Turn down the lights! It’s time for another Ricochet Silent Radio adventure in our ongoing series…Tales From the PIT! (Music theme intro cue)

Yes, you’ve tuned into 1954’s boldest new radio sensation. Rocket with Ricochet into the infinite horizons of the far-off world of the future. At the beginning of the 21^st century, one man will uphold justice…by breaking the law! A total outsider to politics, a moody, gifted loner with a vigilante streak, has risen to power over a great continental nation. Incredible…but possible! It’s been a troubling question for republics since the times of the Caesars; what happens in those few, crucial times when saving the country from chaos seems to demand utterly undemocratic means?

Is this a Buck Rogers fantasy, or could it be a deadly accurate prediction of America’s tomorrow? Ricochet’s imaginary network brings you a daring glimpse into what just might be–(Theme music climax)–Tomorrow’s world!

Tonight, part 4, the conclusion of: “Lord Protector of the United States”.

(The voice of John Mantle, “Judge Mental”)

No war. No one died. In the northeast, especially in Boston, an initial wave of joy and even jubilation cooled quickly. There was lingering shock in some circles over the bloodless secession that avoided a second Civil War.

Letting the South go without a shot was treated by some as an unforgivable crime. The softer separation with the West was rarely brought up, but anger over the “loss” of the South was really being fanned. It was deliberate and it was organized, with money and brains behind it.

Three of the leaders of the former Congress, the very men who led the boycott, came to me with a proposition: I could run for president, unopposed, in a special election and keep my current powers, provided I accepted the old rules and reinstated the government as it was four years earlier. I pointed out that I didn’t create the rules under which I was elevated to power, and I was working day and night to gradually restore normal order. Calling this election and accepting the poisoned chalice of this presidency would be the essence of dictatorship. They slunk away and I never heard from them again.

The provisional constitution, accepting the changed realities of the South and the West, was adopted via vote of the remaining United States over the NXN teletype.

There actually hadn’t been much official press censorship, or much need for it. Reluctance to be out of harmony with a country in a state of crisis was enough. But that was starting to unravel. For the first time I was getting beat up in the press on a daily basis. Usually I didn’t care, and I didn’t have to care. I could let off steam talking over the scrambler phone at midnight with Jason Rudert, and often did.

“I didn’t think I’d have to “sell” peace”, I groused. “I thought its advantages were self-evident”.

“Because there’s a chunk that sees it as surrender. You know that”.

“Damn it, I didn’t lose the South. We don’t own them. I’m not willing to kill millions to try to keep them. So how could I coerce them?”

“They aren’t seeking to coerce them. They know that’s no longer possible.”

“So what do they want?”

“They want punishment. You’re Judge Mental, right? They want to see someone hurt for this. That’s what you’ve failed to understand”.

A video clip of a speech of mine was also causing consternation in the east: “Cities as we knew them in the 19^th and 20^th centuries were an Industrial Age mistake. Take it from me, my friends, few will complain about leaving the cities behind. The new Garden Towns will complete the job of civilizing the passions of the angry streets.” (Prolonged applause.)

This was being treated like the opening shot of a war on cities. It was nothing more than a routine re-statement of the official, car-happy highway and housing policies of every elected government since the end of World War Two. Suddenly it was controversial when I said it.

Yes, I did do a few things out of spite. Nothing big.

At the stroke of a pen, I extended the life of all patents but shrank the duration of all copyrights. The effect was to suddenly increase the asset value of industrial corporations while diminishing the asset value of media corporations. “Mickey Mouse is free at last”, I said; “Now it’s up to Disney to prove it’s still got the better mouse”. Some media interests announced that they were moving overseas, news that was met with a shrug and a laugh at the White House press office. Some “dictatorship”.

As I announced the goals and timetables of the return to full democracy, I was surprised to find I was popular on the streets of New York City. Just as in the 1860s, New York’s ethnic groups did not want to be drafted to fight a war on Chickamauga Creek, and its churches were mostly pleased to have peace. Above all, its business interests wanted good relations with the South.

That’s why Wall Street was the site of the failed assassination of Gregory Arahant in front of the New York Stock Exchange. An anti-Southern agitator, bitter about the sudden turn towards peace, jumped from a cab and fired five shots, missing Arahant but killing two bodyguards before the would-be assassin turned the pistol on himself.

Okay; it was finally time to show this crowd that we weren’t fooling around.

