The Resurrection Platform

Resurrections were commonplace in the comic book world. Heroes would die, drama would peak, everyone would stand there and look sad, and then a while later the dead guy would be back good as new or even better.

Eventually, the conceit found its way into the movies. After that, it was a swift and natural progression: The American Mainstream, ever accustomed to getting its truths from the shining screen, began to demand their resurrections, too. Why should the government only bail out the big businesses that failed and succumbed? Wasn't each and every Joe Neckbone also Too Big To Fail?

Ever sensitive to a popular theme, politicians abandoned their Family Values platforms overnight and began organizing their campaigns around the Resurrection Platform...

Pictures are issued with haste as campaign messages shift in mid-election. It's a flood of full color portraits of grinning incumbents shaking the swaddled mitts of mummies. Upstart challengers bite back with their own photo ops, posing with Beyond and Back Voyagers. These so-called Beyond and Back people, you've heard of them. They're the ones whose hearts stop on operating tables or in hair salons, allowing them a brief glimpse of The Other Side before they drift on back with tales of white light and Endless Seafood Platters... Vern Glaspenhaus makes a special appearance on the Jason Dorgenkammer Show just last Thursday to discuss his own Near Death Epicurism...

'Why, Jason, the whole place was, I guess you'd call it Heaven. And I was seated at the Right Hand of Our Lord, or rather the Right Tentacle, and He did bestow unto me the Plate of Shrimp and Rigatoni that was never diminished no matter how much I done chow on it..."

('Right Tentacle?' Aunt Gladys scowls, outrage creeping across her withered mug. 'Why, that durn Jason Dorgenkammer, he done gone an' book a goddamn Mollusk Worshipper! What ever happen to good ol-fashion values of the Worship of Keinerlei the Pig God? What next -- a War on Porkmas?')

Then the media get ahold of the story and things go right to hell. Liberal press just have to go an' report on shootings that take place at the Patent Office as rival campaigns open up on one another, both sides trying to claim rights for all commercial media, print, broadcast, and placards for ships at sea, with automatic T-shirt option... exclusive use of the ancient Ankh symbol, what mean Eternal Life an' shit.

Well, ya can't hardly blame them none, the Secret Service, if they let loose with a volley 'o' gunfire now and again. Them boys, they nerves be chafe by agonizing waits at MacDonwald's as First Lady tries to decide which flavor Hot Pie she'd like to go with her Meal Deal...

"Trying to act like Typical American Plebe and prove we not be outta touch after all, it such a PIA,' jewel-drenched First Lady tweet. (PIA = 'Pain in the Ass,' that's how The Kids all talk these days, no more words, it's all letters now... Letters and secret code of eye twitch and pheromones what adults got no literacy for, teens are gonna take over, just you wait, old man...!)

Meantime, Secret Service agents glare resentfully at potential threats to First Lady's life. One agent frisks a potted fern while another tenses at the sight of a March of Dimes poster. A third draws down on charity cup for local cat shelter.... Weaponized spare change, that's what we got here... Socialism in every corner! Someone gotta clean up this country!

First Lady sighs with melancholy into her super-size soda. Ain't no one understand how lonesome it is underneath these glamorous furs and suchlike... you'd think these Secret Service guys would at least put all that macho energy to some good use... She send her own wink and pheromone toward Agent Krabbenkloecker, who shoot her frenzied glance in return... a glance not unnoticed by Agent Rueckenstroh, who was last week's favorite. Hearts race and danger is palpable in the air...

Well, it sets a guy on edge, and hence the Secret Service Shootout, as the Liberal Media start to calling it. Campaign directors announce in simultaneous media briefings that their candidate never had no interest in no Ankh, that ain't a good Keinerleist symbol... all worship The Hog, our Lord and Porker Keinerlei! No sir, it was the other guy who was looking to undermine American values and once we start importing foreign sigils, why, it won't be long before our law books are full of Pangaean scrawls, alien legislation that turn our women into vassals when we know good and well they ain't nothing but vessels, and they better just shut up, plump up, and straighten up...

Meantime, campaign volunteers in church basements across this great land shred T-shirts and posters bearing the now-tainted Ankh logo. All volunteers under heavy guard, lips sealed forever by blazing machine gun National Security, a.k.a. Death by Natural Causes. The whole operation overseen by Hasaa himself, the very spirit of Black Ops, his very name stand for his specialties of Heart Attack, Suicide, Auto Accident.

That's how the bullet-riddled corpses are logged at the coroner's office: This old guy here, graybeard with the rent aorta and six shotgun wounds to the midriff, why, he's a Heart Attack, son, list him as such and move on... This young expectant woman, why, it's a shame but her car done spin outta control, such a loss of life with mother and child both put down by three shots to the head, I mean, terrible car crash, heh heh... And this teenager here, well, thought he was gonna get some political experience, turns out he was suicidal all along, we can get PR to do up a quick 'Goodbye Cruel World' note to plant along with lead-peppered corpse in the lad's rubbish-strewn bedroom, can't we?

Hasaa, the Executive Director of Internal Security & Domestic Liquidation, why, he done such a good job, shame he cain't run for President his own self. Put the country to rights if it was run like a good corporation, a.k.a. assassin's boot camp. Under Hasaa the ISDL budget has tripled, what with the diversification of the section's portfolio into cereal companies and stuffed animal sweatshops where tots make toys for tots in perfect symmetry of exploitation, which is to say, job-creating commerce. And when he create so many jobs, why Hasaa gotta pay taxes? It's downright persecution...

Hasaa, unsung, unrewarded, he does his job right even so. Leaves no detail unattended; the assassins are taken out in turn by second wave of well-armed goons, they don't know what doomed Group One saw and they don't want to know, it's all a matter of Purity and Control. That Hasaa, he order the death of a Group Two Elite Corpseman seen receiving urgently whispered message from Group One victim, didn't even matter that she was telling him their grocery list... That's the risk of being a young married couple in the Corpse Corps... Security is bought with a high price, it's true, but no price is too high for security...

Happily ignorant of the meticulously tended mechanics behind their democratic rights, citizens hail one another robustly as they make their way to the polls.

'Hey Clem! You gonna vote for Jackass?'

'I dunno, Vern. I kinda like what Tusk had to say...'

'You elect Tusk an' all you gon' get for the next four years is a white elephant chasing red herrings. Take all yer money an' give it to plutocrats.'

'Better than they give my money to single mothers and jobless bliss jism junkies... And what you got against plutocrats? You a commie or something? Plutocrats need my money or else they ain't plutocrats no more! You want our precious national supply of plutocrats to dwindle to stack of sorry Joe Neckbones?'

'Jackass got a good civil rights plan, all I'm sayin.'

'Why hell, so does Tusk. He gonna build sixteen new prisons in this county alone! And anyways, Tusk promote Resurrection, man. Ain't you want you some Resurrection?'

'I dunno... I dunno about that whole Resurrection thing, Clem...'

'What you mean, you don't know. Ain't you pro-life? I gotta idea to report you to Local Militia...'

'Aw, now... What if'n my mean ol' stepmother come a-roarin' outta her grave? Think you got them ol' monsters put down for good an' then here they come again, thanks to dangerous social experiements like Resurrection an' that.'

'Well, now, you vote how you think you gots to. It's a free country and all... at least, on paper, heh heh!'

Oh, but don't you worry. Tusk already figuring out Constitutional Amendment to remove that final vestige.