Cherry Pie - The Fall of the United States of America

[James G]

Below is a short stand-alone piece based on the book A Handmaid's Tale focusing on the events preceding the fall of the United States.

[James G]

Cherry Pie – The Fall of the United States of America


Richard Nixon. Gerald Ford. Nelson Rockefeller. Jerry Brown. George Bush. These men were the last five presidents of the United States before the nation’s collapse two hundred and ten years after its founding. Only Nixon was alive to see the nation fall apart: the others were dead, by natural causes or most-certainly not.

What replaced the United States was civil war and then the Republic of Gilead.


Nixon had served as vice president through 1953 to ’61 and unsuccessfully ran for president in ’60. He returned in ’68 though, winning that year’s presidential election. Nixon was in the White House for five years and during that time he oversaw the end of the United States’ involvement in the divisive Vietnam War. Scandal erupted following his second term victory in ’72. Nixon covered up what was done in his name and the revelations of Watergate caused his downfall. Rather than be impeached, Nixon resigned in ’74. He was bitter and eager for vengeance. Such an opportunity would never come though.

Ford had been named as vice president to Nixon late the year before when the previous office holder had resigned in a scandal separate to Watergate. Nine months later, Ford took over from Nixon. He pardoned his predecessor in an act which quickly soured opinions of him nationwide. The aim of his presidency was to heel the country following Watergate yet Ford struggled to do this. There were claims throughout his short presidency that he lacked legitimacy too, having never been elected to either the office of the presidency nor the vice presidency neither. Ford tried to do his best regardless. In September 1975, thirteen months in, Ford was in California. A demented young woman, a follower of Charles Manson, shot him while in Sacramento. Ford was rushed away and then to hospital. The bullet wound in his chest became infected and Ford suffered a painful six days post-shooting before he finally passed away.

Rockefeller – Rocky – hadn’t been elected to the office of the vice presidency either; Ford had appointed him with Senate approval. Once Ford died, Rocky took the oath of office as president because it was his duty. At once, he found himself unpopular with the American people. He was out of touch with ordinary Americans, he was out of touch with the mood of the country. Rocky was an old school New England Republican past his prime. He soon favoured spending less time on any extra presidential duties than was necessary and there was no intention of him running for election in 1976. Leadership was what the country needed at a time when the economy was a mess and there were incidents of domestic terrorism aplenty but Rocky was unable to do attend to them effectively. His efforts to do so met extraordinary criticism and so he backed away. Increasingly, his new vice president, George Bush, dealt with many of those as he was running for the presidency in ’76. Rocky himself preferred the company of a plethora of young ladies who attended upon him at the White House in a series of dalliances which would have made JFK jealous.

Brown defeated Bush and took office in January 1977. The then sitting governor of California had won the presidential election campaigning for fixing the economy and using many environmental initiatives to do so. They were controversial. So was Brown too, in particular his lifestyle. He was a bachelor with a string of high-profile former girlfriends. He had no intention of getting married just for the sake of appearances. This had set him at odds with a mid-Seventies upswing of social conservative values that had come when Rocky was in office and something that Bush had been unable to tap into. Extremists had acted with violence to push back against the forces of progressivism which Brown was seem to espouse: moral decay they called it. Brown himself was accused by those on the other side as attempting to use proto-fascist measures to enact his economic and environmental measures. He was as fast as unpopular as Ford and Rocky had been before him. As to Rocky, the former president died of a heart attack a few months into Brown’s presidency when in the company of yet another young lady. That had nothing to do with Brown but he and the ‘culture of moral decay’ he was accused of presiding over nationwide was blamed. Bombings of abortion clinics, armed attacks on the growing porn industry and gun battles between an increasing number of far-right & then far-left groups with each other and federal authorities occurred. Brown led the legislative effort to crack down hard upon the increasing violence despite countless other disputes with Congress. This incurred the wrath of those against him and led to two failed assassination attempts on him. The economy wouldn’t recover against this backdrop of tit-for-tat political violence. Brown’s unpopularity reached new lows as he ran for re-election in ’80. He was challenged in the primary season by Ted Kennedy… before Kennedy was murdered (like his two brothers before him) by a religious nut opposed to Kennedy’s public position on a multitude of internal domestic issues. Brown went on to contest the election in November and subsequently lost to the man he had defeated four years before.

