Beautancus
Well-Known Member
Though near winter, the weather had taken a surprisingly tolerable turn in the capital - more or less - in the past few days. Had any comment on the symbolic appropriateness of it been solicited, the Cussian queried very likely would indeed have answered that Beautancus' weather was every bit as "oppositional" as the people, even in the face of oncoming winter...a winter encompassing promises so dire as to be equal in measure and as serious as the coming of Autumn had been for La Patrie two years hence.
The gift of foresight, by virtue of the basic observation and evaluation of other, albeit kindred, folk. A thing at times vexing, but never less so in the minds of Cussian men - and women, than today, and the past several immediately prior. Gifts that bore down with the crisp, almost crystalline columns of amber-gold sunlight through the last, also obstinate, banks of often roiling morning fog- mixed or altogether overcome as often as not by the eggs and sulphur-smelling, silver-white mountains of "industrial atmospheric byproduct."
Such was the life between "the Hills," in the Heart of the so-called Elder-Settlements. Ten Heights was a city of many wonders beyond the simple atmospheric and meteorological, of which many were as old as the reckoning of proper white-folk went in Occidentia-Santander, but of which an increasing number could be counted as progressively modern. Post-Modern even, some truly avant garde Cussiens might say.
The weather alone would have been all the reason that most of the city's denizens would have needed to take their work outside, in the case that it did allow for such whimsy. Otherwise or failing the availability of such a wild luxury as that, it was likely that many an office or shop window would be "half-cracked," or the screen doors "let stay" for most of the day beyond mid-morning. Ideal for the sort of nationally formative event that the quarter-pickled and altogether otter-like mind of the Chiefest and Foremost Servant of the Popular-State had been turning over and over, like the selfsame otter's favored sea-muscles forming a pearl.
The geography of the city had granted many a grandiose design life in reality over the centuries of its occupation by Baptist-folk, of which today would provide as sterling an example as any other had or aught.
Nestled between two of the hill-crest's of the city's namesake Ten, one of the many paradisiacal public parkways and promenades that the Northeastern boroughs of the city were known for had a particular reputation as being a truly preferential location for stump-speaking. The acoustics of the natural bowl formed there in the depression between those Two of the Ten Heights, and the further rocky bank of the Mitchell River - narrower here than at most places in the city even - those acoustics made for an amphitheater that any Tiburan orator or rhetorician would have appreciated instantly. Even further, it could be said that the genius loci of Bucknell-Hengest Municipal-State Park was one of rising, roaring even perhaps, oratorical success. Certainly, within the context of the "dominance" of the Continental-Consequentialist philosophy that defined and guided the Popular-State of Beautancus.
The riot of color that Autumn brought to the already shockingly beautiful panoply of near every sort of tree and flowering bush or shrub was an equally evocative mirror, symbolic in the Providential sort of way, as the Steward of the Popular-State figured things. As near to every walk of life, every flavor of passion, every corner of the world - every color of people as one could find - that sort of cultural, innovative and progressively virile blend was represented within the bounds of Bucknell-Hengest Park in any day's time.
As was the intention, and is the way of Beautancus - properly, dammit.
In like fashion to the Creator's goodly work, further adornment and ornamentation to the point of ostentation marked the breadth of the park at regular, doubly and trebly meaningful geometrical intervals.
In most cases these were borne out in the form of some engine or vehicle of warfare or another - the might and truth of Popular Arms expressed in plebian steel. Of particular prominence were some of the more recent, and easily most formidable additions to an already august assembly - the ever-more nationally-symbolic Razorback Heavy-Assault Tank. Opposite the tanks were the bronzed, double life-sized Pseudo-Antique "citizen-sovereigns," their faux youthful visages bearing a resolve every bit as steely as the Razorbacks- untarnished, never-aging and unmoved. Faces inspired by men that had been real, to someone - a mother or lover - once, ever longer ago. But in life, certainly in death, they'd earned the respect borne out in their graven images. Horrifically martyred husbands and fathers that never were of an Evangelical-Christian, Perpetual-Revolutionary State.
Children played on them, more often than not. Appropriate and suitable above all else, to have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of carefree and pure souls playing about and atop them. It was, after all the very thing that their living counterparts' blood has so preciously purchased. The ability, the condition of existence in which children could live and play freely, ignorant of the constant and diminishing hunger and pain that so many - untold millions- were required to endure daily.
