students were at all times subject to surprise tests for drugs-urine, blood,
whatever. If they were caught – expulsion, no second chance.
A student who flunked a drug test found his quarters searched at once, all legal and
proper, as there were seven judges in town willing night and day to issue search
warrants on ‘probable cause’. No attention was paid to tender feelings; all who were
caught in possession were prosecuted.
Especially for the benefit of drug dealers the legislature reinstituted a fine old
custom: public hangings. Gallows were erected in plazas. To be sure, drug dealers
sentenced to death always appealed to the state supreme court and then to
Washington, but with five members including the Chief justice of the Supreme Court
of the United States having been appointed by President Patton, it worked out that
drug dealers in New Mexico had little reason to complain of the ‘Law’s Delays’. One
bright young entrepreneur lived exactly four weeks from arrest to jack Ketch. The
average time, once the system got rolling, was less than two months.
As usual, the ACLU had a fit over all these matters. Several ACLU lawyers spent
considerable time in jail for contempt of court, not in the new jail, but in the
drunk tank of the old jail, with the drunks, the hopheads, the wetbacks, and the
quasi-male prostitutes.
These were some of the reasons I moved to Albuquerque. The whole country was losing
its buttons, a mass psychosis I have never fully understood. Albuquerque was not
immune but it was fighting back, and it had enough sensible men and women in key
posts that it was a good place to live during the ten years I was there.
At the very time that America’s schools and families were going to pieces the
country was enjoying a renaissance in engineering and science, and not alone in such
big items as space travel and roadcities. While students frivolled away their time,
the research facilities of universities and of industry were turning out more good
work than ever – in particle physics, in plasma physics, in aerospace, in genetics,
in exotic materials, in medical research, in every field.
The exploitation of space flourished unbelievably. Mr Harriman’s decision to keep it
out of government hands, let private enterprise go at it for profit, was vindicated.
While Pikes Peak Spaceport was still new, Spaceways Ltd was building bigger, longer,
and more efficient catapults at Quito and on the Island of Hawaii. Manned
expeditions were sent to Mars and to Venus and the first asteroid miners headed out.
Meanwhile the United States went to pieces.
This decay went on not just on time line two but on all investigated time lines.
During my fifty years in Boondock I read several scholarly studies of the
comparative histories of the explored time lines concerning what was called ‘The
Twentieth Century Devolution’.
I’m not sure of my opinions. I saw it on only one time line, and that only to the
middle of 1982 and in my own country. I have opinions but you need not take them
seriously as some leading scholars have other opinions.
Here are some of the things I saw as wrong:
The United States had over 600.000 practising lawyers. That must be at least 500.000
more than were actually needed. I am not counting lawyers such as myself; I never
practised. I studied law simply to protect myself from lawyers, and there were many
like me.
Family decay: I think it came mainly from both parents working outside the home. It
was said again and again that, from mid-century on, both parents had to have jobs
just to pay the bills. If this was true, why was it not necessary in the first half
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of the century? How did labour-saving machinery and enormously increased
productivity impoverish the family?
Some said the cause was high taxes. This sounds more reasonable; I recall my shock
the year the government collected a trillion dollars. (Fortunately most of it was
wasted.)
But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United
States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken