Welcome to the year-end Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.
Caveat Ω: The following is satire, or, at worst, a joke. It is neither an earnest account, nor a call to action, nor should it be taken as an excuse for any authorities or their paramilitary proxies to molest or prosecute the writer and/or his, her, or their confederates.
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Can the dead return to life? I know this is more of an Easter question than a Christmas question, but I have to ask because I plan on killing numerous people during and/or slightly prior to the upcoming Revolution, or war for independence from capitalism, and I want to be sure they can’t seek me out from some vantage point in the world of the dead – a mountaintop, or a ziggurat, perhaps – and thus locate me here in the living world, pierce the numinous veil, inhabit some corporeal structure of flesh, bone, and tendon, and do me an injury in payback. It really would spoil my plans, or at least disrupt them terribly.
My plan – and this is just between us – is to commit a few well-chosen assassinations first, either in the first few weeks of the war, or in the weeks leading up to it. This latter option is more difficult to plan for, but if everything we did in following our bliss were easy, it wouldn’t be bliss, would it?
And this particular segment of the plan is not such a worry. No one’s ever gone wrong committing an assassination. I mean, there are the celebrated disasters we’re familiar with from the lurid press – the Kennedys, Lincoln, Caesar, McKinley, King, John Lennon, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and such – but those are the sensational, tentpole assassinations, the splashy affairs.
Your run-of-the-mill assassination is just too run-of-the-mill for the tabloids (and they’re all tabloids these days) to bother with. The Russians, USA, and Israelis get away with them all the time. Israel just did one in Iran a couple weeks ago; Putin just denied an attempted one ten hours ago, and no one even got their hair mussed in consequence. I can hardly imagine anyone but an aggrieved bureaucrat even giving their desk so much as an angry fist-pound. And I think I can muster enough proof of Jewishness to qualify for Israeli citizenship – it used to be automatic for any Jew, but that country club has become restricted in recent years. I would say that’s ironic, but irony is dead, and who assassinated it a mystery. No one doubts Israel had a hand in that operation, though.
Should Israel fail to step up, there are ample alternative options for acquiring the necessary skills. I’m not worried about that part of the plan. They’re even discussing the possibility of the federal government paying to train people for the high-tech jobs of the future, and if assassin isn’t going to be a high-tech, high-status, high-paying career in the years ahead, well, we can pretty much kiss advancement and progress goodbye, along with the American Dream and Lady Liberty herself.
I’m not just waiting around for someone to give me an education, either. I’ve done some auto- didactivity. I once read an article in Soldier of Fortune magazine about how to take out a sentry. The trick to assassination is you have to sneak up from behind. If you can conduct your entire war that way, you’re sure to win. That’s probably the first lesson in The Art of War: “sneak up from behind.” I wouldn’t know. I’d like to pursue war as a science rather than an art. Even more than that, I’d like to pursue it as a sweet science, like boxing, but if the opponent were facing the other way. Wouldn’t that be sweet?
After the strategic assassinations, leaving the enemy leaderless and bewildered, the war proper can begin. That’s assuming the victims of assassination don’t come back to life to get revenge. It’s unlikely the undead would be the speedy zombies of 28 Days Later, and the later Living Dead movies, beginning with Day of the Dead and those that followed. More likely they’d be the lumbering zombies of the first couple of the “Of the Dead” movies, Night and Dawn.
As you can tell, I’ve done quite a lot of research on the dead coming back. Vampires are rough customers, but they have their limitations. The sparkly vampires from the teenage Twilight franchise won’t be a problem. They’re very emotional. But unless you kidnap their girlfriends they pretty much leave you alone. The Frankenstein creature is a one-off, a patched-together jalopy of several lifeless masses, and probably wandering in the Arctic if he’s even alive anymore.
Of more realistic concern are the New Testament undead. In my studies I’ve read The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis, and there, to my relief, the report about Lazarus is encouraging. Lazarus was pretty apathetic after being brought back to life by Jesus. He didn’t seem to have much get-up-and-go to speak of. He wandered around in a pouty, taciturn daze like a resentful, hungover passive-aggressive awakened too early. I think we can handle such a person.
The scary one is Jesus. That’s who you gotta watch out for. That Jesus is one to keep a wary eye on. When he came back from the dead, first thing he did was start rolling boulders around. By all accounts he had the strength of ten vampires. If he hadn’t ascended to a heavenly throne he’d have been a formidable foe, although, as I say, being snuck up on from behind is a difficult move to counter. The avenging host from the Revelation of John the Divine presents Jesus as an insurmountable obstacle, but that whole production, flaming swords, etc, has been predicted over and over and always fails to materialize. And even so, we can still try sneaking up from behind. It seems the strongest move, and I don’t know why generals in the past haven’t relied on it more.
Once the war starts in earnest, well, I can’t reveal all the strategies we’ll be putting into action, but if you wanted to practice sneaking up from behind, I wouldn’t discourage you. I predict we’ll be doing a lot of sneaking up from behind. By the way, Napoleon was an idiot. “Hey, Wellington, meet me at Waterloo, we’ll be facing you, marching right toward you. I’ll be the one with his hand crammed his shirt between the buttons just above my fly, scratching my belly like a dumbass.”
I’ve been taking notes while watching the series, The Good Lord Bird, the story of John Brown, starring Ethan Hawke, who despite his last name does not play the bird. That John Brown knew the value of a sneak attack, even if he didn’t always pull it off. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ho Chi Minh hadn’t swiped a few of his moves back at Dien Bien Phu.
It is my sincere wish for all of us this holiday season that we crush our enemies in the coming year. May we be victorious, may our dead enemies stay that way, may our resolved arguments never be reawakened by returning fads, and may we distribute power and the bounty of the world justly, equally, generously, and righteously among all the beings of the Earth, and may our reconstruction this time be successful, sustainable, renewable, jubilant, and squeaky clean.
Have a blessed revolution, everyone. Ho ho Ho Chi Minh. This has been the Moment of Truth. God Jul!