A SALUTARY STORY OF SORROW MET DEALT WITH AND ASSUAGED

A long, long time ago in a land far from trouble and strife there lived and ruled a rich king and his fair queen. Their offspring, one girl, one boy and three others of assorted gender who had absolutely nothing better to do than complain their gender differences mattered in the kingdom, all bickered and quarrelled with each other as had their father and rich king enshrined in their very privileged minds.

Their exceptionalism, the descriptor having been bestowed on them at birth by their king, allowed them to feel exceptionally aloof from the hoi polloi populating so much of the rest of the kingdom. It was so estranging, so total that even they with their privileges were encouraged daily to go into the public square and encourage the people to think likewise – exceptionally. After many decades it was soon abundantly clear their daily seeding of such thoughts brought about an exceptional degree of arrogance, assumption of greatness, prosperity, number oneism and general belief in their own creation. In their imagined fullness they totally missed out on the reality of things as they are.

Throughout the rest of the world, not contained within the king’s kingdom, a manifest realisation led to a globally echoed line now infamously burned into history.

“There is something rotten in the State of Exceptionalia“.

Its repetition produced not fear but hilarity as those outside saw those inside the kingdom riding on the crest of their imagined wave oozing such pompous proportions they had no chance to perceive the tsunami of hubris racing up to meet them. While many in the rest of the world lived in abject poverty due to a trade embargo by the King’s men and staunching of the reserves of financial command , the people of Exceptionalia believed they lived The Dream. They felt so privileged to be living off the fruits of the land where freedom as the key progenitor equipped them to express their divine right as exceptionals into every orifice of life, land and liberty. That this was truly an illusion passed them by.

At times, well truth be told, all the time, they found themselves out there in the wider world bagging yet more rich resources or staging posts for expansion in an ill thought out, messy and collaterally devastating way. This as it happens meant nothing in the order of chaos sown. Chaos seemed to work so well for them they continued as they only knew fit, with bombs, decimation and distain. Back home the people, now fixated on their distractions freely offered and exceptionally available cared not one infant death as long as they had their toys. When doubt did sow its heady ointments into the still liquid minds of mostly Western state populace, the King’s eldest boy met with his psychopathic school mates from Cuckoonalia and created internal mayhem in the form of what became quaintly named false flag attacks. These involved often active shooters in schools, malls and anywhere the television ‘copters and cameras could reach in under three minutes. Always it had the effect of shutting up the nay sayers and doubters. Most never realised how many passports found at crime scenes, how many incantations to a foreign and strange god uttered moments before annihilation or membership to a rifle organisation indicated a thoroughly set piece set up delivered.

Such quiescence suited all especially the King and his men and erstwhile, cow towing women. In spite of ludicrous mini sub groups of the disenfranchised and disaffected of many colours crying foul and a rise in political correctness on a nano cosmic scale, the king’s lesser bred brood never really suffered any serious attention. Liberals, as they were laughingly referred to tried to fuel the bandwagon, but we all know a three wheeled bandwagon never really makes any appreciable distance.

As more and more adventures were made into and around the world outside the kingdom, it became apparent even to the lowly goat herders on the plains of far off lands and the river folk along the water arteries of the lands where dragons lived that something was so out of kilter, action was needed. The blood and treasure of the king’s men and hirsute women never really amounted to much even in their deathly throes, so any returning were cast onto a pit outside the royal domain where their grovelling and bemoaning their lot was taken up, recorded and turned into a sensational hit of the year in the Misery Moments, an overtly popular TV reality show fed the masses.

The fly in the ointment of global healing was as always a small sliver of land in the middle kingdoms where previously ancient territorial rights had been usurped, under false pretence and occupied by the most evil and rapacious liars, murderers and bigoted beasts. These creatures dressed themselves in a panoply of inured suffering at the hands of everyone else. This had worked for many years as cover for an unrighteous rightness and special privilege. It gained them places in the high offices of everywhere under sufferance of guilt imposed on the put upon parties. In the Kingdom, their success with this policy of attainment had been the literal crowning jewel in their achievements.