There it was, called forth again by that line of reckoning. The inexplicable monstrosity of the apparently never-ending bloodbaths of Touyou, the utter futility of the August Catastrophe. All the various and sundry deviltry self-inflicted upon humanity, the which was altogether absent from the memory of nearly two generations of natural-born Cussians now. Even the threat of such hadn't been all so near at the confusion and viscera-tainted height of the near-doom of La Patrie.
The roar finally faded back enough that Emmett Lucien Wrenn, Steward of the Popular-State, was able to draw himself back down into his narrow human form - his mind's eye receding from the vastness of the half-remembered, half-idealized hawk's eye perspective from which he had been observing the scene. He too had, for all his forty-nine years, clambered atop the locked-in-place turret of the Razorback - new-fangled microphone in hand and trailing the better part of a dozen feet of equally "modern" electrical wire.
Swirling about him, a knot of some of the most nervous men in the entirety of the nation, the "Steward's Service," sworn to defend Wrenn's person to and/or with their last breaths - and beyond them, also swirling were the collective source of the roar. Throngs upon throngs, literally tens of thousands of Cussians of which the slight majority were energized and insanely enthusiastic young University scholars. For many of them, today would be the day that they first tasted the ecstasy and sense of single-minded purpose that had ensured the survival of so preposterous a proposition as the Popular-State thus far.
Raising the receiver-box back to his face, and his free hand high enough to be visibly opened and raised Wrenn gave his signature signal of readiness to proceed. Amazingly, it took only thirty seconds for the swelling hiss to drop to a level at which the Steward was confident he'd be able to hear, or feel himself speaking well enough to gauge it in an appropriate fashion.
"Now...I encourage you, my dearest Country-folk, to consider the prudence of a thing in the coming week as you sit and have at your corned beef or peanut-butter sandwiches at lunch with your colleagues and comrades - with your Committees and Assemblies and even more aside, at your own hearth...just that thing, your own hearth. Because that's the real point, for each and every one of us - our own primary concern and obligation, as properly and truly Sovereign Individuals."
The wall of sound that rose in response to the striking of that key-phrase in the Continental-Consequentialist lexicon was jarring, even so soon after. Wrenn allowed them only a precious few seconds pause this time, before pushing on - and bringing a more earnest calm than he'd yet received today.
"Now again, all you know that it is my job, the job you all decided I was the best son of a bitch for, to help and make sure that you all can do just this, right?" The affirmative hiss was more akin to the rolling of the unconquered tides than any other sound produced by mortal flesh.
"Imagine then, that it's recently come to be known that a number of your neighbors have taken to inviting vipers into their own home. Now to be fair, we've no idea what they're doing with the viper - and it ain't our place to judge the kind or sort of company that anyone keeps. Just ain't the Cussian way, ain't my way. But beyond that, imagine that we've discovered that our neighbors have taken a shine to setting prairie fires around your ranch." Another of his habits, Wrenn leaned down closer to his nearest audience, firmly locking eyes with as many of them as he could, for as long as he could.
"Now, none of the prairie that's been burnt has been yours, or ours - yet. But the cinders are creeping closer friends, the cinders are creeping closer...the flames of hatred and hypocrisy fanned and shaped by crowned and confused Braggarts, by would-be Caudillos and other-such Strongmen! That such as this has the sheer audacity to lay the appellation of "imperialism" at the feet of this Popular-State, much less that of our steadfast Continental-sibling..."
"Where do such men as these find the gall to stack their commitment to the people - hell, even their own people, that one could find on every street and every lane in Beautancus or Sylvania! It seems now, after so long a proscription of abundance and peace that all save we two kindred nations are yet to surrender the Civilization and Christendom that has seen us progress to where we are today, in favor of the most base and heathen Tyranny and Hyper-Statist Idolatries."
Wrenn knew that this would be a point of immediate uproar for the crowd, had designed it to be thus. It needed to strike at the most tender, and by this point in the idiot game so many failed statesmen from climes not so far removed had been so ineptly playing at.
"For most of us, our Sacred Beliefs dictate that we not remain as passive observers in and of this world...the first of our ancestors had been forced to do this, wholly against their will, for so long- their desperation reaching such fever-pitch that they ran to the edge of the world and beyond, to have the chance to become actively engaged and involved in making the world, for better and worse...And we've done fine with it thus far, the better part of this Occidental Continent of ours!"
"...Now, age-old evils of treachery and wanton cruelty from the bowels of the Old World, from the most bestial of states that we have for so long striven to do without, this evil seeks us out again! A cancerous rot from the Old World spreads now in the guts of our neighbors, o' sons and daughters of Beautancus! A cancer that will, without fail, spread...unless we can find the courage to act in the appropriate measure before it is too late...As a people, I swear it before God and man that we shall never be held hostage within our frontiers, prisoners of silence in fear of the paranoia of our neighbors. Never yet - and yet simply Never!"
