Warning: Political Violence. Reader Discretion Advised. Some Scenes May Be Too Intense for Young Children and Reactionaries.
My name is Rick. I'm a small-town sheriff. I live in Cynthiana, Kentucky. Or rather lived.
I woke up alone in a hospital. The staff had fled. My wife Lori and son Carl were missing. And worst of all, the streets were overrun with mindless, flesh-eating Tea Baggers.
It's impossible to reason with the Tea Baggers. They just lurch from rally to rally muttering about "lower taxes" and "brains." And don't get 'em started on Obama. They think he's a socialist, fascist, Muslim Jihadist, Christian liberationist born in Kenya.
The Tea Baggers have no compunctions about guns: they brandish them at their rallies and threaten "Second Amendment solutions" if they don't get their way.
The last thing I remember was Obama's inauguration. I recall how full of hope I felt, how ready for change. At last we had an intelligent, articulate President who would lead us out of the morass the Bush administration had dragged us into. Then some meth-head shot me. I've been in a coma for the last two years. What the hell happened?
I made my way home. There was no sign of Lori and Carl, but there was a big "Foreclosure" sign on the front lawn. What happened to the mortgage crises? Why hadn't it be solved?
I found a few pitiable Democratic survivors hiding in a boarded-up house. They filled me in: "It was the virus. It burned out the brain cells of normal citizens and elevated their T cell counts, turning them into Tea Baggers."
"But where did the virus come from?" I said.
"Nobody knows for sure," they said. "Some people say the Koch brothers cooked it up in a political laboratory. Some people thinks it's FreedomWorks. There seems to be a racial class component -- it seems to affect primarily white, middleclass voters who feel threatened by the country's shifting demographics."
I told them I was going to look for Lori and Carl -- and maybe America along the way.
"Be careful," they said. "They may seem like just a couple of harmless political kooks, going back to the gold standard, doing away with the Fed, that sort of thing. But they're dangerous in a mob. On midterm election eve, the electoral map ran red with Republican victories."
I couldn't get gasoline for my squad car, so I saddled up a horse instead. Apparently there had been some sort of oil disaster in the Gulf Coast. I doused myself with Earl Grey so I could move about the Tea Baggers freely. They navigate primarily by sense of smell, their retinas having been permantly damaged by too much exposure to Fox TV.
I came across a Democratic representative named Nancy outside Knoxville. Her gavel arm was gnawed off all the way to the shoulder, leaving only a bloody stump -- and possibility a minority position. "I delivered the votes on health care! Why am I being scapegoated?" she wailed.
"Maybe the Democrats need a clean break with the past," I said. "Maybe you're too polarizing a figure. Maybe you're just too whiny and scary looking." I couldn't stand to see her suffer, so I shot her in the head and sent her back to San Francisco.
I came across a half-eaten Republican operative named Karl near Chattanooga. His gonads had been chewed off like a plate of Rocky Mountain oysters at an Ozarks picnic. "They're mutating!" he gasped. "We can't control them anymore. They've started consuming Republicans! There's even talking about nominating one of their own for President, guaranteeing Obama's re-election! Oh, the horror! The horror! Beware the Grizzly Mama!"
"Grizzly Mama? What the hell is a Grizzly Mama? Is it anything like Grizzly Adams? Speak to me!" But it was too late. He had gone to that circle of hell reserved for political fixers. I put bullet in his head to make sure he stayed down.
I finally caught up with Lori and Carl in a refugee center outside of Atlanta. My joy at being reunited with my family was tempered by the presence of John.
I never liked John. Maybe it was his permanent orange tan. Maybe it was his country club manner. Maybe it was that he seemed to be doing Lori.
"You've got to understand," John said. "It's a whole new world since the election. Lori, representing middle America, needed comforting. And what's more comforting then extending the Bush tax cuts -- not to mention a little offshore drilling, if you know what I mean?"
I thanked him for the information, then shot him in the head. It turned out he was a Republican establishment politician, not a genuine Tea Bagger. But you can't be too careful.
It was all too much for me. I decided to take refuge in a brick-and-mortar bookstore -- another endangered species. I thought here I would find intellectual refuge from the mindlessness around me. But even here there was no escape from the numbing vacuity of recent political discourse. I saw a copy of Decision Points prominently displayed.
I know I've missed a lot, but does anybody besides me remember 2000-2008 -- the stolen election, the unjustified invasion of Iraq, the bungled response to Katrina, the global financial crisis, "mission accomplished," "heckuva job, Brownie," "bin Laden determined to strike on US soil," etc., etc., ad nauseam...? And, strangely enough, there were no Tea Baggers, no viral infection, no mindless cannibalism of the political process.
Sometimes I think I'm the one who's dead, and wandering eternally in a limbo of deliberately suppressed memories. Or at least until the next election cycle.