The Bracken Anthology

by Matthew Bracken

  The backlash to our efforts saw many of our progressive friends in the Congress retire immediately, and their replacements, mostly appointed by governors, were uniformly reactionaries. The opposition party majority leader that Dennis had formerly dangled on a string was one of the many who swiftly departed the scene. More than half of the Supreme Court disappeared for reasons of age or health. Two had died, some said of “Breitbart’s Syndrome.” Our old protections were swept away.

  And now America has slid back into worshipping the dusty old parchment. In their reading of the Holy Constitution, the Senate and Supreme Court make the rules and conduct the trials, and swift trials they were. Guilty of high treason, conspiracy to commit genocide, and a dozen other charges. Guilty on all counts. What else could we expect? We took the bold action, grabbed for the brass ring of history, and we missed it. Where no mercy is given, none should be expected.

  I’ve seen Dennis but have not been able to speak to him in private. Once we were left alone in a small conference room, but both of us were convinced the room was bugged and under video observation, so we just talked about the food and our involuntary accommodations and such.

  While being escorted in the hallway I have heard Larry talking in his cell to somebody, a priest or a lawyer perhaps. He always seems to speak in a snivel. But he’s not the worst of them. Many of my former colleagues have clearly been eager to spill their pitiful guts and minimize their participation in the plan, hoping that Dennis will take the brunt of the lynch mob’s fury. But I knew that was a foolish hope: there was fury enough for all of us. So I kept my silence, until now, when it can no longer affect my own outcome.

  Now I write for posterity alone.

  I rise from the table and stretch. To see out through the high window in my room, I must climb up on the desk. If anybody is watching me on hidden cameras, they don’t seem to care that I am sneaking looks out through the narrow window. I am on the second floor of whatever building I am in, so I must look down a bit to get a view of the source of the hammering and sawing in the paved courtyard where they used to take me for exercise.

  The gallows structure seems to be complete. There are four square holes under a single beam. Workers are screwing down some hardware for traps not yet installed. The grim work of execution will be done in two shifts, on consecutive mornings. I shall outlive Dennis by twenty-four hours. At times like this, I almost wish I believed in an afterlife, like those fools deluded by the opiate of religion. The only afterlife I shall achieve is what I am writing on the pages of this spiral notebook, and they will be cold comfort in the ground. To come so far, to get so close, and then to be consigned to oblivion—it just seems so damned unfair, after three generations of dedicated struggle.

  (To be tried, convicted, hanged and buried as a traitor concerns me not at all, considering the illegitimate, even farcical nature of the kangaroo court that condemned us.)

  I was scarcely involved in the plan, and then only passively. I gave no orders; I conducted no illegal arrests or executions. In truth, I did little or nothing to influence the President one way or the other before the fact. But I knew of the plan, and for that, I will be hanged in two days time as one of the secondary conspirators. There will be no clemency coming from the “Acting President,” or the new “Provisional Supreme Court.”

  A few days ago Dennis smiled at me when we passed in a corridor in our matching gray jumpsuits. He was wearing leg and waist shackles, in addition to handcuffs like mine. He must have been giving them hell to merit the chains, and I felt a little ashamed of my meekness in captivity. Despite all that has happened, I am proud of him for that smile and his thrown-back shoulders, a warrior for the cause to the very last. He was, in the end, the single man who was bold enough to initiate decisive action. The failure was not his.

  No, it was the President, the man in whom we invested our very lives, the ultimate standard-bearer of the global forces of progress; it was he alone who let us down at the crucial moment. He vetoed the last plan to arrest the remaining right-wing media voices and shut down their vile hate networks. He failed us when we needed him the most.

  Air Force One landed in South America while I was being arrested. As the world has seen, the blue and white 747 now sits empty on a tarmac at a remote Argentinean air base near the Andes, disabled and unflyable. The President has gone with the wind, and he is still a relatively young man, nearly a decade younger than me.

  I have no doubt that he will eventually turn up somewhere in the developing world, someplace tropical and near the ocean, a land where the call of the muezzin is heard at sunset. A place where he will be admired for striking many hard blows at the Great Satan.

  Coming home, the almost-conquering hero, while we face the hangman. It’s just so unfair that the fascist reactionaries will inherit America, and undo the work of generations to advance the human condition.

  Other than the final outcome, I would not change a single thing that we have done.

  Hasta la victoria siempre!

  Up the revolution, forever!

  Jacinda Hamden

  Former Presidential advisor

  (Author’s Note: This story and “When The Music Stops—How Our Cities May Explode In Violence” were both written in response to the article published on July 25, 2012 in the semi-official Small Wars Journal titled “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A Vision of the Future.” My twin tales represent starkly different “visions of the future” that would-be tyrants, their hopeful henchmen and other self-deluded nimrods may want to consider, before ordering the U.S. military or federal agencies to suppress Americans.)

  #13

  October 2012

  I will not submit. I will never surrender.

