Post by redsycorax on Nov 12, 2021 23:59:11 GMT
What would have happened if the Justice Guild had been able to avert its tragic fate on October 28, 1962, amidst the nuclear holocaust that erupted after Earth-109's Cuban missile crisis went out of control?
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A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
-Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History", 1940.
JERUSALEM: OCTOBER 27, 1962:
At the home of renowned Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem, a Paul Klee painting abruptly came alive. It opened its eyes, stared out through the portrait glass that held it in place and then acquired volume, causing the glass to bulge outward and shatter. The creature stared fixedly ahead with mounting horror as its preternatural vision saw the events of October 28, 1962. Instinctively, it flinched and moved away from what it beheld, as fire, burning bodies, collapsing debris and screams for assistance steadily accumulated behind it. It vainly used its four wings to try to impede the carnage, brutality and despair behind it, but then paused. It glanced sideways instead...
WHAT IF...
Unfortunately, while one might wistfully muse on the road not taken, the cliche that one should be careful what one wishes for is a valid observation.
October 20, 1973:
Widower Ted Blake stood at the graveside of his wife, Donna Vance Blake. For years, they had fought crime together as the Justice Guild's Catman and Black Siren, until one dark day in 1968, Donna came home from a breast examination, took her husband's hand in hers and gently told him that she had Stage IV breast cancer. Shortly after, Ted had resigned from the Guild to care for his ailing wife and had stood by her side until she passed away in Seaboard Hospital in 1970. She would have hated the world that had replaced their idyll of a decade past, he reflected. Good men like Dr King and Robert Kennedy had fallen to the assassin's bullet and Richard Nixon was now under investigation for an alleged role in the Watergate Hotel burglary of prominent Democrat official hotel rooms and campaign strategies. There was a divisive war in Vietnam, apparently unwinnable, and it was proposed to abandon the puppet regime in South Vietnam to its now inevitable fate. Thousands of American servicemen had died for nothing. Who would want to be a hero in a world like this? Did anyone believe in it anymore?
Elsewhere in Seaboard City, Jacob Allon, the former Streak, navigated his wheelchair through a synagogue aisle to a more pleasant event. His wife Irene waved from the front row as he made it there, as Mendelsohn's immemorial music began to play. And at the back of the synagogue, down the central aisle, Jacob and Irene's eldest daughter, Jessica, was about to tie the knot with her accountant boyfriend Harold. Jacob smiled at his wife, grey threading their hair, as he reflected on how good the years had been to him. Okay, he could have done without the incident with the hypersonic Rossignol plane which had threatened to crash at Seaboard Airport and had cost him his mobility and his superspeed. But while he didn't regret his days as the Streak, he treasured his time as husband and father far more. Which reminded him, poor old Ted. Irene and him had agreed to meet him at the bar after the reception here ended.
Professor Thomas Terrell ended his Harvard lecture on "Many Worlds Theory", with Lyra Lewis Terrell, his wife of nearly a decade, sitting in the front row eager to start questioning. He sighed to himself. He wished that his daughter Tina was there in the front row. But given the Injustice Guild's final rampage before its members were jailed for the rest of their lives, that was impossible. in their ill-starred attempt to hold Midvale City ransom with poison gas, Tina and the Young Justice Guild that she served alongside had given their lives when a miscalculation caused the detonation of the toxic gas and twenty thousand people died. Music Master, Doctor Blizzard and Sir Swami had gotten the chair for that. Sickened by the magnitude of their erstwhile comrade's murderous act, the former Sportsman, Lioness and Columbine had all testified against them in court. It was bizarre how the years had unfolded. Dear god, though, so many deaths. But balancing it out, his wife winked at him from the front row, ready to give her husband the third degree...
And at another graveside, the Green Guardsman, Scott Mason, lay in relative peace now. That had eluded him in life, after he became involved with a fringe religious group that had denounced homosexuality and caused him to go down a dark one way road, accepting electroshock treatment, toxic psychochemicals, unsupervised and condemnatory 'therapeutic sessions' and other forelorn attempts to deny who he was. After the Justice Guild had closed down after Black Siren's death, Streak's disability onset, Tom Turbine and Catman's retirement and the steadily darkening American domestic political scene and culture, his medication had severed the psionic connection to his power ring. Bereft now of anything that had given his life meaning, Scott Mason took his own life in 1969.
The Angel looked at the men and women in the dreamworld before it, asking itself whether such people of valour and integrity had deserved to have their lives taken amidst a global tragedy that they had not asked for and were powerless to prevent. But then, it saw the ultimate fate of that variant neverland. In the Oval Office, President Nixon's sobriety and mental equilibrium had steadily deteriorated as the Watergate investigations increasingly undermined his personal reputation and political credibility. His alcohol addiction and hallucinatory distorted grasp of his surroundings worsened over time. Ironically, it was on that very day, after a couple of martinis too many, that Nixon locked himself in his Oval Office, reached for his presidential briefcase and tapped in the coded numerical sequence that would launch the entire nuclear arsenal of his country against the Soviet Union. Inevitably, the communist monolith responded in kind when its surveillance systems spotted the incoming missiles arcing over the Siberian wasteland.
And this time, there were no survivors. Four billion inhabitants of Earth-109 died. Sometimes, a fate averted may be a fate only temporarily delayed.
The Angel of History turned and faced the debris and carnage and then noticed the stirrings of hope and reconstruction as things were painstakingly and slowly rebuilt, once more. Even if it were without the Justice Guild of America, still, life and existence and hope and joy remained in that world, however arduous and stygian it was in places. And the Angel smiled to itself as it flapped its four wings and flew from the scholar's home, headed for its home in Paradise. It did not look back as there was a deafening explosion and onrush of stinging, blinding light behind it as the history and culture of millennia past were lost forever, vaporised in an instant.