Bush’s success the second time around saw him win in 1980. He’d managed to tap into the social conservative bloc this time to get their votes though it fast became apparent that he didn’t intend to honour his campaign rhetoric. Foreign affairs came second to the economy; concerns over violence and massive polarisation on social matters nationwide were a distant third. He was regarded as betraying those whose votes he had won when it came to dodging promises in getting a grip on this. Unproved allegations were made that there was a sympathy, maybe even a conspiracy of support, among many in the lower rungs of the Bush Administration when it came to those committing violent acts on the religious right. Yet, at the same time, little was done to combat the extreme left either who took up the mantle of opposing them when the government seemed inactive. Bush’s foreign policy successes were important and won him much praise: it looked like he was ending the Cold War. Economic recovery didn’t come though there was a little improvement, improvement overblown by the White House. It didn’t stop the political violence and that was what the public was concerned about. It drove supporters and opponents of these acts further apart with Bush caught in the middle and unable to fully address it. The high-profile killings continued. Brown, running for the Senate with an open seat in California, was slain and the former president’s Secret Service bodyguards were unable to stop that. Well-known figures for women’s and gay rights, plus those fighting for full racial equality too, were murdered. In contrast, there were killings as well of several leading lights of the growing religious right movement (which had subsumed much of the social conservative movement) to add to these. Bush ran again in ’84 and won. It was far closer than in ’80. This time he abandoned trying to woo the religious right and fought for the middle ground. His weak opponent, Senator Garry Hart, found little support when there should have been so much. Bush won because it was said that there was ‘no one else to vote for’ in terms of whom was presidential material (Hart and his sex scandal had erupted during the late stages of the election) and he was able to point to hyped-up economic numbers. The turnout was miserable though. The American people were not behind a man who’d just won election.

The second term for Bush appeared to promise more of the same. He took office in January 1985 as a re-elected president yet extremely unpopular nationwide. Some of his early appointments in his administration were seen as very strange too because they were outsiders. This wasn’t the usual patronage which could be expected by a president. Newspapers fast dug into the backgrounds of many of them and started to see a connection appearing: there were connections to the religious right popping up everywhere. It appeared that Bush’s campaign had brought off active opposition in the election by promises of participation in shaping the domestic policy of the president’s second term. Could this be true? Put off-the-record to the president’s top aides by journalists working the story before it was ready to be published, this was denied furiously. A trio of those journalists were murdered within days, their killings on Valentine’s Day investigated by the FBI as being the work of a previously unknown group from the religious right named ‘Sons of Jacob’. The investigation was forestalled over the following weekend by internal disputes within the FBI including the new deputy director of that organisation putting a halt on it. Unknown to those who didn’t need to know, he was one of the Sons of Jacobs’ – an extremely secretive, fundamentalist group who kept a low profile and had followers in many positions of influence – coordinating council. Bush had appointed him on the advice of his own chief-of-staff, yet another one of these Sons of Jacob (this man a stooge, not a leading member) who had a very different take on Biblical teachings than anyone else. The coming Monday was President’s Day, a federal nationwide holiday. That would be Bush’s last day as president.


February 18th 1985 saw Operation Cherry Pie commence. Cherry pie was often eaten as a symbolic food of that holiday and the organisers of the coup d’état chose that name in an ironic gesture. It was a rare example of humour shown by the Sons of Jacob and not something to be repeated. They had been planning what they did for a while though had a timetable for August, not February. Things changed though when the Washington Post was on that story and killing journalists wouldn’t stop it breaking eventually. They had yet to have the influence that they planned to and had to move forward with their murderous campaign with haste. They had killed before – Jerry Brown being their biggest target, an act of pure revenge rather than any ideological move – and had used proxies and stooges to do their dirty work. Their ideology came from the Bible, an interpretation of it taken to extremes. Nationwide, they had no real public support even among those who believed what they did (not too many) because they stayed in the shadows. The Sons of Jacobs were men who didn’t want the limelight nor openly tried to woo voters. They had disdain for the secular democratic system and saw the United States as a sinful nation ran in a corrupt manner and crying out for the voice of God. Bush, like so many others, were what was wrong with the country and no democratic means could change the rot of decay that had come in the previous decades. They had a plan to change all that. That plan began when senior military officers who shared their line of thinking – again stooges though, not insiders no matter what they might think – launched Cherry Pie.

Bush was holding a press conference in the White House. The Sons of Jacob had a non-military proxy get a bomb in there. It went off just after midday, killing dozens there including many (hated) journalists too. The forty-first and last president was among the dead.

Green Berets struck at Congress seconds later, in session despite the holiday as there were confirmation hearings taking place for new appointees in second-ranking government departments. These special forces men were sent there under orders to kill members of both Houses… and everyone else inside. The men chosen were the right men, from a team of selected members of the Green Berets put together to ‘defend the nation’ against a coup. They were used to launch a coup instead, manipulated into doing so. Hundreds of elected officials were machine gunned and then grenades were used on survivors before Capitol Hill went up in flames. The House Speaker and Senate president were among the dead.

