Harrowing California

Ayad 3 stories

Summary

Byron is elected Governor of California, head of the Californian Cultural Communal Party and is received with a fawning fan base, wildly popular. He introduces a daffy mixture of communalist, enlightenment, romanticist and anarchist culture and lifestyle. He asks the poor, the ‘Selyaks’, [as opposed to the rich, or the ‘Kulaks’], to vote directly on his proposed laws, rather than go through the motions of the Senate, and in doing so, he succeeds in legislating law after law in a rapid manner, hitherto unseen in California, for the man with the mission has to create the ‘Model New Californian Human’. So, Byron says, “Citizens of California! Either we storm the Bastille, or the Bastille will storm us!” For him, this was the fusion of Spartacus, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Sixties Counterculture all rolled into the exact present moment; a radical, re-purposing of Man’s existential context – for what else is there? Is Man to live happily or to live miserably? And it is the fanatic enthusiasm that shocks California, the United States and indeed, the watching world, far more than his ideology, as Byron’s adherents seem more of a cult-like following, than any