INOFFENSIVE COUNTRY
EPISODE THREE: THE SEARCH FOR GENERAL PETERS
The Resistance base was cleaned and now was being outfitted for war. I had a nice bedroom with 1960s era furniture and a black and white television. I wasn't going to turn the television on and see liberal propaganda like shows featuring many minority characters being upstanding with gay friends who were successful and nice. So, I didn't mind not having a color television, but then they told me their televisions only got good shows like The Rifleman and the original Mission Impossible television show. Those were enjoyable to watch and I was binge watching the second season of The Rifleman when Encyclopedia Brown crashed through my bedroom door with my friend Winston in tow.
"Brown, where did you find Winston?" I asked, knowing that we hadn't brought him with us to the secret volcano base off the coast of Hawaii.
"Well, that's a funny story," Winston said as his little bald head began sweating. "I was sitting in the ice cream parlor eating a banana split when I saw this woman I dated once who walked out on me in the middle of the date. I went up to her and asked her, hey, why did you walk out on me during our date? I thought it was going well. And then she told me she was in an open relationship with two men and another woman and they were doing it all the time, like the four of them, liberal style. Then as I went back to my table to finish my now melting banana split, this other woman comes and sits down at the table with me. She says she could see my discomfort with the woman I'd dated once, and it wasn't even a real date, I had just kind of sat down next to her at her table at this restaurant and she got up and left, so that isn't really a date, but still. She asked how I felt about open relationships and I just said I was lonely and I wanted a proper woman who cooked and cleaned and all that. She told me that kind of thing was possible and to come with her, so she got me into this car and slipped me a mickey and the next thing you know I woke up here."
"He wants to join The Resistance," Brown explained.
"Did you talk to General Peters?" I asked Winston.
"Well, I assume I am in because I was taken here, and I didn't see any General, just the Group Captain."
"Oh, he's in," Brown explained while getting riled up and stimming by moving back and forth in place. "He's in, baby. He's IN!"
The Group Captain walked into my room at that point, making it the equivalent of a party, so I made gin and tonic for everyone and we started drinking while the Group Captain explained that General Peters was missing. There had been a problem of some kind with the nuclear reactor inside the volcano base and the only way to fix it was for someone to go into the reactor chamber and manually do something to fix the problem. The thing about it was that the radiation would kill whoever volunteered to do it, and General Peters wasted no time in going into the reactor chamber by himself. As Group Captain Reagan watched, General Peters fixed the problem with the reactor and was then killed by the radiation.
"How can you say he's missing? It sounds like he's dead, Group Captain Reagan."
"While he was dying he transmitted his conservative spirit into the base doctor, Dr. Carson, and now Dr. Carson is inhabited by the spirit of General Peters conservativism. If we can get General Peters to Mt. Rushmore and the weird religious cult that lives inside of President Lincoln's head, then we could possibly bring the spirit of General Peters out of Dr. Carson and make him a living, breathing American again."
"That sounds like a real shot in the dark," I said honestly.
"It may be a shot in the dark," said Group Captain Reagan, "but Dr. Carson is haunted by the spirit of General Peters being inside of him and he is unwell."
"Isn't he some kind of neurologist? Can't he fix his own brain?"
"It isn't like that," Group Captain Reagan told us. "He doesn't know who he is any longer. One minute he's the regular Dr. Carson we all know and love, and the next minute he's spouting off orders and demanding faster construction of the volcano base defensive shield. If he was the regular Dr. Carson all he'd need is surgical tools and a mirror to do the surgery in front of. We need to get him to Mt. Rushmore."
I worried that such a futile mission would endanger our main mission of attacking and destroying Pearl Harbor and the Seventh Fleet, but as construction continued, and neither Encyclopedia Brown nor myself was working on the construction, we were basically just sitting around watching reruns of The Rifleman and so we agreed.
It would be a long and dangerous journey from the secret volcano base to Mt. Rushmore, and it would have been a lot easier if we had done this while still at the base in Montana, but that base had been destroyed by Liberal Walkers. Group Captain Reagan had us change into liberal-looking clothing, bright and flashy with sayings on the front of the t-shirt like "Out and Proud," which Group Captain Reagan wore. I had one that said "I Just Want to Play Guitar and Get Stoned." Brown had a purple shirt with a smiley face emoji on the front and Winston wore a shirt with rainbow colors on it. We collected the now demented Dr. Carson and began our undercover mission to Mt. Rushmore. It was very exciting.
It is also worth noting that they couldn't get the paint off of Brown's head, and it was still completely blue. Brown didn't mind and Group Captain Reagan said it would help us blend in because it made Brown look like some kind of street performer, with his blue head combining with the smiley face emoji to produce an interesting effect. We looked like a group of wandering liberals and didn't expect anyone to even question us. Our cover story was that we were following The Grateful Dead in our VW Bus that was covered with flowers and bright colors. We had not realized that The Grateful Dead were not currently touring, but those kinds of details didn't matter to liberals, who were big fans of wasting time in stupid pursuits.
