INOFFENSIVE COUNTRY
EPISODE TWO: THE ATTACK OF THE LIBERALS
The Resistance had their main base in the frozen wastelands of Montana, far from anywhere there were street performers or people who stopped you on the street and wanted to show you their guitar or their doll collection. If I had one more kid come up me to and show me his doll collection while saying, "I'm a genetic boy and I play with dolls, and I feel okay about that," I was going to scream. I had decided to join The Resistance and see what it was all about.
I still remember when I was younger and my older brother came to me and begged me to kill him with a rag, because guns and sharp objects had been made illegal by the Liberal Reich. He told me with horror in his eyes about how he had helped a child who had fallen in the street, helped him find a safe space, and had then felt good about doing so. "I'm turning into... one of... them..." he said with the madness of liberalism in his eyes. I almost gave him his wish. I almost killed him with that rag, but I had no idea how to actually kill someone with just a rag.
I thought The Resistance were sitting ducks the way they were in some hillside in the snow that looked like an illegal Christmas card. The Liberal Reich had Liberal Walkers, giant mechanical killing machines with four legs that were easy to take down if you had some rope, but if you didn't have any rope you were in trouble. You could tie the rope around their long mechanical legs and they would trip and blow up every time. There were serious limits to liberal technology as they didn't have the financial backing of the conservatives any longer and had to rely on Chancellor Humphrey's good favor.
The Liberal Reich relied on these Liberal Walkers because they had made guns illegal, even for police and soliders, who had to rely on baseball bats and hockey sticks every time another country invaded us. One time, in 1994, Norway invaded and took over Minnesota and everyone just gave up and gave the invading army garlands of flowers. There were actually only five states still in the Inoffensive Country because invaders had taken the others. Montana just happened to be one of the states no one wanted, and so our base was actually inside of the Inoffensive Country.
What I thought made them sitting ducks was not just that they were inside the borders of the Inoffensive Country, but that they had a huge open field in front of them and no rope inside the compound that could be used to take down the Liberal Walkers. They also hadn't assigned anyone to any lookout positions and the base was barely finished being set up, despite all the workers being conservatives with a strong work ethic and the drive to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. There was just too much work to be done and not enough hands on deck.
"Hey Harry Porter and Encyclopedia Brown," someone called up to us from the floor. "Can you check to see that everything is clear outside?"
"Sure thing!"
Encyclopedia Brown hit his head on a steel construction beam just overhead, and it made a loud ringing noise which got everyone laughing. We hadn't been able to laugh at slapstick comedy in years, since it had been outlawed in 1989. It was good to have such a good laugh in such horrible and dangerous conditions, and I was about to find out that Liberal Walkers were approaching across the snow field and we still didn't have any rope in the compound, just a lot of steel construction beams that had inexplicably been made out in the Montana wilderness.
I thought it would have made more sense if the base was built out of wood from the forests on the other side of the snow field, but then I saw them on the horizon, more than two dozen Liberal Walkers and they were coming straight at the base. I had to warn the others quickly.
I knocked Encyclopedia Brown over as I turned to run back inside the base, causing him to knock over three paint cans, with the one filled with blue paint landing on his head. His whole head ended up turning blue and we had a good laugh about that before going inside to report seeing the approaching Liberal Walkers.
"General Peters, you should hear this," my group captain yelled to his superior officer. "This young, good looking man named Harry Porter has something to report that you need to hear."
"What is it, Porter? What do you have to report?"
"Sir, there are at least two dozen Liberal Walkers heading straight towards the base... and we don't have any rope."
"We don't need rope," laughed the General. "Do you think me so foolish as to not be prepared? I was a Boy Scout before I was a Conservative. We don't need rope because we have... rivets!"
"Rivets? How can we use those?" I wondered out loud while still laughing a little about Brown's blue head. It made him look like one of those crazy aliens we'd once seen in town.
"The Liberal Walkers are made out of metal. We have rivets. And rivet guns. If we can get in close enough we can alter their physical structure enough to cause them to completely malfunction."
"That is an unbelievable plan, General. Can it work?"
"I believe that it can. Go with your Group Captain to your defensive position." General Peters then turned and shouted through the room, "Gentlemen! We are at war!"
Suddenly there I was, a young and attractive cattle rancher from New York City, freshly joined up with The Resistance and now they were at war with the Liberal Reich. The Resistance was no longer a secret. Chancellor Humphrey had found our main base and was attacking it with overwhelming force. And our commanding officer expected us to win this battle with rivets.
Along the way to our defensive position, I overheard one of my fellow Americans saying, "I heard they have Liberal Walkers now that only respond to gender neutral pronouns. Must be a pain in the ass programming those bitches."
