Bill & Ted’s Excellent Armageddon
by C.A. Matthews
Bill, a.k.a. “Bill S. Preston, Esquire”, shuffles into a suburban garage music studio where his friend, Ted “Theodore” Logan, is busily grinding his ax. That is, he’s playing an electric guitar, loudly and poorly.
TED: (Puts down his guitar.) Dude! What did Rufus say?
BILL: (He throws his backpack to the side and sits behind the Wyld Stallyns drum kit and hits a few beats in frustration.)You’ll never guess this, dude, but Rufus says he needs us to time travel back to the dark ages.
TED: You mean to the time where the princesses came from?
BILL: No, Ted, even further back. He wants us to go back in history to 1961 and borrow President Eisenhower and help him write a more excellent farewell speech before he leaves the White House.
TED: Whoa...1961? That is dark! But Bill, Rufus knows we can’t spell, so that’s not going to happen.
BILL: I told him, but Rufus says we gotta do it to save humanity or something like that. He gave us a copy of the speech he wants Ike to give.
TED: Awesome! (Frowning.) So, who’s like “Ike”?
BILL: Ike’s the president’s nickname, like yours is “Theodore.”
TED: (Shaking his mop head.) I like Ike!
BILL: I do too. Well, it’s a bodacious speech that could stop a lot of egregious stuff and do a lot of good according to Rufus, so I told him we’d do it.
TED: No way!
BILL: Yes way!
TED: What’s this speech supposed to be about?
BILL: It’s about how we shouldn’t trust the military-industrial complication something or other. All they want to do is start wars so they can sell more bombs and guns and stuff and make lots of money by killing people.
TED: Whoa. That’s totally bogus, dude. Killing people should not be making anyone rich.
BILL: Right you are, dude. (He hits a few beats on the skins and then hits on the cymbals.) That’s why I told Rufus we’d agreed to do it.
TED: (Shakes his head repeatedly.) Okay. So we travel back and give Ike the speech he needs to give in 1961 and everything will be totally gnarly, right?
BILL: Correctomundo. (He puts down the drumsticks.) We just gotta be extra careful not to forget to tell Ike to not forget the last couple of paragraphs that Rufus told me to tell him. They’re real important.
TED: What are these so-called “paragraphs,” dude?
BILL: Rufus said that we should tell Ike to tell the folks not to trust the government when it lies to them about why the wars are starting all the time. Ike has to say, “I’m lying because I’m the government, and I’m caught up in all the military-industrial complications that make a lot of money for rich dudes. Don’t believe me.”
TED: Dude, that doesn’t make any sense. Aren’t we suppose to like Ike and believe him because he’s the president? He wouldn’t be lying to us, right? He wouldn’t want us all to be heinous and go around killing people for money.
BILL: (Scratching his chin in thought.) You make a good point there, Ted. I was a bit confused with what Rufus said about the censorship-industrial complications and how the government would make up stuff just to keep folks from shutting down the wars and killings and all. Let’s skip that confusing part about the government lying. I don’t have enough room in my backpack for all the papers Rufus gave me anyway.
TED: Excellent, dude! Should we get going now so we can get home in time to rehearse with the princesses when they get home from their jobs later?
BILL: Right you are, Ted! We don’t want to keep our most bodacious babes waiting a second longer than absolutely necessary.
(Bill picks up his backpack. The duo exit the garage and head toward a beat up phone booth sitting askew on the driveway.)
TED: Wyld Stallyns will be burning up the airwaves before too long once we get 1961 all straightened out. Won’t we, Bill?
BILL: (Gesturing widely.) Dude, we’ll make an explosion of sound that will wipe out all this “Don’t trust the president and the government lies” heinous stuff in the speech about making money and killing people in starting wars.
TED: (Shaking his head energetically.) Rufus will be so proud of us this time.
(The two look at each other and smile as they play a riff on their air guitars.)
BILL and TED: Excellent! Party on, dude!
END
To see where Bill and Ted went wrong in their mission to save humanity, check out President Eisenhower’s actual speech above.
To understand more about how the censorship-industrial complex works currently (and it is complicated), read Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know, by Matt Taibbi and company. After you check it out, you'll see how easily Bill and Ted got confused.
Americans are indoctrinated from childhood to believe that authority figures would never lie to us and only have our best interests in mind. To be told that the public needs to be warned against trusting everything they’re told by government officials and spokespersons goes against our earliest training. Throw in a scary scenario like 9/11 and you'll get the Patriot Act before you know it.
If anyone had told Eisenhower back then what we now know about how US government disinformation agencies work to keep the public in the dark about the machinations of billionaire capitalists in the 21st century, I doubt Ike would have believed it. I know it’s hard for me to believe even with that excellent graphic in the Report on Censorship-Industrial Complex article and reading all about the Homeland Security's new "Political Police" program to teach us all how to snitch on our neighbors. The sheer lack of ethics evident in these Behind The Curtain styled machinations is mind-boggling.