The vice president was on an official trip to Florida. Air Force Two was shot down by a lone fighter jet and crashed into the ocean. Eight of the nine justices of the Supreme Court were killed by another team of gunmen; the ninth was on the run for several days before being slain too. The secretaries of state, treasury and defence were each murdered as well: Al Haig, Bush’s Secretary of Defence, was shot in the back of the head inside the Pentagon without any understanding of what was going on. The Chief of Staff of the US Army took over at the Pentagon when the rest of the joint chiefs were killed under his orders. This member of the Sons of Jacob then issued further orders for troops to start moving into Washington. There was a coup underway and it must be stopped! Those soldiers had no idea that they were undertaking that coup.

The elimination of the top level of the US Government was complete. Cherry Pie had worked. Military forces moved into secure Washington. A state of emergency was declared nationwide in response to what was said to have been attempt by ‘foreign operatives’ to topple the nation. No new president was named, the general who ordered the Pentagon killings spoke to the American people from there. He asked the people to pray for their fellow Americans. Have faith, he said, while the chaos is sorted out and God will watch over you. Justice will be swift for those who have done all of this too… it would be for him because the Sons of Jacob would purge him within weeks.

They stepped forward in that chaos. Members were appointed to government positions, without any Congressional nor presidential approval, from the Pentagon. They had the FBI subsumed and the military too. The nation’s nuclear forces were under control at once while military forces were told that lie about an attempted coup before forestalled by military action. The arrests began as those behind that coup were ‘exposed’. Surviving government officials were detained by the military, so too soon enough members of the press. Few arrests were announced and none of the quick extrajudicial killings were either. Across the nation, voices of opposition were silenced and blame pointed everywhere but where it belonged. The Sons of Jacob, still wary of public attention on them personally, controlled this but didn’t show their faces to the American people. They were busy dismantling the organs of state and they built a new one, all over the bodies of the increasing numbers of those killed.

The Republic of Gilead arose from out of the ashes – corpses even – of the deposed United States of America. Resistance began soon but the Sons of Jacob had the upper hand and weren’t about to give up what they had so forcefully taken. There would be a civil war though: those Americans who could resist, who saw through the lies, did so. Gilead would be opposed.

[lordroel]

Aug 21, 2018 14:59:53 GMT James G said:

Cherry Pie – The Fall of the United States of America


Richard Nixon. Gerald Ford. Nelson Rockefeller. Jerry Brown. George Bush. These men were the last five presidents of the United States before the nation’s collapse two hundred and ten years after its founding. Only Nixon was alive to see the nation fall apart: the others were dead, by natural causes or most-certainly not.

What replaced the United States was civil war and then the Republic of Gilead.


Nixon had served as vice president through 1953 to ’61 and unsuccessfully ran for president in ’60. He returned in ’68 though, winning that year’s presidential election. Nixon was in the White House for five years and during that time he oversaw the end of the United States’ involvement in the divisive Vietnam War. Scandal erupted following his second term victory in ’72. Nixon covered up what was done in his name and the revelations of Watergate caused his downfall. Rather than be impeached, Nixon resigned in ’74. He was bitter and eager for vengeance. Such an opportunity would never come though.

Ford had been named as vice president to Nixon late the year before when the previous office holder had resigned in a scandal separate to Watergate. Nine months later, Ford took over from Nixon. He pardoned his predecessor in an act which quickly soured opinions of him nationwide. The aim of his presidency was to heel the country following Watergate yet Ford struggled to do this. There were claims throughout his short presidency that he lacked legitimacy too, having never been elected to either the office of the presidency nor the vice presidency neither. Ford tried to do his best regardless. In September 1975, thirteen months in, Ford was in California. A demented young woman, a follower of Charles Manson, shot him while in Sacramento. Ford was rushed away and then to hospital. The bullet wound in his chest became infected and Ford suffered a painful six days post-shooting before he finally passed away.

Rockefeller – Rocky – hadn’t been elected to the office of the vice presidency either; Ford had appointed him with Senate approval. Once Ford died, Rocky took the oath of office as president because it was his duty. At once, he found himself unpopular with the American people. He was out of touch with ordinary Americans, he was out of touch with the mood of the country. Rocky was an old school New England Republican past his prime. He soon favoured spending less time on any extra presidential duties than was necessary and there was no intention of him running for election in 1976. Leadership was what the country needed at a time when the economy was a mess and there were incidents of domestic terrorism aplenty but Rocky was unable to do attend to them effectively. His efforts to do so met extraordinary criticism and so he backed away. Increasingly, his new vice president, George Bush, dealt with many of those as he was running for the presidency in ’76. Rocky himself preferred the company of a plethora of young ladies who attended upon him at the White House in a series of dalliances which would have made JFK jealous.

