The passage quoted here is the conversation between two characters during the early 1970's:
Mucho blinked sympathetically, a little sadly. "I guess it's over. We're on into a new world now, it's the Nixon Years, then it'll be the Reagan Years--"
"Ol' Raygun? No way he'll ever make president."
"Just please go careful, Zoyd. 'Cause soon they're gonna be coming after everything, not just drugs, but beer, cigarettes, sugar, salt, fat, you name it, anything that could remotely please any of your senses, because they need to control all that. And they will."
"Fat police?"
"Perfume Police. Tube Police. Music Police. Good Healthy Shit Police. Best to renounce everything now, get a head start."
"Well I still wish it was back then, when you were the Count. Remember how the acid was? Remember that windowpane, down in Laguna that time? God, I knew then, I knew..."
They had a look. "Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed to control a population that knows it'll never die? When that was always their last big chip, when they thought they had the power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see through that one, so of course they had to take it away from us."
"Yeah, but they can't take what happened, what we found out."
"Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming--just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after awhile they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us again." It was the way people used to talk.
"I'm not gonna forget," Zoyd vowed, "fuck 'em. While we had it, we really had some fun."
"And they never forgave us." Mucho went to the stereo and put on 'The Best of Sam Cooke', volumes 1 and 2, and then they sat together and listened, both of them this time, to the sermon, one they knew and felt their hearts comforted by, though outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into.
And now this passage, taking place in 1984:
The burden of proof, Elmhurst explained, would be reversed here--to get his property back, Zoyd would first have to prove his innocence.
"What about 'innocent till proven guilty'?"
"That was another planet, think they used to call it America, long time ago, before the gutting of the Fourth Amendment. You were automatically guilty the minute they found that marijuana growing on your land."
"Wait--I wasn't growin' nothin'."
"They say you were. Duly sworn officers of the law, wearing uniforms, packing guns, bound to uphold the Constitution, you think men like that would lie?"
I talked recently (yesterday) to a fellow Christian who had been in prison recently (he had converted in prison), and he could see quite plainly that our whole nation is gradually evolving (devolving?) into 'lock down' status. The Republicans of the last administration might have given us Fascism-lite, but with this new Régime, the gloves will come off. And we will have the full flavored version of Fascism. And in regard to the health nuttiness, remember the Nazi's were all 'health nuts'. The current 'stimulus package' includes the set-up for the aggregation of everyone's health records into one national database. Wait 'till you get denied health insurance because you ate too many cheeseburgers. Ah the joys of Totalitarianism.
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