George Orwell's 1984 couldn't have put it any better!
Time travel as a sub-genre in science fiction has always intrigued me. The temptation to go back in time and “fix things” or to journey into the future and see if we’ll even still be here, alive and well on planet Earth, is so tempting. Until we’ve perfected time travel, however, we’re stuck living a linear existence.
We can’t take back what we’ve said or done to provoke a war. But we can do the ethical and compassionate thing and sit down at the negotiations table and discuss peace terms. We can halt the current wars and prevent any future conflicts from ever starting. We can cooperate and work together with our neighbors on this globe to gain and maintain harmony.
If only Americans weren’t quite as “brilliant” as Bill and Ted! If only we used our critical thinking skills instead of blindly swallowing whatever false narrative those in authority want us to swallow. We’d be living in a peaceful world now, today, and not vainly wishing for a chance to go back in history to do it over again in order to garner better results.
Armageddon need never come then—just excellent adventures of the most awesome and bodacious variety. It’s time we put down our air guitars and journey forth from our garage studios and spread truths to counter the lies. Right, dudes?
No matter how paranoid or conspiracy minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you can imagine. ~William Blum
Articles of Interest:
Eisenhower Farewell Address (Full)
https://youtu.be/CWiIYW_fBfY
Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know https://www.racket.news/p/report-on-the-censorship-industrial-74b
The Government Created a New Disinformation Office to Oversee All the Other Ones https://theintercept.com/2023/05/05/foreign-malign-influence-center-disinformation/
Political Police? New Docs Show DHS Program To Target “Middle-Aged Pro Life Advocates” and “Budding Conspiracy Theorists” Under Guise Of “Deradicalization” https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/dhs-video-series-to-target-peer-beliefs/
DHS and FBI Depict Vegan Activists as Potential Domestic Terrorists https://www.leefang.com/p/dhs-and-fbi-depict-vegan-activists/
Proof 911 Hijackers Were CIA https://youtu.be/-JbdfgqzsEg
US Sold Weapons to Nearly 60 Percent of World's Authoritarian Nations in 2022 https://truthout.org/articles/us-sold-weapons-to-nearly-60-percent-of-worlds-authoritarian-nations-in-2022/
As Arab states seek peace, US insists that Syrians suffer https://mate.substack.com/p/as-arab-states-seek-peace-us-insists
Title 42 Was Inhumane and Illegal. So Are Biden’s New Border Policies. https://truthout.org/articles/title-42-was-inhumane-and-illegal-so-are-bidens-new-border-policies/
War for Profit: A Very Short History https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/09/war-for-profit-a-very-short-history/
Nazis in Ukraine--It's Worse Than You Think https://joebrunoli.substack.com/p/nazis-in-ukraine-its-worse-than-you-think-80a2b8028306
Special Counsel Reveals 2016 Trump-Russia FBI Investigative Failure https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/14/special-counsel-reveals-2016-trump-russia-fbi-investigative-failure/
Former Dumping Ground Became A Flourishing Food Ecosystem
https://popularresistance.org/former-dumping-ground-became-a-flourishing-food-ecosystem/
Sabotage For The Planet? https://popularresistance.org/sabotage-for-the-planet/
London police carry out mass arrests during coronation of King Charles https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/07/siop-m07.html
This Season’s Hottest Trend: Anti-Consumption
https://popularresistance.org/this-seasons-hottest-trend-anti-consumption/
Private Jets Are Dirty Luxuries For The Ultra Rich – Let’s Tax Them
https://popularresistance.org/private-jets-are-dirty-luxuries-for-the-ultra-rich-lets-tax-them/
Teamsters bureaucracy orders members not to join picket lines of Writers Guild strike https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/08/twga-m08.html
Following unexplained death of kindergartner, Detroit elementary school reopens amid cluster of “mystery” illnesses
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/08/kzyk-m08.html
This Civilization Is Mentally Ill https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/this-civilization-is-mentally-ill
The narrative of the “unprovoked war” in Ukraine falls apart
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/11/gfgh-m11.html
Neo-Nazi terror threat grows as Ukraine fighters jailed in France
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/05/09/neo-nazi-terror-threat-grows-as-ukraine-fighters-jailed-in-france/
More People Died from the Failures of Obamacare than from Covid-19 https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/12/more-people-died-from-the-failures-of-obamacare-than-from-covid-19/
Another Norfolk Southern Train Derails 15 Miles From Site of East Palestine, Ohio Disaster https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/14/epal-m14.html
Behind The Curtain https://bernie2016.blogspot.com/2023/05/behind-curtain.html
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