had left hanging in mid-air. "Everything you know is wrong…why?" "Because the universe is in motion, and knowledge is static." Alexis replied. The Cowboy nodded his appreciation to Alexis for cutting to the heart of the matter. "Jonathan mentioned that the problem he had with the 'find' command in UNIX was the result of his studying the details of the command, but expecting to be 'spoon-fed' the results. "At the tail end of the Industrial Revolution, when the education of the masses had been brought into alignment with the goals of the mechanization of society, the common view was that survival was now contingent on fitting in as a cog of the societal and governmental machines that had been created. "No longer was evolution and adaptation to a changing environment the secret to survival. Now, survival was contingent upon forcing the environment to fit into the structures that society and government had created in order to bend the universe to the will of mankind. And the survival of the individual within the society was therefore contingent upon staying within the confines of the defined societal and governmental structures of the day." "In the society that came about as a result of the Industrial Revolution, 'jigs' became the rule of the day. If the 'jig' in the factory required you to put a square peg in the square hole, in order to turn out a final product, then you did so. If all you had was round pegs, then you 'adjusted' them into the shape of a square. "The public education system of the Author's time was geared toward shaping the future adults of society to fit properly into the 'jigs' that had been designed to produce a pre-designed end product. Upon entry into the educational system, the children were ill-suited to being fitted into a slot of a particular size and shape, but they were 'broken down' and 're-formed' to fit their predestined slots in life, over a period of time as they advanced through the educational system." Bubba noted, "And if they failed to be broken down and 're-formed' by the regular educational system, then they were sent to 'reform school.'" The Cowboy laughed at his mentor's astute observation. "The Medium is the Message." the Cowboy reiterated one of the themes of their current discussion. "And the medium of the Industrial Revolution was the 'jig' which enabled mass production by turning the labor of the masses into a no-brainer." "Yes!" Bubba jumped to his feet, rejoining the land of people with functional brains. "Until the Industrial Revolution was overtaken by the Digital Revolution." Bubba was in his element, once again. "The technology, and thus the structure, of the Digital Revolution, was very much in the hands of the youth of the day, who were progressing from childhood to adulthood in a system of higher education in which they were the hands and feet of the intellectual elite of that point in history. "The InterNet was designed by the DOD to facilitate the efficient exchange of ideas and information between the scientific titans of the era, as well as allowing those in charge of the technology to monitor and manipulate both the source and ultimate directions that this sharing of InformEnergy would take." "They didn't realize that they were dealing with InformEnergy, did they?" Alexis asked, beginning to realize why it took so long for those using the technology of the Digital Revolution to begin to understand the true power of the forces they were dealing with. "No, Alexis, they didn't." Bubba motioned for the Cowboy to explain further. "The youth of the day understood the essence and potential of the technology that they were working with." the Cowboy stated. "But the dinosaurs in positions of power and authority, who failed to realize that the Industrial Revolution was coming to a close, thought of the InterNet as a way to pass data, and information. When the government of the US began to recognize the enormous potential of the InterNet, they promoted it as the 'Information Highway,' never suspecting that their children, who were still capable of creating and shaping their world in tune with their own ongoing growth processes, saw it, not as a tool to manipulate static information and data, but as a living, breathing entity, which would ultimately endow the static information of their forefathers with the energy which they, themselves, generated by the methods and processes they chose to employ in the use and development of the technology and the media, itself." "We make our gods, and do battle with them…and they bless us." Bubba quoted one of the sages of the Author's era, Herman Hesse. "Interactive media!" Jonathan exclaimed, realizing for the first time the full import of what this early InterNet aphorism implied. "Precisely." the Cowboy agreed with Jonathan's unspoken train of thought. "Bob Dylan, one of the poets of the Net-Generation's parents, had said something to the effect that those who aren't busy living, are busy dying. "The parents had heard, and understood, the poets of their time, during the flower of their youth, but as they grew older, they settled into the statism of their programmed, mechanized education. " "The saints and sages of each generation were recognized and truly heard only by a small portion of those existing in the epoch within which they lived and died. It was invariably the youth of succeeding generations who separated the wheat from the chaff in the knowledge to which they were exposed in their formative years. "When