Writer
These days, ordinary people are struggling to make ends meet while the rich grow ever richer. Our economy is tilted in favor of millionaires and billionaires, thanks to unfair laws that let plutocrats exploit their workers and pay almost nothing in taxes. Unless we take immediate action to fix income inequality, it’s clear that America’s middle class will disappear like the scientists who are erased from existence after the Clone-otaur alters the timeline of the universe in my un-produced screenplay Chronotaur 3: Hoof Of History.
The culprit is trickle-down economics, the phony theory that if we simply hand more cash to the ultra-rich they’ll somehow create good jobs, the way a sinister cloning program uses stolen DNA from the Chronotaur to create an evil genetic doppelgänger known and feared as the Clone-otaur. Moviegoers will be familiar with the Chronotaur from the previous films in the Chronotaur trilogy, Chronotaur: Labyrinth Of Time and Chronotaur 2: Thread Of Destiny, as soon as my scripts are optioned by studios and released in theaters everywhere, but one thing viewers might be surprised to learn is that the richest 1 percent of Americans now own as much wealth as the bottom 99 percent combined. Yep, income inequality has gotten that bad.
Congress should be trying to fix this obscene disparity, but to please their donors politicians instead pass tax cuts for the rich while slashing social services. As a result, the wealth gap continues to grow like a Clone-otaur fetus floating inside a cloning tank, lowering the standard of living for working-class families just so millionaires can afford a second mansion.
Fortunately, the solution to income inequality isn’t as complicated as the Time Maze, the infinite extra-dimensional labyrinth patrolled by the Chronotaur that can be used to reach any coordinate in space-time by those capable of navigating its ever-shifting corridors. We must split the economic pie so that the rich pay their fair share of taxes, the way Dr. Raymond Childress and his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Childress, evenly divided their lifespans at the end of Chronotaur 2, and in doing so managed to postpone but not prevent the predestined, fatal car crash that Raymond initially time-traveled to alter in Labyrinth Of Time. Although the scientist couple dies during the gripping opening scene of Chronotaur 3, splitting their lifespan energy bought them an extra 20 years together, two decades as blissful as the well-paying jobs that once sustained a robust middle class.
What ever happened to the American dream? Today it’s increasingly out of reach for most people to own a home, retire at a reasonable age, or raise your daughter into a strong female protagonist like Virginia Childress, a beautiful, brilliant, and empowered MIT grad student that movie audiences will immediately connect with.
After the deaths of her parents, Virginia inherits their shares of Quantum Consortium stock and takes over her father’s position as CEO of the company. Under the wise leadership of Virginia’s father, the once-nefarious Quantum Consortium had been reformed into an ethical institute for time research, ceasing its misguided attempts to kill the Chronotaur in order to change the past without interference from the half-bovine cosmic guardian.
It’s important to remember that in the 1950s the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent on income over $300,000, and this high tax rate encouraged corporations to reinvest their profits into paying employees a living wage rather than gifting lavish bonuses to executives like Virginia, who secretly worries that she cannot live up to her parents’ impressive legacy. Sadly, in the 1980s the Reagan administration enacted supply-side economic policies that gradually eroded American prosperity, leading us to the mess we’re in today.
The GOP pretends that high taxes on the rich are as terrifying as the tagline “Double the Chronotaur. Infinity-times the horror,” when in fact progressive taxation is what allowed the middle class to flourish.
In our new gilded age, corporate moguls pocket most of the profits while leaving only scraps for the workers that actually created that wealth. When billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries, it doesn’t take a mysterious transmission from deep within the Time Maze warning you to investigate the file for Project Chronosome on the Quantum Consortium’s encrypted server to tell you that something is seriously wrong with this picture. After hacking her way into the computer, Virginia discovers that a rogue faction within the consortium, led by the beautiful but wicked chrono-geneticist Sirena LeMort, has been covertly working for years to spawn the Clone-otaur.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Republicans continue to insist that a “rising tide lifts all boats.” Well, right now the only boats are one-percenters’ yachts, and middle-class Americans are left floundering in the water like Virginia desperately fighting to stop the Clone-otaur from being unleashed.
