US GOVT MULE

The Foundations of Empire

In the celestial pantheon of Sci-Fi/Fantasy lit, there are a half dozen works, maybe a dozen, that stand out as clear masterpieces, works that not only speak to the reader on multiple levels, but which created a world the reader can actually inhabit: Frank Herbert’s DUNE, certainly, and Tolkein’s LORD OF THE RINGS, absolutely, and, begrudginly, the HARRY POTTER series of JK Rowlings. There are more, of course, but these will suffice for my purposes (oh, and, mercifully, please, leave aside the ‘Great Debate’ of “that’s sci-fi, but that’s fantasy,” which, frankly, bored me fifty years ago. As Billy Joel, who does not even actually exist*, put it: “…it’s still rock and roll to me”).

Among that literature elevated to the heavens in the sci-fi world — and this is clearly sci-fi, not fantasy, but I digress — among the literature is THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY, or tetralogy or whatever it is these days. Isaac Asimov, who considered himself a science writer who only dabbled in sci-fi, but who nevertheless wrote dozens of sci-f novels, created a world, well, a galaxy, actually, an enormous galactic empire that spanned the suns of a million worlds when The Empire of George Lucas could not strike back because it was a mere notion in his then-juvenile brain. By the early 1950s Asimov had penned a not-so-few hundreds of pages about a galactic empire constituting tens of tens of tens of tens of thousands of planet, all ruled by an Emperor from a single city, called Terminus.

There was only one tiny problem with this seemingly eternal, gleaming behemoth: a psychohistorian — a science that combined statistics with psychology — named Hari Seldon had predicted the utter and total collapse of the empire, which would, by his calculations, result in 30,000 years of galactic war, chaos, ignorance and violence. Seeking to shorten the galactic dark ages, Seldon convinced the then-Emperor to create a Foundation, ostensibly to preserve wisdom and knowledge, and soften the blow of the certain, unavoidable disaster to a span of only a thousand years. The Seldon Plan, as it was known, was developed to preserve the knowledge of the millennia until the Empire could be reborn….

And Asimov did a great job of weaving his huge story of the Foundation’s beginning, decades of expansion of influence, and final supremacy, all based on the notion that the Foundation scientists and politicians had access to science-based reality, which put them light years ahead of those who were caught in the collapse and who no longer had any clue about science, logic, reason and rational, critical thinking; these sad folk were limited to faith-based analysis (some of them were convinced by the Foundation scientists that radiation treatment for cancers was a form of food of the gods, e.g.). Now, Asimov loved science, loved logic and reason, and abhorred mindless action — his famous aphorism from the Trilogy is, “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” And his amazing (if stylistically limited) work reflects that.

As the Asimov tale unfolds, the Foundation rises in power because it has science on its side and everybody else does not; and nothing seems to stand in its way — the psychohistorian Seldon had set things up so that statistically it was almost a certainty that the Foundation would succeed in its goal of shortening the dark years from 30,000 to 1,000.

And it all would have worked, except for: a mutant. Yup, that unpredictable anomaly that shattered the hundreds of years of Foundation primacy literally overnight. A single, mutated quasi-human being comes out of the woodwork and throws all the great works of the Foundation out the window. A creature, so warped by fear and self-loathing, a thing so devastated by his own physical limitations and intellectual short-comings, but so focused on power and gain that he cared not one whit for those he crushed or cast aside, uses his super-powers to rule the world in his own way, at his own whim.

This mutant had a nickname: The Mule (ironically, aptly-named, because while he had great powers, he was incapable of reproduction and physically limited in other ways), and his power was almost unstoppable: he was able to control human thought and emotion by a form of ESP, at first using a device that appears to be a musical instrument of some sort, then merely by the force of his own brain waves, as it were.

In any event, because The Mule could make anybody instantly fear — or love — him, he swept aside the Foundation’s forces and became a new Emperor. Seldon, long dead, had failed to anticipate this new sort of person/being/entity, and so his Plan fell by the wayside.

Seldon, the greatest mind of his era, had simply been unable to envision a creature so simultaneously warped and powerful that he would almost-incidentally destroy an empire for his own aggrandizement, his own fortune, his own power, acting as much out of spite as greed. Seldon did not anticipate a thing so foul, so self-absorbed, corrupt, narcissistic and venal that he would cast aside all the good that the Seldon plan, via the Foundation, had done simply because he could. Seldon did not see the possibility that anybody could ever desire the end of the science-based rule of law and reason for his own petty, selfish ends, his own little fears controlling his actions.

In the end, the Mule is defeated by the last great efforts of the surviving members of the Foundation, but only just barely.

It was touch and go, but the Mule is destroyed, in the end, and, being a unique thing, nobody followed in his footsteps, because nobody was a mutant with the Mule’s abilities. The Foundation was restored, the Plan re-activated and good prevails….

In Washington, D.C., our own US Govt Mule — a warped, angry, scared, stupid, ignorant, lazy, incurious, grasping, greedy, loathsome thief, liar, rapist and traitor — sits atop his empire.

Whither the Foundation heroes of DC? Who will rise to take the reins of political power and end the rule of this Mule?

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*While the author concedes that a person by the name of Billy Joel exists, there is serious debate about whether his music does.