Land before the Lockets, verse 1

How many times have you heard a government worker, civil servant, etc. say “‘not my job”’when asked to do a task, any task, outside their mostly self defined “ job description?” Well, I can assure you any irony that is left in this world has been used by people like that. But please be decent when dealing with them, supposing you are in the condition right now to be decent, which very few people are. I consider myself decent. To myself mostly, and a motley crew of human refuse I am forced to associate with out of the need to stay alive. Well, more precisely the need to eat. Being alive, being human, having a soul, are mostly vaguely self defined terms now.

Back to our cherished civil service. Do you know the function the Postal Service is to perform no less than thirty days after a nuclear bombardment? It’s certainly not delivering mail, but in a way it does involve picking up parcels. They are in fact delegated with the the task of facilitating moving corpses out of incinerated cities. True story. Next time you see a Postal van it should not be too hard to imagine their utility in holding mail or hauling stacked bodies. I don’t mean to be impolite, I just miss the old world.

Moving on with the “ not my job” theme, can you imagine the look on a National park Rangers face when they are told by whatever remnant of government remains that their pristine parks are now to be in effect open air internment and resettlement camps for displaced persons of nuclear Holocaust? I for one find it highly inconsiderate these people were not told that when they were hired.

I can go on and on, but the take home message is this. Every federal government agency had a dual role under the concept of “ continuity of government.” Conceived way back during the presidency of Eisenhower as a desperate attempt to insure any shred of control and service would Exist if The ever growing then Soviet Union nuclear inventory was shipped via air to the U.S., it was a good hearted exercise in futility. Please don’t think I’m being rude, I’m just the messenger. And I despise when people shoot the messenger. It happens far too literally these days.

Continuity of government went far beyond telling the mail man to grab a few bodies or asking the Deparment of Education to be the worlds biggest orphanage. There was also the requirement to at least attempt to secure the sitting government at that time would be in a reasonably safe location. During the Cold War of the A.D. calendar, decades of underground tunneling and construction created a subterranean honeycomb that if it received sufficient warning, could bury a vast preponderance of the government under tons of granite and ferro concrete. All this while their constituents were being reduced to their component molecules. Graphic, my apologies to my indecency.

Again, providing irony still exists, it was an off handed suggestion by some faceless civil defense planner whose idea was the most prescient. To leave one cabinet member in the line of succession not present at the presidential state of the union, in the event of a decapatation strike. Well, decapitated the strike was, and left out off that fateful session was me, the Secretary of Homeland Defense, the not so honorable now Michael Coyle. Yes, the head of Homeland security watched , for the split second before everything went dark, the Actual Homeland get its first, of many, unguarded uppercuts to the jaw. Their is no more irony left because I watched it die.

How did the world turn to this? Save all your usual suspects scenarios. I regret to inform you the world as you knew it was undone by a mistake. Somebody fucked up, sometimes that’s all you need for hell to be unleashed. A simpleton making a simple mistake.

I beg your indulgence, from the sounds of it my new department that I run, we refer to ourselves unofficial as the Strong, has bought today’s dinner reluctantly into the kitchen. After a hopefully delicious meal I will dilligently inform You of the ins and outs of the world wide inferno. However proper table manners make it imperative I join these degenerates at the dinner table. Bad table manners are extremely offensive.