To get a better understanding of the way the Reagan administration’s policies of deregulated markets led to the staggering income inequality we’re faced with today, take a look at these pages from Chronotaur 3:
My point is that if the Robo-Chronotaur can learn the error of its ways over eons of algorithmic contemplation, then why does America keep repeating the disproven tactic of trickle-down economics?
You’d think that Republicans wouldn’t get re-elected when their tax cuts fail to help constituents, but they’re kept in office by keeping voters as misinformed as Virginia when she can’t tell the Chronotaur and Clone-otaur apart as they tussle. Just like middle-class American voters, Virginia accidentally shoots the Chronotaur by mistake with a photonic entanglement bazooka. This disperses the Chronotaur’s lifespan energy, making him too elderly and feeble to fight, and shatters the universe into hundreds of parallel realities called the Impossiworlds, where the laws of chance are askew and the only thing that is probable is the improbable, which is quite similar to how America is now more divided than ever.
Sadly, many working-class Republicans have been tricked into voting against their own best interests, like foolish movie studios that pass on a trilogy of screenplays even though they’re surefire hits that would blow up at the box office.
It seems absurd that a poor coal miner in Appalachia could believe that they’d benefit from tax breaks for fat-cat tycoons, or that the Impossiworlds are each themed after different genres of fiction, but as the Fate Cow explains to Virginia, “Once the constraints of physics crumble away, every dream and nightmare will be made flesh.” Each pocket dimension is ruled over by a twisted version of the Chronotaur formed from a fragment of its divided lifespan energy, including the 1920s-mobster dimension ruled by the Crime-otaur, the medieval dimension ruled by the Crownotaur, the zombie-apocalypse dimension ruled by the Corpse-otaur, the pirate dimension ruled by the Captainotaur, the cowboy dimension ruled by the Caballerotaur, the sports dimension ruled by the Coachotaur, the opera dimension ruled by the Contraltotaur, the animation dimension ruled by the Cartoonotaur, the Victorian England dimension ruled by the Constable-otaur, and many dozens of others. These Chronotaur variants are powerful foes my protagonists must defeat to collect their stolen lifespan energy in order to mend the fractured multiverse and revive the Chronotaur so it can fight the Clone-otaur, but it would be a mistake to also treat those deluded blue-collar GOP voters as enemies, because ultimately we’re going to need their help to kick out politicians that don’t take action on income inequality.
Although it’s tempting to vilify misguided conservative voters, that’s exactly what the robber barons are counting on. The banksters want the left and right to keep squabbling amongst themselves, instead of working together like the tie-in video game I’ve designed, Chronotaur The Game: Schism Of Centuries, and the accompanying mobile app, Chronotaur Tap!: Labyrinth Of Sprinting, which will automatically sync data to let you transfer items between games.
When you look at the way our nation’s greedy financial elites pit the working class against each other, it’s hard not to compare them to the Primordial Hogs, malevolent chaotic entities that existed before eternity and have forever sought to unmake the Time Maze and impose disorder upon the cosmos. Although the hogs of chaos are the antithesis of all that is holy and good, Democrats could take a page from how, during the Middle Ages, the Primordial Hogs enacted their dark will on Earth by seducing the LeMort family with whispered promises of power and persuading them into founding the Crusade Consorters, a legion of ruthless knights that were the precursor organization that would eventually become the Quantum Consortium, which proves that if you patiently speak to your constituents with respect they’ll listen to what you have to say and show up to the polls when it counts.
Instead of lobbing insults like “redneck” or dismissing rural areas as “flyover country,” liberals must try to convince conservatives to join the call for another New Deal. In our polarized society, finding consensus may seem as hopeless as the final battle when the Clone-otaur kills the Chronotaur by absorbing all of its lifespan energy, decaying the valiant defender of time into a skeleton that dissolves to dust. When she sees the noble Chronotaur disintegrate before her eyes, Sirena LeMort laughs in triumph, but her victory is illusory because, in a stunning twist, it’s ultimately revealed that the Clone-otaur is actually the younger form of the Chronotaur, because the Chronotaur is a clone of itself, so that by creating the Clone-otaur to slay the Chronotaur, this is, in fact, the origin of the Chronotaur that created the Chronotaur in the first place.
