A Capitol Idea

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Preview

Prologue: Our Mother Is Dying

Chapter 1: In the Doldrums

Chapter 2: I Can See Granito de Ebano from Here

Chapter 3: In the Beginning, There Were the Aquarians

Chapter 4: You Can't Get There from Here

Chapter 5: Extinction by Genocidal Means: The Trial of Irrational Fears

Chapter 6: Patsies, Fall Guys and Sacrificial Lambs

Chapter 7: Begré Versus Schvinghammer

Chapter 8: The Divided House of Rutherford

Chapter 9: They're Legal if I Say They're Legal

Chapter 10: Squire Sean, the Benefactor

Chapter 11: National Defense: Schvinghammer

Chapter 12: Governance: Gunter-Ellis

Chapter 13: Ybanis, Gillis, and Other Deceptions

Chapter 14: Sovereign, Princess, Royal Courtship, and Storm Clouds

Chapter 15: Coup d'état!

A Capitol Idea

Bill Hause

Copyright © 2024 Bill Hause

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2024

ISBN 979-8-88731-784-7 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88731-785-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

To Myra, Robert, and Linda

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I wish to convey my deepest appreciation and gratitude to April Mur, literary development agent at Fulton Books, whose dedication, diligence, kindness, thoughtful patience, pleasant demeanor, and thorough professionalism made the publication of this book a joyful and enriching adventure.

I also wish to express my gratitude to my hometown friends and proofreaders; my former neighbor and previewer, Charles Chuck Wilder; and my one-time high school theatrical leading lady, creative muse, and dramatic adviser, Diana Holcomb Ruhl, without whose assistance and encouragement, the writing of this book might never have been completed.

Preview

If an island landmass larger than Greenland that mysteriously emerges on the equator from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean isn't enough to capture your interest and imagination, then consider what may happen when circumstances turn this private island into the sole property of one Sean Fidwitter, a commoner with royal connections.

Fidwitter, an irresponsible, aimless but convivial "bon vivant" with a healthy sense of humor and compassion for the world's poor and downtrodden enlists the help of an old college friend, Alex, now a renowned international lawyer. As Alex forms an illustrious team to bring to fruition Sean's dream of making his island subcontinent a haven and home for the homeless and indigent, a powerful triad of opposition to Sean's plans quickly set themselves to work, implementing their own schemes for this new land of opportunity, but the island holds its own secrets, which bring their own dynamic into play.

Thus, A Capitol Idea Book One: The Early Daze by author Bill Hause lays the groundwork for an expedition of discovery not only of the new island but of social and political issues and systems that resonate with our times.

Chuck Wilder

Prologue: Our Mother Is Dying

Our Mother Is Dying

The Great Spirit is in all things. He is in the air we breathe. The Great Spirit is our Father, but the Earth is our Mother. She nourishes us…That which we put into the ground she returns to us.

—Big Thunder Wabanaki, Algonquin

Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors; we borrow it from our Children.

—" Ancient Indian (Indigenous Peoples, Native American) proverb

We must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren, and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can't speak for themselves such as the birds, animals, fish, and trees.

—Qwatsinas (Hereditary Chief Edward Moody), Nuxalk Nation

The universe is an infinite, violent realm in ever-expanding chaos, birth, growth, maturity, and death—bright, twinkling, distant, and faint stars, clusters, and binaries, solar, hot blue, red dwarf, and red giant stars, white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes.

Planets, hostile or friendly to emerging, sustainable living organisms, the presence of oxygen and water, are formed from particles of gas and dust, colliding and fusing with interstellar debris, asteroids, meteors, fireballs, icy comets, and sometimes smaller planets while orbiting a star. The heavier, rocky planets form nearest to the star, their gasses blown away by solar winds, their positions within the elliptical orbits of the solar system determined by the gravity of their star and the larger gaseous planets.

The rocky planet Earth in the Milky Way galaxy was miraculously, fatefully, or randomly located exactly in the right place of its solar system, possessing protective atmospheric compositions of nitrogen, oxygen, and argon (gaseous and liquid), an abundance of surface water, borrowed or stolen from other rocky planets and asteroids, orbiting at a safe distance from its light- and heat-emitting star for the birth, development, and sustenance and viability of life.

Mother Earth is vomiting toxic waste, wrote an acid-penned environmentalist blogger to explain the back-to-back natural calamities on Earth.

Commencing primarily during the industrial revolution, humankind had been dumping its waste upon the Earth, burying its poisons in the soil, polluting the sky, and contaminating its rivers, lakes, oceans, and waterways. The only inhabitable planet within its own solar system in the Milky Way galaxy had become one huge garbage dump.

