This Mighty Scourge

by Adam Yoshida

  "Think what you will," said the General, "the United States will not lose this war. And, when we're done, there will be a reckoning."

  "Is it "we" now, Bill?" asked Rajiv.

  "As a matter of fact," said General Jackson, "it is. I have been awarded U.S. Citizenship by an act of the Congress."

  "Well, congratulations, but I don't think that's going to help your political credibility here," said the Chief of Staff.

  The General, his aide, and the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff sat in silence as the vehicle made its way to the downtown hotel where the military officers were being put up.

  "Well," said Jackson, "I guess we'll continue this conversation in the morning."

  Seattle, State of West Washington

  "Ladies and gentlemen," said the Mayor of Seattle, a former City Councillor who had managed to survive and prosper through fully three regime changes in the former State of Washington, "I give to you our Senator, and the next President of the United States: Mitchell Randall!"

  The former Governor of Washington, Randall had been a reluctant-but-firm adherent to the rebel cause from the earliest days of the war. When the Loyalist faction had overrun most of Washington State, leaving only a rump in the east centred around Spokane, he had arranged his appointment to the Senate and staunchly supported the measures advocated by the Rickover Administration, including the partition of Washington into the new states of West and East Washington. However, the victories of the rebel army in the West - leading to the confirmation of Terrance Rickover as the Acting President of the United States and the general recognition that the government he led in Colorado was the legitimate government of the United States - had scrambled the political scene once again. The question had become less whether or not it was right to fight to uphold the liberties of the people as contained within the Constitution, but whether it was right to continue a fight to keep states in the Union where a majority now wanted out. Terrance Rickover believed that the war would not be over until the whole of the United States were restored. Mitchell Randall believed that the objective for which he and others had rebelled and gone to war - securing the liberty of their own people - had already been achieved and that further bloodshed was, if anything, contrary to the principles for which they had gone to war in the first place.

  "Thank you, Mayor Thompson for that very warm introduction," said the Senator as he took the stage, "and thank you, Seattle, for your support and your very friendly welcome."

  The crowd cheered wildly for nearly a minute as the Senator held up his arms to ask for silence.

  "My friends," continued the Senator, "I stand before you today with the greatest of reluctance. It was never my ambition to seek the Presidency - it just wasn't in my plan. Not so long ago - though it feels like a lifetime now - I planned on simply completing my term as Governor and buying a nice new home in the suburbs where I, and my lovely wife Jennifer, could raise our children in peace. Fate, obviously, had other plans."

  "Now, I know that many of us had and have very different opinions about the events that have brought us to this place. Some of us were on one side in the fighting that divided our state. Some of us were on the other. But the fighting is over now. As all of the fighting ought to be."

  The crowd rose in a standing ovation.

  "I know Terrance Rickover. I have worked with him for many years. Terrance Rickover is a good man who has done great things for this nation..."

  Scattered boos arose from the crowd. Randall held up his hands.

  "No, no," he said, "let us give the Acting President his due. Terrance Rickover has done good, but he does us no good now."

  A furious round of applause burst forth.

  "All that the present Administration has to offer us is more loss of life and more bloodshed and all of that with no reward that would justify the cost. Indeed, the reward that they seek - to coerce the unwilling into rejoining the rest of the nation - would be a curse of its own. How many years of fighting would we be required to endure against insurgents and others, whose claims would not be without justice?"

  "Great passions brought us to blows. But those passions have cooled now. Let them die out altogether. As President, I would work every day to bring about a just and lasting peace, one based upon self-determination for all. I know that this will be the work of many years and that it will be tiring and frustrating and difficult. But I know that, together, we can make it happen without death. We can make it happen in peace."

  "Whatever went among us before: we are all in this together now. We can vote for an unjust war or we can vote for a just peace."

  Houston, Texas

  "Let me see them, Ira," said the Acting President as soon as the Chief of Staff stepped into his hotel room nervously clutching a tablet.

  "It's not good to get too caught up in raw data, Mr. President," said the Skelton weakly as he handed over the device to Rickover, who quickly began to read.

  "You're down," said the Chief of Staff, "but only by two points. We can overcome that."

  "We can," agreed Rickover, adjusting his glasses, "but the trend isn't good. I was up by fifteen points when we first started polling."

  "The people are tired of war, Mr. President," said Skelton, "that's what this is really saying."

  "Do you think that I like war, Ira?" asked Rickover.

  "No, Mr. President," replied the Chief of Staff.

  "The question now is whether or not we abandon Americans, free citizens of this country, and some of the most vital places in the history of the United States to the control of a foreign government. I would rather be assassinated than ever do that. I will not do it."

  "Yes, Mr. President," said Skelton.

  "But," added Rickover as he ran his hands over a large display of the present operations, "it now seems to be exceedingly likely that, all other things being equal, I will not be re-elected and that the Presidency will pass over to Mr. Randall, who will have secured the office on such terms as will make it impossible for him to fully re-unify the nation."

