Legends of Urdos and Corinth Starr
If you’ve been following the Testimonies you can skip the next few paragraphs.
For those who have not yet read the testimonies the following represents a small synopsis of what you are about to read.
To start with everything you are about to read is fiction. The story posed in the fiction is even a fiction within a fiction and is a fictional, even fantastical, history of the world and specifically a place called Southern Azania [SA] during the period 2009-2019.
The “enumerator” of the title is believed to have been a census taker called Marak, living in roughly 2137 AD. [There is controversy over this dating procedure and so it is used interchangeable with other numbers] Some commentators have suggested that the enumerator was some form of Exile.
The Testimonies themselves were part of a parcel of what may loosely be called ‘documents’ discovered by a party of mineral explorers who were visiting the desert planet we call Urdos in search of the fabled Olivine resources which it was always believed existed in huge mother lodes on that sad planet.
The documents enabled us to confirm what scientists had always professed. That is that Urdos had once been a planet, abundant in life. Ultimately our ancestors had used it up and moved on leaving the remnant of the well-used environment to coalesce into dust.
What caused great excitement about the discovery of the document cache was that the period covered by this Enumerator encompasses the period when realisation became sentient: Urdos was in trouble. [You will remember that the documents were referred to in the press as “The scrolls of Monte Christo”, being a reference to the place where they were found as defined on the documents themselves, for as you would have surmised a desert has few place markers.]
Some historians see Corinth Starr and her revolution as the spark that accelerated the catastrophes that befell the planet. Others, more rational perhaps [if one should say that about an Historian] argued that hers was the only revolution that could have ridden out the storm that followed her accession to power.
Gramlich in particular argues that the planet had been experiencing increasing seismic activity for almost two generations before Starr was elected President of Southern Azania. She [Gramlich] continued, that “geographic change and seismic turmoil had taken an accelerating curve, after a series of so-called “Nuclear triple double taps”: explosions that took place in a region that bordered onto the plate structure of the planet.” * [ref: F Gramlich: The origins of chaos. Essay. extract from: The Legends of Urdos. Publ: 9870.]
Those who followed the story in the popular press will remember that Gramlich assembled an impressive battery of data demonstrating how the harmonic symmetry of the planet was jarred by an off-note vibration pattern that prompted a series of seismic events, which while small of themselves, were catastrophic for the humans on the planet, for its balance in the universe had been altered and existing patterns were altering, irrevocably as we now know.
What follows over 19 episodes is the story of how Corinth Starr came to power and what she did afterwards
5 The story of Starr the elder.
The Story so far
In the previous episode Corinth Starr the elder launched her vision of the true post- liberation society in an emerging Azanian Konfederacy, her specific mandate being to promote her principle of Basic Pay.
She presented her manifesto in the now famous Constitution Hill Indaba to acclamation and consternation: acclamation from her supporters and consternation from everybody else
The cynics claimed that Starr’s idea was to make the poor pay for their own development and then set them up so they’d lose everything to the thieving rich.
The cynics were not alone. The Greenists and other groupings, that held [prophetically as it turned out] that the earth was in trouble, and would start hitting back. These radicals saw humanity as virus-like, clawing into the body of Urdos, in ever increasing numbers, causing intolerable itching. They saw Corinth’s vision as crass opportunism.
She was exacerbating the problem; they cried…the poor, schmuck Poor would go into debt to fund an ongoing, ultimately unsustainable, chain of consumer behaviour that would only accelerate the planet’s race to destruction.
“More of the same”, said many. There were powerful voices amongst that part of the leadership, which represented strongly vested interests and honorary holdings, who articulated the argument that it was their very inability to access their wealth that saved the poor from sliding into abject destitution. [As if ordinary destitution was ok, said the cartoons in the weekly print press]. In other words being unable to register their shanties and traditional holdings was ‘good for them’. The ultimo cynics amongst the cynics (and those who felt somehow threatened by the whole idea) said that they found the argument strangely familiar, albeit wrapped up in another package.
There was remarkable unanimity amongst the entire range of oligarchs with which society was normally loaded. The idea of Bee Pee was caricatured and ridiculed. The regular writers in the popular press articulated a storm of debate, a great deal centered around the significance of dropping the idea contained in the word “Grant “, which had been dropped summarily from the BIG argument of the preceding years and had suddenly become a universal right: a move that had caught everyone flatfooted. The articulate class chewed over the change, talking endlessly.
“This market dependency syndrome that we’ve created will blow up the planet.” The spokespeople for the opposition were articulate, and comfortable for the most part.
Starr the elder taunted the arrogance of well-fed opponents denying the destitute a crust of bread because it wasn’t mouldy enough. Here was an position she could scorn. The pivot point to her assault on the power base