FBI Chronicles: The Rise of Faith-Based Initiatives; Part 1

This post was written by admin on February 21, 2009
Posted Under: Pathetic

[ Production note: The following is the first in the series encompassing many of the ideas already present on Pathetic Rhetoric. Part 1 introduces the key players and forms the basic conflict. Admittedly, I wrote it in under the spell of the creative moment. I apologize for not considering your perspective, but I feel that I must publish it immediately so as to prevent over-analysis. I trust the nerve endings in my gut. If Part 1 gives you the impression of a ball of frayed yard, I have succeeded. The loose ends will find their place in the whole in the following installments. Happy Reading! - D. Senter.]

People might know the FBI (Faith-based Initiatives) as a programs started by President Bill Clinton and intensified under George W. Bush. President Barack Obama continued to fund the program and took every precaution to ensure equal representation of the several religious superstitions prevailing in our troubled land. Like most of the alphabet agencies started with good intentions by our imperial presidents, it morphed into something hideous.

The recession that began under the auspices of the George W. Bush administration worsened under the stewardship of Barack Obama. A nation stood by, mute and horrified, as trillions of dollars went up in smoke, often literally. By the last of Obama’s eight years, almost everyone who had any faith in the survival of progressive secular bourgeois democracy melted into the morass of survivalism, either clinging to their lace curtains as they witnessed the mayhem in the streets or succumbing to the final temptations of pipe and bottle malaise. The revolutionists continued to get shot and imprisoned. Some things never change.
All the while, the “good” people that brought you old Georgie Boy had their megaphones trained on the masses. A Revival movement gained strength. Like the Incredible Hulk, if you fuck with the militant Christians, it only multiplies their rage, which seems to be as cohesive an organizing principle as faith in Yaweh or J.C.

Cynics, of the classical Athenian mold, also swelled in number around this time, but to a much lesser extent. Instead of microphones, they took their second-hand bullhorns to the streets, to the public meetings of the Revialists, and heckle charlatans blue in the face. The ancient practice of frank speaking became public again. Esteemed gentlemen who insists on “civility” in discussing policy matters were scandalized as they witnessed unkempt men and women disrupt public gatherings of the faithful with the most vulgar blasphemes and accusations.

Unfortunately, one of the most admirable virtues of the Cynics also proves to be their greatest weakness. For example, Vomit King and Snot Rocket (two of the more visible and vociferous Cynics on the Eastern seaboard) might laugh, belch or ignore the suggestion that they “led a following” of “students” or “attendants.” Depending on their mood, they might display the reason for their adopted monikers and leave the questioner disgusted and bewildered. People “followed” them, in the sense that these people generally had nothing else to do but listen to each other talk and share drinks. They pooled their money for transportation, food and alcohol voluntarily and without solicitation. No one took or issued orders. They mirrored their enemies in approach, substance and organization.

The Cynics ignited the holy rage of the Revivalists, many of which owned the big microphones that stoke the flames of fear and outrage for political purposes. Dollars became increasingly useless, even to people with jobs. Gangs of armed miscreants began to hijack gasoline tankers, which forced the price of transportation ever higher via nervous speculators and supply chain security surcharges. This cramped the style of the Cynics, who relied upon voluntary funds. They began to talk to their sympathizers in the railroads and hastily arranged a meeting.

In the last days of the Barack Obama administration, with the Patriot Act still in full affect, King Vomit, Snot Rocket, Chewed Food and Rude Rodney – key Cynic figures of their time – met with the executives of the two main rail carriers of the east coast. Some say the railroads were prepared to make a generous offer to the Cynics, offering transportation in their freight carriers in exchange for maintenance repairs and a promise to not blow them up. Others smelled a rat and tried to keep their de facto leaders from entering the hotel lobby in Pittsburgh. Either way, it doesn’t matter anymore. Before Snot Rocket could even shoot a booger onto the floor and open the meeting, the double doors of the conference room exploded from their hinges.

Twenty armed men and women swarmed into the room brandishing automatic weapons. “FBI!” shouted the leader, who, instead of the typical golden shield, wore a wide chrome-colored cross on his breast. “FBI!?” said the Cynic leaders in unison. The had taken counter-measures against the domestic spy agencies and the CIA. This included the Federal Bureau of Investigation, so Rude Rodney asked, “What the fuck is the Federal Bureau of Incarceration doing here?”