Brown defeated Bush and took office in January 1977. The then sitting governor of California had won the presidential election campaigning for fixing the economy and using many environmental initiatives to do so. They were controversial. So was Brown too, in particular his lifestyle. He was a bachelor with a string of high-profile former girlfriends. He had no intention of getting married just for the sake of appearances. This had set him at odds with a mid-Seventies upswing of social conservative values that had come when Rocky was in office and something that Bush had been unable to tap into. Extremists had acted with violence to push back against the forces of progressivism which Brown was seem to espouse: moral decay they called it. Brown himself was accused by those on the other side as attempting to use proto-fascist measures to enact his economic and environmental measures. He was as fast as unpopular as Ford and Rocky had been before him. As to Rocky, the former president died of a heart attack a few months into Brown’s presidency when in the company of yet another young lady. That had nothing to do with Brown but he and the ‘culture of moral decay’ he was accused of presiding over nationwide was blamed. Bombings of abortion clinics, armed attacks on the growing porn industry and gun battles between an increasing number of far-right & then far-left groups with each other and federal authorities occurred. Brown led the legislative effort to crack down hard upon the increasing violence despite countless other disputes with Congress. This incurred the wrath of those against him and led to two failed assassination attempts on him. The economy wouldn’t recover against this backdrop of tit-for-tat political violence. Brown’s unpopularity reached new lows as he ran for re-election in ’80. He was challenged in the primary season by Ted Kennedy… before Kennedy was murdered (like his two brothers before him) by a religious nut opposed to Kennedy’s public position on a multitude of internal domestic issues. Brown went on to contest the election in November and subsequently lost to the man he had defeated four years before.

Bush’s success the second time around saw him win in 1980. He’d managed to tap into the social conservative bloc this time to get their votes though it fast became apparent that he didn’t intend to honour his campaign rhetoric. Foreign affairs came second to the economy; concerns over violence and massive polarisation on social matters nationwide were a distant third. He was regarded as betraying those whose votes he had won when it came to dodging promises in getting a grip on this. Unproved allegations were made that there was a sympathy, maybe even a conspiracy of support, among many in the lower rungs of the Bush Administration when it came to those committing violent acts on the religious right. Yet, at the same time, little was done to combat the extreme left either who took up the mantle of opposing them when the government seemed inactive. Bush’s foreign policy successes were important and won him much praise: it looked like he was ending the Cold War. Economic recovery didn’t come though there was a little improvement, improvement overblown by the White House. It didn’t stop the political violence and that was what the public was concerned about. It drove supporters and opponents of these acts further apart with Bush caught in the middle and unable to fully address it. The high-profile killings continued. Brown, running for the Senate with an open seat in California, was slain and the former president’s Secret Service bodyguards were unable to stop that. Well-known figures for women’s and gay rights, plus those fighting for full racial equality too, were murdered. In contrast, there were killings as well of several leading lights of the growing religious right movement (which had subsumed much of the social conservative movement) to add to these. Bush ran again in ’84 and won. It was far closer than in ’80. This time he abandoned trying to woo the religious right and fought for the middle ground. His weak opponent, Senator Garry Hart, found little support when there should have been so much. Bush won because it was said that there was ‘no one else to vote for’ in terms of whom was presidential material (Hart and his sex scandal had erupted during the late stages of the election) and he was able to point to hyped-up economic numbers. The turnout was miserable though. The American people were not behind a man who’d just won election.

The second term for Bush appeared to promise more of the same. He took office in January 1985 as a re-elected president yet extremely unpopular nationwide. Some of his early appointments in his administration were seen as very strange too because they were outsiders. This wasn’t the usual patronage which could be expected by a president. Newspapers fast dug into the backgrounds of many of them and started to see a connection appearing: there were connections to the religious right popping up everywhere. It appeared that Bush’s campaign had brought off active opposition in the election by promises of participation in shaping the domestic policy of the president’s second term. Could this be true? Put off-the-record to the president’s top aides by journalists working the story before it was ready to be published, this was denied furiously. A trio of those journalists were murdered within days, their killings on Valentine’s Day investigated by the FBI as being the work of a previously unknown group from the religious right named ‘Sons of Jacob’. The investigation was forestalled over the following weekend by internal disputes within the FBI including the new deputy director of that organisation putting a halt on it. Unknown to those who didn’t need to know, he was one of the Sons of Jacobs’ – an extremely secretive, fundamentalist group who kept a low profile and had followers in many positions of influence – coordinating council. Bush had appointed him on the advice of his own chief-of-staff, yet another one of these Sons of Jacob (this man a stooge, not a leading member) who had a very different take on Biblical teachings than anyone else. The coming Monday was President’s Day, a federal nationwide holiday. That would be Bush’s last day as president.


