Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War
Before we pulled out, we took the opportunity to play some mind-games with the real enemy down in Washington. With a video cam rolling, we turned the .50 cals and 90 mms on the remaining, empty vehicles. The tape of exploding, burning military trucks, HUMMWVs and remaining Bradley, coupled with footage of the line of federal prisoners marching off with their hands behind their heads, went to all the networks. In 24 hours, the whole nation knew Maine had fought the federal government, and won.
Our challenge was to turn a tactical victory into a strategic one. Maine was with us; the Battle of Lake Sebasticook, as it was quickly known, made the Maine Idea real. The slogan appeared overnight on hand-lettered signs in yards, on bumper stickers, on banners hung from highway bridges. But we were nowhere near ready to defeat a full-scale federal invasion, and we knew one was coming.
Washington was still full of fight. President Cisneros, trying to position himself as a second Lincoln, vowed the Union would be preserved, at any cost. Never was the old rule of “first as tragedy, then as farce,” so applicable. He announced the 82nd Airborne was on its way to Bangor.
But we had an ancient and effective weapon with which to defend ourselves: hostages. As our militiamen returned to their homes all over Maine, many carried an unusual cargo in the trunk of their car: a trussed-up federal agent. Of course, the feds had specialized hostage-rescue units. But they didn't have enough of them to hit sites all over Maine simultaneously, even if they could find where the agents were hidden.
On the 30th of June, we made the feds an offer, through an open letter to Cisneros printed in the Bangor paper. The key part read:
We have no desire or intention to harm anyone. We could easily have killed many, perhaps all, of the federal agents who invaded our state. We killed no one, and all the captured agents are now safe. We look forward to returning them to their homes and families as soon as possible. We do not regard them as our enemies. However, our first responsibility is to our own homes and families, which you now threaten. Therefore, we regret we have to say that we cannot guarantee the safety of the federal agents now in our custody if additional federal forces enter Maine.
To underscore the point, we arranged for CNN to interview several militia units that were holding some of the prisoners. They allowed that if those paratroopers landed in Bangor, or the feds tried any rescue ops, the lot of their policeman would not be a happy one. One unit already had a noose hanging from a large oak tree. It was a bluff, but Washington couldn't know that.
We had a few agents at Ft. Bragg, so we knew within hours that the airlift had been put on hold. Cisneros was waffling.
Meanwhile, the 250 black parolees who were to move into Bangor had been stuck in a couple of motels near Worcester, Massachusetts, waiting for the federal troops to clear their way in. The Justice Department's lawyers had determined that, since they had been paroled, they could not be kept under guard. It seems a few of them got tired of waiting and decided to go have some fun. The date was July 4, 2021.
A summer day in New England is a true joy. That Fourth of July was especially nice. The temperature got up to 77 degrees, with low humidity, a gentle breeze out of the northwest and a few white, puffy, cotton-ball clouds, the kind that children like to see animal shapes in. Sister Mary Frances of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament had brought her Bible school pupils, grades two through five, to a small park on the bank of the West River. They had sandwiches and cookies, toys, a big American flag and sparklers to celebrate the day. Sister Mary Frances had planned to read them the story of the Ride of Paul Revere.
Thirteen of the parolees discovered them there just after lunch. By the time the police found them later in the day, the Sister and most of the children were lying where they had knelt to say the Rosary, praying for the protection that did not come in this life. Sister Mary Frances had been raped repeatedly before being strangled with the chain on her Crucifix. Perhaps she had bought the three surviving children the time they needed to crawl off into the woods and hide. A posse of state troopers and frantic parents found them there just after dusk.
The media might well have passed over the event in silence, at least outside Worcester; it didn't fit their agenda. But Ms. LaDrek of HUD happened to be in Worcester that very weekend. She had come to open a new high-rise public housing development, modeled on St. Louis famed Pruett-Igoe. At her news conference, she said that the slaughter of Sister Mary Frances and her young charges “was nothing compared to what people of color had suffered in America since the white invaders first arrived. Maybe it would help the white people of Massachusetts have a better understanding of Black Rage. If so, it might be a positive experience for Worcester.”