I will not lie. I was a little bit scared as I took my position with a rivet gun and a bag of rivets just inside a tunnel that led into the base. I was supposed to wait until one of the Liberal Walkers got close enough and then use the rivets to alter its mechanical structure enough for it to tip over or go in the opposite direction. The task felt impossible. I had to trust that General Anakin Peters knew what he was doing and that the rivets would be enough, but as the Liberal Walkers got closer and I could really see how gigantic they were, the task seemed too daunting.
It would become forever known in history as The Battle of Snow Field, and it would be a fierce battle. After a lot of fighting and riveting, the battle in the end became one where I stood with Encyclopedia Brown and the two American agents that had recruited me, who seemed to have suddenly shown up but were there the whole time (it just happened to be a large base with a lot going on so we hadn't seen each other until that moment), and armed with just swords for some reason we stood surrounded by three Liberal Walkers, which was all that remained of the forces of the Liberal Reich.
"We will never surrender!" yelled out one of the agents, I believe it was Former Congressman Joe Moore, but it might have been his young learner Gerald Ford.
I was sure that the end was near. The four of us, armed just with swords, out of rivets and with the rivet guns having gotten too hot to use without special gloves, could not win against three Liberal Walkers. There was just no way. And then came the miracle.
Some kind of soliders dressed in gold armor and red capes were walking a man towards a hill. The man appeared to be dragging a large log, perhaps one of the ones it would have been more sensible to try to build the base out of, and he was in distress. My first instict was to laugh at his suffering, because he was obviously weak and unable to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. Then they got him to the hill and the soldiers pounded the log, which turned out to be a cross, into the ground and then raised the man up on it. He was already suffering so much! I felt something for him in that moment, something I had never felt before. It is my great fear that it was empathy, the mind drug that creates liberals. I wanted those soldiers to stop, but I also had no idea why this was happening on the same hill where I was trying to defend myself against Liberal Walkers with a sword.
None of us Americans attempted to attack the Liberal Walkers with our swords, mostly because there would be no point, but they also did not use their somewhat technologically advanced laser weapons on us. It was like we had all stopped and stared off at the soldiers hanging this suffering man on this cross on the same Montana hill we were fighting on.
That man was dying for my sins, I realized, and for the sins of my fellow Americans. His agony and pain represented my agony and pain. I felt such sorrow as the man was nailed to the cross, screaming in a kind of passion as they banged each nail. I dropped to my knees, as did Encyclopedia Brown (after bumping his head against Gerald Ford's), Former Congressman Joe Moore, and his young learner Gerald Ford. We all knelt and wept as this man expired on the cross, but none of us did anything because we were surrounded by fully armed Liberal Walkers in some kind of stand off.
We knew we had to move the base after that, since not only had the Liberal Reich found that base, it also appeared to have been built on some hill where some weird, trippy religious shit was going on. We moved it to a secret volcano base somewhere off the coast of Hawaii, which was where the Liberal Reich kept their ultimate weapon, Pearl Harbor and the Seventh Fleet. We were closer to our target, and although greatly reduced in numbers, we soon began recruiting more Americans to The Resistance.
We knew that Pearl Harbor was under the command of someone called Dr. No as he had been the previous occupant of our volcano base and had left the place a shambles. It took us a month just to clean the place enough to get moved in. We were lucky not to be seen dumping trash in the Pacific Ocean by anyone who might have seen us from Pearl Harbor because the Liberal Reich has stiff penalties for pollution. It is evidently something they feel very strongly about and I guess I can kind of get behind that, but we didn't have anyplace else to dump the trash from the secret volcano base that didn't seriously raise the risk of us being seen by Pearl Harbor or the Seventh Fleet.
Our plan was set back by the amount of time spent cleaning and then the rush was on. There was little time to act. Pearl Harbor was now a fully operational naval base and we were at serious risk. They were sending out scout ships on a regular basis.
"A noble woman named Sarah and her noble Alaskan Americans died getting us the plans to Pearl Harbor. And we now know that what we feared was happening. The secret weapon component of Pearl Harbor is also quite real and not a myth like global warming. We will have to destroy it before it destroys us with its awesome power."
General Peters had made a fine speech, and it rallied up the troops, but how were we going to destroy Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had tried once, and failed, and that was before the building of the secret weapon with awesome power. We were but a small group of rebel scum who called ourselves The Resistance. How could we fight against that?
"Americans have never lost a battle for Pearl Harbor," General Peters told us. "Pearl Harbor belongs to America, not to the Liberal Reich."
Part Three: The Search for General Peters