Early this morning while talking with my good friend Rod Serling, he surprised me by giving me complete control over the name of his famous TV show. So, starting this very minute I now make the grand announcement that our beloved country shall now and henceforth be known as the United States of the Twilight Zone! USTZ sure has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
Renaming important places, buildings, and institutions, including waterways and lakes, and entire countries, certainly is thrilling. I feel so powerful even though I know that I’m not. But don’t you think that it’s a fitting name? Rod certainly thought so. Since the recurrent guy was first elected back in 2016, our world and Rod’s Twilight Zone have seemed ever more like the same place.
Every single day when I read the latest insane, absurd, illegal, pathological thing that the recurrent guy has said or done, I feel ever more stuck in an endless episode of the Twilight Zone. I did love that show back in the day, but attempting to live inside that world is not where I’d like to be.
And then it came to me that this is all Rod’s fault! He’s the one who wrote this story; of course he did. That’s why he’s now encouraged me to change the name of our country to USTZ. I would never have thought of such a thing. But, Rod said, if the recurrent guy can change the name of things, so can you. It may be illegal and courts may turn you down, but he keeps on with whatever he wants to do anyway. So can you!
After all, he continued, this is the Zone you’re living in. If you want to change the name of the country to USTZ or the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America, well, you just go right ahead. At that point I started to see that yes, indeed, we are no longer living in the old world where court orders are followed, where the highest court in the land upholds the constitution, where our members of congress stand up and fight for the rights of its citizens against an authoritarian narcissist who thinks he’s a king and is stealing every dollar he can right out of our pockets.
Clearly, we are now actually living deep inside one of Rod’s episodes, and he’s loving it. He told me that he has no idea how it happened, but he’s having a ball watching his most destructive ideas play out in real time right before his eyes. He even admitted to me that the script has begun acting like some kind of AI agent and he has lost control over where it’s headed. Even the recurrent guy’s executive order giving the US Post Office the unconstitutional authority to be the mail-in ballot police department wasn’t his idea! But it sure grew into something he wishes he’d thought up.
After all, creating, in such a very short time, a system that must receive huge state voter lists, then carefully analyze those lists, and then decide which ballots are actually illegal, would take much more time than it’s been given to design, implement and thoroughly test. And all that with the midterm elections less than two months away. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.
But Rod thought it was pure genius! No skin off his nose, not his world. He loved that the recurrent guy is so afraid that many of his political party’s elected officials are going to lose their upcoming elections, that the only way he knows he can win is to cheat by making sure that millions of the opposition’s voters will have their ballots thrown out and never counted.
By the time you read this column, the Supreme Court may have weighed in on this illegal, unconstitutional attempt to rig (the recurrent guy’s favorite word) the November elections. Maybe Rod’s out of control script will allow a majority of the justices to agree that this plan is just one more attempt by the recurrent guy to destroy what’s left of our democracy, and they will rule it unconstitutional, putting a stop to the plan immediately.
Or a majority of the justices will simply keep doing what it’s been doing, allowing the recurrent guy to have his way no matter how unconstitutional that may be. I told Rod that if he can find a way to take back control of this episode we’re living in, I begged him to do it. And then, of course, to turn this terrifying world around, back to something we recognize. I’d even be willing to drop the new name.
Karen Gardner of Haydenville can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.