The Last Crusade

I think it started with the first Bush election. George W. that is. We should have known then, what with the suspicious election results. But we didn’t. And he was re-elected of course, but that seemed on the up and up at the time. Then there was the election of his brother Jeb to the presidency, twice. By that time they owned all three branches of the government completely. All they had to do was change the rules little by little to keep themselves in power. Nobody votes anyway. When the choice is between vanilla and French vanilla, most people just say whatever. This got us George W. back for a third term. They weren’t using the term empire, but that’s the term they use over here, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The war in the Mid-East just went on and on. After the so called “Second Tet Offensive” when the other side took back Baghdad it began to change in nature. The press releases went something like “We’ve tried since World War II to convince the world that we’re the good guys and it hasn’t worked. Maybe it’s time to be the guys they think we are anyway for a while so they can see the difference. They think we’re evil when we aren’t even trying to be, let’s show ‘em what it’s like when we try and scare the living shit out them.” That’s when it really got ugly. They started using Bible quotes to justify the war: “Let us do evil, that good may come”; “For where no law is, there is no transgression”. The one they trained us with was “the wages of sin is death”.

When Pakistan and the Saudis openly joined the axis and China and Korea backed them up, the U.S. annexed Mexico. At first they just drafted all the illegals, but soon that wasn’t enough. They needed the manpower and Mexico had plenty of people. And they were Christians.

It wasn’t very hard to do. Quite a lot of them were all for it. Canada was outraged of course and Europe, but that soon turned to fear and finally they all became our allies. They had to, they couldn’t very well join the Jihad and it was us against them.

They didn’t call it a crusade until the Muslims took Jerusalem. That gave the Christian right, and the radical Jews a nominal common ground. The heretics were desecrating the Wailing Wall and Christendom’s most holy places with equal vehemence. Not that they needed the left’s approval anyway. The center of government was in Crawford by then, but they still gave lip service to democracy. Just because there had only been one President that wasn’t named Bush in the last 32 years was no reason to doubt democracy. There were a few people who tried to raise a stink of course, but they didn’t get much backing. The government legalized a lot of drugs just to keep the people out of their hair. Pot, Quaaludes, Valium, anything that’s going to make people quiescent. And that worked pretty well.

But religion was a different story. The good ol’ USA was officially made a Christian nation. They claimed it had been all along anyway. It was made an official state religion in 2030. Anyone that wasn’t willing to put his hand on that bible and pray to Jesus was asked to leave the country, or wish they had. Inquisition was another word never used, but then neither was heresy or a lot of the other old words. But a special branch of the judiciary was set up and punishments were doled out freely and quickly. The Jews were given a special category as the progenitors of Christianity and therefore an allowed, if misguided branch of the state religion, as long as they agreed that they were a sect, and it’s not like they had much choice. This also gave them an excuse to keep Israel as our base of operations in the Mid-East and they needed that toehold even in its reduced state.

It wasn’t just the former democracy becoming an empire that smacked of Rome. The model for the war was definitely Roman. It quickly got very brutal. Heads on pikes were everywhere. They didn’t actually crucify anyone, that could be seen as sacrilegious. When the other side kidnapped someone, or blew up a bus, hundreds of Muslims died. It didn’t matter who, those were the stated consequences and they lived up to them. When we went into an area, we weren’t just after the territory, we were after the people. What we couldn’t do with logic or example we were going to do with fear. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling”; another bible quote.

We stopped using camouflage uniforms after the Bush family helped Schwarzenegger keep control of California. It’s not like the camo was hiding us from anybody anyway. If we were going to start acting like Red Coats, we might as well look the part. But of course we did it in a very “American” way. Even Bush started wearing garish costumes. Then he replaced “Hail to the Chief” with “Green Onions” as his theme song.

The merger of Hollywood and the military was truly frightening. That was the idea. It was meant to be. We made war like a scary movie. It was fought with special effects with complete control of lighting and sound. It was kind of like that scene in ‘Apocalypse Now’ where the helicopters played Wagner to scare the Vietnamese, only with everything modern technology could bring to it. Giant projections of Christ wielding a flaming sword would appear in the sky to the pounding of Beethoven or heavy metal music depending on the general in charge of the operation. All choreographed to the actual missiles and bombs going off around them. Thousands of foot soldiers in body armor made to look like Captain America’s uniform would come swarming at them wielding flame throwers and tracer bullets supported by armored vehicles each with a laser light show that looked like a Superbowl half time.