February 18th 1985 saw Operation Cherry Pie commence. Cherry pie was often eaten as a symbolic food of that holiday and the organisers of the coup d’état chose that name in an ironic gesture. It was a rare example of humour shown by the Sons of Jacob and not something to be repeated. They had been planning what they did for a while though had a timetable for August, not February. Things changed though when the Washington Post was on that story and killing journalists wouldn’t stop it breaking eventually. They had yet to have the influence that they planned to and had to move forward with their murderous campaign with haste. They had killed before – Jerry Brown being their biggest target, an act of pure revenge rather than any ideological move – and had used proxies and stooges to do their dirty work. Their ideology came from the Bible, an interpretation of it taken to extremes. Nationwide, they had no real public support even among those who believed what they did (not too many) because they stayed in the shadows. The Sons of Jacobs were men who didn’t want the limelight nor openly tried to woo voters. They had disdain for the secular democratic system and saw the United States as a sinful nation ran in a corrupt manner and crying out for the voice of God. Bush, like so many others, were what was wrong with the country and no democratic means could change the rot of decay that had come in the previous decades. They had a plan to change all that. That plan began when senior military officers who shared their line of thinking – again stooges though, not insiders no matter what they might think – launched Cherry Pie.

Bush was holding a press conference in the White House. The Sons of Jacob had a non-military proxy get a bomb in there. It went off just after midday, killing dozens there including many (hated) journalists too. The forty-first and last president was among the dead.

Green Berets struck at Congress seconds later, in session despite the holiday as there were confirmation hearings taking place for new appointees in second-ranking government departments. These special forces men were sent there under orders to kill members of both Houses… and everyone else inside. The men chosen were the right men, from a team of selected members of the Green Berets put together to ‘defend the nation’ against a coup. They were used to launch a coup instead, manipulated into doing so. Hundreds of elected officials were machine gunned and then grenades were used on survivors before Capitol Hill went up in flames. The House Speaker and Senate president were among the dead.

The vice president was on an official trip to Florida. Air Force Two was shot down by a lone fighter jet and crashed into the ocean. Eight of the nine justices of the Supreme Court were killed by another team of gunmen; the ninth was on the run for several days before being slain too. The secretaries of state, treasury and defence were each murdered as well: Al Haig, Bush’s Secretary of Defence, was shot in the back of the head inside the Pentagon without any understanding of what was going on. The Chief of Staff of the US Army took over at the Pentagon when the rest of the joint chiefs were killed under his orders. This member of the Sons of Jacob then issued further orders for troops to start moving into Washington. There was a coup underway and it must be stopped! Those soldiers had no idea that they were undertaking that coup.

The elimination of the top level of the US Government was complete. Cherry Pie had worked. Military forces moved into secure Washington. A state of emergency was declared nationwide in response to what was said to have been attempt by ‘foreign operatives’ to topple the nation. No new president was named, the general who ordered the Pentagon killings spoke to the American people from there. He asked the people to pray for their fellow Americans. Have faith, he said, while the chaos is sorted out and God will watch over you. Justice will be swift for those who have done all of this too… it would be for him because the Sons of Jacob would purge him within weeks.

They stepped forward in that chaos. Members were appointed to government positions, without any Congressional nor presidential approval, from the Pentagon. They had the FBI subsumed and the military too. The nation’s nuclear forces were under control at once while military forces were told that lie about an attempted coup before forestalled by military action. The arrests began as those behind that coup were ‘exposed’. Surviving government officials were detained by the military, so too soon enough members of the press. Few arrests were announced and none of the quick extrajudicial killings were either. Across the nation, voices of opposition were silenced and blame pointed everywhere but where it belonged. The Sons of Jacob, still wary of public attention on them personally, controlled this but didn’t show their faces to the American people. They were busy dismantling the organs of state and they built a new one, all over the bodies of the increasing numbers of those killed.

The Republic of Gilead arose from out of the ashes – corpses even – of the deposed United States of America. Resistance began soon but the Sons of Jacob had the upper hand and weren’t about to give up what they had so forcefully taken. There would be a civil war though: those Americans who could resist, who saw through the lies, did so. Gilead would be opposed.

Another great timeline James.