As much as the King of Exceptionalia was rich it was in no small part due to the deals he had struck with the upstart state of Cuckoonalia, as this Middle Kingdom was known.

Its name grafted onto it by dint of its ability to enter any place it wished to settle and cast out or subjugate the rightful brood whose nest it had been. These criminal cabals of ghastliness oozed into every artery of governance. Their storm troopers of guile were sent to train so many around the world in the craft of deception, cruelty and total lack of tolerance and empathy.

Their crown jewel, its King and the various arms of state became a unity for evil intention. As the stakes were raised, the ridicule becoming even more ridiculous, the mutterings from around an outside world became the strength of vocal disdain and dismissal toward the overarching Kingdom of Exceptionalia.

Out of the North East and Far East the twin beasts of ancient times awoke from a long slumber of millennia. The Great Bear and the Red Dragon stretched in the dawning, extended influence and sanity and stood in the way of a King whose powers had exceeded even his exceptional vision. No thanks to his lieutenants, his cohorts of secretive black organisations and other useful idiots, his power was met full frontal and with little opportunity to debase it.

Along with his friends in Cuckoonalia and anyone else too dim to see the inevitable outcome, he boasted about the greatness of all he had under him. The Bear mightily unimpressed, laughed and distanced himself from the inevitable implosion. The Dragon stood aside, silently observing, with assistance of so many eras of foresight and awaited the inevitable, life saving preparations for the changes ahead.

It was the disappearance into the dust of vanity of his three gender uncertain progeny that amusingly brought the King’s attention to the fact that not everything was fine and dandy in the land. His acolytes, self serving pedophile hangers on and mega rich supporters scurried off the sinking ship to be greeted by a mega tsunami of wised up savvy types who not only exposed this wretched motley crew but encouraged disparate bands of well armed revengers to cut their bodily functions off one by one.

Little was heard by way of cries for leniency. Such evil deserved exorcism in the most expedient manner.

As the King faced ultimate derision, alongside the utter dilution of a former military might funded by graft and guile, the Great Bear alongside its protected family of well cared for peoples finally showed its might. The Red Dragon, whose expertise in copying the best of the rest had amplified into an Eastern art form of incredible beauty and showed its true centuries old magnificence.

The clatter of plastic breaking along the length and breadth of the Kingdom of Exceptionalia could be heard across the globe.

Mutterings of discontent were stammered out in a lonely isle at sea, alone in the drifting Northern Floes. Tepid draught was drunk, lukewarm waters taken to assuage a misery of lost empires and ridiculed greatness on par with their exceptional cousins across the waters.

To the east a continent of squabbling natives never truly integrated, nor showing anything akin to backbone swiftly drowned in its own mess of potage it had tried so hard to implement union.

The only saving grace from both these also rans was their populace who rightly, vigorously and viciously exposed and dealt with the swine of Cuckoonalians among them. This exposure brought a veritable vengeance that for millennia would become source of many a fable forked out for children nestling in the laps of parents and elders, who in turn encouraged them never to support such deceptions again.

It soon became clear the fabled Exceptional Dream was just that. A mirage of masturbated madness forced onto enfeebled minds. The King, his eldest son and surviving acolytes were swiftly brought before the Global Register of Union, masterfully created through multipolar agreement, and were ridiculed until their tortured souls could handle no more.

The indigenous folk of the Middle Kingdom, whose reputation for endurance and tenacity was legend regained their lands, accepted all those who allowed fraternal and sororal bonding to stay and rejuvenate age old community prior to the invasion of the Cuckoonalia.

As the fair queen and her daughter sloped off back to their true roots to merge, mingle and play baubles, bangles and bling the Great Bear and Red Dragon raised their glasses and toasted sanity and its inevitable return centre stage.

The blue marble seemed in that moment from an ever present alien eye to be very pleasingly blue hued. It was time to recede into even deeper invisibility until the next cycle demanded its  overseeing.