STRANGE STATESMEN
No 18. Meet the man of tomorrow
“THE GOAL,” WRITES BASIAGO, “SHOULD BE ONE EGG PER PERSON, PER DAY”
HE IS THE EGG-MAN
The poor, it is said, are always with us – but one far-sighted man disagrees: namely Andrew D Basiago, an independent candidate1 who ran for US President against both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton last year upon a radical new platform of solving global poverty by making foreigners eat eggs. Basiago produced a comprehensive manifesto for his recent tilt at the White House, hatching a 100-point plan for the American nation; point 99 was to promise to spend much of his time in office “promoting [global] egg-consumption as a development tool”. “The goal,” Basiago has written, “should be one egg per person, per day.” Eating eggs, claims Basiago, somehow transforms people into better readers, and better readers become more educated, thus opening the way towards such admirable eggheads gaining better jobs. According to Basiago, “National literacy rates are directly correlated with national rates of daily per capita egg-consumption” – something which may well be true, but does suggest that, no matter how high Basiago’s own reading-age, he has yet to come across the statement ‘correlation does not necessarily imply causation’ written down anywhere. Given that (see pledge 27), Basiago also promises to end all foreign aid handouts on the (not entirely unconvincing) grounds that “foreign aid is a scam in which poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries”, the teeming masses of the developing world would quickly find they had no other option than to go to work on an egg in the brave new world of President Basiago. 2
BROKEN WORD
If you have a 100-point manifesto, then you are bound to end up with a fair bit of filler-material. Rarely, however, can a Presidential candidate’s B-list of policy-proposals have been quite so desperate as those of Mr Basiago. The prime example was his policy pledge 92, which committed the US Government to finding out “why Microsoft, after perfecting Word in its 2003 version, substituted it with a far inferior version in Word 2007”. Could a conspiracy have been afoot? “Is there a plot to make computer use in the US slower, less functional, more cumbersome, less efficient, more time-consuming, less productive, and more aggravating? That is what we have seen!” Who would have thought anyone would end up missing Clippy the talking paperclip so much? Policy pledge 28, meanwhile, made Andrew D Basiago sound more like General Jack D Ripper from Dr Strangelove – he wanted to ban fluoride from the US water-supply on the twin grounds that “The Nazis used it to sedate prisoners in the concentration-camps” and because “its effects include calcifying the pineal gland, thereby blocking the ‘third eye’, which is believed to be the source of human intuition”. Basiago doubtless used his own non-calcified powers of intuition to create pledge 16, in which he promised to place Sasquatch and Bigfoot on the endangered species list. Because “I am the first US Presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt to declare publicly that I have encountered Sasquatch”, 3 Basiago knows for sure that the mysterious beasts exist. He saw a young one and his hairy brown dad whilst camping in the Adirondacks as a small child in August 1966, he says, and claims to have worked out that their matrilineal DNA is human and their patrilineal DNA derived from some utterly unknown primate. Maybe this unknown sperm-donor was actually an alien? Basiago doesn’t specifically say so, but he himself claims to have spotted several strange hominids living on Mars, so this would seem to be a reasonable possibility. In a long 2015 radio interview, Basiago christened these Martian cryptids Homo martis sasquatchis, and talked about having examined a NASA Rover photo of one sitting down on a Martian hillside. 4
If you are surprised by the news that Bigfoot is present on Mars, then this is because the US Government have been covering up their secret knowledge about the true nature of the Universe for decades now, something which led Basiago to make his 15th pledge, that of “resolving basic cosmological mysteries”. As soon as he achieves power, Basiago proposes declaring a new International Geophysical Year 5 to
crack, once and for all, such conundrums as: “whether the Earth is round or flat; whether the Earth is solid or hollow; whether NASA landed men on the moon or hoaxed the lunar landings; and whether the cosmos is natural and organic or artificial and holographic”. If the wonks on Capitol Hill think that the American public made a left-field choice in President Trump, they should consider just how non-mainstream a leader they’re going to end up with next time around. Basiago has already begun his campaign for Election 2020 – it is exactly the same as his campaign for Election 2016, seeing as he deals only in eternal truths – and, being a self-confessed time-traveller with knowledge of future events, he seems confident of winning.