[James G]

Aug 21, 2018 15:01:16 GMT lordroel said:

Aug 21, 2018 14:59:53 GMT James G said:

Cherry Pie – The Fall of the United States of America


Richard Nixon. Gerald Ford. Nelson Rockefeller. Jerry Brown. George Bush. These men were the last five presidents of the United States before the nation’s collapse two hundred and ten years after its founding. Only Nixon was alive to see the nation fall apart: the others were dead, by natural causes or most-certainly not.

What replaced the United States was civil war and then the Republic of Gilead.


Nixon had served as vice president through 1953 to ’61 and unsuccessfully ran for president in ’60. He returned in ’68 though, winning that year’s presidential election. Nixon was in the White House for five years and during that time he oversaw the end of the United States’ involvement in the divisive Vietnam War. Scandal erupted following his second term victory in ’72. Nixon covered up what was done in his name and the revelations of Watergate caused his downfall. Rather than be impeached, Nixon resigned in ’74. He was bitter and eager for vengeance. Such an opportunity would never come though.

Ford had been named as vice president to Nixon late the year before when the previous office holder had resigned in a scandal separate to Watergate. Nine months later, Ford took over from Nixon. He pardoned his predecessor in an act which quickly soured opinions of him nationwide. The aim of his presidency was to heel the country following Watergate yet Ford struggled to do this. There were claims throughout his short presidency that he lacked legitimacy too, having never been elected to either the office of the presidency nor the vice presidency neither. Ford tried to do his best regardless. In September 1975, thirteen months in, Ford was in California. A demented young woman, a follower of Charles Manson, shot him while in Sacramento. Ford was rushed away and then to hospital. The bullet wound in his chest became infected and Ford suffered a painful six days post-shooting before he finally passed away.

Rockefeller – Rocky – hadn’t been elected to the office of the vice presidency either; Ford had appointed him with Senate approval. Once Ford died, Rocky took the oath of office as president because it was his duty. At once, he found himself unpopular with the American people. He was out of touch with ordinary Americans, he was out of touch with the mood of the country. Rocky was an old school New England Republican past his prime. He soon favoured spending less time on any extra presidential duties than was necessary and there was no intention of him running for election in 1976. Leadership was what the country needed at a time when the economy was a mess and there were incidents of domestic terrorism aplenty but Rocky was unable to do attend to them effectively. His efforts to do so met extraordinary criticism and so he backed away. Increasingly, his new vice president, George Bush, dealt with many of those as he was running for the presidency in ’76. Rocky himself preferred the company of a plethora of young ladies who attended upon him at the White House in a series of dalliances which would have made JFK jealous.

Brown defeated Bush and took office in January 1977. The then sitting governor of California had won the presidential election campaigning for fixing the economy and using many environmental initiatives to do so. They were controversial. So was Brown too, in particular his lifestyle. He was a bachelor with a string of high-profile former girlfriends. He had no intention of getting married just for the sake of appearances. This had set him at odds with a mid-Seventies upswing of social conservative values that had come when Rocky was in office and something that Bush had been unable to tap into. Extremists had acted with violence to push back against the forces of progressivism which Brown was seem to espouse: moral decay they called it. Brown himself was accused by those on the other side as attempting to use proto-fascist measures to enact his economic and environmental measures. He was as fast as unpopular as Ford and Rocky had been before him. As to Rocky, the former president died of a heart attack a few months into Brown’s presidency when in the company of yet another young lady. That had nothing to do with Brown but he and the ‘culture of moral decay’ he was accused of presiding over nationwide was blamed. Bombings of abortion clinics, armed attacks on the growing porn industry and gun battles between an increasing number of far-right & then far-left groups with each other and federal authorities occurred. Brown led the legislative effort to crack down hard upon the increasing violence despite countless other disputes with Congress. This incurred the wrath of those against him and led to two failed assassination attempts on him. The economy wouldn’t recover against this backdrop of tit-for-tat political violence. Brown’s unpopularity reached new lows as he ran for re-election in ’80. He was challenged in the primary season by Ted Kennedy… before Kennedy was murdered (like his two brothers before him) by a religious nut opposed to Kennedy’s public position on a multitude of internal domestic issues. Brown went on to contest the election in November and subsequently lost to the man he had defeated four years before.