We had to find passage to the mainland, and that was difficult to arrange. We ended up going to Hawaii in our disguises and going into some of the more hardcore hole in the wall style bars. We'd get well lubricated as we searched for a freighter captain who was just a little bit crooked, and it took five bars and nearly twelve beers apiece before we found one. He was a Chinese man of ill repute who sat in the back of the bar shooting people under the table with his very illegal gun. He did not conform to the rules and laws of the Liberal Reich. He was a badass and just the kind of freighter captain we were looking for. What we didn't bargain for was his Irish wolfhound named Chewdog being with him all the time.
"I can get you to California," said the Chinese freighter captain. "The name is Han Chiang, and this is Chewdog. I call him that because he chews on people he doesn't like, and I don't mean a little nibble. I've seen him eat an entire child."
"Understood," said Group Captain Reagan. "I have experience working with animals."
"Chewy isn't an animal, friend," Han Chiang told us. "Chewy is a person."
I was glad that Han Chiang was actually a white person from Iowa, even though he was supposed to be Chinese. We went along with it, since he was pretty much pretending to be Chinese and took offense to any questions about his heritage. The problem was that liberals had a serious issue with white people trying to be people of other races, especially in an important historical story like this one. If the freighter was stopped by a liberal patrol we would be in trouble. It was getting out of the Inoffensive Hawaii District that was the problem. California had been conquered by the Japanese in 1992, and the Japanese might have some issue with a white person playing a Chinese character, but at least they were more open and understanding than the Liberal Reich.
We were out in the harbor, not Pearl Harbor but a different harbor in Hawaii, and we saw Han Chiang's freighter docked. It was an ugly, old and beat up looking freighter that had been made in Great Britain during the Victorian Era. It was a hunk of junk and we were embarrassed at the thought of being associated with it.
"Steam powered, with Steampunk technology forgotten since the 19th century," Han told us. "You may think she's a piece of junk, but she's got more than you think she does."
"A Victorian era steamship?" I said in disbelief. "This is how we're going to get past the Liberal Reich patrols and into California?"
"A conservative uses the tools at hand to build bigger, better and more profitable things," Group Captain Reagan told us. "Soon it will be morning in America, rather than the time when the sun comes up and most of us sleep in."
"Yeah, okay, I know that is pretty much our ultimate goal, but this mission is bullshit! How is this going to help us win the war?"
"General Peters is needed. His strategic genius is what has gotten us this far. You didn't think we could defeat two dozen Liberal Walkers with just rivets, but we did. Who else could have come up with that scheme?"
"We could have just used rope like a normal person would."
"Are you giving me lip, Harry Porter? I'm your commanding officer."
"I'm sorry for the disrespect. I just don't get the point of this mission. General Peters is dead, and Dr. Carson is nuts out of space, and now we're going to bring General Peters body and Dr. Carson to Mt. Rushmore to see some religious sect that can bring him back to life and have Dr. Carson sort of making sense again? This is stupid and strategically inane."
"And where did you learn military strategy, Harry Porter?"
"I didn't, but I have common sense, like all conservatives. Having three of our limited fighters, a group captain and the base doctor go off on a wild goose chase halfway across the mainland is strategically stupid."
"Mt. Rushmore is more than halfway across the continent, I think," Encyclopedia Brown told me. "Halfway is like Kansas or something."
"I know, Brown, I'm just painting a picture here."
"We will undertake this mission," Group Captain Reagan told me. "We will undertake it, and if we succeed, we will have General Peters back in command. If we fail, then we will forever be known as heroes of The Resistance and we'll go to heaven where there will be rewards waiting for us."
I finally convinced myself to get on the freighter, and Han Chiang fired up the steam engines and put on a helmet with funny glasses that looked like something a welder might use, except with goggle style frames made out of dull metal. He put the same kind of headgear on Chewdog, who got behind the wheel and made it clear he was driving the ship. Winston made the mistake of questioning the wisdom of this and Chewdog took off his headgear and menaced towards Winston growling. Brown and I stepped away in fear as Chewdog began gnawing on Winston's leg, taking it clean off in five minutes. As Chewdog consumed the leg, Winston passed away as a result of bloodloss and we'd had our first casualty of the mission.
After that no one questioned the wisom of letting Chewdog pilot the ship, even after we scraped two coral reefs and plowed into a sailboat. Brown and I were told to dispose of Winston's body by dumping it overboard, which we did gladly because his corpse was upsetting to look at. We then went in the back to play chess, and it was a good game because both I and Group Captain Reagan, who I played against, were stategic geniuses. The game was getting really intense when Chewdog showed up, cleared off the chess board with his paw, and then growled at us.
