Dear Bleaders,
Hi. I can’t believe I am back here in the twenty-first century writing to you guys. I’ve thought of you a skillion times over the decades and I am laterally shivering to be back here at my desk in Old Brooklyn keyboarding you.
21st Century-Jennifer is up at Harvard giving a talk. I’m visiting from 2111, where my students have convinced me to do a Timeback100 with you guys.
In 2088 the Portuguese Michigans came out with a time visiting machine that allowed the visited time to see the visitors, with the visited time forgetting the whole experience days later and time proceeding unchanged. The 3001 model allowed some remembering and reality changed, we lost some good people, and the whole thing was outlawed.
My Steg student had access to one and is so enraged by this chapter in his textra book that he brought it in and since I have one of the last original poetic licenses, I decided to do it and risk radical dislocation and possible disappearance. I mean, what are the odds that we’d have both the machine and the license and an idea worth trying? And what are the odds we’ll disappear?
This was my Steg student’s idea and I’m trusting it, but of course he didn’t tell me exactly how to say it. So it is tough, but here goes.
For ten years after President Obama, the first, shows the birth certificate the thing is sort of a nonevent, it helps him win his second term and then is forgotten. Then starting in 2024 the Papers movement actually starts around a similar issue with President Green but takes all its images and really its energy around this incident in 2011 with Obama’s papers being shown.
If there is any explanation for what happened in the 30s, it begins here, with this act, with the meaning and humiliation and rebellion of what became both the Show Me Your Papers movement, and Papers Please. And in all fairness it also started the Cage Age Rage Page Events which has been the source of everything wonderful about the second half of the 21st and this first ten years of 2100.
But my Steg says the 2030s and their aftermath is to be avoided if possible and we are going to try. I’m going to start with an excerpt from the textra book.
The history of Papers Federal must begin in 2011, ten years after First Bombing and ten years before the Great Landing – two things which are often forgotten and must not be. The country was still thinking in terms of skin color (black, white, brown) and categories like asian, african american, hispanic, and jew. Some early subclubs and Rebrownings included Old Brooklyn, whole areas of Prequake California, and many of the unfederated universities that dotted the country until the 2050s.
This was also when the money corporations were at their zenith, just before the seeds of their collapse are sown in the Landing, and some of these money corporations also resembled the subclubs that would eventually become Blend Times and the whole Darker phenomenon. Still, in most food halls, whole sections of diners would clump up according to self-identified categories of the type described above. Even in the most mixed communities, photographs clearly show that in restaurants most tables were taken by a single one of these categories, though age and gender was as often mixed as not.
Then on April 27, 2011 sitting first-term President Obama the Father made public his Papers (then called birth certificate, which is where the term Birthers comes from).
This gesture was the catalyst that changed the world. Historians have argued over the real significance of the publication of the Papers, but there is no way to deny that this is the moment that people stopped accepting the racism and individualism of the previous century.
Well, I’m not sure how much good quoting the textra is going to do. Let me try to put it in terms that make sense to us, where I come from, in my time. Here goes. Before the Landing, humans had for a few centuries been festering in a bad feedback loop of outsiderism based on age, skin shade, tits or pricks, and the various cults, even still some ultra prims like gods born of virgins.