  "That's certainly a possibility, sir, but far from a certainty."

  "Unless we can win the war before the election. That would give us a boost. Or, in the worst-case scenario, it would present my successor with a fait accompli," said Rickover.

  "Well," said Skelton, "the movement of the Fifth Fleet and the delivery of the Third Army should begin within days. Provided that they make it to the coast relatively intact, that should give us the sort of forces necessary to take Washington and begin to advance up the Coast. If we hurry things in the West, perhaps the Army of the Colorado could be able to take the offensive and perhaps take Chicago before Election Day."

  "Perhaps," said the Acting President, "but that's pushing things. What we need - what we truly need here, Ira - is some movement somewhere else along the front. What we require is something that's going to change the game."

  The Acting President stopped for a moment and gazed at the map.

  "Is General Jackson still on his diplomatic mission to the Western Republic?" he asked.

  Skelton stopped for a moment and checked his e-mails on his phone before he answered.

  "Yes, Mr. President. He got there a few hours ago. Though, from the first report, it doesn't look all that promising. The leaders of the Western Republic seem inclined to continue to get rich off of the war."

  "Can you get a covert message to the General?" asked Rickover.

  "I can," said Skelton.

  "Tell him that I changed my mind," said the Acting President.

  Arizona State Capitol, Phoenix, Arizona

  Governor Robert Schmidt stepped into the chamber to universal applause from the members of the Arizona House of Representatives and Senate. Given that the Governor had personally picked up a rifle and fought together with the members of the Arizona State Guard against the Mexican invasion of the state, he certainly felt entitled to as much as that.

  "Speaker Williams, Senator Andrews, honored guests," began the Governor, "
I come before you tonight not to talk about the past. Enough has already been said - what more can be said - about the suffering that we have just endured. Parts of our state remain in ruins. Blood has been spilled on the sacred soil of Arizona. We can remember and we can mourn, but we must move forward together. And that is what we will do."

  The members of both chambers rose as one to applaud the Governor, who waved slightly with the arm that remained in a marginally medically-useful sling.

  "It is not enough for us to remember and memorialize days of horror and moments of tragedy. In order to truly more forward we must invest those days with meaning. We must ensure that what follows it not simply a return to normalcy, but instead a better future that comes about as the just compensation due those who sacrificed so much not simply to see the restoration of the old status quo."

  "Part of moving forward is not merely stopping what happened to our state, but in responding to it effectively. It is not enough for a few cruise missiles to be lobbed at Mexico and for us to then write off what happened as a bit of foolishness. I was there, as were many of you, as Arizonian men and women died under the fire of their guns. I saw it with my own eyes."

  "For too long we have ignored the gradual descent of Mexico, our neighbor, into a corrupt and broken narco-state. How can we ignore it any longer?"

  "Already we are seeing the Federal troops head east. They are off to fight other battles in other states. I will not, as the Governor of this single state, presume to dictate the military strategy of the United States as a whole. But I will ask: if the Federal Government cannot defend us, then who will?"

  "I know who it was in recent months. It was our own people and our own resources. I swear to you, as the Governor of your state and as a man who stood at the front and joined in what our boys suffered, that we will do it ourselves if we must."

  .

  When the Governor stepped out of the chamber after yet another round of applause, his Chief of Staff was waiting for him.

  "Governor," he said, "Mitchell Randall is on the phone."

  Portland, Oregon

  Mitchell Randall hit the button to disconnect the call on his phone and set it down on the table in front of him. From across the table Oscar Hogan, the manager of Randall's nascent campaign, looked eagerly over at him.

  "Well, he didn't say no," said Randall, "though he reiterated his admiration for the Acting President. Repeatedly."

  "As he should," said Hogan, "we all admire everything that the Acting President has achieved."

  "Yes, yes," said Randall dismissively, tapping the table a few tunes.

  "I think that he's gettable," said Randall.

  "You'd have to do some interesting stuff rhetorically," said Hogan, "I mean, the guy is pretty much on the Genghis Khan wing of the GOP and your campaign as an independent really only works if you have the tacit support of whatever's left of the Democratic Party in free America, or whatever we're calling it these days."

  "Even before the war, anti-interventionist sentiment was running pretty high across the entire country," said Randall, "I don't think that, with a few hundred thousand Americans dead, people are going to be hot for foreign wars. Also, wasn't it another Arizonian who wished he could simply saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out into the Atlantic?"

  "You can't say that," said Hogan.

  "No, I can't say it," replied Randall.

  Federation Museum of Exclusion, Lower Manhattan

  The Minister of Justice normally considered gatherings at Manhattan museums to be a little excessively bourgeois for her taste (in spite of the fact that, before the war, her personal net worth had been over $10 Million), but she was willing to make an exception in this particular case. In the aftermath of the Battle of Manhattan, when a group of United States Marines and local reactionary extremists has attempted to seize control of the city and assassinated its noble and progressive Mayor, there had been a vigorous debate over just who was responsible for the damage done to the city and how it should be repaired. Stepping outside of her official area of responsibility, the Minister of Justice had taken charge of an effort by the Federation Government to begin the rebuilding, on the condition that the rebuilding was fully "politically aware."

