The Green Lady 🗽 Washington, D.C.

 Molotova the Whip 

Dass Capital

It was two months since the Dictatorship declared martial law and taken down the Kapitel Bilding.

It ought to be noted here that the new regime had made several phonetic changes to the English language, so that the Chanseler could read the daily briefings more easily. The Dictatorship replaced ght with t, wh with h, ou with u, kn with n, th with ð, and abolished the horrid silent French h. It also used K, K, and K instead of the hard c, q, and ck.

Molotova deigned to use this new orthography for only two words: FUK U.

The Chanseler said the Kapitel Bilding was swimming with butterfly larvae and had to be drained. He set it on fire, bulldozed it, sanitized it, and then built The National Shopping Mall on the invisible ashes. The new Mall had a skyscraper hotel complex, a golf course, a Mercedes car dealership, and a crystal-domed Ente Nazionale Fashion Garden where the lawns used to be. Built in a record 40 days, the gigantic Nuremberg Plaza was toasted with Salon 1928 champagne. The indoor waterfalls cascaded with Vichy Saint-Yorre mineral water.

While the Dictatorship was busy Making America Great Again, the Revolution was organizing a revolt. After 40 days of constant meetings, redirections to sub-committees, and referenda on the allowed number of referenda, the Revolution finally completed their blueprint for taking back the country. They called it The Diversity and Sensibility Strategy to Take Back the Capital, or DASS Kapital for short.

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I 36 Fagotti

The first thing the Rebel Camp did in its diversity campaign was to divide itself into 36 directorates. It then added a 37th directorate, which was responsible for facilitating clear communication between the 36. The 37th directorate wasn’t nearly as effective as everyone hoped, however, since it was powerless to stop the other directorates from forming and reforming groups of 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 18.

The only person who seemed to have any real power was Molotova the Whip, a fellow-traveller who dressed in black leather and stilettos. She didn’t belong to any of the directorates and refused to answer to anyone, least of all the 37th directorate. The heels of her shoes were actually made of two Sicilian stilettos, forged in the dark heart of Mount Etna. She called them, le cose mie. She also had a black pony tail that she wielded with such dexterity that men across the street cracked their necks when they got a sight of it.

The leader of the Commune Directorate, Antonyminious, was a firm believer in the clear articulation of intentions and positions, yet whenever she sat in on meetings, he would babble incoherently about the split between Freud and Jung, and how this affected his adolescent obsession with Anne Hathaway and bright red lipstick.

Molotova generally ignored him, but always made sure to sit right next to him, lean toward him, and whip her pony tail across his face whenever she said anything about taking back the power from those who can’t stop talking about taking back the power. No one knew exactly what she meant by this, but everyone was worried that it might have something to do with the plotting of one of the revolutionary cells they belonged to. What she really meant, however, was that when she had the 37th directorate up against the wall, she wanted to be sure that she could count on Antonyminious to pull the trigger.

Molotova also had connections. She was constantly on talk shows with Michael Moore and Naomi Klein. She had Chomsky on speed dial. She also had a direct line to Cortez the Killer, who ran the entire Revolution from a soup kitchen in the Bronx.

Occasional Cortez was the diplomatic power behind the militant power of Molotova, although the relationship between the two women was the subject of salacious and at times illustrated gossip.

One afternoon Antonyminious the Communist followed Molotova around the sweat factories of Greenwich Village and saw her go into a taco shop. Peering discreetly with his small binoculars from across the street he saw her embrace a dark figure at the back of the dingy room. He saw Molotova put her hand on the shoulder of the other woman, and caught a flash of two sets of red lipstick which made the binoculars blur in front of his eyes, at which point a man with a thick Mexican accent and a machete told him to move on. Váyase, amigo. Ya basta de pendejadas!

One darkweb political observer put it this way: “Occasional Cortez dresses her doctrine in all the respectability of a Victorian tea-house, while Molotova la Frusta throws pungent cocktails through the gallery windows and calls it art. Cortez the Killer sends out the orders in epigrammatic tweets, like the poems of Emily Dickinson; Molotova the Whip slowly flicks her wrist, and the poems explode into barb-wire haiku. The Japanese subtext is deciphered by any number of kamikaze subalterns, all of whom offer themselves to do whatever she wants.”

As a result of the OC’s desire to allow the maximum freedom of dissent, each card-carrying member of the Revolution was encouraged to disagree with every other member. Her motto was, Wherever there is a grievance there is a victimized group, and wherever there is a victimized group, there is a motto. As a result, the Revolution was constantly splintering into equally-weighted groups of 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 18, which made it virtually impossible to predict what they would do next.

This cunning plan was inspired by the Spanish resistance of the late 1930s and also by the Internet: the more fractured it was, the better it could survive if the others were neutralized. And the better it could strike from any angle. While the fascists put all their little sticks together to make a great big stick, the leftists menaced from the sidelines and poked their enemies to death with a thousand little plastic molotov cocktail stirring sticks.