The news conference had been carried live on most of the Worcester TV and radio stations. It concluded with Ms. LaDrek leading the new residents of the housing project into the commons room for a nice lunch. By 12:30, the courtyard in front of the project was filling with Worcester's citizenry, and they weren't in a celebratory mood. They were construction workers, housewives, good Catholics most of them, some coming straight from the noon mass at Blessed Sacrament. Their kids could have been the ones raped and butchered. In a few cases, they were.
The priest from Blessed Sacrament himself, with some of the nuns, led the uninvited guests into the luncheon, chanting the Dies Irae. The distinguished Secretary of HUD tried to bolt out the back door, but one of the nuns, a sturdy Irish girl, tackled her. The swift, new elevator whisked LaDrek and a party of escorts to the top floor, where a window was knocked out. The Honorable Secretary of HUD followed the shards of glass down, to a hard and fatal landing in the front parking lot.
It's almost uncanny; our Thirty Years War also started with a defenestration. This time, no angels (or manure piles, if you're a Protestant) broke the fall.
A story like this couldn't be hushed up. The nation was appalled, less by the assassination than what had preceded it.
In Maine, we moved swiftly to take advantage of the public's mood. The militias set up recruiting stations in every shopping center and on each town common. The slogan on a banner over each station read, “The Maine Idea–Defend Our Families.” Any male with a weapon could join. The lines ran a block or more long. Within 48 hours we had more than 100,000 men pledged to fight for our state.
In Washington, Cisneros knew he was beaten. The order went to the 82nd Airborne to stand down. Resorting to one of the city's oldest tricks, Cisneros asked Congress to establish a Blue Ribbon Panel to investigate the whole affair. Announcing that “until the panel is appointed and has conducted its investigation, it would be inappropriate for me to comment further,” he crawled into the deepest hole he could find. The panel, everyone knew, would take years to complete its work, then issue a report that said nothing. That's what “Blue Ribbon Panels“ existed to do.
So we'd won. Some might say it wasn't a good, clean victory on the field of battle. It wasn't, but that isn't how war works. War is politics, propaganda, fighting, maneuvering, luck, all boiled up in one big cauldron. This time, our side had bubbled up to the top.
At least we showed that victory doesn't always belong to the bigger battalions.
Chapter Fourteen
When people read Sun Tzu's saying, “He who knows himself and knows his enemy will win 100 battles,” they figure the hard part is knowing the enemy. They're wrong. The hard part is knowing yourself.
After we had rubbed Cisneros's nose in it, some of our guys were feeling pretty cocky. It seemed to them that Maine could go its own way then and there.
I saw it differently. The victory at Lake Sebasticook was genuinely ours. We won it by combining the unexpected, speed, and initiative at the most junior level, which is to say by fighting smart.
But the rest of it was a pure gift from God. As King Philip of Spain of Armada fame found out, God doesn't like it when you presume He's on your side. The next time, the other guy might get the breaks. When the other guy was the whole federal juggernaut, we'd get flattened.
It all came back to something I'd said to my fellow Christian Marines many times: we had to wait for Washington to fall of its own weight. We could drop an occasional banana peel in its path, by setting up a situation where it was likely to embarrass itself. But it was far too strong for us to take on, head on.
Vermont gave us a lesson that way. Our success in Maine had emboldened friends and fellow “racists, sexists, and homophobes” elsewhere in the country. But it had also enraged the enemies of Western culture, the cultural Marxists, who were looking for opportunities to counterattack.
In Vermont—another state with conservative people but a liberal government (God, we were stupid back then)—the governor went on the offensive. He got a law through the legislature that required every Vermont jury to “look like America,” which meant it had to be half women, 10 percent black, 15 percent Hispanic, 10 percent gay (the real number would have been maybe 1 percent at most, but these were political numbers), and so on.