  The former September 11th National Memorial and Museum had been quite thoroughly trashed in the course of the fighting, with the U.S. Marines making their final stand against the French paratroopers who had been dispatched to retake the city around the waterfalls that now marked the former footprints of the Twin Towers. The Justice Minister had insisted that the rebuilding begin here and, therefore, the part of New York's elite that remained in the city had agreed to turn out for a gala to unveil the transformation of the area.

  "I could never have admitted under the old right-wing governments that ran this country," explained the Justice Minister to the black tie crowd, "what we now admit to the world in the re-branding of this museum. The attacks of September 11th, 2001 were a tragedy, whatever motivated them and whoever staged them, but they should never have been viewed or treated in isolation. Instead, they were a powerful testimony to the effects of exclusion and how the United States' long-standing record of oppression, both at home and abroad, could have powerful consequences for individuals who were, in their personal lives, at least blameless."

  "Where the old September 11th Museum was a monument to American jingoism and exceptionalism, the new monument and the new Federation Museum of Exclusion will document the sad history of oppression that marked the entire existence of the old United States and tell the narrative of how we, those who suffered the worst oppression under the old system, gained our freedom."

  The crowd applauded the Minister's worlds politely, if perhaps without much enthusiasm.

  "Of course, today I speak amidst a continuing struggle for the freedom of all of us from those who wish to restore the former era of oppression. It isn't enough - though my colleagues the High Commissioner and Minister Ransom are ably taking up the duty - to defend us from the external military aggression that we face. It is also necessary to recognize that we face enemies within from those who wish to reassert old power of privilege and refuse to recognized that unearned wealth and privileges gained at birth are inherently oppressive."

  "I have, as the provisional Minister of Justice, already taken strong action against those radical anti-woman, anti-minority, anti-poor, anti-Earth, anti-justice forces that still exist within our society and I vow to you that, in the name of the Museum that we are here to dedicate today, that I will not relent in this effort no matter the pressures that I might face to do so. I hope that you will be with me in this cause. Certainly, as the Minister of Justice, I would say that there can be no better sign among those who are still struggling to show that they have a proper place in the new order and that they do not require rehabilitation than open display of support for institutions such as this."

  The organizers of the gala were surprised when, despite the economically-troubled times, the receipts for the evening came in at three and a half times what they had expected.

  Vancouver, British Columbia, United Western Republic

  "You can bring a great tragedy to a much swifter end, Prime Minister," explained General Jackson as he sat in a comfortable lounge chair in the office of the leader of the United Western Republic.

  Prime Minister Christopher Kent was the leader of the governing Conservative Party. Prior to the Canadian Civil War, Kent had been a member of the Federal Parliament in Ottawa and the Minister of Industry under the previous government. A grey-haired man his fifties, he was the epitome of the old establishment. Kent and his Conservatives ruled together with the members of the Liberty Party, which had been founded by Jackson and his allies in the aftermath of the creation of the Republic.

  "Now, General," said the Prime Minister, "we've had this discussion before. There's simply no public appetite for such a move here. In fact, it is largely due to the rumours circulating that we're planning just such a move that the
Progressive Coalition has been winning by-elections. In fact, they're now the largest faction in the House of Commons, even if our Coalition has more seats combined. This is very dangerous talk."

  "Prime Minister," replied Jackson, "this war is going to be over sooner or later. And America is going to win. When that happens, there's going to be a reckoning. Which side do you want to be on?"

  "Look," said Kent, "I've always been a friend of the United States. So are most Westerners. But we have no desire for another war. We've just rebuilt a lot of our cities and many are still mourning the dead of the last war. We're getting enough flack for allowing your volunteer force to recruit within the West and for allowing you to take such a large part of our military and use it to support the American cause."

  "I'm sorry, General, it's just not happening," said the Prime Minister.

  "I'm sorry as well," said General Jackson, extending his hand.

  .

  After leaving the Prime Minister's office, General Jackson and Colonel Benson walked down the hallway directly to the office of Nate Anderson, the Leader of the Liberty Party and, in theory, the second man in the government of the United Western Republic.

  "Bill!" said Nate, who had been a colleague of the General's when he had been a member of the British Columbia Legislative Assembly and, before that, had gone to high school with him.

  "Nate, it's great to see you," said General Jackson as the Leader of the Liberty Party walked up to him and awkwardly hugged him.

  "We've been following your record down there super-closely," said Anderson as he walked the General over towards his desk.

  "That's good to hear," said Jackson, "great to hear, actually."

  "What can I do for you today?" asked Anderson.

  "Can we talk somewhere privately?" asked Jackson.

  "Sure, sure," said Anderson, "I know a place around the corner."

  A few minutes later the General and the Leader of the Liberty Party had quietly retired to a bar, where they sat quietly in a booth, nursing a whisky.