Strategic Emergency National Imitative-Occult Reserve – Google Docs
Strategic Emergency National Imitative – Occult Reserve
The 1970s were, in many ways, the high-water mark for organized occultism inside the federal government. There were a lot of ideas and procedures implemented during that time period that would have never been permitted either ten years before, or ten years after; but in that time period, all sorts of weird programs flourished. And then promptly withered away to vestigial form, to be sure.
One example of this is the Strategic Emergency National Imitative-Occult Reserve (SENIOR), which was put into place via the Office of Management and Budget by secret orders from President Gerald Ford. From 1975 to about 1997 or so, suitable members of various federal agencies were picked and convinced to participate in SENIOR programs; as doing so was widely and accurately seen as a good way to be promoted more quickly in the civil service, there were no shortage of willing participants. The recruitment process ended in 1997, when the last remaining original SENIOR recruiter retired, and her replacement unexpectedly passed away from a heart condition three months later. Nobody at that point in the government was left to provide oversight, and the retired recruiter didn’t think it necessary to continue the program anyway.
After all, the program was absurd. SENIOR existed to purportedly produce an occult simulacrum of the United States; the highly dubious idea behind the program was that it was to act as a lightning rod for magical attacks made against the country itself. Participants would be designated as being occult stand-ins for various elected officials, cabinet-level departments, state governments, and most important cities; if magical attacks were made against any of those groups or territories being ‘protected,’ it would discharge on the SENIOR participant instead. The idea was to prevent a magical first-strike against the USA, thus eliminating any kind of strategic surprise. Assuming that one believed in magic or the occult, of course.
Well, for those who do believe in those sorts of things the SENIOR program is an increasingly creaky problem. Large parts of the USA are no longer effectively covered, thanks to regular retirements and deaths; and more and more parts of the government were never protected by SENIOR in the first place. Unfortunately, it’s not simply a matter of starting up where the last recruiter left off; the program was permitted to lapse, which means that if it’s to be reestablished then somebody’s going to get the President’s formal permission to do so. The civic occultists who discovered the existence of SENIOR, post 9/11, have been trying to figure out how to get a President on-board for that.
They have yet to come up with a strategy that would work. It’s not so much any given President himself; it’s the people who surround him, and — increasingly — the ones who obsessively watch Presidents for any slip-ups. How bad is the scrutiny? It’s so bad that the suggestion to simply summon Gerald Ford’s shade and have him give the reauthorization is gaining traction. The only thing stopping anybody from doing that is the precedent that it’d set. And, when one is talking about civic sorcery; precedent is practically all-important.