It was more important to those in charge that the Muslims (they wouldn’t let us call them the enemy), should be afraid of us, than it was that we should kill people or capture land. The objectives were mostly psychological. Don’t ever go to war with America. They should learn to fear the Lord, our Lord. Our God is bigger than your God. Our God has a bigger dick than yours. This is the lesson we had learned from the medieval Christian crusades. They hadn’t converted the heathen, they just took the land. Eventually the heathen took it back. But the Romans, they offered you Roman citizenship if you played the game, and you could reap the benefits. But you had to take their Gods, their ways.

I was in the Batman battalion. An honor, but that cape was a pain in the ass. Our old man liked to use the Danny Elfman music from the Michael Keaton ‘Batman’ movies. Our sponsor was Coke, another honor. Every battalion had a sponsor, the bigger the product, the more pride in the unit. Every military vehicle was painted up like a NASCAR entry. The red and white of the Coke made a striking contrast to the blues and blacks of the Batman outfits.

Those armored tank suits were air conditioned but it was hot even with one on. Now that I don’t wear the suit anymore it’s even hotter. I have come to know what a miserable place this is. I was once on patrol and it was our job to go into this building and throw magician’s flash pellets around and a smoke canister (red, for Coke) and burst out of the smoke to the sound of the finale to Jesus Christ Superstar and shout at them in their own language through this device that made us all sound like Darth Vader to lay down their weapons and to shoot them if they didn’t. The most dangerous part was for the guys that had to get in first and throw a spot light on the smoke as we burst through it, so it would make a good effect.

So we burst through the smoke, and they threw down their weapons and got down on the floor like we had told them to, but one guy raised his head up and said “Batman is a children’s comic book” before the guy next to me blew his head off. I stood there for a moment wondering why I hadn’t blown the guy’s head off myself. It was standard procedure. After all, what were these guys to the United States of Fucking America? They eat goats for god sakes.

I do miss hamburgers among other things. This is a dry, hot, piss poor excuse for a holy land. The entire ecology here is based on animals that can live on weeds. There is no grass, and no grass equals no cows to speak of, and that equals no meat to speak of. Everything in the food chain is something that can get by on something kind of weedy, so the people at the top of the food chain are kind of weedy too. A weedy guy like that telling me that I was a comic book. Sure it was a comic book, an American comic book. And one American comic book is worth way more than every copy of the Koran in existence. I was a Batman, the Batmen don’t give mercy, and they don’t listen to weeds. But I hesitated that day, and I’ve hesitated a lot more since. I’ve thought about a lot of things since then. But I’m not really a Batman anymore, not really. And I don’t suppose it matters anymore anyway.

We had the privilege of liberating Jerusalem itself. Which is why I’m still alive I suppose. It’s kind of funny. This god forsaken hole is sacred to every one of the dumb sons-a-bitches so this is the one place nobody is gonna drop a really big bomb. You wouldn’t want to muss up a place as nice as this.

I’m just conjecturing, that they all must have started lobbing mushroom clouds at one another. We don’t really know what happened. We had just about secured the town when the communications went off. All of it. We can’t use a phone, GPS, can’t raise a satellite, ham radio, we can’t raise dick. Patrols that go out don’t come back. We sent helicopters out, they didn’t come back. Our orders were to take the town, and wait for more orders, but more orders never came. We kept military discipline for quite a while. But eventually the weeds went back to eating their goats and the goat to eating their weeds and the weeds eating the dirt and that’s the way it’s always been here. Just like we never came.

I suppose we’re stuck here, until the food runs out, the batteries that run our Batsuits ran out some time ago. Maybe a radiation cloud will come by, or nuclear winter or whatever is supposed to happen when an all out atomic war has finally happened. So we wait. We wait just to see what happens. We await God’s wrath? Maybe. We let most of the prisoners go. The real troublemakers we just stopped feeding. There’s a lot of praying going on of all sorts. Most of the natives went back to their old God, even some of our guys are not as devoted to ours as I assumed they were. I’m not going to bother. I figure whichever God he (or she) turns out to be, he’s going to be seriously pissed off, and it won’t do any good anyway.