"Thank you, Chewdog," I said, frightened out of my mind. "We needed the table cleared. Thank you so much."
He barked happily and went back to piloting the ship.
When we got to the coast, Chewdog slammed the ship so hard into the dock at the Port of Los Angeles that he caused five million dollars in damages. If California had been under the control of the Liberal Reich we would have been fine. The liberals would just hug us and ask if we were "okay" and tell us not to worry about the damages, that human lives were more important than money. It was an oppressive and horrible penalty, but not as bad as we feared the Japanese reaction would be.
We disembarked from the freighter and were taken into custody. There were two gates at the port, one marked "Other" and the other marked "Asians Only." This was 1956, a different 1956 than you remember, but this was 1956 and this kind of discrimination seemed outdated, even for the Japanese. The reason it was 1956, by the way, is because the liberals changed the calendar and now instead of the years being marked as being after the dominion of our savior, Jesus Christ, they marked the years since the passing of Conan the Barbarian. The problem was that the liberals could not agree on what the birth year of this fictional character was, so the years were different in many ways.
We were taken through the "Asians Only" gate, even as we protested, but there was a very long line at the "Other" gate as everyone coming into the port that wasn't Asian had to submit to extreme vetting, a process that involved the removal of your soul by a samurai. We hadn't come up with a plan to get around that, as we needed our souls and Dr. Carson apparently now had two souls inside of him. Being in the custody of the Japanese authorities got us around the gate, but the damage we had done to the port by letting Chewdog pilot the ship had brought the full weight of Continental Japan down on us.
One of the problems with having the part of Chewdog the Irish wolfhound actually being played by a male white actor was that once we were in custody, he regained his ability to talk like a normal person, probably the result of fear, even though he could have eaten our captors like he had eaten Winston and helped us escape. Once he was unmasked as a shivering, frightened 15 year old white boy, he was pretty much powerless to do anything to help us. Our whitewashing of his character, and his actions, were considered to be disrespectful to real Irish wolfhounds, and our Japanese captors had great respect for large dogs. Chewdog was done, and he was taken to be executed.
We hadn't really known Chewdog for very long, so Group Captain Reagan, Encyclopedia Brown, and I were not very upset at this turn of events. Han Chiang was very upset, to the point of anger, and he ended up shooting the Japanese police detective that was interrogating him from under the table. This was unacceptable to the Japanese and Han was taken to be executed. Now we had no idea how we would get back to our secret volcano base, because the freighter was also seized and impounded.
"You three are free to go," the Japanese police captain told Dr. Carson, Encyclopedia Brown, Group Captain Reagan and myself. "You were only passengers on that freighter, so we don't believe you had anything to do with slamming it into our very nice new Port of Los Angeles."
We got the VW bus off the freighter before it was impounded, along with our luggage, and we began our trek across the country once known as America the Beautiful but now a divided land occupied by seventeen different countries. When we got to Nevada, now the Palestinian homeland, we were again stopped at the border and questioned. This border crossing would be easier than coming into California, as the Palestinians just wanted to show us their homeland. We spent three days touring New Palestine, once known as Nevada, seeing the sites and eating some terrific ethnic food. After we each had sex with a very nice Palestinian woman, we started on our way once again.
Most of the lands between New Palestine and Mt. Rushmore were under Native American control now. The Liberal Reich had given them back a great deal of land that we Americans had conquered years before. It was heartbreaking to see so much of what was America under Native American control. As we passed through their properous and very clean cities, we held in our vomit and tried to focus on the goal of our mission, to see if we could return the soul of General Peters back into his body, which after so many days deceased was beginning to rot.
The Native Americans had many casinos, but only at the borders of their lands with other nations. It was how they became so rich and prosperous, and there were no casinos in their lands other than on the borders. These Native Americans had turned into free market capitalists, which was ironic seeing as this was what we wanted to bring back to these very same lands, but we wanted it under the control of the United States of America and not these Native American scum.
"We have become very prosperous," said a Native American tribal chief who had seen us at the border and invited us to have coffee with him. "We profit off the vices of the liberals, and of all the other white and Asian and Hispanic peoples who have come to occupy the territories around them. Gambling, liquor, drugs, prostitutes, and whatever your heart desires. Our biggest source of income is from all the liberals who come here in disguise to eat our wonderful buffalo steaks that we serve in the steakhouses that they can actually see from their houses sometimes while they are eating eggplant and hummus. Ha ha ha ha!"
"Can you get us to Mt. Rushmore?" I asked him.
"I think you mean Six Grandfathers, and those awful things have been taken down. That land is now under Sioux control."