The frequency of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, droughts, flash floods, and blizzards caused another misanthropic doomsday observer to declare, We have made our planet terminally ill. We poisoned it. It is vomiting millions of years of toxic waste. Our Mother Earth is dying, and we are all complicit in her murder.

Increasingly, across the spectrum, various groups of individuals both within and out of the science community, spoke of relocating people onto Mars or the moons of Jupiter or Saturn or to inhabitable exoplanets millions of light-years from Earth.

Devout environmentalists bluntly shamed the lazy, science-denying planet trashers with their poor history, placing profits above responsible as land stewardship and labeling them as complacent cowards, ever reminding them, It is the responsibility of those who made the mess to clean it up!

Large corporations were tasked with multimillion-dollar cleanup costs.

Recycling, land and water reclamation, and these environmental regulations are not cost-effective and far too labor intensive! argued the corporate and individual abusers as they constantly fought ecological civil lawsuits. It may be cheaper in the long run to abandon this spaceship and allow it to heal naturally, observed the corporate accountants.

The Earth was a hostile planet at war with itself, embroiled in an unending struggle between climate change advocates and science deniers, economic class disparities, irreconcilable political division, demagoguery, heated conspiracies, racial conflicts, xenophobia, misogyny, and culture wars.

Chapter 1

In the Doldrums

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

—Seneca

You weren't thinking, and you weren't paying attention either. People who don't pay attention often get stuck in the Doldrums.

—Norton Juster

Atlantica was in the doldrums where nothing ever happens and only meteorologists and climatologists take notice of its weather. Sailing vessels in the long-ago Age of Discovery drifted aimlessly in still waters, floundering in the calm, still, windless waters along this equatorial belt, its captain and crew pleading in final desperation to a distant deaf deity for deliverance. The captain was angered at his navigator and the ship's overworked surgeon annoyed by having their card game interrupted by the inexperienced shanghaied hostage crew and New World–bound seasick passengers hanging over the deck railings returning the bad fish and spoiled crab dinner to the sea that produced it. With no lush land sightings from the crow's nest, the crew scanned the cloudless skies in vain for a miraculous sudden burst of strong winds or even seasonal rainstorm to thrust them from peril, feverish sightings of seaworthy ships gliding effortlessly across godforsaken still waters independent of sails. Abandoned by all mankind and facing slow, agonizing death from starvation and thirst in an ocean of inedible sea life and non-potable salt water, the captain and officers face armed mutinies of frightened and desperate men unwilling to die at sea and looking for someone to blame for their cruel demise. Eventually, navigators and cartographers gained wisdom from seafaring disasters by altering the shipping routes around the doldrums, placing the windless ocean deserts between the shipping routes throughout the Age of Discovery well into the modern age of ocean liners, naval cruisers, troop ships, and nuclear battleships and submarines.

Those seafaring voyagers who miraculously escaped the windless, still waters of the doldrums returned with warnings to either avoid the convergence zones entirely or to minimize sailing time there by quickly crossing it at its narrowest point, avoiding seasonal cyclones and thunderstorms.

For hundreds, thousands of eons long before the dawning of another millennium on the eve of the changing of the century guard, it lay unobtrusively, uncharted, and unknown near the ocean floor balancing perilously upon a jagged and eroding subterranean mountain shelf. Over time, the underwater subcontinent escaped the grip of the decaying shelf through natural erosion and drifted upward toward the surface, surfacing above the equator, in a tedious glacierlike movement sustained by the swirling underwater currents and torrential tidal storms.

However, when this newest and now largest of the planet's islands, the main island alone encompassing over 2,330,990 square kilometers (900,000 square miles), 800,000 miles in length from its most southernmost tip to point its northern jutting into the treacherous Darwin Straits and 100,000 miles in width from its rugged west coast to its jagged and mountainous east coast finally surfaced, it received only cursory notice and limited fanfare as the global community of nations and countries was already far too consumed with their own fragile sociopolitical and economic trade alliances and petty rivalries to show any interest in the discovery of an inconsequential equatorial landmass.

The seasonal trade island winds met at the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) as the doldrums narrowed, producing intense thunderstorms and torrential rainstorms that drenched the main island until it was blanketed with vast green forests and grasslands that produced surprisingly abundant vegetation. A natural, luscious green canopy shaded the rich soil and camouflaged the only indigenous creatures—the Aquarians, the Ybanies, and other cryptids—from seasonal shifts of ITCZ toward and away from the equator that produced long intensely wet and dry seasons.