  I will never surrender Da Vinci, Newton and Einstein,

  for Allahu Akbar, and flying passenger planes into office buildings.

  I will never surrender Michelangelo, Vermeer and Rembrandt,

  for Allahu Akbar, and forced female genital mutilation.

  I will never surrender Descartes, Locke and Jefferson,

  for Allahu Akbar, and beheading apostates of conscience.

  I will never surrender Bach, Mozart and Beethoven,

  for Allahu Akbar, and child rape called “arranged marriage.”

  I will never surrender Shakespeare, Byron, and Shelley,

  for Allahu Akbar, and stoning rape victims to death for “adultery.”

  I will never surrender Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway,

  for Allahu Akbar, and poisoning schoolgirls for daring to learn.

  I will never surrender the sacred freedom of speech,

  for Allahu Akbar, and laws that forbid telling the truth about an evil false prophet.

  Voltaire said, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” I will not submit to being ruled over by the followers of a Seventh Century desert pirate, rapist and mass-murderer.

  Randall Wallace wrote, “They may take our lives, but they can never take our freedom.”

  Would that our leaders’ hearts were so brave, or as dedicated to human liberty.

  But even without them, I will not submit, and I will never surrender to a barbaric death cult masquerading as a religion.

  #14

  October 2012

  Trapping Feral Pigs,

  And Other Parables Of Modern Life

  Professional trappers don't catch fast-breeding and destructive feral pigs using hunting dogs and guns, or in little traps one or two at a time. The wily pigs quickly learn to evade humans after such fleeting contacts. So how do the pros trap entire feral pig herds, eliminating them all, from granddads to piglets, in one go? They feed them, most generously. They kill them with kindness.

  First, in a clearing in the woods, the trappers build an enclosure about twenty feet on a side and four feet high, made of stout wire mesh. There is an opening on each of the four sides of the pen. The pen is loaded with corn and other pig favorites. At first, the su
spicious hog honchos will send in a few of the little ones as scouts. The scouts come and go at will, eating to their piggy satisfaction, until eventually suspicions die and they are joined by every other member of the herd right up the chain of command. The pigs soon come to believe that if nothing bad has happened to them after entering the strange wire enclosure full of corn, then nothing bad will ever happen. Their "normalcy bias" kicks in very quickly.

  Soon, the pigs can't imagine any other life. Rooting for tubers? An unpleasant task of the forgotten past. Nightly the herd eagerly trots to the free corn in the pen, and they fail to notice when one of the openings has been closed off with another panel of wire fencing during the day. Pigs are said to be as smart as dogs, but neither can count to four. Nor are the closings of the second or third openings much noticed. Finally, all that remains for the trapper to do is to install a powerful spring-driven trap door above the last opening. The entire tribe of formerly wary feral hogs once again enters the pen, and with a metallic clang their miraculous corn nirvana turns into a death trap.

  The moral of the story: If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Don't go inside the "free corn" pen, not even when all the doors are open. Free food is as dangerous as the sirens' song to ancient mariners. It is all too easy to get used to being fed, and then to miss the exits closing one at a time.

  2. The Turkeys and Farmer Brown

  Pigs are Einsteins compared to turkeys. Turkeys are so stupid that care must be taken to prevent them from killing themselves by accident. For example, if incorrectly stimulated, they might stampede into a corner of a feeding lot and trample many of their brethren to death in their urgency to follow the herd.

  If turkeys think at all, they think of Farmer Brown as "the food man" or "the food god." So you can imagine their simple and unreserved joy at seeing the food man arriving to dispense the daily manna. For 364 straight days they believe they are living in turkey heaven, and they worship the food man, until on day 365 he unexpectedly takes an ax to their necks. (Hat tip to Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his seminal book, "The Black Swan" If you have not yet read it, you are way behind the learning curve. It's waiting for you at your local library.)

  The moral of the story: If somebody is feeding you every day and asking for nothing in return, give an occasional thought to his motives and his possible end plans. Not everybody that feeds you loves you. The normalcy bias can kill you.

  3. The Buffalo Jump

  Native American Indians hunted on foot before the arrival of Spanish horses in North America. Bows and arrows and spears were not showstoppers against stampeding herds of bison, each weighing up to a ton. The Indians understood bison much better than the bison understood the Indians, however, and so the bison repeatedly failed to discern that all the pesky humans waving flags and setting grass fires were funneling them into a narrow draw and then to a yawning cliff, with squaws and children waiting below to commence the butchery.

  The moral of the story: If you are being stampeded and funneled, it might be toward disaster, not away from it. Take any exit and go another direction. Read about the then-Greek city of Smyrna in 1922 to see a human Buffalo Jump in action.

  4. The Lemmings

  The lemmings we are interested in are the small furry rodents that live on islands around Norway. For most of history, their mass charges into the frigid waters were seen as some kind of group suicide. Today, they’re understood to be the result of the little rodent's rapid gestation period kicking into high gear during rare periods of abundance of seed grasses sprouting madly during particularly mild arctic summers. In a matter of months the lemming population explodes, but eventually every last seed is eaten, and not another seed will appear until after the passage of the long arctic winter. The starving rodents packing the small islands can either die in place or undertake a desperate swim to greener pastures on other islands beckoning in the distance.

