Nom Contemplates Texas
Chapter 4
Nom contemplates Texas
What better place in the world to test such a power than in Texas? It was one of the most populated states in the Union, and physically the second largest. The majority of its population was composed of pathetic moron evangelical conservatives, or so the elections seemed to show. If he had the means to cause death at will, why not see if he could cull the very population that needed it the most? Target those responsible for so much of the agony being experienced in the nation and the world in general.
Millions of people dead in the Muslim world due to the war crimes of George W Bush: first his invasions destabilizing the region, creating ISIS, and then his backing the Arab Spring. Every one of those deaths could be put at the feet of the average conservative Texan who had brought the monster to power. After all it was doubtable that he would have ever been elected president without first being the governor of Texas.
Once upon a time, America had some of the best public schools in the world. Thanks to conservative backlashes, led in large part by Texans, those schools had plunged to a pathetic standing. They were now ranked so low, that third world nations were regularly surpassing them. Texas had a law that required it to buy new school text books every few years. All of the textbooks were standardized across the state. The result was that Texas essentially wrote the textbooks for America. Publishers simply set their books to Texas standards, since they bought the most books and did so at regular intervals. Those standards were set by elected evangelical morons who blindly believed the King James Bible. The kind of fool that thought the world was only six thousand years old, no matter what reality had to say on the subject. Idiots, that did all they could to ensure that real science stayed far away from American class rooms.
Texas, what a state. Largest in the lower forty-eight—economic, population, and natural resource, power house. It's population and vast wealth gave it political power essentially second to none. The state of California had a larger population, and one of the largest economies in the world in its own right. But Texas had invented the modern concept of conservative political power. California tended to lean liberal, but much of its population in the north and east leaned conservative. Texas on the other hand was in large part the bastion of American conservatism.
In the beginning of the nineteen hundreds, and extending into the nineteen eighties, the conservatives of the old south realized that they were often in the minority in America. That said, there was one sure fire way to win an American election and that was money. At the time, good old-fashioned graft and corruption sufficed. The political bosses in New York, Chicago, and the rest of the country were usually capable of delivering their constituencies, for a price. Men who owed their jobs to the bosses cast their votes as they were told. In Texas, particularly in the southern regions, "Dons" straight out of old western films, herded their "peons" at gun point into the polls. They ensured that whoever they had been hired by won.
At the time, Texas was full of new money in the form of cattle barons and oil tycoons. Wishing to ensure their continued success, they allied themselves with the conservative Democrats of the old south known as the Dixicrats. When those Democrats were effectively exiled from the Democratic Party in the nineteen-sixties, the southern conservatives did the unthinkable. They joined the Republican Party. The party that one hundred years before, had literally waged war against southern conservatives to end the old debates over states' rights, and slavery. Not only did the conservatives join the GOP, they took it over. In the millennium, the GOP far more resembled the old Confederacy, than the liberal forces of Lincoln.
The South had been a thorn in the side of the United States for four-hundred years. Conservative to its core, it proudly sat on the ass end of yesterday; insisting that up was down, and that they should be allowed to force the world to bend to their lunacy. For one hundred years the conservatives from the South in the US Senate managed to block virtually every effort to improve the human condition of every day Americans. Oh, they certainly backed the New Deal and the Tennessee River Valley Association; but seek human or civil rights, and they would put a noose around your neck. Then, they would set you one fire while you strangled. Afterwards they might even use your corpse for target practice.
In Nom's mind, there was nothing redeemable about the troglodytes of the old South. They were no better than their ancestors. But where to make his first strike for sanity and good? Arguably the main powerhouse of the South was its churches. The religious leaders had for centuries been the bulwarks of their communities. It had been conservative white evangelical pastors who had led the fight for slavery.
From fiery pulpits they cried that black Africans were cursed by god and were damned to serve all others since the time of Noah. They used the book of Philemon in the New Testament of their King James' Bibles to insist that not only had their sky fairy sanctioned slavery, but it condemned anyone who tried to free slaves. Slaves that tried to free themselves were even worse.
It had been the Southern conservative preachers who had been the rallying point for segregation and Jim Crow. They argued that it was a violation of the laws of nature, and perhaps even bestiality for white and black to cross breed. God had brought the savage African to this promised land to be under the benevolent oversight of the white man. It was only the will of Satan to ever bring about equality. Anything else would be an "uneven yoking".
It was the Southern conservative preachers, current and former, who led the charge to deny homosexuals basic human rights: making the act of love a crime, barring them from public service, even military jobs. They sought to force the American Psychiatric Association to bring back the archaic definitions of homosexuality that called it a mental illness, calling for businesses to not serve them, for their children to be seized by the courts, and their marriages declared an illegal abomination against the imaginary sky fairy.
They led the charge to hamstring the education system of America, to make it a criminal offence for a woman to control her own body or to even purchase a sex toy.
Their concepts of the Prosperity Gospel had led to a revision of the old tax code under President Reagan and all following Republican administrations. Rather than taxing people on the basis of what they could afford, as logic would dictate, the Southern conservative preachers called for the rich to be empowered. The result was a flipping of the tax burden onto the poor and middle class from the rich. They pressed a theory: that tax cuts for the rich would result in that same money trickling down into the hands of the middle class and the poor many times over. Strangely, their deregulation and tax cuts resulted in the income of the top five percent to sky rocket, while the middle class lost their annual battle to beat inflation, and the poor, slipped further and further into poverty.
The southern conservative preachers of Texas raised massive edifices to themselves in the form of mega churches. Every Sunday victims attended to receive their next brainwashing session en masse. Colloquially these were referred to as worship sessions. A simple name for self-induced highs and mass delusions, resulting in addictions.
Houston, Texas housed one of the largest of these boils on the ass of humanity, the church of Pastor Joel Ater. Just a week before the Reverend Ater had managed to demonstrate to the world just how literally he took the commandments of his lord and savior. If one were to believe the gospels, then would they not want to follow the teachings of Jesus found there? Feed the hungry? Heal the sick? Minister without judgment to the vilest members of society?
A rational person might think so, but then they would not be familiar with American and especially Southern Christians. When a hurricane came to Houston, "philanthropist" Ater, followed the path of the true Christ. He locked his doors, and refused to let in those in need. They might have soiled his temple to himself after all.
Yes. Nom thought. Joel Ater is the perfect man to start with. The church might be a bit much for a dry run, but it was simply far to cherry an opportunity to pass up.
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