The gift of foresight, by virtue of the basic observation and evaluation of other, albeit kindred, folk. A thing at times vexing, but never less so in the minds of Cussian men - and women, than today, and the past several immediately prior. Gifts that bore down with the crisp, almost crystalline columns of amber-gold sunlight through the last, also obstinate, banks of often roiling morning fog- mixed or altogether overcome as often as not by the eggs and sulphur-smelling, silver-white mountains of "industrial atmospheric byproduct."
Such was the life between "the Hills," in the Heart of the so-called Elder-Settlements. Ten Heights was a city of many wonders beyond the simple atmospheric and meteorological, of which many were as old as the reckoning of proper white-folk went in Occidentia-Santander, but of which an increasing number could be counted as progressively modern. Post-Modern even, some truly avant garde Cussiens might say.
The weather alone would have been all the reason that most of the city's denizens would have needed to take their work outside, in the case that it did allow for such whimsy. Otherwise or failing the availability of such a wild luxury as that, it was likely that many an office or shop window would be "half-cracked," or the screen doors "let stay" for most of the day beyond mid-morning. Ideal for the sort of nationally formative event that the quarter-pickled and altogether otter-like mind of the Chiefest and Foremost Servant of the Popular-State had been turning over and over, like the selfsame otter's favored sea-muscles forming a pearl.
The geography of the city had granted many a grandiose design life in reality over the centuries of its occupation by Baptist-folk, of which today would provide as sterling an example as any other had or aught.
Nestled between two of the hill-crest's of the city's namesake Ten, one of the many paradisiacal public parkways and promenades that the Northeastern boroughs of the city were known for had a particular reputation as being a truly preferential location for stump-speaking. The acoustics of the natural bowl formed there in the depression between those Two of the Ten Heights, and the further rocky bank of the Mitchell River - narrower here than at most places in the city even - those acoustics made for an amphitheater that any Tiburan orator or rhetorician would have appreciated instantly. Even further, it could be said that the genius loci of Bucknell-Hengest Municipal-State Park was one of rising, roaring even perhaps, oratorical success. Certainly, within the context of the "dominance" of the Continental-Consequentialist philosophy that defined and guided the Popular-State of Beautancus.
The riot of color that Autumn brought to the already shockingly beautiful panoply of near every sort of tree and flowering bush or shrub was an equally evocative mirror, symbolic in the Providential sort of way, as the Steward of the Popular-State figured things. As near to every walk of life, every flavor of passion, every corner of the world - every color of people as one could find - that sort of cultural, innovative and progressively virile blend was represented within the bounds of Bucknell-Hengest Park in any day's time.
As was the intention, and is the way of Beautancus - properly, dammit.
In like fashion to the Creator's goodly work, further adornment and ornamentation to the point of ostentation marked the breadth of the park at regular, doubly and trebly meaningful geometrical intervals.
In most cases these were borne out in the form of some engine or vehicle of warfare or another - the might and truth of Popular Arms expressed in plebian steel. Of particular prominence were some of the more recent, and easily most formidable additions to an already august assembly - the ever-more nationally-symbolic Razorback Heavy-Assault Tank. Opposite the tanks were the bronzed, double life-sized Pseudo-Antique "citizen-sovereigns," their faux youthful visages bearing a resolve every bit as steely as the Razorbacks- untarnished, never-aging and unmoved. Faces inspired by men that had been real, to someone - a mother or lover - once, ever longer ago. But in life, certainly in death, they'd earned the respect borne out in their graven images. Horrifically martyred husbands and fathers that never were of an Evangelical-Christian, Perpetual-Revolutionary State.
Children played on them, more often than not. Appropriate and suitable above all else, to have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of carefree and pure souls playing about and atop them. It was, after all the very thing that their living counterparts' blood has so preciously purchased. The ability, the condition of existence in which children could live and play freely, ignorant of the constant and diminishing hunger and pain that so many - untold millions- were required to endure daily.
There it was, called forth again by that line of reckoning. The inexplicable monstrosity of the apparently never-ending bloodbaths of Touyou, the utter futility of the August Catastrophe. All the various and sundry deviltry self-inflicted upon humanity, the which was altogether absent from the memory of nearly two generations of natural-born Cussians now. Even the threat of such hadn't been all so near at the confusion and viscera-tainted height of the near-doom of La Patrie.