ONE SMALL STEP FOR BIGFOOT
Basiago is an educated man, a lawyer with five degrees, including a Masters from Cambridge, and a background in environmental law, journalism and planning; who can ever know how many eggs he has had to eat to get where he is today? Certainly, he was an “avid” reader of that well-known printed form of brain-food, National Geographic magazine, to whose then-President John Fahey he wrote an intriguing letter in 2008, which first brought him to public attention. “Dear Mr Fahey,” his missive read, “I am writing to inform the National Geographic Society that I have discovered life on Mars and to invite your great organisation to publish my findings.” These findings were included in an attached 41-page White Paper, The Discovery of Life on Mars, whose prefatory abstract contained a chilling declaration that it contained some “frightening content”. 6 It certainly did …
The story began in January 2008, when a detail from a panoramic photograph taken by NASA’s Spirit rover of the Martian landscape went viral due to the presence of a small rock that happened to look a lot like a humanoid figure. The remarkable thing was that the simulacrum’s appearance and pose were (as FT reported at the time: see FT233:5) “strangely reminiscent of the notorious Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot freezeframe”, leading some to dub the thing ‘Bigfoot on Mars’. However, subsequent analysis of the image, given the official reference PIA10214 by NASA, showed that it had been blown up and cropped drastically, with ‘Smallfoot’ being really no more than 6cm tall. Worse, the way Spirit’s camera worked meant that it took three broad 180° panoramic scans of the Martian landscape, each using a different colour-filter, and then spliced all three together later to produce the full-colour image released to the public. If this really was some kind of living creature, then it must have stayed perfectly still, as if frozen in time, between the camera’s separate fly-pasts. 7 Naturally when Andrew D Basiago, having five degrees and an IQ of 168, saw the ‘Bigfoot’ image for himself, he did not fall into the foolish trap of claiming that this was a living creature; instead, he identified it as being a small statue of some kind, probably showing a robed female alien, and possibly honouring the Martian dead from some past planetwide catastrophe like those mentioned in the books of Graham Hancock. Alternatively, maybe the figure was a real Martian, but she had been caught up in an “apocalyptic event” like a giant mudslide, and been fossilised mid-stride. CREATURES OF THE STONE AGE
Further examination of Image PIA10214 as a whole revealed a series of other figures on Mars, which Basiago admitted “look like rocks”, presumably because they are. However, he had downloaded the photo in question and imported it into Microsoft Paint on his “HP Pavilion Entertainment Laptop Personal Computer”, before cutting-and-copying small sections of the panorama, which he then pasted into Microsoft Word 2003 (NOT the 2007 edition!!!). These snippets were then enlarged at 500 per cent resolution and stretched out to fit the text-margins onscreen. The end result was a blurry mess which could have showed just about anything – but which, to Basiago’s eyes, provided evidence of an entire Martian menagerie, an alien zoo full of hybrid freaks to shock even Dr Moreau. Amongst other bizarre fauna, Basiago describes living, semi-transparent totem-poles with multiple “asymmetric” arms and “a childish grin” on their faces, a species of “glassine mantises”, scorpion-men and caterpillar-women, penguins, bulbous-headed, meditating humanoids adopting the Lotus-position, an elephant sitting at a table, cows, horses, an octopus with the face of a lion, a toddler with the lower body of a lizard, and even “an astronaut buried in the sands of Mars that time forgot”. Some other animals were given tentative taxonomic names, such as ‘The Woofy’ (a tumbleweed with the head of a dog), ‘The Gumby Lizard’ (a breed of flat reptile), ‘The Spying Giraffe’ (with “red lips, a patch of blue beneath its bulging eyes, and a crest atop its head like some dinosaurs”), ‘Triangle-Face the Rock-Animal’ (whose morphology is surely self-explanatory), and ‘The Wrench-Bird’ (which “has the look of
HE HAS SPOTTED TWO VAST OBJECTS WHICH HE THINKS LOOK LIKE MR POTATO-HEAD
a wrench that has been left too long in the rain”). Some of these things may even have been “spiritual beings” which had only agreed to appear on camera “because of the inter-dimensional significance” of NASA’s photo.
Perhaps anticipating the objection that the images were time-stretched composites, Basiago’s paper is full of uncertainty over whether the ‘animals’ he has discovered are really living creatures at all, or merely artificial constructs. For example, one category of “exophenotype” (alien creature) identified by the future leader of the Free World was, he said, “for want of a better description, all head.” “Imagine the head of a clown in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade that has broken loose from its body,” says Basiago, and you will have some idea of what these beings look like. However, due to their colossal size, he admits that they might actually be giant head-shaped buildings, not living things at all. For example, he has spotted two vast objects which he thinks look like Mr Potato-Head and the bald pate of the Dr Evil character from the Austin Powers films, both of which life-forms he deems unlikely to have evolved on other planets, especially as disembodied cephalic giants. Another “mirthful egg-shaped face surrounded by tubules”, meanwhile, he identifies as being a potential Humpty-Dumpty-like roller-coaster ride of some sort, though this is only one of “a universe of possibilities.” Basiago has christened another region of Mars that is full of such possibilities ‘The Debris Field’, which he says is full of thousands of dead humanoid Martians, although he admits to the untrained eye it may simply resemble “a vast, light-brown, pebbled moraine”. Did these Martians die in a giant flood? Were they killed by snakes? Or are they not dead bodies at all, but “fungal primates”, which grow in the ground “like mushrooms do on Earth”? Possibly they are all part of one gigantic underground animal, which possesses a “unitary mind”? Or, then again, maybe not, as one of the Martians appears to be wearing “a white shirt and blue pants”, suggesting some level of individual consciousness. Perhaps instead they are “thousands of corpses fructifying in a sticky paste”, covered by some “immobilising substance” sprayed out onto them by reptilian predators? Or maybe they are just some pebbles? Until Basiago comes to power and (see pledge 11) reveals the suppressed truth about the secrets of Mars, we shall never know.
