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Back in 1994 as he mounted his successful campaign for governor of Colorado, most of Bruce Benson's critics didn't have a clue about the wealthy Republican's game plan, an ingenious forward-looking strategy that catapulted the Centennial State well into the 21st century well ahead of its competitors.
The critics, led by two other candidates for the GOP nomination, charged that Benson was running a Ross Perot-style campaign based on paid television, so that Benson could remain in total control of his message.
Other candidates make the rounds to all the Lincoln
Day dinners,
one contender charged early in the
campaign, but not Benson. He just buys TV time. For all
we know, he's just a computer-generated image, like Roger
Rabbit or the dancing raisins in a cereal commercial. He
dodges debates, so we have no idea how well he can think on
his feet. He refuses to get out and appear personally
before the public.
A check of newspaper clips from the late summer of 1994
reveals that Benson may have made a few personal
appearances, although there questions as to whether these
Benson sightings
actually occurred.
Perhaps the most credible report came from an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms on assignment in Gunnison County to mop up surviving Branch Davidians.
I was at the Wal-Mart on the north side of town,
the agent reported, when a large Greyhound-type bus
suddenly materialized near the rolls of sod in the parking
lot. The bus stopped, its door opened, and then out stepped
Bruce Benson. I am absolutely positive of this
identification, because he said 'Colorado must move
forward, and I'm the man to take it there.' Who else could
say something that banal and keep a straight face?
However, the agent also reported seeing Elvis Presley step off the bus right behind Benson, followed by David Koreesh, at whom the agent emptied the clip of his M16 before calling for a tank battalion and close air support.
Local police, summoned to the scene, could find no bus,
but took no action against the agent after he said I'm a
fed, and I can do anything.
Other Benson sightings were reported later that summer in various corners of the state. On Aug. 1, an Akron woman saw the usual Elvis and Benson duo sipping malts in downtown Fort Morgan. Two days later, Benson was spotted near Aspen with Barbra Streisand, who couldn't have been there because she was boycotting Colorado although, for some reason, she still allowed her cassettes and compact disks to be sold in Colorado.
There was also the Gardner woman who claimed that on the night of Aug. 8, a mysterious glow outside her window awakened her, and she felt herself pulled inside the UFO (rectangular in shape, with wheels on bottom) where oddly dressed humanoids (expensive three-piece suits, according to the hypnotist who debriefed her and explained that such garb is pretty odd for Gardner) carefully examined her for several hours before returning her to her home.
I learned the key secret of the cosmos,
she said,
that 'a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small
minds,' and that it takes a big mind to be for DIA in 1990
and against it in 1994. We all must expand our
consciousness.
Those and half a dozen similar incidents were the only reported Benson sightings through the primary and general campaigns. He took office in 1995, irking his supporters because they were not invited to the inauguration, which apparently took place in a television studio.
Benson's bold strategy became clear when his televised
image delivered his first state of the state
message.
One of my goals has always been to save tax
money,
he explained, and it costs a mint to maintain
a real, physical governor -- transportation, security, the
office in the capitol, the mansion. So I have become
Colorado's first 'virtual governor.' Thanks to the miracles
of modern electronics and virtual reality, we can dispense
with the cost and aggravation of a physical governor.
Further, Colorado itself is just some lines on a map
-- a mental construction if there ever was one. We don't
have the same economy, culture, language; face it, we've
got nothing in common.
So instead of having a physical state of Colorado, we
shall henceforth operate as a cyberstate. Anyone who wants
to be in the Cyberstate of Colorado can just pay a
substantial fee to the Colorado Board of Realtors, log into
the system and then experience the glorious virtual
realities of simulated skiing, whitewater rafting,
wilderness, mountain biking, llama-packing -- whatever
strikes their fancy that they're willing to pay well
for.
This way, we can accommodate all those who want to move here without the worry of finding water or real real estate for them.
True to his campaign promise to cut taxes, Benson moved boldly to slash the budget. Stone-walled prisons were replaced with virtual prisons, expensive schools and colleges became cyberinstitutions and the Colorado Department of Transportation replaced costly physical roads with digital information highways to transmit the virtual governor's operations into every node of the cyberstate.
We were a little leery at first,
said one state
senator, but actually, it's a lot easier to work with a
virtual governor in a cyberstate than with a real one, and
we'll never go back to the old system.
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