Bush’s success the second time around saw him win in 1980. He’d managed to tap into the social conservative bloc this time to get their votes though it fast became apparent that he didn’t intend to honour his campaign rhetoric. Foreign affairs came second to the economy; concerns over violence and massive polarisation on social matters nationwide were a distant third. He was regarded as betraying those whose votes he had won when it came to dodging promises in getting a grip on this. Unproved allegations were made that there was a sympathy, maybe even a conspiracy of support, among many in the lower rungs of the Bush Administration when it came to those committing violent acts on the religious right. Yet, at the same time, little was done to combat the extreme left either who took up the mantle of opposing them when the government seemed inactive. Bush’s foreign policy successes were important and won him much praise: it looked like he was ending the Cold War. Economic recovery didn’t come though there was a little improvement, improvement overblown by the White House. It didn’t stop the political violence and that was what the public was concerned about. It drove supporters and opponents of these acts further apart with Bush caught in the middle and unable to fully address it. The high-profile killings continued. Brown, running for the Senate with an open seat in California, was slain and the former president’s Secret Service bodyguards were unable to stop that. Well-known figures for women’s and gay rights, plus those fighting for full racial equality too, were murdered. In contrast, there were killings as well of several leading lights of the growing religious right movement (which had subsumed much of the social conservative movement) to add to these. Bush ran again in ’84 and won. It was far closer than in ’80. This time he abandoned trying to woo the religious right and fought for the middle ground. His weak opponent, Senator Garry Hart, found little support when there should have been so much. Bush won because it was said that there was ‘no one else to vote for’ in terms of whom was presidential material (Hart and his sex scandal had erupted during the late stages of the election) and he was able to point to hyped-up economic numbers. The turnout was miserable though. The American people were not behind a man who’d just won election.

The second term for Bush appeared to promise more of the same. He took office in January 1985 as a re-elected president yet extremely unpopular nationwide. Some of his early appointments in his administration were seen as very strange too because they were outsiders. This wasn’t the usual patronage which could be expected by a president. Newspapers fast dug into the backgrounds of many of them and started to see a connection appearing: there were connections to the religious right popping up everywhere. It appeared that Bush’s campaign had brought off active opposition in the election by promises of participation in shaping the domestic policy of the president’s second term. Could this be true? Put off-the-record to the president’s top aides by journalists working the story before it was ready to be published, this was denied furiously. A trio of those journalists were murdered within days, their killings on Valentine’s Day investigated by the FBI as being the work of a previously unknown group from the religious right named ‘Sons of Jacob’. The investigation was forestalled over the following weekend by internal disputes within the FBI including the new deputy director of that organisation putting a halt on it. Unknown to those who didn’t need to know, he was one of the Sons of Jacobs’ – an extremely secretive, fundamentalist group who kept a low profile and had followers in many positions of influence – coordinating council. Bush had appointed him on the advice of his own chief-of-staff, yet another one of these Sons of Jacob (this man a stooge, not a leading member) who had a very different take on Biblical teachings than anyone else. The coming Monday was President’s Day, a federal nationwide holiday. That would be Bush’s last day as president.


February 18th 1985 saw Operation Cherry Pie commence. Cherry pie was often eaten as a symbolic food of that holiday and the organisers of the coup d’état chose that name in an ironic gesture. It was a rare example of humour shown by the Sons of Jacob and not something to be repeated. They had been planning what they did for a while though had a timetable for August, not February. Things changed though when the Washington Post was on that story and killing journalists wouldn’t stop it breaking eventually. They had yet to have the influence that they planned to and had to move forward with their murderous campaign with haste. They had killed before – Jerry Brown being their biggest target, an act of pure revenge rather than any ideological move – and had used proxies and stooges to do their dirty work. Their ideology came from the Bible, an interpretation of it taken to extremes. Nationwide, they had no real public support even among those who believed what they did (not too many) because they stayed in the shadows. The Sons of Jacobs were men who didn’t want the limelight nor openly tried to woo voters. They had disdain for the secular democratic system and saw the United States as a sinful nation ran in a corrupt manner and crying out for the voice of God. Bush, like so many others, were what was wrong with the country and no democratic means could change the rot of decay that had come in the previous decades. They had a plan to change all that. That plan began when senior military officers who shared their line of thinking – again stooges though, not insiders no matter what they might think – launched Cherry Pie.

Bush was holding a press conference in the White House. The Sons of Jacob had a non-military proxy get a bomb in there. It went off just after midday, killing dozens there including many (hated) journalists too. The forty-first and last president was among the dead.

Green Berets struck at Congress seconds later, in session despite the holiday as there were confirmation hearings taking place for new appointees in second-ranking government departments. These special forces men were sent there under orders to kill members of both Houses… and everyone else inside. The men chosen were the right men, from a team of selected members of the Green Berets put together to ‘defend the nation’ against a coup. They were used to launch a coup instead, manipulated into doing so. Hundreds of elected officials were machine gunned and then grenades were used on survivors before Capitol Hill went up in flames. The House Speaker and Senate president were among the dead.

