From Part I: Dorothy: Battle Creek Headquarters, New Libertarian Overworld

[Excerpt from The Truman Prophecy, due for publication 12/25/15.]

Alfonse’s days of actually running to escape police capture were behind him—as a young leading man of the new cloth, Brother Al was ‘Mr. Medical Marijuana’ before Medical Marijuana was cool… or legal.

His tech setup back then was like something out of a science fiction movie: the distribution-center he set up in his church and residence on Emmett Street doubling as a halfway house, and all product in proximity to carriers or workers was protected from detection via ‘transform tech.’

Transform technology (transform tech) was one of a series of high-tech antiaggression (AA) tools[1] made available to ordinary fellows like Alfonse Cody Jefferson by a mysterious benefactor in the early part of the new century. Basically, for finely programmable circumstances of unwanted intrusion or coercion by authorities or other aggressors, your illegal substance and all nearby traces would turn into a material analog… instantly.

It drove drug cops and prosecutors bananas. The police would pull some guy over with a trunkful of weed and while they were radioing in the details—and notifying their friends on the force of some primo kickass Colombian for the after-hours party tonight—the find would all turn into oregano. Down to the last roach-clip remnant in the ash tray.

[So the official bullies would have to settle for the civil forfeiture takings, which were mostly the driver’s old beater, $20 in cash, and an expired VISA. Man, those guys would come in George-Foreman-Griddle hot and looking for some homeless guy or cripple to beat bloody… go home and kick the wife, kid, and dog.

[Then, get this. When the heat backed off and sent you on your way, depending on your settings, the oregano—no one is going to confiscate an herb from you—would turn back into whatever grade weed it was! (If the cops did confiscate it, it would remain oregano forever.) Nothing lost but some time to the increasingly occupational police forces of the country.]

Same kind of behavior for when the drug police would bust down the door of your residence or place of work looking for contraband. Bro Al lost count of the number of raids where Battle Creek’s and the state’s finest would come a callin’, think they’d just scored their evening party stash, then go ape-feces when they discovered it all transform away.

Of course, the prohibition squads managed to do a lot of damage to the soup kitchen after a decade of B&E under color of law. Which was actually another benefit: insurance covered the damages and paid for a substantial amount of remodeling. Bro Al and his Church of the Caring Jesus became a fixture in the neighborhood, a beacon of hope and self-help.

Al was always more comfortable among traditional left-oriented political persons… but only to a point. He absolutely loathed the government welfare and schooling systems, which he felt created a whole subclass of lazy obedient dummies who were of no use to anyone, especially themselves. This culture of dependency had descended—by clear, full intention—on all the cities and towns across the American landscape. Keeping the economically disadvantaged economically disadvantaged… and morally, spiritually bankrupt as well.

Cereal City was the town Reverend Cody Al, now 40-something, had grown up in. Like most company towns, or industry towns, in America, Battle Creek’s corporate-governing hierarchy had long ago discharged any genuine productive leaders in favor of neurocratic yes men. The real-person economy tanked.

Yes, there had always been some racial divide, but when he was born, 1967, Big Cereal had only just started disintegrating. Blue collar work still abounded, especially by today’s standards. It didn’t matter that you happened to be black, as was his family.

Later he would learn from his mother that the system wasn’t so much racist or prejudiced as it was culturally conformist:

“When I grew up,” she declared, “you as an individual had a lot to say about who you were going to be, and access to tools and schools—and decent, caring white people, that actually helped you develop your mind… so long as you stood as an individual and resisted any collective identification.” [Battle Creek was, in the latter half of the 19th century, the home of celebrated abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Sojourner Truth. People claimed his mother was Truth’s reincarnation.]

Thus Cody Al was raised with a strong sense of the importance of the independent mind and individual virtue. Mom had developed astounding business English and clerical skills and taught both part time at the community college. She also filled in as a court reporter-stenographer.

Al’s father, having enlisted in the Marines rather than be drafted, was killed in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. The photos and memorabilia that his mother maintained around the house were testimony to her love for the man, also conveying to only-son Cody, a respect for the country—its First Principles and Constitutional liberty—that, at least his dad thought, he was fighting for.

His mother read widely and kept track of the political environment, also the educational world. As Cody approached the latter years of grade school, she realized how hazardous the government schools—more and more federalized and administration-heavy—were becoming to her son’s mental and moral health. Quality was going out the window as the educational mission morphed into kowtowing to the lowest common denominator, giving up classical education of the individual conceptual mind, entirely.

She heard of Marva Collins, the extraordinary Chicago teacher who started a private academy for teaching African-American children that the Chicago schools had labeled learning disabled. His mother made arrangements for acquiring the materials and learning Marva’s key methods, then locating other parents in their neighborhood to create a ‘homeschool’ based on those ‘Westside Prep’ school principles.

So, thanks to his mom and three other home-teachers who shared duties, Al and roughly a dozen other kids went free enterprise in the learning department. This was 1979, just before he would have entered junior high school. No longer shackled to deadening, meaningless factory-prison-school comformities, Al’s comprehension of everything took off like a Saturn V rocket….

[1] Some say the benefactor has OIB (other intelligent being: ‘Kindly Visitors’) roots or connections, mainly because the technology looks ‘breakaway’ sophisticated. Other antiaggression (AA) tools include some that act a) as repeller/neutralizer, even inverter, of physical blows or projectiles, b) to render immediately unconscious human assailants, c) to cloak assailant targets rendering them invisible and undetectable for short periods of time, d) to provide—for well-trained users—limited telekinesis/transportive powers for moving assailants and would be assailants and their equipment to locations of safety, and e) to confine such aggressors benignly, autohealing wounds, releasing them upon lie-detector oath of refusing to aggress further.