Some old-fashioned Vermonters saw an opportunity. Calling themselves the Green Mountain Boys, they declared a “White Strike.” No white male would agree to serve on a jury, which would mean the jury could not look like America. Under the new law, that would appear to mean no jury.
The whole thing was a flop. A good number of white males joined up, but a good number wasn't enough. The Green Mountain Boys hadn't thought the situation through. To succeed, they needed near 100 percent support from white men, which they were never going to get. There were still some white male lefties, and beyond them lots more white males who didn't want to listen to the third act of Medea every night over the dinner table from their feminist wives. The courts had to go through more white men than they otherwise would to make up a jury, but eventually they always found enough.
Our cultural enemies won a victory. Their triumph in Vermont allowed them to say their defeat in Maine was just a strange accident; the country was really still on their side.
One Friday evening in late November, 2021, the phone rang. I always hated the damn thing; Ambrose Bierce was right when he defined it, in his Devil's Dictionary, as “an instrument almost as useless as the telescope, but unfortunately equipped with an annoying bell.” I had to set down my cigar and my book, dump the cat off my lap and walk into the cold back hall to answer it.
Finding one of the leaders of the Green Mountain Boys on the line didn't improve my mood. “We've got a problem,” he began.
“You sure do,” I said. “You screwed the pooch. Didn't help us any in the process.”
“Ayuh. Sorry about that,” he replied. “Look, we heah you folks have some sort'a organization that helps think these things through. Bunch of fo'mah Marines, so we'ah told. Any chance we could get theah help?”
“Waal, I don't rightly know,” I said, talking Emmett myself. “Sounds to me like you want us to pull you'ah chestnuts out'a the fiah.”
“Ayuh, I guess that's what we want, all right,” he replied.
I had to think about it a bit. I was tempted to let them sleep in the bed they'd made. On the other hand, the Christian Marines did intend to reach out to the rest of New England, eventually. This was an opportunity to start. We needed to reverse the defeat in Vermont.
“Waal, I guess we can talk about it, anyway,” I finally said. “Get your folks togeth'ah at the Norrich Inn Friday night. I'll be the'ah.”
By the time we met, I'd done a bit of legal work, with the help of Uncle Earl. It seems Vermont wasn't exactly living up to its own law on this jury business. It couldn't. The problem wasn't the White Strike. Vermont simply didn't have enough blacks and Hispanics to make up the required percentages on the juries. So they were just saying they tried and letting it go at that.
The Green Mountain Boys had about a dozen men at the Norwich Inn that Friday evening, the last Friday in November. After we got to know each other a bit over some supper and cider, I laid out a plan. “Any of you know a lawyer who thinks like we do but doesn't let on?” I asked.
“Sounds like you're talking about my neighbor,” one of the Boys replied. “Over pie and coffee in the kitchen, he's as pissed off as the rest of us. He talks funny, of course, since he's a lawyer. ‘I have no desire to live in an America that has been Hispanized, feminized, and sodomized,’ is the way he puts it. But he always looks over both shoulders to see who's listening before he says it, because he figures he'd lose half his business if his clients knew where he stood.”
“It sounds as if he's the right man for a pseudo-op.”
“What's that?” another of the Boys asked.
“It's where you dress your troops up in the enemy's uniforms and have them do something embarrassing to the enemy,” I answered.
“What we need from your lawyer friend is this,” I continued. “Representing the oppressed peoples of the world, he files a suit demanding that the State of Vermont stick to its own law. Trying to get the right percentages of gays, blacks, whatever on a jury doesn't cut it. Each and every Vermont jury must have all the numbers right, or it can't be empaneled. He should file the suit in such a way that it goes straight to the Vermont Supreme Court.”
“How the hell does that help us?” asked the first fellow.
