Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.The Second Coming, W. B. Yeats
On the third of April, 1961, Eric Marques was inaugurated to thundering applause, announcing a massive crackdown on labor unions and leftist parties, some of which held seats in the Rosen congress.
At the time, the Republic was a paranoid state of paranoid people. Two weeks before Marques’s big party, a ring of communist spies had been uncovered in the Navarro Motor Corporation. Three weeks later, Marques declined a federal bailout to NMC. Fifty-thousand unemployed factory workers roamed the West. During their forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, they came upon the realization that communists were to blame for their woes.
This led to the progression of their rhetoric against minorities, which then led to the ransacking, rape, and destruction of cities across the Leeward Coast. A thousand Tuvayans, Helsayans, and Feveiks die, scapegoats for a scandal they had no connection to.
Marques chose not to condemn the rioters and instead dissolved congress by decree and appointed a cabal of loyalist business magnates to be the new legislature.
1962 comes in. Unemployment is nearing twelve percent, and the unemployed see conspiracy in everything. The very real, very powerful band of yes-men Marques appoints immediately becomes a focal point. In the West, opposing conspiracies abound. Ethnic minorities blame majorities for their woes. The majorities claim the minorities are sabotaging Rosen industry. They both shout “Remember Leeward!“.
“Here is 1963,” Florian Klimowicz says. Eric Marques is dead of a heart attack, a result of a lifetime of eating ultraprocessed food from an industry he deregulated. “Victory in the Cold War is at our fingertips,” Klimowicz yells. There is considerably less applause at his inauguration. And speaking of victory - it was, actually, very far away. Saya, with its parallel global economic system, had no stake in the Republic’s lost years. It boomed.
“Here is 1964,” I say, and there is no more applause. At this point, the concept of a federal government has begun to unravel. Unemployment is at twenty percent. Leeward is in fact Remembered and the events of 1961 reoccur, this time across the entire Commonwealth. Navarro is set aflame, and with no firefighters, no water, and little policing, the city is left to burn. In São Lola, communists briefly control the city until they are shoved from their pedestal by ultranationalists.
People stop counting unemployment statistics, because there is no longer a bureaucratic institution to count. A census was planned for 1965, but it was called off in 1962.
Klimowicz breaks out in tears during a national address. He speaks to an empty stage, because his aides couldn’t find anyone who wouldn’t relentlessly heckle him while he spoke.
1965 is like miasma as it wafts past ‘64. Klimowicz resigns and is replaced by Ricardo Kulig, a self-absorbed politician with dreams of restoring the Republic. His disciples call themselves “Kuligites.” Quaint.
As Kulig hangs his coat in his office, twenty Helsayans hang from a road bridge outside a sleepy farming town. Most are, (excuse me), were children. An angel by the name of Marco Weizmann snaps a picture on 35mm film. It becomes the face of ethnic resistance and ethnic oppression. Like Leeward, the conspiracy, the hatred, the anger, it all seeps together and sets on fire.
Ricardo Kulig, like the men before him, does not acknowledge the violence. Instead he devotes his prime-time slot to presenting a new economic plan. On television he is rushed out by aides who inform him, in hushed tones, that his secretary of defense is dead, poisoned by vigilantes.
‘66. From the view I’ve got up here, it looks like about one in three Rosens are unemployed, give or take a few million, and so they begin to search beyond conspiracy, introspectively. The year Rosens make contact with reality. They’re priced out! Kulig’s economic plan, which consisted of desperately printing money, leads to inflation on a scale never seen before in the Republic.
The Kuligites, skilled economists as they are, pivot, and blame the political system for Rosen woes.
To distract the hundred and thirty two million jobless Rosens, they televise debates over the legislative system, election of supreme court justices, and mandatory retirement ages. It’s white noise to the gutted Rosens. The federal government—at least as a conspiracy—was never very enticing.
In 1967, the monopoly on violence is gone, because there is no more law to enforce. Once you leave the city, there’s nothing but oblivion for miles, a sky red with the glow of a thousand fires, a million dead in the countryside because of famine, violence, and all that horrible jazz.
In Żole, vignettes from familial separation: a daughter, once a thriving, pretentious college student, is urged to flee her hometown for Navarro, where there’s at least the promise of a degree of law and order. A phone rings. Her girlfriend is dead, shot in the chest by some anarchist sniper. She lived in Navarro.
Lo, 1968, and, well, I’ll take the usual. Marco Weizmann and his beloved camera are tossed into a mass grave outside of São Cedillo. He dared to protest martial law.
The daughter from Żole is next to him, beat to death by policemen minutes after arriving in São Cedillo. We will never know of the hardship she faced to get to law and order.
1969 and the concept of a “Rosen” is dead. It rots underneath the ground with Marco Weizmann as Leeward is Remembered for the eighth time.
It is 19- some bastard in Alismos found a store of chlorine gas. Do you smell that? It reeks of pepper.
In Alismos, vignettes from familial separation: a single mother coughs; an irritated throat. A cough, dry from years of limited water. Where is my son? In a ditch. Why? It’s where the graves are.
1971 trips and falls into the margin of a lower schooler’s first persuasive essay.
Ricardo Kulig waltzes down a hallway in the Capitol. He shimmies into a cardigan because the Commonwealth can no longer extract gas to power heating. It’s November and Kulig no longer reads the news. He hands his hat to a security guard and traipses into the assembly chambers, where he indicates to his band of yes-men that he will organize a new census.
What year is it? 1972. A census volunteer knocks on a door in São Lola. It opens and he is shot three times, twice in the skull. The ghost of Marco Weizmann considers the composition of the moment and takes a mental photograph.
The very real, extremely corporeal man who shot the volunteer is draped in the flag of the socialist party. The man is Julian Rybicki. The volunteer knocked on the door of the headquarters of organized armed leftist resistance. Rybicki mumbles to himself and goes back inside. There is a world to win, after all.
Ricardo Kulig died today, the 12th of September, 1973. The Kuligites mourn while the Rosens shrug. Rumor has it the government is gone. São Lola falls to the communists again. By the time São Lola falls, there is no one left but the communists.
Regardless, they celebrate. Tapes-into-tape-decks, they burn effigies and dance around the bonfire. Rybicki digs a latrine.
It is 1974. the revolution has at last come. There are no more Rosens, no more unemployed, no more rioters, no more conspirators, no more Weizmann, and for God’s sake no more Kuligites. There is nothing to document anymore.
Now, the weary traveller asks you “which side are you on?”, and you have but two options: you are a nationalist or a communist.
The decline and fall of the Rosen Republic was a grotesque affair with the following thesis: In these latter days, are there still Rosens? The spiral, the devolution of men into creatures, creatures into dirt, dirt into dust—and this through the vessel: the automobile industry, Marques—and do you Remember Leeward?—Klimowicz, the Kuligites, Weizmann, gas prices, rural oblivion, the mother, the daughter, the mother once more, the census, socialists, and, at long last, the revolution.
And so, in these latter days, there are no Rosens. Just animals.