Political Satire/Fiction
Date Published: October 28th, 2025
Publisher: Acorn Publishing
The battle pits cereal titan Todd Swindell, head of Flakes Alive Incorporated, against Chad Scandalman of the Great American Flake Company. When Scandalman hires a diminutive assassin named Twinkle to bump off his rival’s top chemist, it sparks a war of the flakes that makes the bloody feud of York and Lancaster look tame by comparison.
But not everyone in the Cornflake capital of Domino, Indiana, is happy with the status quo. Ziggie Wexler, an unemployed pipefitter and all-around average Joe, knows that something is deeply wrong with his country.
All history prior to 2040 has been banned, but old-timers whisper about the days when people still voted for their leaders. After Ziggie posts fiery polemics against the state to the Clandestine Journal, he becomes a marked man. But in a world built on lies, there’s one truth he’s sure of. Somebody needs to fight back.
Zigmund Wexler, a German-American pipefitter, fidgeted with his right ear, where the intelli-phone implant rested inside. He wondered whether medical professionals had ever performed an intelli-phone unplant. Sure, the device was hands-free, but Ziggie struggled through a constant ringing in his left ear, which he blamed on the device in his right ear. And he just could not get used to the gadget weighing down the right side of his brain.
Other people had no problem with the electronic organ. But most people were phone people, that is to say, they loved to blab over the phone all day while their country went to hell and were not bothered by the inconvenience of metal machinery parked in their ear canal forever. However, Ziggie was no phone person; he did not talk much over the phone. He hoped that one day he could find an underground doctor who would remove it.
And the commercials! One had to tolerate a minimum of two hours and twenty minutes worth of commercials every day. That was the rule. For the unworldly, this was acceptable. But for Ziggie, a veteran intellectual, these blasted verbal ads proved insufferable. Little twenty- to thirty-second plugs for this product or that. Inane and dainty laugh-alongs, nerve-grating jingles, and tireless ditties that featured the most stupid humans and animals doing the most stupid things.
One commercial from a major butchery featured a manmade piggie called Porkenflesh who absorbed a bolt of lightning that inspired him to arise from a state of nonexistence and hand out free packages of sausages to the neighbors. That ad was so successful that a follow-up called Brood of Porkenflesh featured piglet children. The piglets left a pork roast on everyone’s doorstep. Then, as is the case with all free-market packs of fools, they milked the thing as far as they could, and came out with a commercial for Pork ‘n’ Poop, a pink litter box for pet pigs, which had become the rage in the 2090s.
Phone implants became available in 2046 but mandatory in 2073, and since then, the gadgets had been embedded in the ears of children as soon as they reached the age of five. As for the implantee, he or she had the option of turning the phone off by verbal command (as long as they had listened to the required two hours and twenty minutes of commercials): recite the phone serial number and the words “phone off.”
So, during face-to-face conversations with others, one could disable the phone, though, unfortunately, with that being a hassle, it led people to limit face-to-face communication with other people, a bad thing for a society that already lacked in human relations. One had to leave the phone on at least eight hours a day. Ziggie deplored the entire process of carrying a phone in his head and would pay a sizable sum to have it removed.
About the Author
Immensely curious about human behavior, James spent the 1970s hanging out on the streets to observe people, many of whom became inspirations for his fictional characters. Later, he worked in cube farms at conservative insurance companies, where the idiosyncrasies of corporate personalities sparked his imagination.
James has spent the last decade reading and writing offbeat fiction about bizarre protagonists. Corporate Almighty: 2098, a dystopian tale about the rise of the corporation and the fall of democracy, follows his first two novels, Animal Candy and Pods of Bubbledumb: A Study in Mass Depravity.
Born and raised in an industrial suburb on the south edge of Chicago, James lives with his wife Sue and four cats in Evansville, Indiana.
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