  The moral of the story: There doesn't need to be a pig trapper or a turkey farmer in the equation to cause a mass die-off event; nature can do it all on her own. And nature doesn't care about your schedule, or your personal problems.

  5. The Land Crab Massacre

  One day in Puerto Rico a platoon of Navy SEALs had to drive in a few trucks and vans to an isolated rifle range way out in some swampy corner of the Roosevelt Roads Naval Base, now sadly closed. A few miles of gravel road paralleled the Caribbean shore, with mangrove trees close on both sides of the narrow track. You had to access this rifle range at certain times during the daily tidal cycle, or the road might be under water. The frogmen spent the day shooting guns and blowing things up, then at sunset packed up the trucks for the quick run back to their beloved NavSpecWar Det Caribbean.

  Truck headlights illuminated a moving sheet of land crabs, migrating from the ocean toward the land for the night. Land crabs have a body about the size of a fist, and one claw as big as a Maine lobster's. They were so tightly packed that you could not toss a hat into their midst without hitting two or three: a near solid mass of them covering a mile of gravel road and the mangrove swamps on both sides. All the SEALs could do was drive over them in their government trucks, pulverizing thousands of them, maybe millions, leaving two wide swaths of crushed crab, crackling and squishing beneath our tires for a mile.

  On the return trip to the range the next day, not a sign remained of the land crab holocaust. The smashed crustaceans had been immediately devoured by their erstwhile kin, who were probably happy that the hard work of shell-cracking had already been done by Goodyear tires. A mile-long crab massacre was followed by a cannibal feast that left no trace, overnight.

  The moral of the story: Don't be caught in the middle of a mass migration where you have no room to maneuver independently. Any outside force, or your neighbors, can smite you at will. Like Desert Storm's "Highway of Death," refugee columns attract warbird attention the way that honey attracts flies. History is full of refugee columns being strafed, on purpose or through mis-identification. Or like the bison, refugee columns can be herded into traps, and the individual refugee can do nothing to prevent it. This is a paradoxical case where the normally presumed “safety in numbers” is a deadly betrayer instead of a savior. Given a choice, going it alone beats The Buffalo Jump every time, but it’s very hard to bolt from the herd.

  6. The Rat Flood

  This occurs in northeastern India and parts of Burma. Only in the last century was this bizarre cycle of human famine following unexplained super plagues of rats finally understood. It turns out that forests of a certain bamboo species go into a wild explosion of fruiting, producing seed nuts on a 48-year cycle, a trick of nature that had been missed until the middle of the 20th century. Intrigued by the half-century cycle of human famines reported in 1862, 1911, and 1959, modern scientists finally noticed the link between the famines and the bamboo tree cycle. By 2006, the next time the bamboo began to fruit, they were on hand to observe the complete phenomenon.

  The superabundance of nuts every 48 years leads to an explosion in the population of Asian black rats, which live in the bamboo forests. Because of their rapid breeding cycle, the number of rats per acre shoots up to astronomical levels, eventually the entire mega-crop of nuts is consumed, and a lemming-like mass starvation follows.

  Millions of starving rats break out from the forests in what the local people call the Rat Flood. The onrushing solid tide of scurrying rats destroys entire crops in the ground and attack unprotected granaries, leading to an immediate human famine. Millions of dying, dead and decaying rats add to the misery by polluting streams and causing other intensely nasty sanitary problems. A once-every-48-years bamboo nut super-fruiting leads to millions of rats and then to human famine.

  The moral of the story: If subtle connections are missed, a radical new situation may at first wrongly be considered a Black Swan Event. But sometimes the Black Swans can be seen in advance, if seemingly unconnected links and mechanisms are properly understood in advance. And if you’re not sure what a Black Swan
Event is, you definitely need to read the book.

  7. Hippos and Crocodiles

  Certain stretches of African rivers dry up from time to time, stranding all the water-dependent creatures in a new desert-scape dotted with evaporating ox-bow lakes. During the normal times of plentiful water, hippos and crocs are the masters of the riverine environment. Lions and elephants interface with them at the edges, but pose no challenge to the undisputed lords of the river.

  That is, until the water level drops during a severe drought cycle, and the last stagnant ponds dry to cracked mud. Then the crocs and hippos, already starving and dehydrated, must bolt overland to discover another pond or river extension. Few of them moving cross-country in the desert heat live to see another waterhole. Their overland fatality rate is lemming-like, as lions, hyenas and vultures swarm in when they finally drop to the earth.

  The moral of the story: Don't be a hippo if your stretch of river might dry up. Be adaptable to many environments, not just the master of one that might prove to be impermanent. Better yet, be a bird, able to fly away to a safe location as conditions on the ground change for the worse. Have an agile mobility plan—or two or three.