"Can you get us an introduction to the Sioux leaders?" I said, holding back my vomit at the idea of the great faces of our finest presidents being removed by the Sioux.
"I am a Sioux leader, you fucking idiot," the chief told us. "Are you morons conservatives by any chance?"
"No," said Group Captain Reagan quickly. "We are following the Grateful Dead in our VW bus."
"The Grateful Dead is not touring now," the chief told us. "Your cover story has many holes in it."
"Look, chief, if you really are a chief, we need to get to Mt. Rushmore, or whatever you've decided to call one of our greatest monuments now. General Peters' soul is inside of Dr. Carson and he's going mad from having two souls inside of him. We want to know if the spiritual types that hang out inside the mountain can restore General Peters' soul to his body."
"Ah, so that is why you are dragging a dead body around with you. I was going to ask about that, because it is pretty fucking disgusting, to be perfectly honest with you."
"Yes, so time is of the essence," Group Captain Reagan told him as he propped General Peters' body back up, because it had slumped forward onto the table, and put his sunglasses back on.
"Is this General of such importance to you that you would undertake this mission? Tell me about your relationship with him."
"None of us were in a relationship with General Peters. He had a wife, I think."
"That is not what I meant. Tell me about your relationship with General Peters and how he became of importance to you."
"He was in command of The Resistance, he was a great strategic genius. We all loved and respected him. He was a hero to us, even though when we faced off against three Liberal Walkers in the Battle of Snow Field, he was nowhere to be found, and we only had swords at that point because the rivet guns had gotten too hot to use."
Group Leader Reagan glared at me for blowing our cover story, but this Sioux tribal chief had seen through our smokescreen already. I figured telling him the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, would somehow help our cause.
"We Sioux are a very spiritual people, as well as being the wealthiest nation on the continent now. I can see your pain and distress, I can see it in your faces, and even in the face of the spirit of the one who was killed by a dog man who still travels with you. I think I may be willing to help you, but in return I want a gift."
"Like a case of wine or something?"
"No, no, we have plenty of cases of wine to mark up and serve to liberals on the border. What I will ask you for now is a gift so incredible that it will blow your minds, and in return for that gift, I will return the soul of your General into his body and free Dr. Carson from his suffering."
"Is it some kind of intense ritual with dancing and chanting and stuff?"
"No, no, that we do for show. All I have to do pretty much is touch them both at the same time, close my eyes, and think of Paris in the springtime. I've been there, you know. Very nice."
"I see. So what is this gift?" Group Captain Reagan asked.
"I would like you to get me a copy of Ayn Rand's seminal work, Atlas Shrugged. The liberals banned it and burned all copies, and that was long before they gave us back our lands. It is very rare, very valuable, but I think if anyone would be able to get their hands on a copy it would be the Conservative Resistance, hmm? I tell you, this Injun got mad powers. Did you know that I recently bought the professional baseball franchise that was in Cleveland and I moved to Sioux City, our capital? I figured maybe not our native capital, but the name had a ring to it so we went with it. We changed the name back to the original name, the Indians, har har, and even use the Chief Wahoo logo everywhere. It is good for a laugh, I tell you, and what are the liberals going to say? We're making fun of Native Americans? We ARE Native Americans, so it is hilarious. My friend Bobby Running Deer bought the Washington Legends football franchise and did pretty much the same thing, Sioux City Redskins. We have so much fun. I bet you wish you were Sioux right now, don't you? We have so much fun, I swear. Hilarious stuff. I mean, we're really Dakotas, if you get right down to it, but that confuses some people, because they are used to saying 'Sioux' but you know, just go with the flow, dude man."
Now I was confused as to whether this so-called chief, who might have been very stoned, was a free market capitalist or a liberal. It was very confusing.
"We will try, I swear on my mother's grave," Group Captain Reagan told him. "Now, what about our situation with General Peters and Dr. Carson?"
"Oh, that, easy enough, but I warn you. It can have unexpected results, and General Peters may not be the same man you know, especially as his brain has begun to decay."
With that ominous warning, our madcap chief put his hand on each of the two men involved in the soul jumping from one body to the next at the time of death from radiation poisoning and closed his eyes, probably to think about Paris in the springtime like he'd talked about so poetically just minutes before. Suddenly, General Peters body jerked and groaned. His eyes opened, but they were dead, black eyes, and I was frightened. This was probably the stuff we were warned about before the chief closed his eyes and grinned. As he stood up, brushing off dust from his filthy clothing, we heard his bones creak as he spoke in a raspy, deep voice similar to that of James Earl Jones.
"I am General Zod. Take me back to your secret volcano base. I am assuming command of the Conservative Resistance."
I will admit, I gasped at that moment.
Part Four: An Already Established Hope