The Best of Mariah Carey: Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Somewhere over the rainbow

By Paco Prado

There is one magical place, a place of dreams and a place that exists in my imagination. It is real all right; at least it is for me. Let me tell you about this enchanted land. It would even leave Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz speechless. Disney doesn’t even have the imagination to envision my make believe world.

So, follow my yellow brick road with me and I will take you there. I will describe it although I’m afraid that I don’t have the adequate words to describe it. No matter how articulate and descriptive I can get.

This is not fucking Kansas anymore. Disney now has a day exclusively reserved for gays, once a year and it is all due to the fact that we all are “friends of Dorothy”

I will not formulate an idea in your mind of the largesse, the great satisfaction and fulfillment that this world offers.

In my world all the males that live there have big cocks. The queens don’t really have to wear tiaras anymore; they actually have real crowns, made out of platinum and studded, yes, I said studded with tons of diamonds bigger than the Hope diamond.

The men and the women can marry. I mean women marrying women and men wedding men. And it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow because in my world what matters is the love we have for one another, not the ability to procreate or conform to any one religious interpretation of some fucking scripture that was deemed “sacred”. No, in my world, like the Beetle’s song “Imagine” there is no religion to distract one from the business of real life.

Oil drilling has stopped and the Gulf of Mexico platforms have been turned into fishing resort hotels

The Republican Party in my world had dissolved over a decade ago because with the absence of greed, there was no need for their ideology any longer. They went from being the party of bigots and the ignorant to eventually become irrelevant and highly provincial, limited to some of the less enlightened states. There are only a few pockets of ignorance left in our country. They are mostly around Provo and Salt Lake City and some remnants in Mississippi and Alabama. They too eventually were exposed for what they were and little by little began to disappear as the voters learned to read and write and stopped their practice of marrying their cousins and having sex with their step fathers. We still have a two party system but now we have the Secular Progressive American Party and The Democratic Party. The later is the actual conservative and considered way to the right.

Some very profound changes happened in America and it was totally unexpected and the results just the opposite of what was intended. Amazingly enough, this agenda was led by the Fundamentalist Evangelicals who wanted to turn America into a theocracy. One of their objectives was to change the way tax revenues were administered. They had the balls to propose in Congress that the U.S. Government would take taxes and reserve 20% for its use and give 10% (tithing) to the churches, allotted according to church adherent numbers. Of course this didn’t go over very well with the corporations or the secular progressives and they didn’t get very far. But what they did accomplish was to change their own believers into a different way of thinking; they were no longer willing to be the marionettes the Republican Party used for so many years. Now they had a prevailing philosophy: That ambition was good but greed was evil. Right then and there the battle was half won. It became more difficult for the very rich and the corporations to manipulate the general public and to put in their pockets all the elected officials. Lobbyists became almost irrelevant and rightfully so after new campaign contribution reforms were enacted.

Also, because of the backlash this legislation caused, the Supreme Court had a case before it and it voted unanimously that the United States was a secular country in a decision that changed the whole position of religious organizations because they now had to pay taxes on all their properties and investments with the exception of the sanctuary or church building itself.

Trailers are no longer seen. All trailer trash has succumbed to education. They are actually functional human beings. Even the divorce rate for these breeders has disappeared almost in its entirety. The word had it that breeding was a sexually transmitted disease.

Somehow in my world, the men are more attractive. They all have five o’clock shadows and their bodies are incredibly muscular.

In my world circumcision is no longer an accepted procedure performed on infants. It is seen as what it is today: a form of mutilation. So all men will enjoy sex and take pride in their foreskin. The image of Christ on the cross is not looked upon very favorably as it is very morbid.

The image on the left is seen a lot less these days. Most people in my world think it is rather crude and in bad taste. It is deemed terribly morbid and the watching a moribund man crucified is no longer part of our guilt trip.

In my world you work a 35 hour work week and you have 5 weeks paid vacation by law. Am I talking about France here or my imaginary world? Health Care reform was finally passed in the last year of Obama’s first term. It basically is an extension of Medicare and Medicaid to cover every man, woman and child in the United States. And to everyone’s surprise, the savings are astronomical and we are now able to pay off the national debt. The inequities in salaries are gone…women now are earning the same as their male counterparts.

Puerto Rico became the 51st state and Republican xenophobes all simultaneously gave birth to a 500 ton cow

Five years ago, in my brave new world, Puerto Rico became the 51^st State. Canada is now holding national elections and the main question is if Canadians want to join the American Federation of Free States. The polls are indicating that they are favoring a merger. It does not mean that they will lose their autonomy, only that they are in a lose kind of federation similar to the European Union. Mexico is also in the process of becoming part of this Federation. The wall that divided Mexico and the U.S. was torn down in the year 2012. The president of Mexico, in a historic speech in Morelos, told Barak Obama: “Mr. Obama, tear down this wall”. And the U.S. did.

It no longer matters what side of any river or body of water you were born in. We are all citizens of the world and the much despised oil companies have diversified and their oil business it is now only marginal, accounting for only 15% of their operations. We are totally dependent on wind, solar and there was a system of turbines installed off our Eastern coast to harness the power of the Gulf Stream. Oil is only used for the purpose of chemicals that are necessary in the production of plastics.