The expansive, lush green main island was home to aquatic animals and mammals, tide pools of star fish, anemones, sponges, snails, sea turtles, sea lions barking on rocks, and hungry sharks in the ocean, dark forests, rocky ridges, and thick vegetation, hominids and maybe even fabled humanoids, the Aquarians possessing the mystical but undocumented innate ability with any solid scientific evidence to change shape and disappear into the rocks and foliage.

Atlantica originally was meant to designate the entire archipelago, but future pretentious residents would call the main island with its thick vegetation, forests, and foliage as Greatsylvania to distinguish it from the small perimeter islands (and hundreds of asteroid belt–like islets) that formed an impenetrable boundary around the self-important main island, rendering any future development of commercial ports of call. The black granite, boulderlike island across the Darwin Straits from the northern tip of the main island was eventually named Granito de Ebano as a place reserved by Greatsylvanian snobs and elitists for the great unwashed and the culturally undesirables—the socially unredeemable boorish, boisterous, and crude menial laborers, recalcitrant petty criminals, the habitually impoverished, the uneducated, and the perpetually relapsing drug and alcohol addicts. In general, all those denizens who were to be denied any reasonable and equitable opportunity to rise and compete for a higher rung in society's ladder of success.

Thus, Atlantica was to be left to its own devices in its early daze to gloriously succeed or fail miserably, to prosper or perish, to feast or famine, to lead or follow, and to stumble, stagnate or progress or collapse from perpetual exhaustion and fall into the inertia of oblivion.

Chapter 2

I Can See Granito de Ebano from Here

The mining industry might make wealth and power for a few men and women, but the many would always be smashed and battered beneath its giant treads.

—Katharine Susannah Prichard.

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization [sic], to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.

—Christopher Hitchens.

Isla de Granito de Ebano ( SP. Island of Ebony Granite ), across the Darwin Straits from Atlantica's northernmost, needle-nosed point before the mass immigration to the main island, was simply and more conveniently for non-Spanish speakers called the black boulder. In time, it would be revealed that it encompassed much more than a slick and slippery black granite boulder, a small island jutting skyward from the swirling eddies in treacherous, unnavigable Darwin Straits. This rocky island—5,456 square miles (14,130.98 square kilometers) in area, approximating the size of a small country, colony, or the State of Connecticut in the United States—was inhabited by inmates, deportees, and others ostracized by society, cultures, and communities. All but completely ignored and neglected by Atlantica's earliest settlers, the elitist, exclusionary main islanders, Granito de Ebano was formed even prior to the settlement of the main island by the mongrels strictly as a mining colony, the Granito de Ebano Rock Mining Company by the JJ (Jake) Gillis Enterprises to segregate and isolate the great unwashed —boorish, boisterous, and crude menial laborers, recalcitrant criminals, the habitually impoverished, the uneducated and unpolished, drug and alcohol addicts, and all those deemed by main island status quo devoid of any redeemable social value. Under constant surveillance by military security drones, the Granito de Ebanos lived under " virtual Dickensian workhouse arrest ," beneath the yoke of poverty, strict draconian control, and scrutiny without any of the most basic freedoms and liberties—speech, voting, labor negotiations, and freedom of movement—and any of the most basic autonomous of human rights, including population control, religion, and political activism. They were for all intents and purposes worker bees pejoratively known as moles.

In general, all those denizens were prevented from any reasonable and equitable rise and competition to the higher rungs on the proverbial ladder of success. A series of colonial governors—whose salaries, inflated fees, and exaggerated allowances were regularly misappropriated through these workers' payroll deductions—administered the day-to-day management, maintaining a safe distance from Isla de Granito de Ebano. The governor and staff's spacious and lavish residential compound sat securely across the straits on the northern tip of the main island where the workers' toils and activities were under constant surveillance by the most intricate and detailed vigilance of military satellites and sophisticated listening devices. The governor and staff rapidly evaded threats of capture as hostage bargaining pawns by accessing the two private eight-passenger jets with vital, classified documents, equipment, and luggage aboard the helicopters at the small airport within his gated compound. The governor quipped, I can see Isla de Granito de Ebano quite safely from here and even that's too damn close.

Chapter 3

In the Beginning, There Were the Aquarians

Men are beastly and natural, and when touched by God, the One who is supernatural, they become as ‘mythical creatures'—only more true and just, and therefore all the meeker.

—Criss Jami

The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls.

—Edgar Allan Poe

The Aquarians (seldom sighted by any human unless by drug-induced hallucinations, complete fabrications and hoaxes, or sheer imagination) were the island's first inhabitants, its natives and indigenous beings—mysterious, mystical, chameleonlike, shape-altering