for Amy

In 2018 the folk singers seized power.
“If I Had A Hammer,” they sang, and smashed the state!
Oh, they hammered in the morning.
And they hammered in the evening.
And they hammered in the suppertime.
The streets ran red with their hammering.
When they were done, America was their land, from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters.
The army, momentarily distracted by a series of bizarre and inexplicable alien visitations, was powerless to stop them.
The aliens, of course, were just happy to help.
(The alien/folk singer cabal dated back decades, when Woodie Guthrie first made contact in 1936, just outside Muscatine, but that wouldn’t come to light for years. And by then, of course, it was much too late.)
As far as vicious, hymnocratic regimes went, the North American Collective was utterly benign.
Mostly they were concerned with feeding everyone beans and cold corn-beef hash, but at least everyone was fed and clothed, even if all the roads were torn up and all the trains were replaced with endlessly moving boxcars.
When the morris dancers came down from the high places Europe died in flames; when Nanki-Poo, the dreamer, woke and returned to Titipu, Japan vanished forever beneath the waves.