The roar finally faded back enough that Emmett Lucien Wrenn, Steward of the Popular-State, was able to draw himself back down into his narrow human form - his mind's eye receding from the vastness of the half-remembered, half-idealized hawk's eye perspective from which he had been observing the scene. He too had, for all his forty-nine years, clambered atop the locked-in-place turret of the Razorback - new-fangled microphone in hand and trailing the better part of a dozen feet of equally "modern" electrical wire.
Swirling about him, a knot of some of the most nervous men in the entirety of the nation, the "Steward's Service," sworn to defend Wrenn's person to and/or with their last breaths - and beyond them, also swirling were the collective source of the roar. Throngs upon throngs, literally tens of thousands of Cussians of which the slight majority were energized and insanely enthusiastic young University scholars. For many of them, today would be the day that they first tasted the ecstasy and sense of single-minded purpose that had ensured the survival of so preposterous a proposition as the Popular-State thus far.
Raising the receiver-box back to his face, and his free hand high enough to be visibly opened and raised Wrenn gave his signature signal of readiness to proceed. Amazingly, it took only thirty seconds for the swelling hiss to drop to a level at which the Steward was confident he'd be able to hear, or feel himself speaking well enough to gauge it in an appropriate fashion.
"Now...I encourage you, my dearest Country-folk, to consider the prudence of a thing in the coming week as you sit and have at your corned beef or peanut-butter sandwiches at lunch with your colleagues and comrades - with your Committees and Assemblies and even more aside, at your own hearth...just that thing, your own hearth. Because that's the real point, for each and every one of us - our own primary concern and obligation, as properly and truly Sovereign Individuals."
The wall of sound that rose in response to the striking of that key-phrase in the Continental-Consequentialist lexicon was jarring, even so soon after. Wrenn allowed them only a precious few seconds pause this time, before pushing on - and bringing a more earnest calm than he'd yet received today.
"Now again, all you know that it is my job, the job you all decided I was the best son of a bitch for, to help and make sure that you all can do just this, right?" The affirmative hiss was more akin to the rolling of the unconquered tides than any other sound produced by mortal flesh.
"Imagine then, that it's recently come to be known that a number of your neighbors have taken to inviting vipers into their own home. Now to be fair, we've no idea what they're doing with the viper - and it ain't our place to judge the kind or sort of company that anyone keeps. Just ain't the Cussian way, ain't my way. But beyond that, imagine that we've discovered that our neighbors have taken a shine to setting prairie fires around your ranch." Another of his habits, Wrenn leaned down closer to his nearest audience, firmly locking eyes with as many of them as he could, for as long as he could.
"Now, none of the prairie that's been burnt has been yours, or ours - yet. But the cinders are creeping closer friends, the cinders are creeping closer...the flames of hatred and hypocrisy fanned and shaped by crowned and confused Braggarts, by would-be Caudillos and other-such Strongmen! That such as this has the sheer audacity to lay the appellation of "imperialism" at the feet of this Popular-State, much less that of our steadfast Continental-sibling..."
"Where do such men as these find the gall to stack their commitment to the people - hell, even their own people, that one could find on every street and every lane in Beautancus or Sylvania! It seems now, after so long a proscription of abundance and peace that all save we two kindred nations are yet to surrender the Civilization and Christendom that has seen us progress to where we are today, in favor of the most base and heathen Tyranny and Hyper-Statist Idolatries."
Wrenn knew that this would be a point of immediate uproar for the crowd, had designed it to be thus. It needed to strike at the most tender, and by this point in the idiot game so many failed statesmen from climes not so far removed had been so ineptly playing at.
"For most of us, our Sacred Beliefs dictate that we not remain as passive observers in and of this world...the first of our ancestors had been forced to do this, wholly against their will, for so long- their desperation reaching such fever-pitch that they ran to the edge of the world and beyond, to have the chance to become actively engaged and involved in making the world, for better and worse...And we've done fine with it thus far, the better part of this Occidental Continent of ours!"
"...Now, age-old evils of treachery and wanton cruelty from the bowels of the Old World, from the most bestial of states that we have for so long striven to do without, this evil seeks us out again! A cancerous rot from the Old World spreads now in the guts of our neighbors, o' sons and daughters of Beautancus! A cancer that will, without fail, spread...unless we can find the courage to act in the appropriate measure before it is too late...As a people, I swear it before God and man that we shall never be held hostage within our frontiers, prisoners of silence in fear of the paranoia of our neighbors. Never yet - and yet simply Never!"
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