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Divided We Stand

Just as there was a large group of 1, called the Revolution, so there were also 36 separate groups, which were collectively referred to as the Dissolution. Each of the 36 dissident groups fervently believed that their approach was the best, and they did everything they could to disparage the other groups. While the Right stood in an iron line of martial grey, and offered clear choices to a confused electorate, the Left was a colourful rainbow with so many shades of mulberry and magenta, scarlet and crimson, cobalt and navy, teal and aquamarine, shamrock and chartreuse, that even looking at one part of the spectrum was exhausting. No wonder the people had voted for Trump.

In addition to 36 groups of 1 and 1 group of 36, there was every combination in between: 18 groups of 2 (the Eighteen Dicers), 12 groups of 3 (the Dirty Dozens), 8 groups of 3 (Octopussies), 6 groups of 6 (the Whores of Babylon), 4 groups of 8 (the Gangs of Four), 3 groups of 12 (the Triad Tigers), and 2 groups of 18 (the Big Clusterfuckers).

Group members were in constant disagreement with the people within the group, with other groups in their subset, and with other subsets that were not an immediate threat but that presented a theoretical challenge nonetheless. For instance, when the Triad Tigers were in the ascendent, the Gang of Four and the Whores of Babylon battled each other from the shadows, all the time gearing up for a unified resistance to the Dirty Dozen. When the Gang of Four was pressing widows for protection money, the Triad and the Whores pimped out each others’ spies, all the while minimizing the chances that the Dicers would take over the game.

Among the Gang of Four, one cell was called the Direct Actionaries, and another the Red Brigadiers, even though both used the same slogan, Fight the Power!  Together, these two factions called themselves the First Line or the Prima Linea. While this geometrical metaphor suggested a deep level of unity and co-operation, the Brigadiers thought the Actionaries (who they called Reactionaries or, worse yet, Actuaries) were a bunch of pussies, and plotted regularly to blow up their club house.

When this was about to happen, Molotova was the only person cunning enough to keep the Direct Action Brigadiers in line. It wasn’t that the Brigadiers feared Molotova so much as that they would do anything to get into her good graces. And by good graces they meant her black leather pants. Man and woman, trans and bi, pluro and incerto, every single one of them couldn’t resist her Catwoman garb, her iron wrist, and the flick of her disdain. All Molotova had to do was crash a super-secret Brigadier cell meeting in her tight black leather cat-woman jacket, suggest a reconciliation of sorts, and drag the zipper down two and a half inches.

The other two cells in the Gang of Four were the Truenewsers and the Deverbalizers. Both cells aimed to reverse the abusive language of the Regime, and they banded together under the banner, Death to the Eloquent Liars!  They called themselves the Commune, and their leader was the eloquent Antonyminious of South Boston.

The big difference between the First Liners and the Communists was that while the Communists wanted people to fight the power, they didn’t want to wear silly masks, dress up like Robin Hood, or pop up on people’s computer screens accompanied by a dread voice that sounded like Sauron or Voldemort. They didn’t want to blow up bridges, kidnap tourists, or otherwise take the law into their own hands. All they wanted was to squeeze the bourgeoisie dry, make Wall Street into a homeless shelter, and turn the Boston Commons into a tent city for the victims of capitalism.

The First Liners and the Communists needed each others’ support in the Gang of Four council meetings, otherwise the Gang would look weak and this could only lead to the tyrannical hegemony of the Triads or the even more hopeless fragmentation of the Whores. So the First Liners and the Communists made a big show of solidarity for the cameras. After the meetings, however, the First Liners couldn’t help themselves: they sent the Communists threatening emails, called them wordmongers and predicate drones, and put horse heads under their pillows.

Unperturbed by these threats, Antonyminious argued the next morning in his pamphlets that the root of action was language and that if only they could change the language they could control the action. The leader of the First Line, Antifatta the Gnat, counter-argued that she didn’t give a fuck about language. If you had somebody pressed up against the wall with a 22 up their nose, they’d say anything you wanted them to.

Whenever the various combinations of groups coalesced into 2 large groups of 18, all hell broke loose. It was Civil War within the Civil War. It was 1937 Catalonia all over again. The only thing that could save the Revolution at this point was the quick turn of Molotova’s head and her shiny black crop. Molotova would whip them back into line, or at least into groups of 4, 6, and 8, a dissolution that would calm their blood-thirsty rage. She promised them that together they would squeeze the 1% dry and put them on ice. Their bodily fluids would then be freely distributed as slushees and popsicles to the thirsty, overheated workers.

The political insanity of the Revolution wasn’t the main problem for Antonyminious. He had long ago gotten used to the old rivalries, with all their backstabbing, double-dealing, and bomb threatening. He knew that underneath all of these antipathies and poisonings the directorates were united by an intense and unwavering hatred for the leader of the Dictatorship, Donald J. Trump. No, Antonyminious’ problem was of another sort altogether. Her name was Molotova, and every time she looked at him he wondered if the First Liners weren’t right after all: he could hardly put a sentence together. He also had the sneaking suspicion that actions would be more effective than words.

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Next: In the General Direction of Doom: 🎲 Talfar

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