Resisting Rhett Caan
When my worst nightmare becomes reality
Is there a story that impressed you so much that you typed your own copy of it?
I was at the height of my Jack Kirby phase in 2004. I wanted to own everything the ‘King’ of American comics had written since 1970. (I couldn’t afford most of his earlier work which I own almost entirely in reprint form.) That included “The Conversion of Tegujai Batir,” included in David Copperfield's Tales of the Impossible.
I got that anthology solely for Kirby’s story - an excerpt from his unpublished novel The Horde!. Eleven years later, I remember nothing about “The Conversion” beyond its Mongolian subject matter - an oddity even in Kirby’s diverse oeuvre. Even its title was unfamiliar to me when I flipped through its pages tonight, perhaps for the first time in two decades.
Disappointed by Kirby’s contribution, by chance I started reading another story in the volume, Lucy Taylor’s “Switch”. I never heard of Taylor before. I’m not sure I ever want to read anything else by her. Because “Switch” is hard to beat. It is the second most disturbing thing I’ve ever read. (I considered including the first here, but it deserves its own post.) I cannot do it justice with a synopsis. So I’ll just give you a taste of the premise:
Twelve-year-old Erika wakes up from a nightmare in Colorado to find herself in an even worse reality after her old world was blown away. I’m all alone, she thinks to herself. Even when she encounters other people. Because even though they look like people she knows - her Grandma Bertie and her parents Sarah and Jim Spence - they don’t know her anymore. They go by different names now. Bertie is May, who doesn’t even speak English and who lives in a part of town with
signs […] in fanciful red letters that looked like small houses pierced with a variety of slashes and strokes. They ran up and down, not left and right.
The Spences are the Hollys who never had a daughter. And everyone thinks Erika Spence is ‘Lizbeth’, the daughter of strangers.
Everyone except her math teacher Mrs. Markson. Whom everyone else thinks is ‘Mrs. Gordon’. Mrs. Markson/Gordon remembers:
Like God got bored and He went and did - this. […] I don’t think it can go back. […] And we can’t tell people everything’s different now, because they won’t believe us.
Then the police take away Mrs. Markson/Gordon.
Then Erika is alone with her thoughts:
Put everything back like it was. Put it back.
I typed the entire story to internalize it.
Today I realize I was a bit like the typists of samizdat. Imagine reading something so precious you had to replicate every letter.
But I wasn’t sharing copies in secret with others. I was the only audience of my copy. This morning, I happened to rediscover a printout of it not long after a disturbing conversation.
Someone I’ve known for decades is now on Team Orange, Christian Division. We were talking about LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ propaganda in pop culture. They said something about how “we” (meaning them and somebody else, not me1) had warned back in the day that mainstreaming gayness would result in the celebration of degeneracy. (I paraphrase because the exact example we discussed is too gross for my Substack account.)
That snippet out of context made that person sound as if they had been a member of the Moral Majority.
The Moral Majority portrayed issues such as abortion, divorce, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment as attacks on the traditional concept and values of American families and tapped into a sense of societal moral decay that resonated with many evangelicals.
However, that person had been pro-rainbow until recently, and I recall them telling me decades ago that they had ditched Christianity because it was anti-gay.
Whoosh!
That past is gone now, just like Erika’s past in “Switch”. The wind blew it away.
Brett Rhett Caan has struck.
Rhett Caan, thought to be formerly Brett Caan, is a being from Meta Reality with a variant of the power Vocifery which makes anything he says the truth, or more accurately he has the power to make it so that things were always a certain way.
Reality isn’t what it used to be.
This person is a stranger to me. A familiar voice saying unfamiliar things. The Church with a capital C rules half their life now, and the other half is ruled by the Good Guy Gang - demigods like Eeeeelon, The Jordan, and Joe Rogan. They told me about MAHA and those horrible food dyes. Topics of no previous concern to them in the old reality.
But now …
Five years ago during CONvid, another person I thought I knew well after decades donned da mesk and declared that they were germaphobic. Which they hadn’t been in the old reality. I remember their old dirty apartment. Not fit for Howard Hughes.
wrote thatthe Current Thing seems to be a defining feature of this age, everyone talks about it and thinks about it and is animated by it. Yet that’s where it ends for almost everyone, pigs forcefed at the trough of shill marionetted influencers and media.
The people whom I thought I knew best in the world - whom I thought were more like my family than my actual family - care more about the Current Thing than about reality, much less me. They retcon themselves to be characters in the script of the Current Thing. The no-homo Christian crusader. The viro-vigilant mesk-ed hero.
I don’t care about that script.
I am Erika.
I took “we” to mean ‘I and some CONservative people’ excluding me because I don’t remember making any such prediction. I myself was very pro-gay for a very long time.
This person also never made any such prediction in all the years I’ve known them. They wouldn’t even have wanted to because they were pro-gay until the last few years when they embraced Christ.
And by 2022 or whenever, it would have been awfully late for them to make such a prediction because by then the alphabet had been in our faces for years. Such a prediction would only have made sense up to the nineties when Will & Grace and Ellen could be taken as warning signs.
That is very disturbing and yet also very accurate. I am having the same experience. Often.