Ironically, it turns out that the age-old quest of the Primordial Hogs to manipulate humanity into eradicating the Chronotaur backfired the same way that trying to stimulate the economy by giving tax cuts to upper-income brackets is counterproductive because the rich simply stash the extra money in offshore bank accounts instead of spending it, as Reagan and his economic disciples so adamantly attest, to bolster the market and enrich the middle class.
We may not be able to convince everyone, but if Democrats can persuade even a small slice of Republicans to support progressive taxation that funds a Scandinavian-style social safety net, those moderate voters may prove to be as valuable an ally as Genghis Khan #457, who overcomes his clone brainwashing to do the right thing and trip the mind-controlled juvenile Chronotaur by riding a war pony tied to a rope in circles around the Chronotaur’s mighty legs to ensnare its ankles, saving our heroes from its deadly charge. The reprieve is momentary, since the Chrontoaur easily bursts through the rope, but seeing the Genghis Khan switch sides inspires Lt. Jaxon to also follow his conscience and fire an electromagnetic railgun through the Chronotaur’s skull. The injury immediately heals thanks to the Chronotaur’s regenerative anti-entropic field, but the mind-control chip in its brain is destroyed by the projectile as it passes through, freeing the cosmic guardian to turn against Sirena LeMort and unravel her dastardly scheme.
But don’t expect America’s plutocratic overlords to be defeated that easily. They’re corrupting our democracy by purchasing media outlets to unfairly influence elections, thanks to the disastrous Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court declaring that money is speech. Likewise, once her Clone-otaur plot is defeated, Sirena turns to equally desperate measures by injecting an untested serum of Chronotaur DNA into her spine, mutating herself into an unstoppable genetically perfect monster that’s the ultimate endpoint of evolution called the Omegataur.
Virginia, in dismay, asks, “Sirena, what have you done to yourself?” and when the Omegataur replies, “I have become God,” you can recognize the callous addiction to power that motivates the United States’ billionaire class seeking to enslave American workers in a cycle of inescapable poverty and debt.
However, like our rapidly eroding democratic norms, Sirena’s cellular matrix is incapable of containing the limitless energy of the chronosome. The villain screams in horror as she begins metastasizing outward in an ever-expanding, miles-wide sphere of churning flesh, fur, hooves, and horns that threatens to grow until it consumes all matter in the universe. Even the Chronotaur is unable to stop the imminent bio-apocalypse.
Yet even when all seems lost in my screenplay, I still have hope for our country. Across the United States, we’re seeing a resurgent wave of civic engagement in protests and town halls as people demand a more equitable society. Americans are finally speaking up, like Virginia’s deceased parents do when they miraculously appear before her as translucent glowing spirits. Raymond and Elizabeth explain they exist in this ghostly form thanks to the Second Rule of Time Travel, which states that lifespan energy cannot be destroyed by altering the past, just as the First Rule of Time Travel ensures additional lifespan energy cannot be created to save or extend lives. Therefore, when the scientists had their lives prematurely truncated by the Clone-otaur, it freed their unused lifespan energy to be reborn as Time Seraphs, angelic protectors tasked with fixing the damage caused by temporal meddling, and they also tell Virginia how proud of her they are.
Sadly, this emotional family reunion is as brief as the wealthy are rich.
In one of the most noble acts of self-sacrifice in cinema history, the spectral Raymond and Elizabeth use up all of their remaining lifespan energy in order to power a tachyon rifle that Virginia reversed the polarity of in order to convert it into an anti-Darwin ray that rewinds Sirena’s expansion, causing her to evolve backwards into a human, but the villainess’ relief is short-lived as she then devolves into a Homo erectus, then a monkey, then a lizard, then a fish, descending the evolutionary ladder until she finally disperses into a cloud of bacteria as numerous as the participants in the grassroots political revolution about to sweep Washington.
We are the 99 percent, and this is our country, too. Right-wing pundits might call this claim “class warfare,” but the war for the Chronoverse is only getting started as the adventure continues in my planned TV series, The Chronotaur Chronicles: Labyrinth Guardians Of The Time Maze, of which I’ve already outlined several seasons. The onus is now on Hollywood producers to immediately green-light my screenplays and primetime television show without further delay, because Americans cannot afford to wait for Chronotaur any longer.