THE END
++
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
-Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History", 1940.
JERUSALEM: OCTOBER 27, 1962:
At the home of renowned Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem, a Paul Klee painting abruptly came alive. It opened its eyes, stared out through the portrait glass that held it in place and then acquired volume, causing the glass to bulge outward and shatter. The creature stared fixedly ahead with mounting horror as its preternatural vision saw the events of October 28, 1962. Instinctively, it flinched and moved away from what it beheld, as fire, burning bodies, collapsing debris and screams for assistance steadily accumulated behind it. It vainly used its four wings to try to impede the carnage, brutality and despair behind it, but then paused. It glanced sideways instead...
WHAT IF...
Unfortunately, while one might wistfully muse on the road not taken, the cliche that one should be careful what one wishes for is a valid observation.
October 20, 1973:
Widower Ted Blake stood at the graveside of his wife, Donna Vance Blake. For years, they had fought crime together as the Justice Guild's Catman and Black Siren, until one dark day in 1968, Donna came home from a breast examination, took her husband's hand in hers and gently told him that she had Stage IV breast cancer. Shortly after, Ted had resigned from the Guild to care for his ailing wife and had stood by her side until she passed away in Seaboard Hospital in 1970. She would have hated the world that had replaced their idyll of a decade past, he reflected. Good men like Dr King and Robert Kennedy had fallen to the assassin's bullet and Richard Nixon was now under investigation for an alleged role in the Watergate Hotel burglary of prominent Democrat official hotel rooms and campaign strategies. There was a divisive war in Vietnam, apparently unwinnable, and it was proposed to abandon the puppet regime in South Vietnam to its now inevitable fate. Thousands of American servicemen had died for nothing. Who would want to be a hero in a world like this? Did anyone believe in it anymore?
Elsewhere in Seaboard City, Jacob Allon, the former Streak, navigated his wheelchair through a synagogue aisle to a more pleasant event. His wife Irene waved from the front row as he made it there, as Mendelsohn's immemorial music began to play. And at the back of the synagogue, down the central aisle, Jacob and Irene's eldest daughter, Jessica, was about to tie the knot with her accountant boyfriend Harold. Jacob smiled at his wife, grey threading their hair, as he reflected on how good the years had been to him. Okay, he could have done without the incident with the hypersonic Rossignol plane which had threatened to crash at Seaboard Airport and had cost him his mobility and his superspeed. But while he didn't regret his days as the Streak, he treasured his time as husband and father far more. Which reminded him, poor old Ted. Irene and him had agreed to meet him at the bar after the reception here ended.
Professor Thomas Terrell ended his Harvard lecture on "Many Worlds Theory", with Lyra Lewis Terrell, his wife of nearly a decade, sitting in the front row eager to start questioning. He sighed to himself. He wished that his daughter Tina was there in the front row. But given the Injustice Guild's final rampage before its members were jailed for the rest of their lives, that was impossible. in their ill-starred attempt to hold Midvale City ransom with poison gas, Tina and the Young Justice Guild that she served alongside had given their lives when a miscalculation caused the detonation of the toxic gas and twenty thousand people died. Music Master, Doctor Blizzard and Sir Swami had gotten the chair for that. Sickened by the magnitude of their erstwhile comrade's murderous act, the former Sportsman, Lioness and Columbine had all testified against them in court. It was bizarre how the years had unfolded. Dear god, though, so many deaths. But balancing it out, his wife winked at him from the front row, ready to give her husband the third degree...
And at another graveside, the Green Guardsman, Scott Mason, lay in relative peace now. That had eluded him in life, after he became involved with a fringe religious group that had denounced homosexuality and caused him to go down a dark one way road, accepting electroshock treatment, toxic psychochemicals, unsupervised and condemnatory 'therapeutic sessions' and other forelorn attempts to deny who he was. After the Justice Guild had closed down after Black Siren's death, Streak's disability onset, Tom Turbine and Catman's retirement and the steadily darkening American domestic political scene and culture, his medication had severed the psionic connection to his power ring. Bereft now of anything that had given his life meaning, Scott Mason took his own life in 1969.
The Angel looked at the men and women in the dreamworld before it, asking itself whether such people of valour and integrity had deserved to have their lives taken amidst a global tragedy that they had not asked for and were powerless to prevent. But then, it saw the ultimate fate of that variant neverland. In the Oval Office, President Nixon's sobriety and mental equilibrium had steadily deteriorated as the Watergate investigations increasingly undermined his personal reputation and political credibility. His alcohol addiction and hallucinatory distorted grasp of his surroundings worsened over time. Ironically, it was on that very day, after a couple of martinis too many, that Nixon locked himself in his Oval Office, reached for his presidential briefcase and tapped in the coded numerical sequence that would launch the entire nuclear arsenal of his country against the Soviet Union. Inevitably, the communist monolith responded in kind when its surveillance systems spotted the incoming missiles arcing over the Siberian wasteland.
And this time, there were no survivors. Four billion inhabitants of Earth-109 died. Sometimes, a fate averted may be a fate only temporarily delayed.
The Angel of History turned and faced the debris and carnage and then noticed the stirrings of hope and reconstruction as things were painstakingly and slowly rebuilt, once more. Even if it were without the Justice Guild of America, still, life and existence and hope and joy remained in that world, however arduous and stygian it was in places. And the Angel smiled to itself as it flapped its four wings and flew from the scholar's home, headed for its home in Paradise. It did not look back as there was a deafening explosion and onrush of stinging, blinding light behind it as the history and culture of millennia past were lost forever, vaporised in an instant.
THE END