That’s when I had a few dozen of my more unhinged enemies arrested. I’m not a fool. I did it in one swift purge and let the others know the purge was over, but as intended I made my point. I had a legal monopoly on violence and I intended to maintain it while it was my duty to do so.

Announcer: You are listening to Judge Mental in “Lord Protector of the United States”. This is Ricochet.

Local Announcer: This is KRCH 980 Los Angeles, coming to you from the radio studios of MGM. Stay tuned for Lion Radio News at the top of the hour.

And now back to Tales From the PIT. There will be no further interruptions.

Voice of Judge Mental:

Separation Day was proclaimed a national holiday in the South. I was invited to attend the official celebration.

We gently floated off the White House lawn on our way to Atlanta. I tapped my microphone and spoke to the pilot quietly. “Colonel, head out over Chesapeake Bay to the ocean before going to jets. I want to spare everyone’s eardrums”.

It was one hell of a celebration; a parade along Peachtree Street and the grandest banquet I’ve ever seen. I didn’t say much, just congratulated the South, and reminded my domestic enemies up north of my readiness and eagerness to relinquish power to an elected government as soon as one was formed.

As pre-arranged, it was announced that I’d been given the honorific title “Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of the United States, the Greater South, and the Western Alliance”. It was like the Queen of England and her Commonwealth, purely honorary; after all, the whole point of the day was I no longer had any real power in the South or the WA. The three nations had a common defense policy and jointly administered the dollar. Jason Rudert generously unveiled a large-scale picture of a WA-issued Mantle dollar, ready to hit the presses at the Denver Mint.

I suppose that I stood at the height of my powers that day. Julie Smith and her volunteers had arranged it all flawlessly. Everyone was respectful. People wanted this transition to succeed.

Yet I was a rare political creature: a dictator with no political base. In the northeast and midwest, both major parties were competing to undo my work as soon as they returned to government.

Announcer: A new, valid series of national Congressional elections were held. The US, the WA, and the Greater South would re-form in Congress as a looser commonwealth, strictly to deal with things that weren’t the internal affairs of each. Together they called themselves the American Union.

As Congress prepared to gavel itself to order, the era of the Lord Protectorate was all but in the rear view mirror. On Sunday morning, three days before the official handover of power, a long line of cars left the White House and drove up Wisconsin Avenue to WRC-TV.

(Sounds of a television control room in the final few seconds before a TV show goes on the air. “Roll header!” “This program is brought to you in living color and three dimensions by N…B…C”. A colorful peacock dissolved into the network’s animated butterfly rainbow logo, flying straight at the viewer.)

“Welcome to Meet the Press. We have a very special guest who has requested time for an announcement. Ladies and gentlemen, the Lord Protector of the United States, John Mantle”.

“Good morning”, I said, relieved to know that this was one of my last scheduled appearances.

“I won’t take much of your Sunday. Today I am honoring a man that too few of you ever had the chance to know, the late Skipsul Harrigan, prime counselor to the president. In the midst of a national horror, he worked for the good of this country right up until his dying breath. A Harrigan Institute for Political Studies will be funded in Skipsul’s home state of Ohio, which is my home state as well. I will be relieved of my duties by a properly elected government in a few days, and I hope to have the honor of being invited there to lecture. Mr. Harrigan will also be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Thank you.”

There was nothing left to say. I walked off the set and walked with my Secret Service detail out of the studio and towards the exit, across the loading docks, where our motorcade waited. There was almost always a crowd of uniforms wherever I went, so I didn’t notice at first that a detachment of three officers was coming towards me.

“Lord Protector?”, asked a tall, nervous Colonel. I nodded.

“Sir, it is my duty to place you under arrest”. “What’s the charge?”, I asked.

“Treason against the United States”. Then after a pause he added, “Constitution of 1787”.

(MUSIC fades up and then out again. Sound of a gavel pounding impatiently.)

Angry Judge Mental: “This isn’t justice! Don’t try to put on airs! This is nothing but a Star Chamber trial!” (Sound of a noisy, surly crowd).

Judge Mental, as narrator: “Supreme irony, isn’t it? Because there weren’t enough Supreme Court justices to render a definitive opinion, I was tried under the same rules that raised me to power; the power of British Crown courts of three hundred fifty years ago. The trial was fully up to the standards of the 1650s. The verdict was never in doubt, of course.