Especially intriguing are Basiago’s speculations about the numerous plesiosaurs which he says roam Mars. Some of PIA10214’s rocks, when viewed in blurry enlarged form, appear to have long necks which resemble profile shots of Nessie peeping her head out over the waves of her Loch, as in the famous ‘Surgeon’s Photo’ of 1934, or former FT- columnist Doc Shiels’s equally striking image of 1977. Basiago’s conclusion is that on Mars plesiosaurs have evolved to have large shells like turtles, some of which mimic stones, for purposes of camouflage. However, as well as possessing shells, these creatures are land-based and must have (concealed?) legs rather than flippers if they are to move, so one has to question in what sense they are really plesiosaurs. Again, Basiago anticipates this objection by speculating that “some of the plesiosaurs might not be reptiles at all, but rather a species of fowl with round, grey bodies that make them look like boulders and that have earned for them the name ‘Rock Roosters’.” Like a typical politician, he has an answer for everything …
TOMORROW’S WORLD
When Basiago later began claiming to have physically travelled to Mars in the presence of a young Barack Obama8 and been chased by alien plesiosaurs himself, people naturally asked why he hadn’t thought to mention any of this in his 2008
White Paper. His answer was simply that he had forgotten all about it at the time, as the CIA had used a special machine to suppress his memories. Basiago’s story at this point becomes extremely convoluted and has been partially covered in FT before ( FT286:21), so this is just a summary. Basically (so he says), his dad worked for an engineering firm which successfully developed timetravel for the US military, and the young Basiago was chosen to become the firstever child time-traveller because the CIA, having used the technology to see into the future, had direct evidence that he would one day become President: at some time between 2016 and 2028, to be exact. Part of his historic future role would be to reveal to the world the hitherto-secret fact that America had timetravel and teleportation facilities, thus ushering in a new era of clean-energy transport, and so the authorities thought they had better introduce him to this technology early on in life.
The future leader had a great chance to brush up on his speechifying skills by being sent back to 1863 to witness Abraham Lincoln give his celebrated Gettysburg Address, and claims to be visible in a photo of the event, wearing overly-large shoes donated to him by a friendly cobbler after his own had gone missing during the time-travel process. (In this Basiago got off lightly; during one early teleportation experiment, another child accidentally “arrived a few seconds before his legs”, leaving him “writhing in pain with just stumps”.)
As time went by, and Basiago’s work as a “planetary-level whistleblower” spreading news about life on Mars brought him into contact with other fringe-theorists at weird-sounding conferences like Hawaii’s ‘Dolphins and Teleportation Symposium 2011’, he began to retrieve previously blocked memories about his past. Slowly, he remembered that all future Presidents were briefed about their future time in office by secret agents, and that there was a clandestine ‘Jump Room’ programme in existence, of which both he and the young Obama had been a part, in which the US were secretly teleporting people to Mars, hoping to establish a colony there; of 97,000 beamed up thus far, only 7,000 had survived. Some tame Martians had been down here in their turn, too, but seeing as they were simply bald humanoids, whenever anyone saw them in the street they would just “think it’s Telly Savalas”, thus maintaining their cover. The task of Obama and Basiago on the Red Planet was “simply put, to be seen and not eaten” by either the plesiosaurs or a separate race of Nosferatu- like humanoids who enjoyed holding Earthling-barbeques, thus acclimatising the natives to mankind’s colonial presence and giving the US a legal basis for claiming territorial property-rights on Mars, based upon the argument of visible prior occupancy.
In terms of his actual political programme, this all translates into Basiago making a pitch for the vote of every conspiracy-nut going, whilst simultaneously courting the Green ballot. Naturally, he wishes to unveil America’s teleportation and time-travel capabilities, using teleporters to replace cars and trains and thus reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by some 60 per cent, but he also wants to pardon his fellow whistleblower Edward Snowden, disclose the real truth about 9/11, end chemtrail-spraying, close down the Shadow Government’s secret concentration-camp network, ban GM foods to ensure that the small creatures, “partmicro-organism and part-robot”, which they contain stop invading citizens’ bodies and making them ill, prevent Nestlé from stealing public drinking-water, protect Earth from various fictional apocalypses, and promote the use of cold-fusion technology. He also wants to discover the truth about the mysterious forces which, according to one-time Bigfoot-hunter David Paulides, have recently been making people “melt directly into their pants” and then disappear within America’s National Parks.
Slightly less controversially, he also pledges to end mass immigration and look into ways of managing the forthcoming rise in unemployment when robots begin to steal people’s jobs. He also pledges never to go on dire TV chat-shows and play the “Comedianin-Chief” as Clinton and Obama did, which would indeed be most welcome; Mr Basiago is able to make people laugh through other means in any case. But let us be fair to the man. He appears genuinely to believe in what he is saying, and to keep on pushing it in the face of massive public ridicule and indifference, committed as he is towards telling what he thinks is the truth. That is actually a rather admirable quality in a prospective president, one that many recent Washington politicians have singularly failed to possess. I suppose that must be why he ends up winning the next election.