The vice president was on an official trip to Florida. Air Force Two was shot down by a lone fighter jet and crashed into the ocean. Eight of the nine justices of the Supreme Court were killed by another team of gunmen; the ninth was on the run for several days before being slain too. The secretaries of state, treasury and defence were each murdered as well: Al Haig, Bush’s Secretary of Defence, was shot in the back of the head inside the Pentagon without any understanding of what was going on. The Chief of Staff of the US Army took over at the Pentagon when the rest of the joint chiefs were killed under his orders. This member of the Sons of Jacob then issued further orders for troops to start moving into Washington. There was a coup underway and it must be stopped! Those soldiers had no idea that they were undertaking that coup.

The elimination of the top level of the US Government was complete. Cherry Pie had worked. Military forces moved into secure Washington. A state of emergency was declared nationwide in response to what was said to have been attempt by ‘foreign operatives’ to topple the nation. No new president was named, the general who ordered the Pentagon killings spoke to the American people from there. He asked the people to pray for their fellow Americans. Have faith, he said, while the chaos is sorted out and God will watch over you. Justice will be swift for those who have done all of this too… it would be for him because the Sons of Jacob would purge him within weeks.

They stepped forward in that chaos. Members were appointed to government positions, without any Congressional nor presidential approval, from the Pentagon. They had the FBI subsumed and the military too. The nation’s nuclear forces were under control at once while military forces were told that lie about an attempted coup before forestalled by military action. The arrests began as those behind that coup were ‘exposed’. Surviving government officials were detained by the military, so too soon enough members of the press. Few arrests were announced and none of the quick extrajudicial killings were either. Across the nation, voices of opposition were silenced and blame pointed everywhere but where it belonged. The Sons of Jacob, still wary of public attention on them personally, controlled this but didn’t show their faces to the American people. They were busy dismantling the organs of state and they built a new one, all over the bodies of the increasing numbers of those killed.

The Republic of Gilead arose from out of the ashes – corpses even – of the deposed United States of America. Resistance began soon but the Sons of Jacob had the upper hand and weren’t about to give up what they had so forcefully taken. There would be a civil war though: those Americans who could resist, who saw through the lies, did so. Gilead would be opposed.

Another great timeline James.

Thank you. Took more effort than I thought but I wanted to write & finish the idea I had.

[lordroel]

Aug 21, 2018 15:08:54 GMT James G said:

Aug 21, 2018 15:01:16 GMT lordroel said:

Another great timeline James.

Thank you. Took more effort than I thought but I wanted to write & finish the idea I had.

Well it looks good, but i have not read the A Handmaid's Tale novel, only seen the TV series, but i can assume that it there is a difference in if it is set in the 1980s as your short story ore in present time which is the TV series.

[redrobin65]

Good work. Reminds me of Rumsfeldia in the radical religious part.

[James G]

Aug 21, 2018 15:20:19 GMT lordroel said:

Aug 21, 2018 15:08:54 GMT James G said:

Thank you. Took more effort than I thought but I wanted to write & finish the idea I had.

Well it looks good, but i have not read the A Handmaid's Tale novel, only seen the TV series, but i can assume that it there is a difference in if it is set in the 1980s as your short story ore in present time which is the TV series.

It comes from the little info in the book about events and general ideas of a timeframe - though no names - which I then ran with.

Aug 21, 2018 17:38:23 GMT redrobin65 said:

Good work. Reminds me of Rumsfeldia in the radical religious part.

Thank you. I've never read that. I read Atwood's book the other day on the train and a lightbulb moment occurred.

[stevep]

   James

   Nasty scenario but is a decent way of getting the dystopia in the book. Good work again.

[James G]

Aug 21, 2018 20:45:42 GMT stevep said:

   James

   Nasty scenario but is a decent way of getting the dystopia in the book. Good work again.

Thanks. Yep, for a full piece it would need far more work but the idea was there and I like to write these things out.

[lordroel]

Aug 22, 2018 13:38:09 GMT James G said:

Aug 21, 2018 20:45:42 GMT stevep said:

   James

   Nasty scenario but is a decent way of getting the dystopia in the book. Good work again.

Thanks. Yep, for a full piece it would need far more work but the idea was there and I like to write these things out.

And we like reading the thing, long ore short you put on this forum James.

[Brky2020]

Now that's a dystopia and a world I definitely wouldn't want to live in.

[James G]

Aug 26, 2018 23:23:44 GMT Brky2020 said:

Now that's a dystopia and a world I definitely wouldn't want to live in.

It is a bad place indeed.