What I Did After the Revolution

I’m not proud of what I did after the revolution, but I reckon it had to be done. Once the Devolution Party held it’s convention and announced the dissolution of the federal government and after the “Mutiny of the Colonels” left the pro-federals with limited means to enforce their will, federal officials became an endangered species. POTUS and VPOTUS and a number of their henchmen sought asylum in Riyadh. Ironically, it was a vengeful Mossad that apprehended them and brought them to justice.

I don’t know how I ended up on the tribunal set up to try the neocons. I’m a nobody. I used to be a military lawyer, and I had been outspoken in my criticism of the regime. I reckon I was considered a sure guilty vote and could be counted on to understand that these were show trials after all. We were going to give the neocons a fair trial and then hang them.

We decided it was a no-brainer that we would set up the tribunal along the lines of the tribunals that the neocons had designed for their detainees. How could they object to the fairness of their own mechanism? And those aggressive interrogation techniques the neocons touted? Boy, that one White HOuse advisor turned into our lead witness after just one waterboarding session. VPOTUS never made it to trial, what with that bum ticker of his. POTUS was pathetic as he tried to lay all the blame on the dead Veep. “I was out of the loop,” he claimed. He tried to convince us that he had been surrounded by a cadre of yes men who had hidden all bad news from him and had misled him about what the regime was up to. His defense lawyers tried the insanity defense and alleged that POTUS was so addled by coke and booze that he couldn’t tell right from wrong.

After the trials, we would pretend to deliberate for a couple of days. We mostly played cards and noshed in the secret deliberation room. Then we’d announce that we had found the accused guilty on almost every count. Sometimes we’d find them not guilty on a few counts just to make it look as if we were really weighing evidence and considering the defenses. I liked to read the not guilty verdicts first just to get the defendants’ hopes up. I was a jerk. We all were.

Then we’d have a sentencing hearing to determine if the accused would be executed or imprisoned or some such thing. Everybody got death except the White House advisor who had cooperated with the prosecutors. He got life in a prison in Baghdad. Who knew he’d get a shiv in the liver so soon after checking in?

I usually oppose the death penalty, in large part because I don’t want states to have that kind of power. But we weren’t part of any state. We were just a kangaroo court, a kind of gussied up lynch mob with no legitimate authority, and we were going to disband after the purges. So I went along with the death sentences. These guys were ruthless murderers, after all. I felt that I had to attend all the hangings personally. The first couple of hangings were disturbing, but you get used to them after a while. You even find yourself able to engage in some gallows humor after a couple dozen executions. The hard part was the galling speechifying by the condemned. They were proud to give their lives for their country and yadda yadda yadda. I preferred the begging for mercy.

We never did disband. We kept on trying a widening pool of former federal officials, lobbyists, neocon think tankers, Fox News “journalists”, and what have you. It took years to round them all up. A lot of them tried to pass for decent people and lived among them for years before being recognized and apprehended. Still others fled to Paraguay and Myanmar. We didn’t sentence everybody to death any longer after the higher level folks had been purged.

I left the tribunal after the fifth year, and I don’t follow its activities much any longer. I just can’t get all that worked up over the crimes of some GS-3 file clerk at the Department of Commerce. I know that they have to be rehabilitated or removed from society to keep their parasitism from re-infecting us. Now I’m working on the tribunal for the former State of New York here in the Confederated Republics of Beekman and East Fishkill. Man, those former state legislators are a whiny bunch and hard to catch.