“Faith-Based Initiatives! Now all you dirty punks [he meant the Cynics] come to the middle of the floor, remove your clothes and lay on the floor with your cheeks spread!”
King Vomit arched a stream of puke over the leader’s visor. Pea soup and half-chewed rice noodles nearly choked him. A sputtering of gunfire avenged him instantly. Half-Chewed emptied the contents of a gallon bag – kielbasa sandwiches with sauerkraut – at another agent’s feet, causing her to slip. Again, 18 angry guns ended the life of an unarmed, dirty loud-mouth. The remaining three didn’t even take the time to look at their dead comrades. They crashed through the second-story windows and took off running towards Bloomfield.

Faith-Based Initiatives, with jurisdiction over the crime scene, planted small arms on King Vomit and Half-Chewed Food. The railroad executives went along for the ride, corroborating the FBI’s story in local and national media - penance for almost having reached a deal that would have enabled the Cynics to publicly humiliate the leading candidate of the Christian Right, Malcolm O’Toole, who had come to Washington during the Clinton Administration to be a part of the newly formed Faith-Based Initiatives.

With the voting population clamoring for deliverance, begging the Almighty for a savior, the FBI turned a few knobs on the soundboards of the national networks and found such a figure: Malcolm O’Toole. Provocateurs inside the sniveling, politically bankrupt Democratic National Committee engineered the nomination of Wendel Stanton, a Barack Obama facsimile, as their candidate, or punching bag, depending on which angle one views history.

Stanton deplored the ascendancy of the FBI. He repeatedly expressed his intention to dismantle, or, at least, disarm it. Furthermore, he wanted to return to the old idea forwarded by the Founders that the State have nothing to do with religion as it is a private matter.
The national media, in the claws of the FBI, viciously attacked Stanton as a dangerous radical who wanted to punish and incarcerate Christians. They printed photographs of him smoking marijuana and made insinuations about his sexual orientation based on a his opposition to the amendment – authored by the FBI with all credit given to O’Toole – that made same-sex marriage illegal and sodomy punishable by life in prison. A week before the election, a video of a drunk, ranting Stanton clinched the election. In a twenty-minute rant, Stanton said such things as “If my son can pay his own bills, why shouldn’t he smoke a little pot?” and “Why should I give a fuck that two grown men are fucking in the bathroom right now?” It made the choice clear to the public: either a righteous man of God or a pot-smoking, drunk, commie fag.

Meanwhile, Snot Rocket had been learning how to vomit on demand in honor of his fallen friend. He could foresee the outcome and predicted the chain of events to follow. Still, the lesser cynics tried to remain hopeful. “What if Stanton is the most useful puppet for these times. He has ties to the credit agencies, the Fed, HMO’s, the auto-makers – the same strings as other presidents. There’s still a chance.”
Snot Rocket would shake his head at such nonsense. “Don’t you realize how dangerous you are? YOU!” A booger would strike an eyelid. “Our assault on untruth doesn’t exclude the Democrats. We are a publicly denounced danger to society! Only the FBI can gain the public, private and government support to chase us to the ends of the earth and kill us!”

Snot Rocket knew he would die, but always imagined his death would come as a result of either freak accident or heart disease, not at the end of a gun barrel. He gazed into the red and green evening sun from the remains of a construction project where he often drank, slept and spoke to gathered crowds. Only a few of his dozens of devotees did he allow to the level where he slept. One was his secret favorite, dubbed Ass Scratch.

She pinched and twisted the flesh on his side. Snot Rocket clung to an H-beam to keep from falling. “You crazy bitch!”
“You know I love it when you call me by your pet names,” said Ass Scratch, birth name Katy Umber. Snot Rocket resumed his relaxed, contemplative posture with an arm holding his weight on a dirty beam.
“I never knew you to be a mopey little bitch, Snot,” she said.
He blew a stream of mucus that curved 30 degrees leftward and down into a rain-barrel. “Not moping, just imaging my funeral…attended by state witnesses of the FBI that are there to make sure I’m in hell. I need to have the cash taped onto my body so they don’t use tax money for my final bullshit.”

