User:Sbaynes22/sandbox

A Culturally Inappropriate Armageddon puts the reader on an Haudenosaunee reservation with a hand full of people that work at its first ever radio station, C-RES. Drew Hayden Taylor starts off this short story by introducing us to the characters and their first days at the station. Emily Porter is the founder of the station and hired broadcasters Aaron Bomberry and Tracey Greene. Emily wants one thing more than anything and that is for her station to succeed and bring change to the world through "News, weather, sports, music and talk about and for the Iroquois people" (2). Emily is the more serious one of the group and that goes to show when both Aaron and Tracey are late but once Aaron shows up he can't stop talking about how ever since Marconi and his wireless telegraph experiments that the planet has been spilling into space and C-RES is not adding to that. Tracey finds this to be funny and thinks that aliens will hear their broadcasts. This shows that Emily doesn't really have serious people in her station, that is until Karl comes into the picture. Karl is Emily's secret weapon because he is the only one with real experience at a station and has two years of college under his belt. Karl is the one that Emily chooses to start their first broadcast, and a wise decision that was. Taylor then skips ahead in his story seven years to 1998 where Emily is struggling with a battle within her station of content vs. ratings. Tracey is arguing that ratings are more important because no one wants to listen to the Kanien’keha programming and states that even Aaron’s radio play of “starship trooper” is getting better ratings. Emily at this point is losing control over her station but in this process of finding something more historical for her audience her and Aaron find an old record “the Calling song” that they play and broadcast to their audience. The Story jumps to the year 2018 where they are all huddled around a television watching a program that stated there was life beyond earth and it was headed towards them. The discussion of what is going to happen comes into the picture and they all decide it would either be like contact or the day the earth stood still. After another jump in a year we are brought into a world where the aliens have destroyed everything, and they realized that the aliens received the broadcast of the calling song and that the Haudenosaunee people were responsible for the destruction of the earth.

The second part of the short story tells us of an elderly man that is watching the news and listening to the radio about a spaceship coming to earth. He knows that he and everyone he knows will die, but the people around him are excited. He finds a book on his night stand and flips to a page where he underlined a sentence a long time ago. That sentence read “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (23). He closes the book and Drew Hayden Taylor concludes the story.