Jesus said, "I Am the Way, and the Truth, and the Light." many of those of his own generation recognized the truth of what he spoke, but did not understand the import of what these words could mean in the process of daily life. "The Net-Generation understood, 'I Am the Medium, and the Message.' They understood that they were living in an interactive universe, in which they were the eternal Tao which has moved the universe from the beginning of time. Bubba interjected, "While the titans of the computer industry were busy finding ways to wrestle dynamic InformEnergy into predefined slots corresponding to their own narrow desires, there were groups of individuals, such as those in Taos, New Mexico, who were exploring such things as Chaos Theory, and the like, which took into account the role of randomness in the creation of the structure of the universe." "And with the recognition of the role of chaos in the flow of the universe," Bubba continued, "came the possibility that humankind, through the use of logic and rationale, could dance with the chaos surrounding them, taking part in the creation of the universe in which they lived." "Everything you know is wrong…" Alexis said, pausing to complete the thought that was taking shape in her mind, "…if what you know remains static." "Everything you know is right…" Jonathan expanded Alexis' line of thought, "…if you recognize that you are living in an interactive reality which is a creation of your own thoughts and actions, as well as those of others…a co-creation of yourself and of the chaos around you." The tattered remnants of the Circle of Eunuchs sat in quiet contemplation of the surprising turn that their investigation into a period of time which lay a hundred years in the past had taken. "We are the world…" Priscilla quoted a song which had touched a nerve in the generation of humanity that they had been scrutinizing. Bubba smiled, taking Priscilla's hand in his own, and kissing it gently. He turned to his compatriots in the Magic Circle and spoke softly. "One of the terrible moments of each generation is when they look in the mirror and exclaim, in horror, 'I have become my parents.'" The group laughed, recognizing one of the verities of life that each generation of humanity had to face at a certain crossroads in the course of their life. "But they need not say it in shame," Bubba continued, "if they can honestly say that they have also, at some point in their life, gone beyond what their parents were, and beyond what their parents were capable of becoming. "The epitome of human development is to raise the children, whether they be your own, or the children of others, to go beyond the limitations of what you, yourself, have learned in the course of your lifetime." Bubba turned to Jonathan to bring their meeting to a close, knowing that he was the member of their small group who best understood the mentality of the time which they had accessed through use of the Trei Transponder, in the hope of making a difference in their past, and their future. Jonathan's countenance took on a seriousness that reflected a wisdom that went far beyond the number of years he had resided in physical existence. "In my grandfather's era," he said, "when the CypherPunks stood at a point in time where the future of humanity's movement into the arms of the Digital Revolution was as yet undecided…" Jonathan paused, to gather his thoughts in a manner that would fully express one of the defining issues of that era, then continued. "The battle cry of the day was, 'For the children.'" "Save the children…protect the children…in the interests of the children…" Jonathan sat, immobile, repeating, "…the children…the children …the children." After a few moments, he looked up at those around him, and said, "As governments based on physical location began to become an anachronism, those who sought to disguise their evil intentions by 'wrapping themselves in the flag' of their particular country, began to 'wrap themselves' in the cloak of 'defenders of the innocent' in all areas of life, across the face of the globe. "The cry of 'Save the children!' was used to justify every evil action under the face of the sun, as those in power strove to maintain their position in a civilization that was in the process of dying and decaying around them." "In order to save the children, we had to kill them." Priscilla said, weeping at the thought of the innocents who died in the government assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. "The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children." Alexis, added, referring to the actions of Timothy McVeigh in bombing the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. "Nuke the children!" Bubba bellowed, causing the others to pelt him with a fresh round of ice cubes. The Cowboy stood up and raised his shotglass in toast to the youth who currently existed a hundred years in the past of those gathered around the antique oak table. "A tribute to those to whom the future truly belongs…and to those who are truly our only hope for the future." "To the children…" Copyright "Anonymous TruthMonger <blancw@microsoft.com>" "That's not my boss. That's my lover!" ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre" "WebWorld & the Mythical Circle of Eunuchs" "InfoWar (Part III of 'The True Story of the InterNet') Soviet Union Sickle of Eunuchs Secret WebSite ----------------------------------------------------------------------------