Also, in my world, something very remarkable happened at the end of the year 2012. The prophets of doom were predicting a horrendous holocaust derived from the realignment of the poles. With the magnetic north switching positions, the earth was supposed to be subject to devastating earthquakes, tsunamis and fires of biblical proportions. When December 21^st arrived, there were a lot of mass suicides, a lot of them within the Jehovah’s witnesses that almost wiped out their numbers in the millions. The funeral homes and municipal authorities could not bury the bodies fast enough. It was a very sad scene to watch as parents would give their children arsenic laced cool aid a la Jim Jones.

December 21^st came and went and on New Year’s Day 2013, in a cave adjacent to the Red Sea, a bunch of scrolls were found by a young Palestinian couple who went into the cave to copulate. The scrolls were turned over to the Jewish authorities and they are still being deciphered. They are in remarkable good shape and most of what it relates is how these visitors from another far away planet established themselves in a remote past over fifty thousand years ago and unleashed a chain of events that gave rise to mankind as we now know it. These visitors were not well equipped to withstand the rigors of our climate or the impurity of our atmosphere and they were gone within two generations. But they were around long enough to teach the humanoids then living to speak and to use tools. They introduced them to agriculture and to make tools out of metals. Unfortunately, they were far too primitive and also learned to make weapons and spent the next fifty thousand years in the pursuit of violence and war.

These scrolls also predict the future visitation from these aliens and it is calling for the pacification of the planet and he purification of the earth. That is not about spiritual purification, it has to do with pollution and the safekeeping of the environment. Earthlings have now understood that when the old scriptures proposed “the coming of the Lord” it did not mean Jesus but these out of space visitors.

The War on Drugs was given a reprieve. It is now in a state of detente. What is really happening is that after hundreds of thousands of judges, lawyers and law enforcement personnel lost their jobs due to a moratorium on prosecutions, they were left homeless, the Federal Government began a prevention, rehab and information program. They would take eleven year olds over to the morgue, open up one of the drawers and tell them the corpse in front of them had died of an overdose. We are no longer a society that worries about criminals trying to get money to purchase expensive drugs. There is a better way: the municipalities provide the free drugs and a place to crash. But with drug use, there is the responsibility by the user that they have to agree to counseling.

As citizens of my world, the question of where we come from and where we are going is no longer a puzzle nor is it of any consequence. The important things in life are completely different in my world. It is by far more important to leave this world a little better place than the one we found.

There are many significant events that happened in my world. In the last weeks of his second term, President Obama was successful in securing an accommodation of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The changes in Tunisia and Egypt also brought about significant changes in the other Arab nations; from Syria to Yemen the yoke of dictatorship has all but disappeared. Tyrannical regimes are now a thing of the past. The peace so far is holding as the Palestinians recognize the right of Israel to exist and they no longer throw rockets across the border and Israel has agreed to the rights of the Palestinians to have a separate country. But the United States also had a major role in this; they stopped selling and giving away armaments and getting these countries military aid.

In my world, there still are pockets of conflict: In North Korea the civil war that ensued after the death of its leader has created a problem of major proportions for China. They have now almost two million political refugees as the Chinese have been unable to contain the tide of this exodus. But things are improving as the forces are wearing each other out and there is no longer the amount of fighting or repression. There are few men of military age left.

The United Nations is playing a much more important role in maintaining the peace in the world. Darfur is but a memory. Iran has adjusted to a change within that has resulted in a more moderate government that is leaning towards secularism.

The United States is now a major contributor to the United Nations in terms of military but our military budget has been cut over 75% allowing now for increasing the budgets of education, healthcare and building an infrastructure for green energy. The United States is now leading the world once again in science and technology. But we as a country are not stingy with our advances. We are sharing our discoveries and providing medicines to those areas of the world that have traditionally been less fortunate.

We are not frittering our money away. There seems to be a new attitude towards consumerism. We are also not interested in keeping up with the Joneses or in planned obsolescence. The products we manufacture, and yes, manufacturing has returned in my world, these products are of high quality and durability. But most of all, we are a technology oriented economy.

President Obama in his second term was able to balance the budget and he has been able to reduce the debt and if it continues to follow this trend, the national debt will disappear within eight years.

That is a great accomplishment for a President that inherited a Recession of the magnitude of the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

Churches are now taxed like the rest of the entertainment industry. That is what they are, no different than movie theaters. Also, they can’t get involved in politics or spew inflammatory rhetoric from the pulpit as it is prohibited by law…the law is very clear on that: if you get involved in politics from your pulpit you lose your tax exempt status because you have become a political organization and not a religious one.

At first the Mormons for example were pissed. They could not believe that their activist stance on gay marriage and their tireless efforts to convert others would have such a negative impact…a backlash that made almost all non LDS repudiate and admonish the Mormon church. But they had one of their BISHOPS as they often do when confronted with public disapproval…this asshole came out and said he had a vision from God and the message was that homosexuals had to be admitted into the Mormon Brethren.

Wind turbines and solar collectors are a very familiar sight…they are beautiful!

People seem happier; meritocracy once more has become important. The sciences and learning in general has taken on a sense of urgency. Teachers are now revered and respected. It is now the noblest of all professions. True prosperity does wonders for the soul and people are less likely to commit suicide, to be depressed, edgy or cranky. Civility has returned and good manners are highly valued. It is now possible to have civil discourse without personal attacks or dehumanizing lies. The rhetoric of violence is deemed repugnant. Guns are not outlawed but they are jealously regulated. But curiously, since there is so much prosperity people seem to feel they don’t need a gun because there is no Armageddon.