“According to my Uncle Earl, who knows his judges hereabouts, the Vermont Supreme Court is as politically correct as they come. He's willing to bet real nutmegs to wooden ones that the court will rule in favor of such a suit. If it does, the Governor either has to repeal his law or go without any juries. In practical terms, that means repeal, which also means we win.”
Well, they bought it, and the lawyer filed suit. The Vermont Supreme Court made Uncle Earl look good. It said the law is as the law reads, and the juries have to get all the right numbers of blacks and Hispanics and gays, or they aren't lawful.
But what happened next came as a surprise.
The governor, a fellow named Fullarbottom, felt the hollow eyes of all those oppressed minorities fixed upon him. He had been their great hope, a sensitive, caring, feeling white male. Now he had to dump them, and they'd howl like a sackful of cats.
So he went to the legislature with an ingenious proposal. Instead of repealing the requirement that Vermont juries “look like America,” Vermont would turn to the rest of America to achieve the balance it sought. Any American citizen could sit on a Vermont jury if his or her presence were required to make a quota. Fullarbottom concluded his message to the legislature with the words, “We are proud to welcome our oppressed black, Hispanic, and gay sisters and brothers as ‘Vermonters for a day’ to aid us in our battle to reverse two hundred years of white male oppression.”
It is in the nature of war that the enemy sometimes makes a good move. This was one. Unfortunately for Fullarbottom, like most good moves, this one had to work fast to work at all. And it couldn't. The Vermont state constitution required that a juror be a legal resident of the state. That meant the governor needed a state constitutional amendment, which in turn required a two-thirds vote in the legislature. And he didn't have the votes, not right off, anyway.
With the rest of the Establishment cheering him on, Fullarbottom launched a campaign to get the votes he needed. The papers, most of them, backed him with editorials; various black, Hispanic, and gay entertainers, sports figures, and other celebrities came to Vermont to support him; President Cisneros himself even paid a visit. In the past, this sort of thing had worked.
But it took time, and that gave our side a chance to counterattack. By 2021, Vermonters who believed in traditional American values had a good grass-roots network. They quickly organized their own campaign, one aimed both at state legislators and at the average Vermonter. They struck some deep chords, especially when they blanketed the state with posters and bumper stickers asking, “Where Will It Stop?” If out-of-staters could serve on Vermont juries, what else would they be allowed to do? Vote in town meetings? Help themselves to the Vermont treasury? Sent their kids to Vermont schools, at Vermont taxpayers’ expense?
By January, 2022,
it was clear Vermonters were becoming uneasy with Fullarbottom's proposal. The legislature would meet in March. Its members were feeling the public pulse, and getting nervous.
But something was still needed to push them our way, once and for all. We needed an action average Vermonters could do that would scare politicians. The thing that scared politicians most was the danger of becoming un-politicians, of losing their office. The problem was, how could we make them feel that fear when an election wouldn't come until the fall?
Late in January I got an idea, so I drove over to Montpelier to see the head of the grassroots network in Vermont, Sam Shephard. On anything important, I always tried to meet people face-to-face; no fax or phone call or email was as effective in getting things done.
In typical North Country style, we met in his kitchen. “It seems to me,” I said, “that we need to appeal to your politicians’ patriotism.” That was my usual expression for grabbing somebody by the balls. “We need to let them see what happens to whoever opposes us, and we need to make Fullarbottom himself the example.”
“Good idea,” Sam replied. “How do we do it?”
“I've done a bit of research about your state. You don't have a recall provision in your law, but over the years, a good many folks have said you ought to. My proposal is this: launch a petition drive to recall Fullarbottom. Explain that if you get a majority, not only will it tell the governor to back off his plan to import out-of-state ringers and put them on your juries, it will also tell the members of the legislature you want a recall law. And it will tell the members of the legislature that their own necks are in danger if they vote the wrong way on the jury issue.”
“Hmm, that's not bad,” Sam replied. “Let me run it by my people. Still, it would have a lot more punch if we could actually toss Fullarbottom out.”