It was a most strange and sinister sort of court room. It was very dark. A black wooden screen that rose from waist high to nearly the ceiling concealed the identities of the attorneys and the accusers from me. All I could see of them, and the handful of people who’d already decided my fate, was their hands. Often they betrayed themselves with anxious gestures and hand wringing.

“If not Confederate sympathy, what else made you show that sort of accommodation to our enemies in the South?

“The South knows a few things the rest of us don’t, Inquisitor. Life has its tragic aspect. It doesn’t always work out. We act like it’s un- American to say so, but being human means knowing there will be times of despair, of defeat. Right doesn’t always triumph in the end. Our friends everywhere else in the world grow up knowing that. And so do our Southern friends”.

“So you felt, perhaps, that your singular acts of impulsive generosity would cure them of this inclination to a dark view of life?”

“I thought it would avoid a war. It did”.

“Look at it this way, Mantle. We look at you and see someone who chose not to take action, not to bring progress, not to bring help, if forced help, to the most backwards and uneducated part of the nation.”

“I saw no reason to confirm their low opinion of us for additional centuries to come”.

I wasn’t making it easy for them. “To quote a great man, tomorrow never knows. We try to tell them but we know they won’t understand.”

“Great man?”, one of the accusers sneered. “Are you referring to the money traitor Arahant? Oh, we’ll be going after your little friends soon enough”.

“Of that I have no doubt”.

“Silence!”, barked an unseen voice. They were all unseen voices.

They got their wish. I spent the next two months in solitary confinement.

Last night they sent in the chaplain. Well, we all know what that means. I didn’t have much to say to him.

Before dawn it started to rain again. At six a.m. the guard shift changed.

The stewards laid out an excellent, alas, untouched final breakfast. They averted their eyes, guilty and ashamed. Why? It’s not their doing. One of them took the risk of doing me the final kindness of leaving out a newspaper so I could see a joint statement of protest signed by prominent North American leaders, led by WA Commissioner Jason Rudert, Governor Julie Smith and private citizen Gregory Arahant.

“Regarding the Lord Protector: Mr. Mantle is a far finer man than his enemies, certainly a finer man than most who preceded him in office, and, we firmly believe, most men who will succeed him. Mantle was a patriot, who fought in his own way for this country. In our memory, he will be a majestic statue condemned to toil in the shadows of history. But as a people, we know that there is often greatness and nobility in those shadows”.

There was a bustle of noise and the “honor guard” appeared; the new speaker of the House and the new majority leader of the Senate. He looked particularly stricken. “I know this is an injustice”, he said earnestly.

“Then why are you here?”, I asked.

An attorney from the Federal prison system read my formal indictment and sentence as we walked out into the blustery gray. This was supposed to be the first public execution in the United States in many, many years, but it looked like they chickened out; the damp field was blocked off. The lone television camera that was, no doubt, now broadcasting to nearly every TV news viewer in the world was unmanned. It was a message; nobody wanted this duty.

Cromwell’s corpse was beheaded two years after he died of natural causes. Regrettably my successors in office did not have the patience to wait. Mortis Hora Nemo Scit. “We know not the day nor the hour”–of our death. That’s what the phrase means. But I do know the day of my death; today. I know the hour of my death. The rarest of all knowledge. It comes at the highest of all prices.

I ascended the thirteen steps. I tried to believe it brought me thirteen steps closer to heaven. In my heart and mind I knew better. I made a lifetime specialty of cheating death. But no one likes being cheated, and death eventually wins every single game he plays.

Now I saw my Headsman. He wore the traditional black hood of anonymity. Through the eye holes I saw fear and sadness. I handed him a golden coin, the traditional tribute to the executioner that is supposed to ensure a clean cut, a more painless death. In the final irony of my life, I noticed the coin had my face on it.

Judge…and judgment. Not the cheap, phony kind that my enemies visited upon me. Real judgment. I too was about to be judged. For what I did and didn’t do for this country, for what I did and didn’t do with the power I had on Earth, I am about to account.

And someday, so will you.

THE END

Announcer: You’ve been listening to the conclusion of “Lord Protector of the United States”, a production of Tales From the PIT. If you wish to follow this story from the beginning, please click here.

Ricochet members featured or mentioned in tonight’s show include @judgemental, @juliesnapp, @jasonrudert, @skipsul and @arahant.

Disclaimer: Ricochet Silent Radio is a mark of satire, not an official part of Ricochet. Regarding the use of Ricochet members as fictional characters: Dialog, attitudes, and actions attributed to them are not their own.

This is the Ricochet Silent Radio Network.

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