3 t was winter and World Repartition III was still dragging on and Calendar Reform VI was still not fully implemented. Cuboslavakia had just given Florway back to CanaMex, and Mayor Zero had been appointed Governor because his integrity and impartiality were unimpeachable. Or impeccable. Or whatever. His first act as Governor was to make it clear that "This is not about *that*! This is about *about*!" And his first appointee to head the joint "ACLU of Love" and the "Death Squad of Desire" was, of course, me. 4 And I got right down to work without any bullshit because I knew the Governor badly needed my help running his new raceless, sexless, classless, jingoless, self-righteousnessless colony. My job description as the head of various front organizations would, itself, be just a front, and my real mission would be finding and recruiting skinny 3- and 4-year olds who could be lowered down from an apartment building roof in a basket, fit through the bars covering an open window, crawl inside, and go let the older, larger members of the team in through the front door, to rob and ransack the place when nobody's home.

5 threw myself into the work, at first, and we managed to recruit enough talent to comprise several crack teams. But, then, the Governor just kinda let it slide and never lined up any jobs for them and, in the end, just used them to make the 10 minute promotional film, "One World People, One World Government, One World Celebrity" and, then, quietly, abandoned the idea altogether. 6 He had more important projects, anyway. He went on world satellite and offered a free, orbiting space station to any nation that renamed itself after the most popular or most repugnant slur used against it. This was such a good deal that, right away, Gritaly took advantage of it and changed its name to Goombahland, and Ireway followed suit, changing overnight to Mickland. 6 months later, however, even as the Governor continued to assure both nations that "The space station's in the mail," they just quietly changed their names back and appealed to World Database to have the incident removed from any mention in the Nabisco History of the Cosmos. 7 I was sent by the Governor as his personal envoy to Ireway, to try to smooth things over. When I got there, I didn't fuck around and told the President right off that everything would be cool again between our 2 states if he would just change the name of his country to Fontella Bass, and let us take over his highways to use in testing new experimental UPS vehicles, ranging from personal 2-seater UPS sports-trucks, to armored, military, UPS personnel carriers, to motorized UPS wheel chairs, to high performance UPS bullet cars.

8 efore the President had a chance to think it over and respond, I was called away suddenly to attend a high-profile, weeklong public ceremony at which I would be presented with the prestigious "Surface Award." The prize had been established by the company that made those massive air-conditioning units that people turned on full blast whenever the lady upstairs started screaming things at her wife like: "You fucking moron. You stupid fucking moron. You lame stupid fucking asshole moron. You lame stupid fucking asshole moron piece of shit." The "Surface Award" was supposed to be given to someone who'd spent an entire career just skimming the outermost surface of ideas -- but over the years, it had been politicized to the point where, now, it was usually given to someone who'd spent an entire career just skimming over the outermost surface of appeasement. The first part of the award was an ancient collection of historic phone/sat-comm and filthy verbal/vid-talk. 9 The other part of the award was a position on the World Peoples' Universal Products Council. This was a bunch of men and women in the Action Room on the 19th floor of the main building of the Universal Products complex, sitting around a large table with a universal multi-workstation built in at each place. An 8X12 foot video wall displayed a brightly colored semantic network structure with the names of some of the human traits scratched in pixels, across appropriate nodes and arrows. This was the working design-in-progress of the new one-size-fits-all, hero, deity, mother, father, lover, protector, child, punisher, comforter, asshole, genius, lamo, super(wo)man to be -- who would pretend to happen along by chance, one day, and then stay on to fulfill the needs and desires of everybody in the world. "Fuck each other! or Kill each other!" would be her motto. "Nothing in between!" 10 The team leader filled me in on the current state of the design. "First off," Dr. Afrasia said, "She's the kinda guy that just storms in anywhere and does whatever the fuck she wants. She's always hyper, always wants everything, always thinks everybody's out to stop her or get in her way. "So, out of pure paranoid defensiveness, she just forces her will on existence, grabs everything, takes everything, demolishes any obstacle. She has no commitments or sense of responsibility. Her motto is: `Career is like a library -- once you're inside, you just have to keep your mouth shut.' "But she's sensitive too -- a genteel hun. "The comic book about her (which is projected to become the sacred spiritual text, more or less, of the world people) will only show her as either manic-possessive- but-righteous, or extremely violent but ultimately self-sacrificing. "It'll be left, then, to world literature of the future, to devote itself to examining her darker, more depressive and sensitive sides, not touched upon by the comic book or popular mythology. "And, likewise, world philosophy and psychology of the future will certainly be based on everybody wondering why the fuck she even bothered at all. "And world sociology of the future will, no doubt, revolve around exploring the concept that she's not entirely the self-indulgent asshole her loyal followers consider her to be."