“Look at me,” said Ass Scratch softly, in an almost sultry voice. When Snot Rocket turned and grasped her extended hand, she delivered a quick jab to his solar plexus while holding his hand firmly to keep him from falling to his death. “Feel like dying now, motherfucker! You know they can’t kill you! That you’re just a man and…”
“An idea doesn’t die?” Snot Rocket flung her hand away in defeat. “Face it, Scratch, the FBI serves the people their ideas now, and there’s nothing but shit sandwiches on the menu from now until doomsday. Not even real shit sandwiches either. Holy shit sandwiches and everyone has to eat ‘em or die choking.”
“So you’re gonna give up? Go join the Revival, marry a woman named Polly, raise a worm farm and keep you mouth shut?”
“No, but what did I tell you already?”
“To tell these bastards the truth even if it hurts. That’s what you said. So what if they kill you?” said Ass Scratch.

“Not that. I say that every day. It comes out of my face like puke and snot. I told you, Scratch, that we might not win. I don’t believe in a teleological universe. If they can lose, so can we.” He turned away and pretended to wipe his nose to give himself a moment to stop tears. “Sooner or later we have to deal with that possibility concretely. What the fuck are we going to do when the hammer comes down?”
Ass Scratch casually threw a brick underhand through the open grid of the structure onto an abandoned car windshield. She thrust her hands, palms up, to the side, curtsied slightly and said in her school-girl voice “We die, of course. Even if we do lose, we might as well give them hell.”
Snot Rocket didn’t try to hide his misty eyes. He felt proud of this young woman, six years his junior, who he had coaxed away from the ledge of personal destruction. In their first meeting, she had beckoned him to her with a sultry smile and crooked finger through dirty, purple and green hair and said, “Your speech sucked.” It was he who had told her “If you’re going no where in your life, you might as well do something wherever you are.” The sudden, violent reminder of his own mortality made him temporarily forget this lesson. She had pulled him to his feet and brushed the broken glass off his back when he fell two stories, fleeing a hail of bullets. “I knew something smelled funny,” she had said as they ran. Now, at the verge of arrest, death and defeat, Ass Scratch reiterated to him a piece of advice that had become her own wisdom. It inspired Snot Rocket to give her a new name.

“Thanks,” he said sincerely.
She furrowed her brow, almost indignantly. “For what, Asshole?”
“For being the Queen Bitch.” They laughed together for a moment that subsided into one of those dilated silences that burn images into permanent memory. Years later, as they died, choking on their own blood, they would remember the musty smells of dust on masonite, a sweat-stained, vomit-soaked mattress (a gift from King Vomit that Snot Rocket kept for comradely, sentimental reasons) and the exact shape and colors of each others eyes. In that moment, that seemed to last longer than their lifespans, they could not tell the difference between their own and the other’s eyes. They knew that much of the time between that moment and their death would be spent with each other. Snot Rocket had resisted the temptation to come onto Queen Bitch. Sex had always sullied his best friendships with the attendant neediness, manipulation and wanton acts of cruelty. She had felt the same way until then, when they became partners in body and spirit, which is to say, they put their heads together to find ways to heckle as many political revivalists as possible.

The preacher could speak to the flock penned in the church, but as soon as he tried to talk politics in the neighborhood – what the Cynics call Revival – Queen Bitch and Snot Rocket knew about in advance and brought their obnoxious friends, who spoke at least at the equivalent decibel level.

Meanwhile, the FBI, feeling their upper hand on the situation like a surgeon’s latex glove, also thought like a pioneering surgeon would. Only turkey hunters would burst in a-blazing like they did in the hotel. The mistakes of that incident served as a lesson to the FBI. They had the capability and willingness to hunt them down and kill them in cold blood. Yet, the Cynics seemed, in their eyes, to have wrapped themselves a vital blood-vessel of their power. They begrudgingly maintained the appearance of the law while devising a procedure to surgically removing the Cynics from American society. Sufficiently cruel punishment would them be devised. Spontaneity is part of the fun.

President O’Toole made only veiled reference to the “vulture of cynicism circling the hopeful travelers on the Road of Freedom.” No one on the cable stations made much of the curious capitalization in the official transcript of the speech. One late-night comedian made a joke about it, but fail to identify it as a road sign on a dark path.
The Cynics noticed. Queen Bitch said the “Road to Freedom” ran straight up their asses.
“Not before we take a giant shit on it,” said Snot Rocket.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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